This just in: Old people complain about progress.
But for real, if you actually read any of their complaints it’s literally just normal construction stuff.
Chilterns Tunnel (not to be confused with the Chunnel)
A country that can have nice things.
IIRC this always had complications so it was never an easy project
Using the £80bn figure, and after adjusting for inflation and differences in local prices using purchasing power parity (PPP), HS2’s projected cost of $537mn per km makes it by far the most expensive of the 94 lines in the TCP’s dataset.
According to Why do they hate California high speed rail? Because it could actually succeed | High Speed Rail Alliance, at a little over $200m per mile, California HSR is a bargain by comparison.
I don’t think I would hold up HS2 as a particularly strong example of a country getting its capital projects right — it’s been slashed into a short London-Birmingham shuttle, as compared with the initial brief to connect London to Manchester and Leeds.
Although the fact that even this neutered line looks good in comparison to most US projects is pretty damning.
The UK is on par with us when it comes to infrastructure.