Oh I have no doubt that HS2 will speed up journeys and improve capacity. But the point you don't seem to be getting is that that doesn't really make much difference in comparison to the risk that the economy of the city where I live and work will shrink as a result of it.
Now, you may not have noticed, but since 2010 we have been goimg through a period of.constraints in.government spending. As the government have recently admitted that the deficit which was meant to have been eliminated by 2015 will still be with us in 2031, there is a possibility that this will be witj us for a bit yet. One feature of austerity has been a radical reduction in grants to local authorities. By the end of the decade, the grant to Liverpool will have been reduced by over 60%.compated to 2010 levels. (You might wonder whether the general public's lack of support for HS2 has anything to do with it questionning why £50 bn is being spent on a railway which benefits a handful of places,, chief among them London, at a time when spending is being cut everywhere else).
Now, to make up for reduced central government grants, cities are being expected to increase their rates and council.tax revenues. As the whole country outside London has been in recession since 2008, cities must therefore fight between each other for their share of a shrinking pie. This is why economic growth, or shrinkage, matters more to people in cities like Liverpool than the possibility of getting a go on a big, shiny new train.
Let's look at the benefits of HS2 from the point of view of someone living in Liverpool. We get 1 extra train an hour to London which is 30 minutes faster. I should sa6 we get this for part of.the day, as Liverpool already haa 2 TPH to London in certain hours. The trains will be shorter than the class 390s, and will therefore have fewer seats, or be more cramped. The trains will spend 40 miles on clasic tracks taking longer to get to Crewe than the current trains do. As HS2 does nothing to.relieve capacity for this dtretch except relocating 1 Anglo-Scottish service per hour, and in particular does nothing about the 2 track bottleneck at Winsford, the prospects of any more services to Liverpool from the south or east, or any better local services on these lines, remain approximately zero. As Liverpool services are expected to cater for Crewe demand as well, they will be more crowded from day one of HS2 phase 2b opening than everywhere else's. Our Birmingham service will remain a glorified commuter train, taking 1 hr 47 mins to cover 98 miles, at an average speed of 55 mph, because HS2 hasn't, it seems, even contemplated a Liverpool-Birmingham service. These improvements to XC of which you speak (forgetting for a moment that XC could be improved overnight by buying enough trains to run it properly, and assuming that XC services would continue to run in parallel with HS2 when the DfT clearly despises XC as it is, and seems determined to run it down further) will bring us precisely zero benefit because we lost XC services in 2003, because there are no plans to restore them, and because we remain the second worst city in Britain for long-distance rail connectivity, a situation that HS2 will do little to help with. There will be no effect at all on the slow and infrequent services we currently 'enjoy' to other northern cities, no improvement to local services, no relief for the dangerous levels if overcrowding at our busiest station, and no lilelihood of improvement to the city's traffic congestion, described last by the NIC as Britain's second worst.
So, in return for a slight improvement in service, we get the risk of a shrinking local economy. That would mean fewer jobs and / or less money for what jobs there are. So again, would you like to explain why anyone in Liverpool should support HS2 ? I repeat that 'taking one for the team' is unlikely to prove a popular option.
