No it's not. Nobody knows the correct end figure, it's already gone up since Labour agreed to it, and could/will increase as it advances.
It's gone up because people in Buckinghamshire wanted it to be put in more tunnels than are needed. Would you prefer the cost to be advertised as lower? Will you then just complain that it wouldn't be delivered on budget? It is a lose-lose situation for HS2 Ltd since if they do get it under budget they'll at best be ignored by those who said it would be over budget and at worst be accused of cutting corners and therefore have the antis try to tell the public it is unsafe.
You know what happens to the money spent on infrastructure? You know it pays for real things like bulldozers and concrete and bits of metal and to pay workers wages? You know that the Government will see a lot of the money come back in through the taxation system? You know that workers wages are spent on paying for other things like houses and cars which the Government will get tax revenue off? The cost of this scheme is miniscule in comparison to our economy and government expenditure and if it isn't spent on HS2 it won't be spent on anything else. Current Government policy is to replace current spending (i.e. benefits) with capital spending and that's why there have been so many infrastructure schemes approved.
London-centric tosh. These improvements only exist in the commuter glory world of London and the South. No such advances in the North (as ever).
Northern Hub.
Selling HS2 as a means to travel in luxury is all very well were the entire nation at the same point. It's not.
It's also theoretically a means to have Ryanrail with 5-abreast double-decker trains. Either way you're going to complain about it. You know that effectively no one uses the classic lines between Paris and Lyon now for the reason that the high-speed services are better for everyone.
As admitted on this forum, WCML is only just approaching something close to capacity in two parts of the country. HS2 won't necessarily solve this.
It's at capacity the whole way along the WCML between Birmingham and London unless you close every local station along the route and therefore decimate the property values of a huge swathe of the London commuter belt.
Damn right we do. Spend the same amount of money in the North as on HS2, and you get a better all round transport system.
We only have to spend so much in London and the SE because: 1. the networks there are already pretty full with 12 car electric trains so there's not much else to do than to build expensive schemes and 2. the people who live there have more power and influence in raising the cost of schemes simply to reduce the inconvenience to them. Things also cost more in general down there since all the wages of workers have to be high enough to afford reasonably local housing.
No proof. And it will ignore dozens of towns and cities who have no HS2 station despite the line going past them.
There may be dozens of towns but not a great number of them are big enough to fill a 400m double decker train. HS2 is not a glorified Metropolitan line and it shouldn't be. It connects truly global cities together, not wee villages in the heart of Middle England and that is a good thing.
Improvements in signalling and timetabling can go a long way to solve this.
The best signalling in the world can't fix the fact that a 140mph Pendolino will go faster than a 75 stopping Pacer. There is no Moving Block signalling in use on a line anywhere near as complicated as the WCML and even on the Tube where the lines are often operationally unconnected with another with every train doing exactly the same thing they haven't managed it either.
It's not about make-do-and-mend. Focused resources and better use of spending has always shown better results.
If you applied that argument to other situations you would see the absurdity. If we did what you wanted we wouldn't have built road bypasses, we would have demolished city and town centres every 5 to 10 years to build marginally bigger roads every time.
