HS2 is a story of the incompetence of British industry, the corruption in the British political system, and a complete failure to achieve the initial goals of the project (to connect Northern England to London).
It’s depressing how much Britain’s construction industry has been gutted by decades of neoliberal policy, it’s depressing how the land that has already been acquired for use in HS2 is now going to be sold off for pennies on the dollar, and it’s depressing how this will only serve to further the wealth gap between the two biggest urban areas and the rest of the country.
the initial goals of the project (to connect Northern England to London).
This was never the goal. Northern England is already connected to London. But the trains to London use the same trains as local commuter trains, which don’t work as a reliable commuter service because they have to squeeze into the gaps between fast trains, and get held up every time a fast train is running late.
HS2 is about giving the fast trains their own track so that local trains can function properly.
Thanks for the correction!
From what I gathered, though, the high-speed connection got support from Northern England only because of the connections up to Manchester and Leeds lol.
China’s entire high speed network (42000km) was funded on only $900 billion of debt… Yet HS2 is estimated to cost $130 billion and California HSR $128 billion. For comparison, the Beijing-Shanghai high speed rail cost $38 billion (inflation-adjusted) and the Beijing-Tianjin line (China’s first HSR) cost about $3.3 billion (inflation-adjusted).
London-Birmingham is a distance of about 160km, Los Angeles-San Francisco is a distance of about 560km, Beijing-Shanghai is a distance of about 1060km, and Beijing-Tianjin is a distance of about 110km (all straight-line).
Edit: another comparison, Japan’s Chuo Shinkansen, which is pioneering high-speed maglev technology at scale and involves an absolutely astronomical amount of tunneling, is estimated to cost only $60 billion for 266km.
Just to note, the 130 billion figure for HS2 isn’t just for the London to Birmingham leg.
Also there’s a lot of things that went into making it expensive: a lack of high speed expertise, extra tunnels to satisfy nimbys, the government insisting on low risk contracts and changing plans constantly, etc
You know what, that’s a good point.
However, Japan’s Chuo Shinkansen is like 90% tunneled or something crazy and the rest of Europe (and China and Japan) has a ton of high speed expertise to draw from.
In general. Construction can be made very cheap in dictatorships.
The other thing making things cheap is scale.
China did a lot of things well, but especially on point 1 - we need to hold the line.
Lots of projects are expensive in the west because we care about nature, quality, worker safety and the communities impacted by the work (but also because this all opens the doors to malicious bad faith legal battles that make projects stupid expensive)
Japan isn’t a dictatorship, nor are France or Spain.
deleted by creator
https://www.tradecommissioner.gc.ca/china-chine/wages-salaires.aspx?lang=eng
Average salaries in Beijing and Shanghai are 24k USD and 22k USD, respectively.
https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/download/downloads/id/2867/average_earnings_2022.pdf
Average salaries in Birmingham are 38k USD. In London, they’re 49k USD.
https://stacker.com/california/lowest-earning-counties-california
Although the best I could find for California was household average salary, it is 62k USD for Madera county and 55k for Kern county. These two counties make up the endpoints of the initial segment of California HSR, which is currently projected to cost $35 billion.
There’s definitely a gap, but it’s not a huge one.
Guess what? Being an authoritarian government means never having to ask permission to steal someone’s land, rip up a pristine habitat or demolish an entire village. Those types of considerations are what make infrastructure expensive in democratic countries.
You mean the principle of eminent domain? China is legally required to pay fair market value and rehouse displaced peoples, but it’s also just the right thing to do for political stability. The key is that China doesn’t really have the concept of private land ownership (only leased government and collective-owned land). That’s the primary driver behind why China’s costs are lower than the rest of the world in this domain, but doesn’t explain how Japan and France and etc. are also so cheap.
China is legally required to pay fair market value and rehouse displaced peoples
Lol.
For large government projects the principles tend to be followed (for example, China HSR and Shanghai’s subway expansion). There’s corruption that happens at the local (rural) government level that sometimes requisitions farmland for commercial or industrial use, and the systems there are usually less robust, but when talking about regional, provincial or national projects there are better systems in place to handle things with minimal risk and it’s seen as more politically expedient to just pay the piper than it is to deal with the civil unrest.
China’s land ownership system means that land is split between being owned by the national government and being owned by small collectives. The greatest corruption (requisition without proper compensation) usually occurs at the collective-level. At a higher administrative level, it’s not like China is missing housing that it can use to rehouse people lol.
The minister in charge of HSR was sentenced to death for corruption.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A future Labour government would not be able to easily reverse Rishi Sunak’s decision to scrap the northern leg of HS2 as he has “spitefully” authorised the sale of properties that were subject to compulsory purchase orders on part of the route.
Steve Rotheram, the mayor of the Liverpool city region, said the move killed HS2 “stone dead” and would “tie any future government’s hands and make the delivery of HS2 for the north all but impossible”.
Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, on Thursday refused to commit to building HS2, telling ITV News Meridian: “What I can’t do is stand here now they have taken a wrecking ball to this project, and say that we will simply reverse it.
Mark Harper, the transport secretary, also conceded on Thursday that paying off contracts previously awarded for the cancelled HS2 sections would cost hundreds of millions of pounds.
Gareth Dennis, a railway engineer and writer, said the decision to sell off the land was motivated by “spite” and was, in effect, “salting the earth” to make it extremely difficult for Labour to restart the project.
He denied that the line would be reduced to a mere “shuttle service” between London and Birmingham, insisting that many more people would be helped by paring back plans for the project and boosting other transport schemes instead.
The original article contains 879 words, the summary contains 221 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!