tbtc
Veteran Member
is it really good for people to be daily-commuting 150+ miles, anyway? I'd say it's not
I think most people assess their commute in terms of time and price - distance is less of an issue.
If people are prepared to travel for an hour each way as part of their commute then it doesn't matter so much to them whether that's 150 miles on HS2 or thirty miles on a Sprinter - it takes just as long.
Return fares might be cheaper on HS2, but why would season tickets be cheaper than the above, already competitive, prices?
Thousands of extra seats - eighteen additional paths an hour, four hundred metre long trains - much cheaper to operate than legacy lines.
At the moment, the "door to door" commute from suburban Manchester/ Leeds/ Sheffield to a well paid office in London is going to be around five hours a day (i.e. you are coming home just to grab something out of the fridge and go to bed). HS2 brings that closer to three hours a day which becomes more feasible for people to do.
The focus needs to be on building more affordable housing in London, not offering cheap season tickets on HS2 to provide another commuter route.
Ideally, sure, but any attempt to build affordable housing in London tends to see the "social" aspect ditched (as unaffordable), the properties snapped up by investors (rather than those needing to buy somewhere to live) and are still going to be horrifically expensive for any basic rate tax payers. It keeps being attempted but never seems to deliver.
the focus needs to be on building a much more distributed economy like that of Germany. It is not sensible to have someone commuting from Darlington to London
HS2 may encourage fewer people to leave the regions completely to live in London (instead commuting), but that doesn't really address economic distribution.
Look at Germany - the financial centre is in Frankfurt, the government is in Berlin, the industrial base is in the Ruhr. Different areas are leaders in different sectors. Real redistribution won't happen until supporting institutions are moved to the regions. If you move the stock market to Manchester (for example), financial firms will follow. If you move the courts to Leeds, legal firms will follow. If you move government to Birmingham, the thousands of government-related jobs (not just government jobs themselves) will also move.
With a structure like that in place, HS2 gives a significant economic boost, as it makes it easier to travel between all these institutions. Now of course it's very easy already, because they're all in London, but in my opinion (and I don't have any data to back this up) it's worth taking a small economic hit to spread the wealth around a bit. And of course there's nothing stopping legal firms with headquarters in Leeds opening financial law offices in Manchester.
The BBC to Manchester was a very good start. Now how about farming out more Government administrative work and headquarters to other parts of the country
I'm all for living in a fairer society like Germany has - they have a much more sensible approach. But, given that we are where we are, I don't know how you realistically achieve that.
There was huge upheaval just to move part of the news/ sports/ kids BBC services to Salford... I can't see us moving the Stock Exchange or the High Court any time soon. Huge numbers of Civil Service jobs are already in "the provinces". Look at the NHS in Leeds, for example.
HS2 only serves London Euston. It will take 20 years and 40bn to save 10 minutes off a banker's commute. In the shires, the forgotten north, Wales , and Anglia, HS2 helps Nobody.
It’s up to you.
Either keep up with the chip-on-the-shoulder stuff about “bankers saving ten minutes” or maybe explain why faster journeys are A Bad Thing?
e.g. if Manchester/ Sheffield/ Leeds will suffer from HS2 and have the life sucked out of them then why are Liverpool/ Bradford/ Nottingham/ Derby so envious? Wouldn’t those cities be jubilant about being kept off the map, if HS2 is going to be such a danger to the provincial conurbations that it directly serves? Shouldn’t the Mayor of Liverpool be campaigning to keep HS2 out of Liverpool (rather than encouraging it to serve his city)?
e.g. why are speed/capacity increases on normal lines “good” but speed/ capacity increases on lines to London “bad”? We have threads where people complain about the fact that a journey in 2017 takes longer than the same route did a hundred years ago (albeit they are generally comparing apples and oranges as the fastest train of the day on a quiet network is being compared to a clockface service on a busy network).
I’d welcome faster journeys between Liverpool/ Manchester/ Sheffield/ Leeds and longer services but a lot of people think that faster journeys are bad if it involves London.
Is this because some people are only happy with better services as long as these improvements happen on existing alignments, and get sniffy at the idea of new lines that don’t follow Victorian routes (HS2, HS3)?
And nobody has explained why a new line from a fairly small place (Tavistock. Portishead, Ebbw Vale, Galashiels etc) into a significantly bigger place (Plymouth, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh etc) will benefit the small place BUT the large cities of Manchester/ Leeds/ Sheffield are at risk if they have a better train service to London? How come Portishead is resilient enough to cope but Manchester isn’t?
(Note that lines to Tavistock. Portishead, Ebbw Vale, Galashiels etc didn't help "Anglia" etc but there's no requirement that every new scheme has to benefit every single postcode in the UK - that's a silly argument)