A petition to slow down trains headed to Birmingham from London has hit almost 70 million signatures in under two hours today.
“Why on Earth would anybody want to get to Birmingham more quickly?” asked David Higgins, Chairman of the High Speed Railway and the former Chief Executive of Network Rail told The Herald. “I’ve been and frankly the best thing about the place is that I was able to leave.”
The petition has been signed by everybody in the UK in a matter of hours and has called into question the UK’s appetite for the £55.7Bn project which is being built by a consortium of French, Japanese and Swedish companies whilst nurses can’t afford to park at hospitals.
“Honestly I don’t get it. I can understand why you might want to get to New York or Paris more quickly, but Birmingham?”
The HS2 project has been dogged by controversy from the start and was originally a solution to the question, “how can we improve the journey between London and Birmingham?”
“Well the obvious answer to that question is to make the trains not smell of piss.” One regular commuter told us. “I bet you could design a toilet for a train that doesn’t stink out a whole carriage for a lot less than £55,700,000,000. It didn’t cost that to fake the Moon landings.”
Other proposals to improve the route between London and Birmingham that were dismissed out of hand included free recreational drugs, on board massages and comfortable seats.
“Nobody suggested that being in Birmingham for longer than absolutely necessary was the answer.” A bemused David Higgins told us.
