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Did you mean to include "not" in your first sentence?

Some on this forum might have driven past signs which say the lower speed limit is to reduce pollution. Wrexham by-pass is one example. However the road is clearly a 70mph road, and its galling to have to do 50mph when there's hardly any traffic around. It makes me think of the many large car...

Shrewsbury's Northwest Relief Road has recently provided a classic example of how to waste money by our modern way of doing things. The scheme was supposed to cost £87m, but it was abandoned thanks to political changes. However, not before £32m had been spent on consultants and legal fees...

I guess you must live in a nice area. Sadly the minority you refer to is growing, and some people are affected more than others. When it comes to driving, you'll find that the numbers who are prepared to break the law are already in the majority. You only need to drive on a motorway at 70mph...

Ah okay, I read your first couple of words and thought you meant to say "Hard to disagree"! But yes, I agree with your observations. I was mainly also disagreeing with @Tetchtyke 8-)

So next time you go on a flight, think of this as you're preparing for take-off. You see your pilot looking very carefree as they go into the cockpit, and then they announce that they've forgotten many of their test standards and are just going to try their best, hoping that it all works. And...

Just ask the ex-manager of Morrisons in Aldridge who was sacked for daring to restrain a repeat shoplifter. It seems that their policy is "deter, not detain". So that's it then, the worst you can expect when shoplifting in that store (and many others, as encouraged by our out of touch...

This "moving traffic offence" issue is an example of just part of the problem of wholesale lack of focus on enforcement. Police deal with those, while parking offences are usually dealt with by local authority wardens, but one situation is this ... In one area I used to work a vehicle was seen...

You're spot on with your comments, a great deal of the problem is the inconsistency of enforcement, and iften the fear of even discussing it. There has been disinterest in traffic from successive Governments for several decades. The occasional appearances by politicians claiming to be taking it...

Another reason for the overspend, as in the title of this thread, is perhaps because of such an unwillingness to learn from the experience of others. Some European and Asian countries have done really well with their HSR projects, due at least in part to being willing to listen. But many...

Yes, a lot more willing than people in the UK often think. They just don't bend over backwards for whingers and nimbies, they do have an expectation of understanding that the needs of the country are sometimes more important than the sensitivities of individuals. But they do compensate...

When I visited China in 2005, it was to discuss Maglev options beyond the Pudong airport route. It was then a possible alternative to HS2 for the UK (the 500kmh project) as well as for their Beijing route. Maglev was never really likely to overcome opponents in the heavy rail industry in the...

HS2 would have been better starting from the north (Leeds/Manchester). London-Birmingham should have been called something else, or HS2 done as a single whole scheme - yes like the Chinese scheme. Either we do something or we don't. The HS2 debacle shows exactly why it was wrong to do it in...

16 years ago? It's longer than that! It was being seriously discussed as a Greengauge21 project some years earlier. I remember attending a conference about it in around 2007 when it was clearly going to become the UK's new HSR. It was then only a couple of years behind China's 809 mile Beijing...

Hindsight? A lot of pitfalls of how HS2 was designed and phased, were pointed out long before construction started - just that those with power didn't want to listen. Phase 1 was too big? At barely 100 miles? When China's Shanghai to Beijing route at 809 miles was constructed in one go? And...

Or next to the M1? Of course there's plenty who are ready to pounce on this alternative and point out all the things that would physically lie in the way of this, but then there's a lot of tunnels along the Chiltern route, so what would have been so wrong with tunnels along the M1 route? And...

I don't think it matters how much you compensate for HS2 costs, the figures are still wildly different from those incurred in Europe. You said the only one that's really comparable is LGV-SEA. This leaves HS2 as being *only* 18 times as expensive per km. So let's assume that the figures weren't...

Let me put it another way. The figures I quoted at post #422 showed just 8 numbers in the final column. These numbers were what Rail stated were the construction costs per km of various HSR projects. These varied from 9m to 77m for 7 of the projects, but 626m for HS2. It appears from the...

You sound very defensive of HS2, and pretty scathing about those who expose its costs. So perhaps you could provide some more accurate costs for the table that I posted?

Are you comparing Rail magazine to the gutter tabloids?