The projected cost of building the London to Birmingham section is estimated at £17 Billion.
The time saved on a journey from London to Birmingham is 23 minutes.
Obviously when Manchester and Leeds are incorporated the time saved will be greated but it seems like a lot of money for the times involved.
Besides which I've always believed that the UK's biggest transport problem isn't between cities but within them.
Doleham: The least used station in East Sussex
5 hours ago
4 comments:
"The time saved on a journey from London to Birmingham is 23 minutes."
Not much is it? A better service with really good broadband access might be all that is required to make up for those 23 minutes.
I'm mildly against the project (enough to tweet it, not enough to do anything else) but - despite what some advocates say - the case is more to do with capacity than speed. The cost/benefit looks at an additional line at normal speed, but it finds the additional cost for the extra speed has a much better benefit/cost ratio than the new line itself.
They also look at the objection that smart phones etc have meant time travelling is not wasted, but have a rather elegant argument that you really can't do any work while standing up, so it makes the extra capacity even more important.
Obviously such studies have huge error margins but it's not as if they are absolutely stupid.
I don't use trains very often, is the broadband access usable on most trains?
On GNER think of it more as dialup speeds. Of course you can use 3g, although signal on GNER seems very weak and often unusable.
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