Yes, one hundred thousand times this! The national government desperately want to cut bits of it to save money, so there's a concerted effort to paint it as an unnecessary boondoggle, and a lot of people are buying that. And they always say "why don’t we focus on increasing capacity on the existing lines?" - which is insane because HS2 is doing precisely that.

Or it would if they didn't keep cutting bits from it (cough)golborne spur(cough)

(I wrote the grandparent "vanity project" comment)

I do understand that hs2 is about adding capacity, not speed. And I agree that we need more non-car and non-aviation capacity.

What i disagree with is provisioning that capacity in the form of a single railway line that goes nowhere near almost all of the country.

I described it as a vanity project because politicians (particularly the current pm) like being associated with big, impressive, expensive infrastructure developments. An alternative world in which we spent the hs2 budget on improving the capacity and throughput of existing rail lines and rolling stock could deliver similar objectives while benefitting more of the country. And by being more distributed, it would be more fault tolerant. But it probably wouldn't create photo ops for politicians in hiviz jackets, or translate into votes.

And i hate the landscape and habitat destruction inherent in building hs2. Too much damage has been done already.

My taxes help pay for this thing. I dont think my scepticism and disgust is uninformed.

> I do understand that hs2 is about adding capacity, not speed

Great! Glad we're on the same page!

> An alternative world in which we spent the hs2 budget on improving the capacity and throughput of existing rail lines

Ok we are clearly not on the same page.

> Ok we are clearly not on the same page.

I haven't lived there for three decades, but I grew up in Hull. Nobody in Hull is talking about HS2: it's as irrelevant to them as Crossrail. Even if HS2 ever makes it as far as Manchester, its still a two+ hour drive to get the the nearest HS2 interchange - or slightly less on a diesel train via Leeds. (And it probably will still be a diesel in 2035-40.)

And HS2 is similarly irrelevant if you live in Norwich or Exeter or Carlisle or Newcastle. Or pretty much everywhere.

HS2 is an impressive bit of engineering that will be great for extending the commute capacity for London. It does little or nothing for the UK as a whole.

On the Golborne Link, I think they had a fair bit of help from the NIMBYs too

Very helpful too that one of the NIMBYs is a local MP who happened to be overseeing the no-confidence vote in Boris.