The economic impact of Covid-19

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, bickster said:

Why would you build a conventional track? Our railways are already light years behind in terms of speed. Building a conventional track, now that would be a substantial waste of money. If you build a new rail track you make it as fast as you can

The point I'm making, maybe not very clearly, is that capacity, speed and low price are three possible goals, and no more than two of them can be combined. HS2 combines speed and capacity, and is obviously not low price. We could increase capacity at low cost, but it would be at the expense of speed. This point falls down a little on the final aspect, because I don't there's any cheap way to significantly increase speed.

[Demitri_C]

1 hour ago, HanoiVillan said:

It won't make London less important. It will mean that middle managers who work in London can live east of Birmingham and still commute to work occasionally, so they will be able to buy bigger houses with bigger gardens than they would get in the South East. It's great news for garden centres and estate agents in the Shirley area, not sure how much it will do for anything else.

Even with this i still wouldnt leave london. Cant speak on anyone else but would nlt appeal to me at all

[Davkaus]

3 minutes ago, Demitri_C said:

Even with this i still wouldnt leave london. Cant speak on anyone else but would nlt appeal to me at all

You were having a right moan about how dangerous it was a few days ago. 

There's nowhere in the country I'd like to live less than London. A great place to visit for the odd day out, but living there? Hell no. 

[chrisp65]

2 minutes ago, Demitri_C said:

Even with this i still wouldnt leave london. Cant speak on anyone else but would nlt appeal to me at all

I thought you didn’t feel safe and hated the transport costs?

C’mon man, you could live in the Shires and have a duck and a goat and a pond and sign petitions to stop that affordable housing estate they want to stick in the bottom field. 

[VillaJ100]

12 hours ago, lapal_fan said:

I don't mind HS2 - it'll boost the economy, it'll help some people, I do think a part of it will be to make good on promises to make London less important (cynical perhaps).  

Our infrastructure is shit, from roads to motorways to trains - it's Victorian.  We helped Germany demolish their Victorian networks, the Germans helped France - they didn't help us enough.. 

Should have been maglev though, and there should be one line through the spine of the country, all the way into France and the rest of Europe.  That would have future proofed itself better. 

This is the right answer - Most of our railway infrastructure is Victorian, been rarely upgraded and is falling apart. We desperately need a new line for capacity as opposed to speed. 

£100 Billion in the scale of government finances for a railway that will be used for at least 75 years is next to nothing. That's about 3/4 of the cost of the NHS for a year. Sure demand has dropped for now. But if the population keeps growing and Covid eventually ends, people will return to the railways and the same problems of lack of capacity will emerge.  What we should be demanding is hyper-corporations pay their taxes so we can spend money on things that are needed.

You can't build a new standard line as everyone will demand it stops in their town and then it will be clogged up with local trains and freight. A purpose built high-speed line is exactly what's required.

The government will be looking to further infrastructure projects to repair the damage from Covid - it's the easiest way to get money pumping through the economy, keep people employed and come out of recession, so if people are concerned about government spending, sorry but it's going to continue.

With regards to Maglev - aside from the speed increase with HS2, part of the reason the line is so straight is to easily enable it to be upgraded to Maglev in the future.

Edited August 20, 2020 by VillaJ100

[blandy]

1 hour ago, HanoiVillan said:

We could increase capacity at low cost

How? I may have missed something but the costs are based around the new lines - building, demolishing, evicting, compensating and so on, and far less around whether the track supports 100 mph or 200 mph trains.

[chrisp65]

3 minutes ago, VillaJ100 said:

Most of our railway infrastructure is Victorian, been rarely upgraded and is falling apart. We desperately need a new line for capacity. 

if the population keeps growing and Covid eventually ends, people will return to the railways and the same problems of lack of capacity will emerge. 

 

3 minutes ago, VillaJ100 said:

You can't build a new standard line as everyone will demand it stops in their town

 

Well that’s got me thoroughly confused. 

[Demitri_C]

11 minutes ago, Davkaus said:

You were having a right moan about how dangerous it was a few days ago. 

There's nowhere in the country I'd like to live less than London. A great place to visit for the odd day out, but living there? Hell no. 

@chrisp65 you both must have missed when i said i was moving to hertfordshire which is on outskirts of london brum isnt exactly much safee than london either!

@Davkaus i get that itsa crazy busy city. Very hard to adjust to if you never were born and raised here unless you come from a background similar. 

