Comment by steve1977

> Even when it doesn't work

I was genuinely surprised last summer, when a locomotive standing still at a station spontaneously burst into flames, during the busiest commuting period. Had I not been WFH that day, it would have been a major inconvenience, as the whole station closed down for a couple of hours... I thought that this kind of experience was reserved for Eastern Europeans, but the Swiss proudly followed suit.

https://www.blick.ch/schweiz/zuerich/feuer-in-zuerich-zug-am...

There is always room for improvement. If you don't stay on top of things you end up with what Germany has now for public transport infrastructure.

Or like in Vaud and Geneva, if it doesn't work it's because we love it to death, completely overwhelming the limited capacity available with hordes of rush-hour commuters.

But we must admit that Switzerland does not actually have high speed rail at all. So asking how it would build High Speed 2 is a bit of a misleading question. Swiss rail runs on time but slowly, this suits the Swiss culture which is much less centralized around big megacities than the UK so there's less need to do long commutes at high speed.

The article does agree that Switzerland wouldn't have built HS2 to begin with, and the point about continuous development over occasional megaprojects is a good one. But it goes off the rails when it starts saying like

"They'd have identified core intercity links that are far too slow: typically not to/from London, but some of the second-tier city connections that are extraordinarily slow:"

The UK doesn't need these things. What it needs is much more capacity in and out of the center of London. That's where people actually need to go and go fast. The author seems to think that British transport planners are inexplicably stupid but the depressing reality of British transport is that it's dominated by the problem of moving people in and out of the center of London at peak times. Economically nothing else generates a return on investment and there's nothing the planners can do about that. Swiss planners would reach the same conclusion.

Given that there's already a lot of physical rail going in and out, and there's no good way to add more or expand stations due to the insanely high value of the land around them, that means increasing speeds on existing lines or massive tunnelling projects. Hence, Crossrail and High Speed Rail 2.

Switzerland has a unique solution to this problem of people wanting to work in city centers. It just ignores it! Zurich is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in, and sometimes literally the most expensive, whilst also having a big living space problem. It got that way because the Swiss refuse to do any of the following:

- Increase urban density.

- Make trains fast.

- Build more parking.

- Allow a free housing market so workers can move in. (Zurich is run by socialists who buy up tons of housing to stop "rich" people from renting it, which then makes what little remains even more expensive for everyone else).

This strategy kills the cities and makes life worse for the people who actually generate the economic value, who find their high salaries barely stretch to even a student-sized apartment and for whom an 11km commute takes 30 minutes.