HS2 – the Cosmological Cost?

[Is it really almost a year since my last post? Whoops!]

So, we now know the UK government’s preferred route for Phase-2 of the proposed “High-Speed” railway. (Given it’s unlikely to be actually up and running by 2032 - even with a favourable tail-wind - one might question the choice of moniker, but that’s another story!)

We also have an estimate of how much the entire project will cost: approximately £32.7bn.

This prompted me to do some thinking about what that means. It can be difficult to get your head around super-huge numbers, but maybe these two pieces of information will help to put it into perspective:

• current (2013) world population = 7bn (approx.);
• age of Universe (time since the Big Bang) ~ 13.7bn years.

We could therefore think of the project as costing about £4.60 for every man, woman and child on the planet.

Alternatively, the government proposes to spend - on a railway, for goodness sake - about £2.39 for every year the universe has so far been in existence. Of course, that’s ignoring inflation. (Economic, rather than cosmological!)

And this when we are apparently entering a “triple-dip recession”.

As far as the “benefits” are concerned, I would have to admit I’m no expert, but it seems to me that shaving off a little more from an already respectable journey time from London to Manchester (for example), is a poor return for the investment. The UK is not exactly a vast country (though it is crowded, of course).

Moreover, who is likely to benefit? If I were cynical I might say “the small number of Fat Cats who will be able to afford the (no doubt) astronomical fare”. But I’m not, so I won’t.

And, being naïve on such matters, I would have thought that seriously upgrading our local public transport infrastructure would have provided more tangible benefit to a far greater proportion of the population. (The rolling stock on my local line, for instance, is embarrassingly out-dated compared with its counterpart in most EU countries I have visited.)

There will of course be a “public consultation” exercise. In conclusion, I would simply ask this question: approximately how many times, since the birth of the Universe, has a public consultation process resulted in the plans of a determined (if misguided) government being thwarted?

I suspect you know the answer!