HS2 will never reach Euston, mark my words. All the money so far has just been the design phase of the station rebuild AIUI plus some preparatory work. They’re going to spend £200m just to pause the work. If it were completed at the current budget it would be the most expensive station in the world by some margin. Hence they’ll go for the presumably cheaper option of terminating at Old Oak Common
What an enormous waste of money on the existing work
Edit: I double it’ll ever reach Manchester. It’ll just be Birmingham to turn it in to a commuter hub and for companies to get cheaper office space. I said this from the very beginning. Leeds was a total joke, Manchester somewhat believable if you are the kind of person to trust and believe London would ever fund such a project in the north lol. And here we are
I have not found a coherent explanation why HS2 does not link to HS1.
The unreasonable cost of rail tickets makes the current scheme a toy for rich people. Connecting the last few metres to HS1 at St Pancras would allow trains to compete with air travel to Europe. Taking an eco-guilt-free trip from northern England to Paris is something a normal person might do, even if the rail tickets cost 3x the flights. But not when you have book multiple tickets and drag your stuff between stations in London.
> I have not found a coherent explanation why HS2 does not link to HS1. The unreasonable cost of rail tickets makes the current scheme a toy for rich people.
The current scheme is designed to relieve capacity on the WCML to make way for more local services. I'm not sure that providing local public transport is a "toy for rich people".
> Connecting the last few metres to HS1 at St Pancras would allow trains to compete with air travel to Europe. Taking an eco-guilt-free trip from northern England to Paris is something a normal person might do
You can already get the the train from the north to Paris. You change at KGX/STP.
> even if the rail tickets cost 3x the flights. But not when you have book multiple tickets and drag your stuff between stations in London.
You can book a direct ticket, and dragging your stuff between two stations 50 yards apart is much easier than dragging to/from the airport.
I’m not entirely sure what your comment is implying but there is plenty of affluence and quite a few millionaires in the North. If you believe only poor people live in the north that’s also a belief that’s wildly out of touch.
double-O says it's not going to reach Birmingham.
Word is it will be scrapped.
I would have Kim Johngson, Goodun Broon, Warmonger Bliar et al replant every tree they dug up along the route; all whilst singing that old favourite: "all the world's a stage, for ...'
Isn't this an unavoidable curse of all maturing democratic/capitalistic countries and economies? As the society matures, and people's incomes and standard of living rises, and the apparatus for doing such projects grows, it gets more costly to build the infrastructure that powered the very same improvements to get there?
Factors:
People's labor is no longer so cheap to build stuff, they have more qualifications and alternatives to their labor and they want to be paid more.
Government contracting becomes influenced by political / additional considerations.
The projects get more and more complex and are no longer decided by just a few responsible people but dispersed among multiple agencies each with requirements.
Regulations and standards increase.
There are more people to insert their hands into the revenue streams and extract some value.
Property now is worth something and has to be bought off.
It goes on and on. I don't know if there are any good examples of where an advanced economy was able to avoid this increasing cost of basic infrastructure building, although of course, some countries manage to do it without the same levels of cost as the USA for example.
The NY Times did an expose on infrastructure expenses and found that France simply uses fewer people to build and doesn’t waste time asking for peoples opinions.
France also has half the population density meaning that there are in fact fewer people to ask and fewer people negatively affected (per unit distance of rail for instance).
These metrics are almost meaningless when you use them this generically -- for the same reason Spain is on the lower end of EU countries ranked by population density yet contains some of the most densely populated regions in all of Europe (as mentioned in the article). Moreso than Paris.
Paris and the surrounding area is densely populated. The rest of France is very rural overall it comes in at 105 per km^2. England, in contrast is almost as densely populated as India (434 per km^2). There are a lot more places to put things in France. As a consequence land in France goes for about €6k per h, while in England it's closer to €30k.
If you want to begin to understand this I recommend you read two books, in the following order:
The Abolition of Britain - Peter Hitchens
The Abolition of Liberty - Peter Hitchens
Synopsis:
Two worldwide wars led the flower of Britain to be torn to shreds by shrapnel into rat food. The millions of broken homes, (furthered by the subsequent exodus of native Brits which continues somewhat to this day), and society which has never really recovered led to the spivs taking charge. Hence the phrase 'mediocre mafia'.
