Prime minister’s move criticised as ‘salting the earth’ so Birmingham-Crewe line cannot be built
  • zephyreks@lemmy.mlOPM
    111·
    1 year ago

    HS2 is a story of the incompetence of British industry, the corruption in the British political system, and a complete failure to achieve the initial goals of the project (to connect Northern England to London).

    It’s depressing how much Britain’s construction industry has been gutted by decades of neoliberal policy, it’s depressing how the land that has already been acquired for use in HS2 is now going to be sold off for pennies on the dollar, and it’s depressing how this will only serve to further the wealth gap between the two biggest urban areas and the rest of the country.

  • zephyreks@lemmy.mlOPM
    71·
    1 year ago

    China’s entire high speed network (42000km) was funded on only $900 billion of debt… Yet HS2 is estimated to cost $130 billion and California HSR $128 billion. For comparison, the Beijing-Shanghai high speed rail cost $38 billion (inflation-adjusted) and the Beijing-Tianjin line (China’s first HSR) cost about $3.3 billion (inflation-adjusted).

    London-Birmingham is a distance of about 160km, Los Angeles-San Francisco is a distance of about 560km, Beijing-Shanghai is a distance of about 1060km, and Beijing-Tianjin is a distance of about 110km (all straight-line).

    Edit: another comparison, Japan’s Chuo Shinkansen, which is pioneering high-speed maglev technology at scale and involves an absolutely astronomical amount of tunneling, is estimated to cost only $60 billion for 266km.

    • mondoman712@lemmy.ml
      2·
      1 year ago

      Just to note, the 130 billion figure for HS2 isn’t just for the London to Birmingham leg.

      Also there’s a lot of things that went into making it expensive: a lack of high speed expertise, extra tunnels to satisfy nimbys, the government insisting on low risk contracts and changing plans constantly, etc

      • zephyreks@lemmy.mlOPM
        1·
        1 year ago

        You know what, that’s a good point.

        However, Japan’s Chuo Shinkansen is like 90% tunneled or something crazy and the rest of Europe (and China and Japan) has a ton of high speed expertise to draw from.

    • what_is_a_name@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      In general. Construction can be made very cheap in dictatorships.

      The other thing making things cheap is scale.

      China did a lot of things well, but especially on point 1 - we need to hold the line.

      Lots of projects are expensive in the west because we care about nature, quality, worker safety and the communities impacted by the work (but also because this all opens the doors to malicious bad faith legal battles that make projects stupid expensive)