Re: Priorities
Despite its manifest problems, I really don't like HS2 being held up as the whipping boy for wasting public money. It should be compared with similar projects only, and if you want to look for something that did less and cost more, mile for mile, then you need to look no further than CrossRail, which also illustrates just quite how skewed infrastructure investment is towards London and the South East.
By all means debate the pros and cons of high-speed rail (and additional freight capacity), but do this for the whole network rather than cherry-picking things to bash. I remember clearly when the TGV line down to Marseille was under construction how one French farmer asked why he should lose fields just so that the journey time would be halved. This is a very valid question but also a false equivalence. High-speed rail has been shown to reduce both car and air travel on the routes served within integrated networks, which is why many of the Spanish lines remain of dubious value.
But I think HS2 also highlights the fake dichotomy of big versus small projects. There are good technical, geographical and political reasons why the existing West Coast Main Line couldn't simply be upgraded to a high-speed line. But parts of it certainly could have been significantly improved while work was done a new high-speed line. And other parts of the network could and should have been upgraded (electrification of many branch lines on hold since the 1960s) to ensure real network effects; George Gideon Obsorne deserves at least some credit for pushing this idea.
And it's the same for science: innovation and development for and from CERN have helped projects in all participating countries. Yes, there's the WWW but also work done on really large magnets, superconductors, tunnel making, vibration damping, particle detection have often been groundbreaking in their fields. But good scientific discovery works both ways: many projects improve on, adapt (often at much reduced cost) stuff from the larger ones because their focus is narrower. This, indeed, has been one of the main claims of the scientific method with investments generally repaying themselves many times over, if often indirectly, which is why tax-based funding is a good idea™.
Okay, rant over, I'll take another dried frog pill!