Things are changing for the better, and will continue to do so. But right now we are seeing the light of the past fade and the lunacy (PR1D3overPrinciples) of a nation only just coming to terms with this loss from 1914 onwards - hence 'special relationship' sucking up to 'USA'/'YU-ES-AY'.
> Things are changing for the better, and will continue to do so.
I'm curious as to what gives you cause for optimism. As an interested observer from Australia, it seems to me that the UK has a very bleak immediate to medium term future. But I'd be happy to hear why I'm wrong or what I'm missing.
Though even within England, the population is highly concentrated in the South East, so the South West and North East have a lot of relatively sparsely populated areas.
Brits don't want quietness. Instead they go to Germany and drink until they can't stand upright - and then continue to drink until they pass out.
Source: was a barkeeper many years ago in Munich. A group of half a dozen Manchester fans drank more in one night than what would last two days otherwise, it's absolutely insane. Australians also tend to drink a lot, but IME they tend to get rowdy when too drunk.
Maybe the brits who want quiet aren’t going to bars in Munich to seek it out? What a fucking ridiculous means to back up an equally ridiculous statement.
Yeah, UK by area is mostly Scotland, which is stunningly beautiful and quite empty. Also infrastructure there tends to be more basic; even main roads in the north of Scotland are often single lane with passing places.
Wales and Northern Ireland are smallish by land and not very densely populated (?) but not massive outliers I'd think.
Even the SE has areas with surprisingly low population density. Outside of the urban areas much of the land is protected against development as national park/AONB/green belt.
> Isn't this an unavoidable curse of all maturing democratic/capitalistic countries and economies?
It seems to be, which is really ruining many aspects of society.
One hears all the stories back from the 40s and 50s where a group of neighbors or interested people just got together, bought some materials and built up a club house or community center or pool or any number of things in a few weeks. So towns had all these amenities because they were cheap and easy to build comunally.
Today to build even a small club house for the kids in the community for instance, you'll need to raise millions of dollars to pay off permits and inspections and lawyers and insurance and professional builders (since they won't let you build it yourself). So hardly anything can be done, nobody can afford it.
Arguably sure, the quality of the club house today, if it could be built, is better. But does it matter? How much do we lose by not being able to build hardly anything? That clubhouse from the 50s might be a bit rough around the edges but in most cases it is still standing 70+ years later and has brought joy to counless people.
Yes, in 1970s England, my junior school added a new swimming pool, largely paid for by community fundraising, and built by parents. My father was an architect and craftsman, who contributed design skills and labour.
In the 2000s, most old clubhouses and village halls had to be upgraded for disabled accessibility, or face closure. This usually meant rebuilding toilets, not just adding wheelchair ramps. Grants were available from local government. My father was retired by then, but did the designs and grant applications for several halls in his neighbourhood.
> Yes, in 1970s England, my junior school added a new swimming pool,
I attended an elementary school that had an olympic swimming pool, which was built just from parent donations because it didn't cost much at all to build. Dig a hole, pour some concrete, done.
Today I can't think of any elementary school around here that has any kind of swimming pool (let alone an olympic one) because it would take millions of dollars for permits and other BS fees.
There's a lot more context behind why we were better at building things in the 1940s and 50s than less regulation and bureaucracy.
For example we spent 7% of GDP every year on a government agency to build stuff - not because it was needed, just because it created jobs for people at the tail end of the Depression and first half of the War. Perhaps the entire industry that it fueled didn't die overnight and the millions of people they employed made building at scale during the largest economic expansion in American history helped.
No, it's a consequence of British rent-seeking culture, where all policy at the end of the day is evaluated by the question: does it make property prices go up or down, and if down we don't do it.
> Isn't this an unavoidable curse of all maturing democratic/capitalistic countries and economies? As the society matures, and people's incomes and standard of living rises, and the apparatus for doing such projects grows, it gets more costly to build the infrastructure that powered the very same improvements to get there?
