Road-building

HS2 is a nonsensical vanity project, the UK's attempt to imitate the long-established (and likewise misconceived) high-speed rail projects in Europe, Japan, or China. Their main purpose, apart from being rooted in futurism ('the Concorde of the rails'), has always been mainly to facilitate fast business travel. I'm obviously not talking about that sort of railway.

You treat highways as a fixed resource in what you say, but most highways built during the 20th century are already a long way into their design lives. The most obvious example of this at the moment are bridges, which in Germany, for instance, were apparently built with a design life of 30 years and are now having to be renewed in extremely costly projects. The non-bridge elements of motorways also need to be resurfaced periodically, and sometimes rebuilt, especially at junctions. Maintaining railways is considerably less resource-intensive and far more sustainable. Existing motorways should be converted to railways.

Transportation by individual motorised modes along highways is desperately inefficient use of energy, whether it is 'electric' (read: currently mainly generated from burning fossil fuels or by nuclear fission in power stations some distance away) or not. As with greenwash generally, e.g. in the promise of solving the energy crises by introducing smaller! less polluting! more fuel-efficient! more aerodynamic! cars, overall energy use would probably increase through electrification.

Historically, even though its development was haphazard and, of course, resisted on similar environmental grounds at the time, the railway freight system reached almost every town and city and a great many villages. It long accounted for the vast majority of transport mileage. Distribution from its terminals throughout towns and cities was accomplished by porters or by the horse and cart, e.g. from the old freight terminals of London like in Shoreditch. Even in London, the distances that had to be covered between terminal and destination were not great. Of course, this well-functioning system was dismantled by 20th century science fiction nonsense combined with corrupt interests such as those of Ernest Marples, but there is absolutely no reason to assume that it couldn't be re-established. Today, last-mile distribution would be an absolute doddle and would require very few off-rail motorised miles compared to the silly miles that lorries constantly do when being driven around the country to and from very few distribution centres (Amazon being the latest, and worst, example of unsustainable centralisation in this respect). (As it would be difficult to re-establish the old freight stations that used to exist in London, today it would be advisable for London to build a relatively inexpensive underground goods distribution railway network, a much better use of an underground railway than one for people, to London's well-established centres, which would reduce motorised road traffic very much.)

Electrification of non-rail, no-water freight would only perpetuate the completely unacceptable status quo and delay progress indefinitely. I'm obviously well aware of what the political mood is on all these things at the moment, and I'm not holding my breath for any positive changes, but the rational case is clear.