13 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

I thought you didn’t feel safe and hated the transport costs?

C’mon man, you could live in the Shires and have a duck and a goat and a pond and sign petitions to stop that affordable housing estate they want to stick in the bottom field. 

Aaah im touched you want me to be your neighbour

[VillaJ100]

2 hours ago, blandy said:

 

The point about capacity and speed - it is necessary to get people off planes and cars and onto trains for internal travel within the UK. So the speed is important. Reducing capacity via pricing also goes counter to that need. Therefore capacity AND speed both require faster rail travel. Faster rail travel cannot be achieved on the existing lines, because of all the local rattlers and separation between inter city fast trains and local short journey trains.

So the argument goes that for both the environment and for facilitating people's mobility we needed a new fast line take inter city trains off the current network, put them on a faster network, move people's travel from aircraft to rail. Moving the express trains off the current network then frees up more slots for more frequent local train journeys.

The downside is that the new HS2 lines are environmentally destructive in their creation, are hugely expensive, and the gov't's ethos is that it will have to pay for itself, so ticket costs will be high, thus dis-incentivising people to move from cars and planes.

And then there's this corolafungus that seems to have changed the way people work and the need for commuting locally and whizzing between cities. So now it looks even more like a white elephant than it did previously.

The Gov't (whichever one it is) will get slated if it's cancelled, because "all that money wasted" and slated if they continue it because "all that cost and destruction for something no longer needed".

Prediction: It gets "put on hold" indefinitely at some point in the next 12-18 months, and corollafungus is named as the reason.

With regards to the 'environmental damage' - things are a lot more nuanced than they seem.

It's true HS2 will take an amount of ancient woodland. This is deemed as woodland that has been present since the year 1600. However, so long as one single tree has been there at all times, it is still classed as ancient woodland. The trees could be 40 year old oaks, but classed as ancient due to this description. Most woodland in Britain was cut down in WW1. Also, a lot of them have been really trashed. One piece of woodland has protestors inhabiting it (Jones Hill Wood). They claim it was the place where Roald Dahl was inspired to write the Fantastic Mr Fox. While this may be true, what they fail to mention is a large part of the woodland was absolutely trashed by Victorian chalk quarrying and subsequently replanted, making it less of a pristine landscape as it may seem. Also, the Lower Thames crossing is taking more ancient woodland than the entire HS2 trace.

Another aspect is the ecological mitigation being undertaken. Every bat roost, badger sett, newt pond etc is being studied, evaluated, then a new habitat is being created and the animals moved safely. With regards to the ancient woodland, any woodland specialist will tell you the value of the woodland is in the soil, not the trees, so prior to the trees being cut down all the new saplings, dead wood, dead stumps etc are removed and marked, and then after the trees are cut, the whole of the woodland soil is translocated. It is cut into large blocks and transported to the donor site, where the wood is placed and saplings planted. Most of the non-ancient woodland is single species oak plantation usually dying of honey fungus so would need to come down anyway.

Obviously, this sort of work is horrifically expensive. However if it wasn't mitigated to the nth degree HS2 would be hammered by the environmentalists even more. Then people complain about the cost.. "China could build it for 20 billion!!" yeah of course they could, cos they give zero shits about the environment, archaeology etc. Also, everyone in every town on the trace moans that they don't want to hear or see it. So it has to go into tunnels or deep cuttings which guess what - are incredibly expensive. China would just build it on a concrete pad and say 'f off'. 

 

[VillaJ100]

9 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

 

 

Well that’s got me thoroughly confused. 

If you built a new bog standard train line from London to Birmingham, every resident in every town along the route would demand the train stops there, so they benefit from it. That would make it incredibly slow, And would cause a mix of trains of fast direct city-city services mixed with local clogger trains and freight. We already have a line for that - its just this mixed use means it's shit. If you built a new high speed line for the direct services and high speed, the former line is freed up for local trains and frieght. 

[chrisp65]

5 minutes ago, Demitri_C said:

@chrisp65 you both must have missed when i said i was moving to hertfordshire which is on outskirts of london brum isnt exactly much safee than london either! 

Aaah im touched you want me to be your neighbour

 

Ah, I should make clear that when I invited you to live in the Shires, that’s nowhere near me! Plus it turns out you are already moving to the shires. Albeit one that contains Watford. 

Parts of Birmingham are actually no go areas under Sharia law, so you’d do well to avoid them. 