Not really. Numerous examples world over of first world countries/ expensive cities managing to get infra done (Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore)
What's really happening in many western capitalist societies, both the rich landowning class as well as the unions dominate and capture the regulatory authorities and use the "system" to increase friction and costs for things that could reduce their own wealth extraction (land being taken away, more efficient construction) even if it's in the broader interest of the nation. Indeed this awesome flex of power of individual or small group wealth extraction over total system efficiency is seen as a highly positive ideology and is not all that far from third world countries where wealth extraction from corruption is seen as just a way of life.
As usual the key is how a society strikes a balance. The Western democracies of the 20th century did know how strike a balance pretty well - perhaps because of the existential threat of first the Great Depression, then the Nazi and then the Russian threat. Perhaps removal of existential threats that necessarily require a society to come together encourages private profiteering.
> I don't see this as being wrong - it's in fact a feature of freedom and a high-rights country.
That's precisely the point I'm making. The US in particular values this over common social good, so public services don't really come about.
> No reasonable person will.
Many societies operate differently and get stuff done, even highly capitalist economies like Singapore or Japan. I've even found China to be far more markets oriented than European societies.
I wonder how "project cost expressed in terms of hours of labour at national median wage, per mile of track" compares to the Victorian times. That is, hours per mile.
I bet, even digging by hand, the Victorians did it cheaper.
It’s funny though, how productivity massively goes up per capita yet pay doesn’t really change much and despite each person today being the equivalent of many multiple people from yesterday, capitalists complain about how they can’t find enough affordable labor in a system known for its profit gouging and corruption. Something’s not right here…
I don't intuitively see why trains would be massively cheaper than a circle nowhere interesting (underground).
HS2 is too expensive, sure, but the LHC is built next to ~a century of research institutions and took a very long time, whereas trains can actually be on somewhat tight schedules in the places where it actually matters and requiring bulldozing a fuckload of expensive land, houses, and history etc.
Everybody knows HS2 will never happen and looking at trains in general maybe it's better that it doesn't. I pay £45 for a return from Biggleswade to London. It's a 45min journey one way, trains rarely come on time and are often slowed down once you pass Stevenage or we have to randomly stop at a red signal. Going back they are often cancelled, almost as a rule they are 10min late when they come and a lot of times they come in 8 carriages instead of 12, so that means standing like a sardine for 45min not being able to breathe normally and when you do you're breathing in someone else's bad breath or afternoon farts. Sometimes going to London if we get stopped at Finsbury Park (because "that's as far as we go sorry") then I have to buy a new ticket to get to Moorgate for example which wouldn't be a problem normally if Moorgate had QR scanners, so instead I have to queue 20min to leave the station, go outside and buy a paper ticket and then go back into the station to get onto the platform. Imagine a train station in central London not having the high-tech that's capable of scanning e-tickets. That's why I can never go to work "on time" but instead have to go an hour early because I never know what's going to happen and leaving work I have to monitor both thetrainline.com and TfL in case a train is cancelled or the Tube is part suspended or heavily delayed. Worst part is I have to pay a small fortune for the privilege.
I would like to mention something else. I recently sold my car and moved to a place close to the train station because "public transport is great, why should I need a car" and it was working great until a few days ago when I was looking to go somewhere for the long weekend. A simple trip from Stevenage which has great train links to a place like Norwich proved impossible. Best trains I could get were one stop and 2h 30min and most had two stops 2h 30min. But those were expensive, between £90 and £130 for a return is a bit much and I got a warning saying due to strikes trains may be cancelled. National Express had no coaches in that direction, taxi was more expensive than trains and there's not a single BigName car hire company that is available in Stevenage and one that I found was not open on Sunday and Bank Holiday so I wouldn't be able to return the car. Had I rented it, it would be £120 for two days with £700 security deposit. With train strikes and ticket prices I didn't want to risk booking a hotel, so I stayed at home because what else am I going to do. Uneless I go to a local supermarket across the road or live in central London, I need a car.
NHS is also public infrastructure but I'd rather not even get into that. I'll just say that I'm convinced the Gov is letting NHS collapse on purpose so that they can pick it apart and privatise it. It's simply impossible that people are actually that incompetent.
> NHS is also public infrastructure but I'd rather not even get into that. I'll just say that I'm convinced the Gov is letting NHS collapse on purpose so that they can pick it apart and privatise it. It's simply impossible that people are actually that incompetent.
