With Manchester, Leeds and Doncaster all having really good airports perhaps we should utilise these to travel to London quickly if that is what we want. Manchester airport to London on a plane which is available right now: 55 minutes Manchester airport to London on HS2: 59 minutes. We are planning to spend a now projected £80b, severely damaging the landscape and destroying some communities to build something which is SLOWER than we already have and will most likely be outdated by the time it is finished in 20 odd years. Anyone care to remind me what the benefit of this plan is again?
They'd be better off then spending a bit of money developing a shuttle from heathrow to the centre of london or deciding where they are intending to create a new runway/airport and building a short distance high speed shuttle from that. Money from HS2 would be far better spent connecting sheffield and manchester and from the M1 straight into your neck of the woods at east anglia. Too much is spent trying to connect everyone to London instead of trying to stimulate the economy and links throughout the rest of the country who have no interest at all in getting stabbed in the nations shithole capital
Not really slow though is it - you've to get to the airport, check-in a certain amount of time before the flight, go through the actual flight, then you could have at least an hour getting from the destination airport to the bit of London you're going to. With HS2 you'll be taken straight to the centre of London, and if the plans don't change it will be great for Barnsley as we only have to go to Meadowhall. All those who say we don't need it obviously haven't been on a train to London, I've done it about 15 times over the last five years and the trains are always jam packed whatever time of day it is. Especially the Donny one, I had to stand up all the way there once despite having a reserved seat, couldn't be bothered arguing with the folk who were in my seat who said they only sat there because someone was in their seat. Whatever. These big infrastructure projects are just what we need to get the economy going, £40bn over 20 years is peanuts. The higher figures than this quoted include new roads and loads of urban regeneration which is obviously needed anyway. Better thing to do would be to commit £200bn and go all the way - new motorways to areas of the country that is lacking, HS2, a fast transpennine route and maybe even the Thames Estuary Airport as it's obvious Heathrow is losing it's battle to be the major European hub to cities that have already acted like Frankfurt.
Trouble is we all know that the new road building and urban regeneration will be concentrated on London same as the only reason the Olympics where applied for was in order to re generate East London. Seb Coe himself said words to that effect on Radio Sheffiels a few weeks ago, when asked for his opinion on the demolition of Don Valley Stadium. Olympic legacy my a**e.