If me and the missus won the lottery (which we’ve never entered) then she would head straight for the house / pond / goat / duck scenario whereas I would head straight for the flat in a mews somewhere slightly scruffy in London. Somewhere in just slightly the wrong bit of Earls Court or something like that. Somewhere with a bit of life about it, somewhere with a theoretical chance of being knifed but also walking distance to some bistros and a pub that does open mic poetry upstairs on Tuesdays.

 

 

[blandy]

2 minutes ago, VillaJ100 said:

It's true HS2 will take an amount of ancient woodland. This is deemed as woodland that has been present since the year 1600. However, so long as one single tree has been there at all times, it is still classed as ancient woodland. The trees could be 40 year old oaks, but classed as ancient due to this description...

... a large part of the woodland was absolutely trashed by Victorian chalk quarrying and subsequently replanted, making it less of a pristine landscape as it may seem. Also, the Lower Thames crossing is taking more ancient woodland than the entire HS2 trace.

Another aspect is the ecological mitigation being undertaken. Every bat roost, badger sett, newt pond etc is being studied, evaluated, then a new habitat is being created and the animals moved safely.

I struggle with this a bit. I mean I get efforts, even strenuous efforts are being made, and that's good.

The difficulty is that for all the caveat that ancient woodland isn't all ancient, it's still established (as per your example) from for example Victorian times - over 100 years old. Planting new woodland does not recreate that environment and habitat - the holes on old trees for birds to nest in, the variety and complexity of insects and creepy crawlies that start the food chain. The fungi, the bracken, the hunting grounds for Owls and hawks....

Then there's the hedgerows and wildlife corridors that bats and so on use. You cannot just move a colony of bats to a new location, the conditions need to be already there, at the very least, for them to settle. Ditto badgers, Newts, frogs and all the rest. The outcome, however much effort goes into mitigation is a much worse, less diverse, less vibrant local ecology.

They've also been cutting down trees in the nesting season, for example. Some contractors act wholly responsibly, others don't. There is no harm free way of doing it.

That other projects (lower Thames trace) are also eating away at woodland is not remotely an excuse - if anything it only makes preservation of what's left even more vital.

[HanoiVillan]

21 minutes ago, blandy said:

How? I may have missed something but the costs are based around the new lines - building, demolishing, evicting, compensating and so on, and far less around whether the track supports 100 mph or 200 mph trains.

No you're right to be fair, it probably wouldn't make much difference in the end if the alternative option were simply building exactly the same line but slower. My understanding is that there are capacity increasing options that could be implemented without doing that, but I'm no engineer so I'm probably out of my depth at this point.

[chrisp65]

9 minutes ago, VillaJ100 said:

If you built a new bog standard train line from London to Birmingham, every resident in every town along the route would demand the train stops there, so they benefit from it. That would make it incredibly slow, And would cause a mix of trains of fast direct city-city services mixed with local clogger trains and freight. We already have a line for that - its just this mixed use means it's shit. If you built a new high speed line for the direct services and high speed, the former line is freed up for local trains and frieght. 

No, this is it. We were told it wasn’t about London. It so clearly absolutely is.

Improve the infrastructure between Liverpool and Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Edinburgh and Glasgow. improve the infrastructure between Swansea and Cardiff and Newport. Bristol, Plymouth, Exeter. Wolverhampton, Coventry, Nottingham.

Everywhere and anywhere except one more transport hub for London.

Let’s make the huge capital spend about something other than London, which could then potentially stop so many people needing to go to London which would then begin this levelling up this project is supposed to be about.

It would also, as a virtuous side effect, reduce the demand to get to London and solve the problem they’re pretending they are not trying to solve.

 

[VillaJ100]

1 minute ago, chrisp65 said:

No, this is it. We were told it wasn’t about London. It so clearly absolutely is.

Improve the infrastructure between Liverpool and Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Edinburgh and Glasgow. improve the infrastructure between Swansea and Cardiff and Newport. Bristol, Plymouth, Exeter. Wolverhampton, Coventry, Nottingham.

Everywhere and anywhere except one more transport hub for London.

Let’s make the huge capital spend about something other than London, which could then potentially stop so many people needing to go to London which would then begin this levelling up this project is supposed to be about.

It would also, as a virtuous side effect, reduce the demand to get to London and solve the problem they’re pretending they are not trying to solve.

