It's amazing the expense we are going to to avoid building a railway across a few rich peoples land. Not that this is new, it happened during the steam age.
Yes it's expensive, but a future where most infrastructure is underground, from mass transit to power and communications, allowing nature to return to the surface, for future generations to enjoy seems like a worthy goal imo, even just on the aesthetic merits, saying nothing of the ecology. Just a damn shame we couldn't build these boring machines in the UK, and funnel the spending into the domestic economy.
Wholeheartedly agree! Giving back to nature is a very good goal. In the Netherlands, there is a growing problem of the "boxyfication" of the landscape (verdozing van het landschap), meaning that because of the growing trend of internet shopping, more and more warehouses and distribution centers are being built in the iconic farm landscape. Moving these structurally simple buildings underground would allow for more space for nature in the already densely populated country
I actually like railways and think there is a need for more capacity up and down the country. What I don't like is the cost of this project. We could get a lot more bang for our buck.
Deduct from the cost the price they'd have had to pay for valuable land by going over-ground, maybe?
I mean there's a reason the London Underground is underground.
There's a lot of tunnelling in Buckinghamshire and other counties with open countryside because the mainly Tory voting areas close to London object to HS2
If there's one thing I've learned from the Heathrow third runway, it's that "fuck the locals, the nation needs this (according to its supporters)" does not appear to be the way to get large infrastructure projects done.
And with the current electoral situation, if merely being a Tory constituency got you a tunnel, HS2 would be in a tunnel from the M25 all the way to the outskirts of Birmingham.
I've seen some complaints about HS1, but not from people in Kent - just from NIMBYs in Buckinghamshire saying "HS1 was rubbish and nobody uses it and everyone uses it to go to London every dy so the towns it serves are now run down ghost towns"
No. But I would like it if, for national infrastructure projects the UK would be a bit more assertive. China's approach is too far the other way.
And being able to build hundreds of miles of high speed lines for single-digit billions of pounds/dollars tells you everything about wages, and compensation for home owners on the route.
At about £106bn for 531km, that's £200m a km. If the line were built out of a stack of twenty pound notes, it would come to about £100bn. So HS2 costs about the same as a 500km stack of twenties.
Only a million people live in Birmingham. That's £100k each.
