I’m all in favour of spending money to improve transport links but I think that the high speed rail link from London to Birmingham is probably not money well spent. £33bn for something that will take 21 years to fully be completed and will probably be delayed and cost twice as much as first thought does not make sense to me.
People argue that there is a strong business case in improving journey times but has the government thought about whether there are alternatives that are cheaper and better ?
Most of the UK’s major cities have major transport problems. Millions of people a day spend hours commuting into our cities on journeys that should take half the time they actually take. Imagine how much more productive we would be as a nation if we saved time travelling to work!
The government continually blocks the development of tram systems in our cities because they say there is no money available. These schemes cost a fraction of the cost of HS2. Imagine what cities could do with a budget of £10bn. If all of our major cities were given just £250m each that would mean all our cities would have tram systems. If they had more they could probably build their own underground systems !
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