Why Can't Socialists Think of This?
- Editor Darren Birks
- 4 minutes ago
- 3 min read
THINK SMARTER
by Darren Birks
HS2, once trumpeted as Britain’s flagship high-speed rail project, has become a monument to political overreach and outmoded thinking. Conceived in 2009, HS2 was a vanity project for Tony Blair, it's vague promises about getting people from London to Birmingham eleven minutes quicker didn't make sense then, now, it just sounds ridiculous. The project has been going 15 years and already cost over 25 Billion, yet what do we really have to show for it? A half-finished line, ballooning costs, and a business case that collapses under even the gentlest modern scrutiny.
The numbers alone are staggering. HS2 has already cost the taxpayer around £25 billion to date. The final bill for the truncated Phase 1 to Birmingham is projected at £66 billion, while the scrapped northern sections would have taken total costs to well over £100 billion. For what? To save hypothetical executives a few minutes for a meeting they'd now do on Zoom anyway.
This is the uncomfortable truth: HS2 was designed for a world that no longer exists. The idea that business deals need to be done face to face belongs to a long gone century. COVID-19 and the remote working revolution finished what smartphones and cloud computing started. Today’s economy moves at the speed of fibre broadband, not railways.
And that’s the second uncomfortable truth: railways themselves are an outdated mode of transport. A hangover from a bygone age. The first rail boom may have transformed Britain in the Victorian era — Trains may have made sense in 1925, but In 2025, they really don't.
The Solution
So why are we still pouring billions into this obsolete relic? If we really want to salvage value from HS2, we should rip up the old logic with it. Here’s a radical but obvious idea: turn the HS2 routes into dedicated highways for autonomous electric vehicles instead.
Let’s look at what we already have. A vast, clear corridor — much of it already flattened, tunnelled or bridged — running from London towards Birmingham. Around £25 billion has been sunk into civil engineering, tunnels and viaducts. Instead of finishing the line and adding billions more to the debt pile, we could adapt what’s there for a future-proof transport solution.
Fully autonomous electric cars — like Teslas or any of the new wave of AI-driven vehicles — could use these routes exclusively. Free from pedestrians, cyclists and unpredictable human drivers, these roads would be the perfect proving ground for true autonomy. Vehicles could link together into “road trains”, drafting one another in tight formation using radar, LIDAR and satellite navigation to slash energy use and congestion. The result? A hyper-efficient, zero-emission flow of traffic running non-stop from London to the Midlands.
If that sounds fanciful, it’s worth remembering that Elon Musk’s Boring Company is already building high-speed tunnels for electric cars under Las Vegas. In these test tracks, Teslas zip through narrow tubes at speeds that rival high-speed rail — but with the flexibility of a car. The same approach could be adapted to HS2’s deep-bored tunnels and overland viaducts. Instead of a single, inflexible train line with fixed timetables, you’d have a smart motorway for the 21st century — always on, always moving, responding instantly to demand.
There are no downsides
The benefits are obvious. First, massive cost savings: instead of buying and maintaining an expensive new fleet of high-speed trains and stations, we’d use existing electric vehicles. Second, flexibility: anyone with an autonomous EV could use the route. Third, resilience: if a section needs repairs, traffic can be rerouted instantly, unlike railways where a broken signal can paralyse an entire line. And finally, it’s future-proof. As self-driving technology improves, so does the efficiency of the entire system — without needing to tear up tracks or retrofit trains.
Such a shift wouldn’t just save money. It would show the world that Britain is capable of real, daring, visionary thinking about the future of transport — not just clinging to the faded glories of steam engines and brass buttons. It would signal a pivot away from Whitehall’s love of mega-projects that always run late and over budget, towards leaner, smarter infrastructure that fits the way we actually live and work today.
Of course, it would take a government with real vision to make this happen. One that understands modern transport should be flexible, smart and built for how people actually live and work today — not stuck in the past with old ideas about railways and business travel.
HS2 can still be turned into something useful. We already have the land and the tunnels. The technology exists. Now we just need leaders with the imagination to use it properly. If they don’t, we’ll be stuck with an expensive mistake when we could have had a world-leading transport system instead.
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