Road v rail

For convenience, the car is unparalleled. It enables you to go door to door whenever you want. It lets you carry stuff and ferry passengers. Yet the traffic dictators make roads a dangerous obstacle course beset with contrived conflicts, bottlenecks and traps. £50bn would enable most of our road system to be transformed into Equality Streets, enabling civilised, efficient coexistence, where children could go in safety. But the supporters of HS2 want to spend £50bn on a single branch line of an overcrowded, overpriced 19^th century mode of travel: rail.