> There's no political force to make actual improvements in London, or in the UK as a whole.
HS2 was an attempt at an infrastructure project for the long term greater good but quickly devolved into nothing but bad news cycles.
Everyone is too busy flinging shit and whipping out soundbites to actually do anything, in part because anything worthwhile is hard and mistakes are more punishing than not trying?
It all just feels so inevitable and I don't understand what stops other countries getting into the same spiral of short termism
> HS2 was an attempt at an infrastructure project for the long term greater good [..]
Simon Jenkins' 2016 article entitled "HS2: the zombie train that refuses to die"[0], is worth reading:
"HS2 was always a project born of political vanity. Like several other unstoppable megaprojects, it was not rooted in commercial reality or value for money – and it has therefore not been halted by accusations that it is not needed and not worth the cost"
One of the British national pastimes is to complain about the state of the railways and then to complain about infrastructure investments in the railways (whic, granted, often turn into an omnishamble).
My take-away from HS2 is that the UK is not able to build a relatively short high-speed railway. HS2 (so just London to Birmingham) is 134 miles/215 km long, that's nothing and yet...
HS2 is somehow insanely expensive and slow moving compared to France. We just need to go and look at how they do it. The two countries are very close in terms of GDP income and regulatory burden. We seem to be very inefficient in comparison.
> HS2 is somehow insanely expensive and slow moving compared to France. We just need to go and look at how they do it. The two countries are very close in terms of GDP income and regulatory burden
They aren't anywhere close to each other in population density.
HS2 was an attempt at an infrastructure project for the long term greater good but quickly devolved into nothing but bad news cycles.
Everyone is too busy flinging shit and whipping out soundbites to actually do anything, in part because anything worthwhile is hard and mistakes are more punishing than not trying?
It all just feels so inevitable and I don't understand what stops other countries getting into the same spiral of short termism