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HS2 and national infrastructure

I have little time for the people described in this article who oppose HS2 because it has negative impacts on them personally. Sometimes, decisions taken at a national level benefit us, sometimes they don’t – it is called living in a society. I'm also weary of listening to nonsensical business case arguments made by people using the business case arguments as a front for the fact that they don't want their precious views obstructed (i.e. it is not the business case they are really concerned about).

Still, I'm thankful that the UK's system isn't as difficult as Germany's, where pretty much every municipality along the route has the right to demand extensive modifications to suit its own selfish local interests, or even veto the project altogether. For instance, Andrew McNaughton has recognised the uselessness of having intermediate stations between London and Birmingham. On the other hand, Germany had to compromise when it built the Cologne-Frankfurt high-speed lines – as far as I am aware, Siegburg/Bonn, Montabaur and Limburg Süd stations were built to satisfy local interests, even though there was no engineering merit in having stations in these locations.

(Re: Connectivity and capacity – blog post)

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