Journey times have been decreasing since the wheel was invented but London’s power has grown so why do you believe HS2 will buck that trend?

If that’s not full of straw I don’t know what is. Journey times to London from an hour away have always been an hour. What’s happened is that the radius of places that are an hour away has expanded over the centuries. Due to better technology. Isn’t that what you want to happen? Help activity move further away from London?

I get to see colleagues face to face which in priceless and can’t be replicated on skype.

With a bit of practise, it could be. We just need to get used to it. Otherwise, we’re all ****, aren’t we? If economic activity is to increase and we DON’T change our working practices, the entire world will consume itself moving more and more people around to deliver nothing more than words.

Video conferencing etc replaces some meetings, but as business becomes more global, the overall need for travelling increases, hence the continual rise in business travel.

Video conferencing etc replaces some meetings, but as business becomes more global, the overall need for travelling increases, hence the continual rise in business travel.

Jevon’s paradox, innit. Or, if you prefer, the Khazoom-Brookes postulate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazzoom%E2%80%93Brookes_postulate

We don’t NEED to travel, we just like it.

Well I like new bikes, can’t have them all the time though.

Is it in left luggage?

I agree with HS2.
Once Brexit hits the fan the sheer amount of folks unemployed will need jobs, however since thee already is a huge skill shortage I expect this current Government to welcome that there Europeans back in to fill the gap.

As for the route, who cares. The route has to go somewhere, better just drawing a line on an OS Map and throw some diggers at it….now.

molgrips – Member
What’s happened is that the radius of places that are an hour away has expanded over the centuries. Due to better technology. Isn’t that what you want to happen? Help activity move further away from London?

Making London more accessible and encouraging business to be located in other cities are not the same. London could be 2hrs from Newcastle or 1 from Leeds/Manchester but we ought to be investing in those cities being self sustaining vibrant business centres rather than celebrating their increased ability to be commuter suburbs for London.

We do NEED to travel. For business and pleasure. Business is still done face to face and always will be, now more than ever – especially since more and more business is global with nations of other cultures and languages where things don’t translate very well over email or link call/video conference. A lot of the day to day admin and contact has been replaced with tech, but the business of doing business is still done face to face – at the end of the day it’s all about trust and you don’t develop trust over What’s App, LinkedIn or, heaven forbid, a phone call!! Business travel is increasing because global business is increasing at a tremendous and exponential rate and it has always been the case that improvements in physical infrastructure facilitates increases in business and ultimately GDP because it means companies can attract people and business contacts from wider afield. Its a self-feeding mechanism. Throttle back on infrastructure and you throttle back on business activity. It is the life blood.

So bring it on – build more rail links, more roads (urgently!), more airports and runways (runway 3 & 4 for Heathrow and more runways for Gatwick and others around the country), and of course improve our digital infrastructure. It all needs doing and a damn sight faster than we are doing now.

No idea if HS2 is a good link or not – I have no doubt we need high speed links connecting all our major cities and towns as well as more local branch lines and trams for more local connections – not good to mix and match them as you just end up slowing the fast trains down. One thing I heard today is that HS2 wont link upto Eurostar – that’s a mistake for sure.

Business is still done face to face and always will be

That’s what I dispute, that’s what needs to change for the good of the planet and all our sanity.

But until then:

we ought to be investing in those cities being self sustaining vibrant business centres rather than celebrating their increased ability to be commuter suburbs for London.

Let’s say businesses do relocate or start up in these cities *because* they are accessible from London. If enough of them do this then they’ll find eventually that when they pick up the phone to someone they want to work with they’ll find they are also in the North and not London.

That’s what’s happened in the outskirts of London – places like Camberly, Bracknell, Staines, Guildford etc etc.

@molgrips
There are many reasons why businesses are located outside of Central London but in close proximity however unless HS2 vastly exceeds its predicted journey time savings I can’t see Newcastle/Leeds/Manchester becoming the new Staines in the foreseeable future hence my preference for investing in those cities in their own right rather than expansion being London dependant.
Even with teleportation and London being accessible in seconds that isn’t the same as trying to better balance our economy/country by growing business in other cities. The success of HS2 seems highly dubious which was my original point.

To be honest, free fast wifi and lots of tables would be as much of a benefit as anything else.

Even with teleportation and London being accessible in seconds that isn’t the same as trying to better balance our economy/country by growing business in other cities.

Well as said on the EU thread – I’m all in favour of governments properly managing the economy instead of just letting it run riot doing whatever it wants.

I read something that made a good point about reducing travel times to/from London and how it might make things worse for ‘the provinces’.

If you’re running a small business in Birmingham and you need an ad campaign, or a website or a piece of software designing, you could spend two hours getting to New Street, getting on the £140 train to London, then getting the tube across London to the trendy offices of the firm you’ve decided to employ to do that bit of work for you. Or you could choose someone local, they might not be quite as good due to a smaller pool of workers and less experience/variety, but they’ll do a decent job and it will cost less.

