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Arthur Figgis

On 03/01/2014 20:32, d wrote:

If the government had been honest and said simply that the west coast main
line has reached capacity and a new parallel line is needed I suspect most
people would be for HS2 or some version of it. But selling it as a way just to
shave 15 mins off a trip to brum was moronic and quite rightly people said it
would be a waste of money.

The official stuff did say that. Unfortunately no-one official seems to
have stepped to shout about it once NIMBYs and the media decided to run
with "OMFG 100 million billion quid to cut 20 minutes off London -
Birmingham and who wants to go to anywhere outside the M25 anyway".

It doesn't help that much of the official position seems to come from
engineering types, so is accurate and sourced but not headline-grabbing
like the rival scaremongering is. I heard something on the radio a while
ago, to the effect of "HS2 will take up all the land which could ever be
used by any employers in the West Midlands forever, so if is it built
your children will be reduced to begging on the streets!", and the HS2
response was along the lines of "page 94 of study A shows that within a
95% confidence interval there are no plans for Class B development of
this zone C in region D within a timeframe comparable to Phase E of the
project element F", which might be perfectly true but won't win the
argument.

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Arthur Figgis Surrey, UK