 

If you ask me while i totally support the project, i think they should have started with the 'crossrail for the north' and the Leeds/Manchester to Birmingham spur FIRST. However the London/Birmingham bit is the most expensive so I think that was done first.

And as someone who used to commute by train fro Brum to the East Mids i agree the east-west lines are shit.

[VillaJ100]

11 minutes ago, blandy said:

I struggle with this a bit. I mean I get efforts, even strenuous efforts are being made, and that's good.

The difficulty is that for all the caveat that ancient woodland isn't all ancient, it's still established (as per your example) from for example Victorian times - over 100 years old. Planting new woodland does not recreate that environment and habitat - the holes on old trees for birds to nest in, the variety and complexity of insects and creepy crawlies that start the food chain. The fungi, the bracken, the hunting grounds for Owls and hawks....

Then there's the hedgerows and wildlife corridors that bats and so on use. You cannot just move a colony of bats to a new location, the conditions need to be already there, at the very least, for them to settle. Ditto badgers, Newts, frogs and all the rest. The outcome, however much effort goes into mitigation is a much worse, less diverse, less vibrant local ecology.

They've also been cutting down trees in the nesting season, for example. Some contractors act wholly responsibly, others don't. There is no harm free way of doing it.

That other projects (lower Thames trace) are also eating away at woodland is not remotely an excuse - if anything it only makes preservation of what's left even more vital.

The woodland is established from at least the 1600's - the trees however could be 10 years old. That's why the value is in the soil resource, not the trees. Old dead trees are also being translocated. Everything deemed a 'historic hedgerow' by HE guidelines is also being translocated. With regards to newts etc, the conditions are created to be suitable. However you are right in that of course it's not perfect, but its as close as it can be and can recover quicker than if just hoyked out.

As far as i am aware absolutely no instructions for deforestation have gone out from out section from march until this october. So if some rogue contractors are cutting trees down, they will be fired and also not paid for it. Please highlight where this has happened and i will look into it.

My point was that numerous groups cry murder at HS2, yet the Thames crossing gets nary an eyelid bat at it and it's more destructive to the thing the group care about.

[lapal_fan]

Also, think of all the lovely new habitat which'll be created on the old lines  

There's hardly any "ancient" woodland left in the UK - only 14 are larger than 500 acres in the entire country.  Everything you usually see is plantation (and so re-doable). 

It's all an illusion.

[Follyfoot]

25 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

 

Ah, I should make clear that when I invited you to live in the Shires, that’s nowhere near me! Plus it turns out you are already moving to the shires. Albeit one that contains Watford. 

Parts of Birmingham are actually no go areas under Sharia law, so you’d do well to avoid them. 

If me and the missus won the lottery (which we’ve never entered) then she would head straight for the house / pond / goat / duck scenario whereas I would head straight for the flat in a mews somewhere slightly scruffy in London. Somewhere in just slightly the wrong bit of Earls Court or something like that. Somewhere with a bit of life about it, somewhere with a theoretical chance of being knifed but also walking distance to some bistros and a pub that does open mic poetry upstairs on Tuesdays.

 

 

If you want a bit of that type of edgy action call out your wife's sister's name or her best friend's name whilst in the throws of passion (after carefully planting a streak knife on the bedside cabinet) 

[chrisp65]

1 minute ago, Follyfoot said:

If you want a bit of that type of edgy action call out your wife's sister's name or her best friend's name whilst in the throws of passion (after carefully planting a streak knife on the bedside cabinet) 

Ah yes, the old ‘bucking bronco’ I believe that’s called.

Technically, you should also be tied together in some way.

[Demitri_C]

2 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

 

Ah, I should make clear that when I invited you to live in the Shires, that’s nowhere near me! Plus it turns out you are already moving to the shires. Albeit one that contains Watford. 

Parts of Birmingham are actually no go areas under Sharia law, so you’d do well to avoid them. 

If me and the missus won the lottery (which we’ve never entered) then she would head straight for the house / pond / goat / duck scenario whereas I would head straight for the flat in a mews somewhere slightly scruffy in London. Somewhere in just slightly the wrong bit of Earls Court or something like that. Somewhere with a bit of life about it, somewhere with a theoretical chance of being knifed but also walking distance to some bistros and a pub that does open mic poetry upstairs on Tuesdays.

 

 

Earls courts a nice area - shocking for parking but i guess you would tube everywhere.

Its mainly townhouses up there. If i won lottery im not sure where i would live. As all my friends and family are here i would probably stay in Hertfordshire side.