I think you're vastly underestimating just how incompetent the large majority of people are (not just NHS/UK, the world, the dumber you are the more you breed etc) - we're being overrun
Should people in the West start calling things their names? Public sector corruption, not unlike at all what once plagued Eastern European countries. I see the problem as very similar in nature, despite dramatically different origins.
The difference I see though, is that much of Eastern Europe hardcore criminalized things which would not amount to a crime at all in Western legal systems, and not pass the extreme standards of proof.
1. Look for nepotism in appointments
2. Illogical high profile job competitions
3. Oversized, omnibus projects
4. Strange demands in procurement tenders, or one intentionally made noncompetitive
5. Income beyond known means of supervising officials
6. Strange project structuring, and legal acrobatics
7. Illogical financing arrangements
8. Long periods of doing nothing to extract more fees
9. Unreasonable fees of intermediaries and third parties
nope, not even close. it's just lots and lots of rules and regulations. just the environmental stuff takes years and years of work, documentation and planning. and that's just 1 out of 100s of subject that need to be ticked off.
Hs2 is going through the most densely populated part of the Uk, and in tunnels.
And in addition to queuing, we also seem to enjoy bureaucracy. There will have been a decade of planning employing dozens if not hundreds of people before a shovel is in the ground.
Then of course every new station has to be ‘special’ in some way. So we pay some architects firm absurd amounts to use Tibetan Yak hair insulated, Alaskan larch clad stations for some weird Green box ticking exercise.
We don’t do viaducts over streets or houses. We have to tunnel under tunnels, and so much bureaucracy. Newts on the site? Need to be moved. Some other animals? Need to wait a year to move them. Bats? Careful there. Well motivated neighbourhood group? Some sort of legal challenge. Protestors in tunnels that can’t be removed for months. The list is endless.
Looking at safety and operational outcomes, those differences in regulations don't seem to have a negative effect. So they're not sacrificing something for this efficiency it seems.
So why doesn't europe or britain adopt these different regulations and make their own system more efficient?
You need to prove that the construction of the train is not going to affect negatively the area environmentally.
This translates as, you need to dry boreholes along the place, take samples, send the samples to a laboratory, get the data, save the data, store the data, build a system that deals with the data (because different laboratories have different methods) standardise everything, and present the data. You need to do that every month or so.
You need to make sure that the watercourses are suitable for fishes and other animals. 40 years ago, you had a watercourse, you threw a 200mm pvc pipe, call it a culvert and carry on. Now if you really want to preserve the watercourse you need a super oversized culvert that can contain the whole watercourse. But such a culvert is dangerous (people can go inside), so you need to install a grill. Now you need to study the flood risk of the culvert with a blocked grill.
That is in addition to the multiple flood risk assessment that need to be done for a linear project, basically one for each watershed that it crosses. An what if the design changes for whatever reason, like not being compliant with the flood risk assessment? Oh you need to start again, and repeat everything.
Plus in engineering, every time you change something in any of the steps, you need at least 4 pair of eyes to check the change.
So the reason is bureaucracy. These rules are important, but in linear engineering projects, they do impose a high toll on the project price, because you need to make sure they comply on every mile of the project.
That is from my point of view, I am pretty sure there are other stuff that increases the price.
It is just good design. But that includes a lot of things that cross traditional discipline boundaries. So there is a large communication overhead between different teams.
If this were even remotely true, companies like Hitachi, Skanska, Bechtel and so on, would never have received contracts. Given that the contract bidding process is publicly recorded, you'd think the newspapers would be all over it if 'Overpriced contracts given to political allies'.
A partial list: SCS JV: Skanska, Costain, Strabag. Align JV: Bouygues Travaux Publics, Sir Robert McAlpine and VolkerFitzpatrick. EKFB JV: Eiffage, Kier, Ferrovial, Bam Nuttall.
Indeed. Ever increasing prices of UK property is desirable to keep entire sectors of the economy in work, most working with percentage fees of the property prices: estate agents, legal and conveyancing, house builders, plumbers, decorators, electricians and so on. And that doesn't cover other secondary effects like pensions investing in properties, landlords with huge portfolios, small 'investors' putting their savings into housing, and so on.
The main effect is that we've moved from a single average income being able to support a family to two incomes barely being able to cope.
