On the HS2 front, I think we should take the position of a "critical friend" - my previous post argues that there is a genuine need to be addressed and therefore I believe we should support the principle of building new rail capacity (it's not a vanity project as some have characterised it), but the detail of where and how we build it needs a lot of careful thought. Route selection for London to Birmingham is slowly getting there, but the preferred route for the sections further north is still under discussion and we can have an influence here (the route will eventually go to Manchester and Leeds and then on to Scotland).
This is a difficult question, because the railway needs to be fairly straight with no tight bends and gentle gradients, resulting in a lot of embankments and cuttings (I drove up a hill the other day marked as an 8% gradient, but trains find 1% pretty steep - the rails are deliberately low-friction!) Our choice of route will also be affected by natural hazards - we need to avoid floodplains, soft ground and hilly areas!
Land purchase costs are a major part of the overall cost. Unlike the Victorians, we aren't going to bulldoze slums and ignore the poor who are left homeless as a result - we have to compensate everyone for the land we use. So do we avoid built-up areas due to the high cost of urban land and the number of buildings affected and neighbours who will have noise problems, or do we avoid the countryside given that this means damaging woodlands, habitats, areas of outstanding beauty and good farmland? And if we find a major obstacle, how do we deal with it? For example, we could divert around a site of high ecological value or a listed building, but does that mean damaging a bigger area of slightly lower ecological value? There is a good argument to extend one tunnel through the Chilterns to avoid an area of ancient woodland, but you couldn't do that for the whole route because it is very technically complex and expensive (and higher carbon emissions than to build at ground level).
We also need to consider what happens at stations - at the moment, the routes proposed include a lot of "parkway" style stations, which are unacceptable if they are not a genuine interchange. Birmingham International could be a good place to change trains, provided that there are fast connections by metro or normal train to the city centre. Similarly, Meadowhall interchange outside Sheffield is well connected by tram, train and bus to Sheffield and the surrounding area. On the other hand, many of the proposed "parkway" stations seem like an invitation to drive to the station, which is the opposite of the outcome we want! The Hong Kong metro company owns a lot of land around stations, which has brought in a lot of income used to cross-subsidise the metro, bringing the ticket prices down. This might be a model we want to adopt here as well, because the worst possible outcome is that we end up like the M6 Toll: shiny new infrastructure but the price is too high so few people use it and everyone else is still on the crowded existing routes! We need to learn from other countries here: France just built another high speed route between Bordeaux and Tours, which has only taken them three years to construct and opens later this year. Japan is a small overcrowded island nation like ours, and they have had a high-speed rail network between all major cities since the 1960s.
So as environmentalists I think we need to be concerned about outcomes, not just outputs - civil engineers can deliver a new railway but we need to take a much broader view to ensure that this genuinely delivers the benefits we want to see. And we need to be prepared to challenge some of the assumptions behind the proposed benefits - we DON'T want to encourage crazy commuting from Birmingham to London and we don't regard "economic growth" as the be-all and end-all, especially if that growth makes the country even more London-centric than it already is. If we can make it genuinely work for the regions, we can call it a success. So when we look at increasing demand for rail travel, it may be that we don't want to facilitate all of it! Rather than the "predict and provide" model of infrastructure provision, we need to manage demand as well as supply. Failing to address the problem from both demand and supply sides gives you Spain's awful record of building ever more desalination plants but still never having enough water, because every time a new plant is built, more golf courses, hotel resorts with huge swimming pools and greenhouses growing lettuces and other water-intensive crops spring up.
We also need to make sure that full and comprehensive environmental surveys are conducted prior to design, and that there is ring-fenced funding available for environmental mitigation: we cannot allow destruction of habitats which are irreplaceable simply on the grounds of cost, so we need to ensure that the rail engineers take the potential impacts very seriously. Many proposed mitigation options have so far been rejected on grounds of cost.
See also:
HS2: why do we need it?
Towards a Sustainable Railway - Part 1 and Part 2
What a wonderful world - why we need to protect it
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