UK Politics

3096 readers

178 users here now

General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

tom

GreatAlbatross

flamingos

Government ‘does not understand how HS2 will function as railway’ (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 9 months ago by Patch to c/uk_politics

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] mondoman712@lemmy.ml 10 points 9 months ago

HS2 never had to be some kind of souped up bullet train service. All HS2 had to be was an increase in capacity, with any added speed as a bonus. Four track instead of two track - so that fast trains didn’t get stuck behind stopping services. That’s all that was needed.

The speed isn't what makes it expensive, and it actually does make sense. If you look at the original Y layout vs the existing mainlines, the East Coast Mainline is more direct to Leeds than HS2, so it needs to be faster to match that travel time. Faster travel times also induces travel which has various economical and societal benefits. It will also help to shift more travel from other modes.