Soon it's going to need 3-4 incomes, and maybe relationships will have to move from couples/traditional families to 'polycules' sharing a home just to pay the bills.
Spain has a long tradition in civil engineering and is able to reach some of the lowest costs per km in multiple infrastructures, despite a difficult landscape, and execute complex projects well. Two things really help:
* Government has an engineering corps that draft really detailed specs for all projects, and ensure compliance
* Laws that allow confiscating land in the name of public interest
The second item tends to be problematic in common law frameworks typical of the Anglosphere.
I'll explain it, since no other local has bothered to.
In the UK, those who know don't call the so-called 'DfT - Department for Transport', we call it Department for Roads, because that's what it is.
But those who actually know are not yet a majority. The majority think 'Dr Beeching' (an mere frontman), destroyed the railways, yet have never heard the name Ernest Marples. Since the Marples creature unleashed carnage decades ago, there hasn't been a single government in Westminster which has not been anti-railways.
Nobody wants 'HS2'. The railway industry does not want it. The PR for it is ridiculous even by Unicorn-chaining HM Gov standards (see: Gareth Dennis), even the contractors admit its a farce.
Not only does 'HS2' reflect the bigotry of UKpolitik against real civilised transport, but it reflects a much greater stagnation and overall decline in the 'yu-kay' formerly Great Britain.
I feel like the pound is strong against other currencies because of the city of London and arms sales (and what’s behind those). But it’s spending power inside the UK is shit. People just don’t make much money compared to how much things cost. I moved to the USA when the pound was worth two dollars, but I earned far more dollars and those dollars bought more.
Britain is a tiny overpopulated island with legacy law and property problems that effectively has serfdom. It got powerful because it had the right ingredients for the Industrial Revolution but all the reasons that made the revolution happen are all reasons that weigh on it now.
I earn poor money relative to a comparative US citizen, but I wouldn't swap places if given the chance.
I walk my kids to school, and local schools are pretty good.
I cycle them a couple miles down the canal to the local sports centre for cheap swimming and recreation. I have many free high quality playgrounds nearby within walking and cycling distance, and streams and woods to play in. As a result my family can get away with a single medium sized car and use it infrequently.
I don't think there are many places in the - especially affluent areas - where this would be the case in the US, but I may be wrong.
I paid little for university and get free healthcare, which has been excellent quality whenever I've needed it (including for the birth of my two kids).
My employer gives me 30 days leave a year, with the option to buy more (and I do). There's no implicit pressure not to. I was able to take 6 months of after the birth of each of my kids on shared parental leave, which my employer had a legal duty to allow me if asked.
There are many beautiful historical places to visit for little money. The coast in any direction is within a day's drive and a varied holidays can be had without flying.
My country has in the pipeline 100GW of wind power, meaning that in a couple of decades energy is likely to be abundant and cheap if on a smart plan.
We do lots wrong as a country, and I haven't listed the negatives, but Britain is far from a failed state.
Have you ever lived anywhere else other than the UK? Almost everywhere in Europe has all the nice things you described, but cost of living is lower (parity adjusted - meaning you make less than in London in absolute terms, but the money buys you more quality of life).
We're not doing great at the moment but I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that we're becoming a failed state. Also it looks very likely that we'll have the right wing government that caused a lot of these issues in the last 10 years out at the next election.
What's the definition of 'failed state'? For example Venezuela had hyperinflation a couple of years ago and people couldn't access everyday essentials, Colombia was sending toilet paper as aid. My personal experience is that, life has got more expensive and my purchasing power is quite a lot less which is frustrating but not yet massively problematic. I'm at the lower end in terms of income. I have seen in the news that there are a lot of people who are doing worse than I am in this respect but I haven't actually seen that in anyone around me.
For context, those raw sewage events (untreated sewage, strictly — it is usually mechanically processed but not chemically, I think) have always happened infrequently (e.g. in storm situations).
They are meant to be exceptionally rare events because sewage bubbling up into sinks is unacceptable. (This is a small, densely populated country and it has to go somewhere.)
They used to be more common into the 1980s, and then regulation and modernisation caused the rates to drop dramatically.
