Just in case you do not know, High Speed 2 (or HS2) is a planned UK high-speed railway line that is planned to run from the West Midlands and London.
The original plan was for the line to continue further up from the West Midlands to Manchester and Leeds but these parts of the plan have been cancelled. However, there were no real plans for the line to reach the ‘real’ north of England (such as Newcastle or Carlisle) let alone into Scotland. Nor were there any plans for HS2 to stretch west (into say Wales or the deep south-west of England) or into the east of England. This means that HS2 has been perceived as a ‘southeast UK’ thing.
However, HS2 has been flawed from the start.
The West Midlands to London already has some decent (for UK standards anyway) public and road links in place. Although the underlying infrastructure cannot support the passenger volumes at least there is something in place.
But there are parts of the UK where public transport is quite frankly terrible. There are vast parts of the UK with no real public transport. If public transport exists then trains/buses are cancelled frequently, the infrastructure is poor and unreliable, and there is not sufficient capacity to cope with passenger volumes. This means people are reliant on cars (assuming they afford one and dodge the ‘potholes’) which means the roads are often busy and clogged up.
The core problem is that HS2 is a ‘political decision’ as opposed to a rational, logical and thought-out decision.
The UK Government wanted a big headline-grabbing transformational announcement that they were investing lots of money into public transport.
However, as most people can attest to, these large transformational projects are very risky. They are impossible to fully cost at the start which means their costs overrun by large amounts (HS2 is ca £45billion over its original budget of £55billion). They are always delivered late (HS2 is around 2 to 3 years behind plan at the time of writing). And they do not deliver the benefits originally promised (per above HS2 has had its Manchester and Leeds extensions already descoped).
It would have been better to spend the original budget of £55billion on smaller more focused public transport improvements. For example, trying to improve rail lines across the north of England or in Wales or Scotland.
While this would not have the ‘headline-grabbing’ nature of HS2, it would have ensured (a) public money would have been spent more efficiently and (b) it would have improved the lives of many more people as opposed to the narrow set of people who would commute between London and the West Midlands.
Remember (and to misquote Richard Feynman) to implement a successful change, reality must take precedence over public relations, because the real world cannot be fooled.
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