But if the journey time to London comes down to an hour and a half, or an hour, then at some point you’re probably going to end up deciding that the ‘better’ London designers/marketers/coders are worth the hassle of the journey, so you use them instead of the company in the Midlands (at some point, due to the crap local public transport, it ends up taking longer to get 10 miles in the same county than it does to jump on the HS train and get to central London). The size of London means that there will almost certainly be someone there who can do a job at least as well as your local, provincial supplier. But at the moment, the journey times put people off. As what people consider ‘local’ grows then they’ll start using firms further away.

The counter to that is that the non-London firms are probably cheaper, but will customers based in London want a worse product/service for the sake of saving a few quid?

I’d much rather see the money spent on decent local transport. I live on a main bus route, and yet there’s no bus to the train station (which will be on HS2). So it takes me two or three busses and 45 minutes, plus a walk, to get 3 miles to the station, and then HS2 will make it 45 minutes to travel all the way to London. I don’t think an hour or 45 minutes to get to London would make a noticeable difference, the thing that’s noticeable is that in London (central London at least) you just turn up at a tube station, swipe your oyster card and get catapulted to your destination after at most a 3 minute wait for a train. Compare that to almost every other city where you’re lucky if a bus goes to your destination more than once an hour, and there’s no Oyster so you have to pay in shrapnel, and the drivers don’t give change so you might be out of luck and have to hand over a tenner for the privilege of using a bus!

I wish they would spend some money on the SW trains….London to Bristol seems fast enough then you go back to the 90’s to Plymouth then you get on a Deltic to PZ…. thats if the weather is good and you can get past the coast.

The compelling case for HS2 is expanding the size of the London commuter belt and inflating house prices accordingly across a wider radius from the Thames. That’s been the Conservative party’s main aim since Thatcher. The more people taking out the largest mortgages possible the better.

This not only provides the illusion of wealth, economic growth (essential to secure further borrowing) and a healthy banking system, it also traps working people under the yoke of debt. The more debt a worker has, the less likely that worker is to rock the boat when his or her employer changes the conditions governing the job the worker depends on to service that debt to something less in the worker’s favour.

The idea that the government wants to build HS2 to create and support a thriving hub of innovative industry in Bradford is laughable. They do not care about the north of England and beyond.

Its a vanity project pure and simple and will suck more money out of the rest of the country into london.

If the government were serious about regeneration it would be started in Edinburgh or Glasgow and built south from there

Its a vanity project pure and simple and will suck more money out of the rest of the country into london.

Different continent but living somewhere that I can access 2 major cities in under 3hrs door to door it actually has the opposite effect where business can reside outside of the major centres and get in easily enough to work there. Of a sample of the 10-15 of us at our co-working space Friday beers 80% don’t earn money in the place we live, we do however spend it.
If it were to do one thing and alieviate the housing pressure in the south east then it may have a big ongoing benifit for essential workers and those that have no real choice but to live there.

To build south from Edinburgh to Glasgow you would end up connecting Newcastle/Leeds/Manchester first, all places that have a good direct train connection mostly – A quick look tells me I can do Newcastle To Edinburgh (1hr45 our 1hr30 back) first class for 70 quid this morning or 40 quid standard. Glasgow down the west coast was never that busy till you hit the Manchester area, it’s the bit below that needs the work.

The compelling case for HS2 is expanding the size of the London commuter belt and inflating house prices accordingly across a wider radius from the Thames. That’s been the Conservative party’s main aim since Thatcher. The more people taking out the largest mortgages possible the better.

Yep

Of a sample of the 10-15 of us at our co-working space Friday beers 80% don’t earn money in the place we live, we do however spend it

That’s 8-12 people from “the provinces” drinking their friday beers (and eating their lunch every day, presumably) in a distant city ? Hopefully they don’t buy all their shit online, otherwise the local towns might as well shut, hey ?

No that is us working remotely for most of the time but being able to be face to face when we need to. It allows for better remote working when you can easily and reliably get to places you need to.

the TGV in france is great .

Good transport links allow people to live elsewhere and work in London – either all the time or occasionally. This brings money back out of the capital, and that money then grows the economy in those other places.

So it is a commuter line, with another, wider housing bubble, and even more pressure on the busy London services such as buses, tube etc…

I’m also intrigued in the ‘London earns the UK it’s money’ and ‘London is the economic powerhouse’ argument. To make it this powerhouse, you have to spend far more on infrastructure and services then elsewhere in the country.

If, as others suggest, we invested the £60bn of Hs2, the £00’s bn of Heathrow, the cost of crossrail, Olympics, M25 upgrades and various road improvement programmes inside M25 etc etc that has or is to be invested in London and area into (for example) Leeds, how much would we have another economic ‘powerhouse’, while reducing many pressures on London and spreading the economy wider.
Total Investment vs reward – does London offer best value?

I do think that this forum contains a fair mix of smart and well read individuals regardless of political affiliations – however there is no debate on HS2 it’s a “new deal” “Hoover Dam” project designed to create an illusion/distraction, no one in power gives a **** about the North (or Birmingham for that matter) Google ain’t building in Manchester or Leeds- it is far easier to borrow money to invest in a flagship project (regardless of any real value) than actually try and distribute infrastructure to the provinces. The current government does not have the time to work on multiple projects while dealing with the biggest fiscal catastrophe since WW2 – easier to turn around and say “look at the investment we are making for you”
Complete bollocks and we all know it.