They are by no means constant events but the numbers have risen in a way that suggests that the penalties are now cheaper than the remedial work and the risk of consequences is collapsing. Not sure if the risks are on the same scale as they were before those regulations were enforced, but people are rightly concerned about the increase; we have slid down the rankings in terms of beach and river water quality in the EU:
I don’t think the UK is unique in this, alas, and to be fair I would still rather have this than issues with drinking water. The water that comes out of the taps in the UK is among the safest in the world:
Based on? We had Growth the last time we had a Labour government. The ineptitude at every level of the current Tory party is staggering. Added to the rampant nepotism and other forms of corruption, I'd argue it's virtually impossible for any Labour government to do any worse.
Local elections typically are (and sometimes general elections are timed at the same time). And they probably would have stuck with May general elections if they'd kept the Fixed Term Parliaments act that they rolled out after 2010 and then decided they didn't want.
But by convention the government has always been able to choose the timing of the election, now up to a maximum of five years which was the length set in 1911. (World War II was an exception.)
The 2019 election was in December. Boris needed and got an act of parliament to be allowed to call that one, and the Fixed Term Parliament Act was repealed afterwards.
So now there must be an election by mid-January 2025 at the latest (since it has to be called by 11th December 2024 at the latest and there's a fixed period of campaigning after that).
I think Sunak will conclude that his best chance of winning next time is to push it as late as possible; he has little to lose at the moment. A December or January election is always a risk when you're relying on older voters, but on the other hand you might be able to interfere with students voting if you pick the time they are going home. Though that could be quite late in 2024 because of where the weekends fall in December.
According to this Indian government report, 110 million toilets and 2.23 million community toilets were built between 2014 and 2019 under the clean India drive begun in 2014. All states reported open defecation free in 2019.
Coverage estimates vary between 70-97% in 2019. I would assume the situation has continued to improve over the next 4 years so 15% seems like a believable figure.
False. Numbers are now in the 15% of the whole population.[1]
I know its a negative stereotype meme at this point and westerners love bringing this old number up whenever India does something good but please do better next time.
Take into account that India is a federal state which, while densely populated on average, has very, very remote area (think pacohontas county, WV), lack water and industrialized recently. Some people in WV have no toilets either, so what?
Dry toilets and chamber pots are used in rural areas all over the world, yes? How city-centric must you be to not know that?
But even in rural areas with easy road access (so not the area I talked about in WV), I can easely see people using dry toilets and putting their excretions in the field. It's not like DIY plumbing for sceptic tank is particularly easy or inexpensive, any person living off grid, by choice or necessity, might prefer 'defecate in fields' (ie: using dry toilets) imho.
Now I remember how some urbanites think themselves above rural people from their own countries, I almost forgot. Parisians are not the only self-centered narcissists it seems.
Child, please. Pit latrine and chamber pot are dry toilets. Common, its not that hard.
'modern' hipster composting dry toilets are found at festivals or in 'new rural' houses (don't really know the English translation), but in mountain farms I guarantee you it's not that that they use.
And yes, pit latrines are often in outhouses, temporary or not. 'outside' don't mean 'in public'. Pit latrines and chamber pots absolutely dont count as toilets in statistics. Those are dry toilets. Even if you never stepped in the countryside, look at Wikipedia 'dry toilets', and learn.
Boomer immigrants bring their old world practices with them. A handful of isolated incidents indicative of a practice on its way out. Modi the current PM of India is from a low caste. The president of India is from a low caste.
"was estimated to cost about £56.7bn in 2023 prices. But this proved to be a massive underestimate. The 134 miles of track between London and Birmingham alone is now forecast to cost £53bn,"
How is -£3.7bn a massive underestimate. Usually coming in under estimate is a good thing (outside of govt and consulting, of course)
The original £56.7bn estimate was from London all the way to Leeds. Whereas the £53bn figure they quoted is just for London to Birmingham which is only about half way to Leeds.
What an enormous waste of money on the existing work
Edit: I double it’ll ever reach Manchester. It’ll just be Birmingham to turn it in to a commuter hub and for companies to get cheaper office space. I said this from the very beginning. Leeds was a total joke, Manchester somewhat believable if you are the kind of person to trust and believe London would ever fund such a project in the north lol. And here we are