The UK has a weird chicken and egg thing going on. Everything is in London because everything is in London. HS2 is an attempt to break out of that. By developing better rail links across England we allow companies to start moving out of London.
> The idea that HS2 can make Birmingham airport competitive with Heathrow for Londoners is clearly wrong.
But that's not the aim. The aim is that we shouldn't have everyone in the country using Heathrow for all journeys. Currently we have about 80 million people going through Heathrow which is stupid if a chunk of them are only using it to get into the UK.
London doesn't just have Heathrow and Gatwick. London has six international airports.
Heathrow alone at 80m people currently carries the equivalent of Manchester, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Bristol combined. We urgently need to fix this.
Despite the topic being divisive, this is an ill-informed comment and does not relect the real purpose of HS2 ─ which is to increase capacity and improve links in the North of England to stimulate local economy and reduce the burden on over crowded services.
I will leave you with a couple of articles, which do a good job at explaining some of the reasons behind the HS2 project; which also serves as a springboard for the Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR).
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/hs2-logistic...
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2019/08/just-when-y...
One of the criticisms of HS2 is that it will just facilitate centralisation in London, by helping people get there more quickly!
It will just drag even more resources to london
If you let that be a guide then you wouldn't invest in anything outside of London.
H2 increases capacity for commuter lines out of London, and one of the reasons it's so f'ing expensive is people in Tory Shires demanding the line is placed in a tunnel
Most of the claims in this piece are simply nonsense. The Euston to Crewe train that's mentioned doesn't go anywhere near Birmingham, so it's not obvious that HS2 would make much of a difference to traffic on it.
And even if it did, it's merely one of a large number of routes heading out of London in all directions that are ridiculously overcrowded. At best, HS2 might reduce a small proportion of that overcrowding, but it's certainly not going to eliminate it.
The idea that HS2 can make Birmingham airport competitive with Heathrow for Londoners is clearly wrong. Birmingham doesn't have the flights, the destinations, or the capacity. London also has Heathrow Express for quick train journeys from Paddington to Heathrow - concourse to concourse. Even with a shorter journey time, HS2 can't match that.
And HS2 doesn't start to make sense until Phase 2 is built, linking Sheffield, Manchester and Leeds. You might see some benefits then - but the realistic total cost is likely to be the far side of £100bn. Which is madness.
It's actually five years of the total NASA budget, which is supposed to pay for development of the next Lunar program, as well as everything else NASA does.
It would be much better to spend a much smaller sum making the UK's broadband the best in Europe, set up a world-leading incubator fund for digital startups outside of London, with next-generation training and education, and try to persuade existing corporates to consider home working options. The return on that would be huge.
This is just a giant train set for rail nostalgists.