Britain, especially England, is geographically compact. There is no good evidence that very high speed rail would deliver large benefits in aggregate, or that any benefits would accrue disproportionately to the desired locations (rather than encouraging further centralisation in London).
In effect, high speed rail in France has only reduced the rail “distance” between their major cities so that it is now similar to the UK. (But at generally lower frequencies, of course.)
In the British context, fair greater benefits would have been gained by spending the HS2 cash on other things.
Again, this is nonsense.
The UK has one of the longest domestic rail routes in europe, it was the second longest at least until recently. We also have regular domestic flights into London from Newcastle, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, etc all would have been served by hs2, some still will be. Its a myth to claim its too geographically close for high speed rail. High speed rail works best on routes 90-500 miles - apart from Birmingham, most of the destinations to be served were 200miles+.
In any case, the primary reason it was being built was for capacity, that north south connectivity on both road and rail would be at capacity by the 2030s. The capacity release of the designed scheme though is far greater than that and would have, in full, taken out many of the biggest bottle necks on the network and with the effects of that spreading around the country.
If youre building a new line, might as well build it fast. It doesnt cost much extra - the biggest cost per mile sections of phase 1 are the slower bits such as the new stations and the urban parts needed for the CAPACITY. France doesnt include costs of stations in their latest buulds nor the connectivty to their network nor does it have any urban sections, termini, rolling stock in their costs. Often the land costs arent included because the government already bought it.
Speed also helps capacity, it provides a faster alternative to cross country services and to ecml, despite going via Birmingham. It means more trains arriving before the end of rush hour. Speed provides additional economic impact from trabsport benefits..
The econonic returns where never calculated in full since they didnt need to be it passed the test fine without including the economic impacts of the additional services on ecisting lines or redevelopment of old oak, Birmingham, euston, etc.
Providing connectivity to London is two way - companies can move outside with still easy access to their extensive london client base, which Birmingham is already benefiting from. But the real benefit from hs2 was the connectivity of places like Birmingham to manchester, leeds to Nottingham, Sheffield-York and the connectivity of the regions to UK's main international hubs.
This is before we talk about the benefit to housing, and how places like MK cannot grow without providing the necessary infrastructure. The redevelopment of ooc alone will provide 10s of 1000s of homes and similar in Birmingham.
What better things would you spend the money on? When the government went over that exercise during network north, they included projects that were already built because they didnt know what to spend on.
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