I approve of this message. It's nice to see someone trying to bait Northerners into making their voices heard over the bray of the Home Counties. No, it won't be very nice having hundred mile an hour trains whizzing past your back garden; tough. Making the country a smaller, more manageable place, improving services and reducing air travel are all worth paying for. Especially since this is the kind of thing the rest of Europe was doing decades ago.
If you haven't passed on your opinion yet in the High Speed 2 consultation, you can do so here. Go on - take a couple of minutes to change the country.
Incidentally, has anyone seen anything similar on Merseyside?
3 comments:
While I dismiss the NIMBY concerns out of hand, I do actually worry whether HS2 will have the opposite effect to that intended and end up with northern cities such as Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds being reduced to dormitory towns for London commuters.
The proposed journey times of under 90 minutes will make a daily commute to the Capital feasible (though expensive). Result: more jobs and wealth pouring into London.
It will probably cost about £1000 for an open return, though
I don't believe the North will ever be made up of dormitory towns, but I can't believe that making London commuter-close will be a bad thing. There's a lot of wealth down there that could come this way as much as heading to London. Places like Guildford, Brighton and Hertford are rich precisely because of their their links to London.
Making Liverpool a place where London's millionaires have weekend apartments and houses, a place where people nip up on the train for a round at the Royal Liverpool golf course or a day at Aintree, is a great side effect.
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