Comment
if this is as good as the sums are going to get, I can only conclude it remains vital and necessary. There are, nevertheless, very substantial problems with the
Department for Transport’s case. The government has built its case around the cornerstone idea that high speed rail would reduce the imbalance in the UK’s economy between north and south by improving transport links to the north. But is it really credible that Manchester would be transformed by having trains to and from London taking 80 minutes, rather than two hours, and four trains an hour rather than three? Nor, as Rod Eddington pointed out in his report on the UK’s transport networks in 2006, is there anything to stop better transport links allowing people to live in a provincial city but to do their business somewhere else. It is distinctly possible that, as some suggest high speed rail in France has done, new links would benefit professional services, retail and other sectors in the capital, at the expense of the provinces. HS2 is also being given perverse priority over other schemes
that would, at least according to recognised cost-benefit analysis methods, do considerably more good. The arguments for a third runway at Heathrow – that the existing infrastructure is so overstretched that the only option is to build something new – are precisely the same as those for building HS2 over tinkering with the existing West Coast Main Line. The private sector would fund the runway and one serious study put the benefit-cost ratio for the project at 3.6:1 – against 1.4: 1 under the latest calculations for HS2. But events in the early hours of 3 February – when a
Freightliner Class 90 derailed at Bletchley, blocking all four tracks of the West Coast Main Line – have made further nonsense of the already fairly far-fetched claims of those that claim high speed rail isn’t needed to solve London to Birmingham capacity problems. The single derailment illustrated precisely how fragile the existing line is. No-one who has ever spoken to a senior Network Rail manager about the challenges of handling a 200kph express train every three minutes on the fast lines, while juggling the needs of freight and commuter services on the slow lines, would ever seriously entertain the anti-HS2 campaigners’ claims about the potential to enhance the line’s capacity. Moving block signalling, longer trains and some route straightening are all desirable – but far from sufficient to solve the looming capacity problem. This leaves the question of whether it could be done another
way. Roger Ford, the Modern Railways columnist, has argued for the building – at far lower cost – of a new, 200kph line to parallel the West Coast Main Line. Instinct suggests this is an inconvenient half-way house, offering few of the journey time improvements of a high speed line while requiring much of the necessary investment. There are also voices calling for the new line’s maximum speed to be 300kph, as on High Speed One, rather than the 400kph proposed for HS2. But it is hard to imagine that the savings – which would mainly come from allowing tighter curves than are possible on a 400kph line – can be seriously justified when there are already 380kph top-speed trains on order in China. Yet the truth remains that the cost-benefit calculations have
been undertaken mainly for a negative reason – so that they can be produced at the almost inevitable judicial review hearing into the government’s decision. The serious arguments in favour of the project have, in fact, got far more to do with the theories championed by economists such as Oxford University’s Dieter
Helm, who analyses the nature of the networks the UK needs in future, rather than the precise costs and benefits of individual links. Such arguments, not yet a recognised part of UK transport
planning, hold that cost-benefit analysis fails to capture properly the benefits of radical changes to a country’s transport networks. It is, of course, possible for new transport links to prove less popular than expected and for costs to spiral out of control. The new line’s effects on the UK’s economic geography will probably be very different from everyone’s expectations. But, since the last few years’ frantic debate has produced no
better solution to the looming capacity problems than HS2, now is surely the time to stop arguing about whether to go ahead. The task now is to make the best possible job of building it.
ROBERT WRIGHT is the shipping and logistics correspondent for the Financial Times:
robert.wright@ft.com
Clarification: In Robert Wright’s February column he wrote that, on the day of the 2012 fares announcement by the Association of Train Operating Companies, Michael Roberts, its chief executive, stuck to arguments about how fare rises would pay for new trains and better services. We are happy to point out that Atoc issued a press release – and Michael Roberts made a number of national broadcast media appearances – explaining the overall level of fare rises is determined largely by government policy and the industry is working together to continue cutting costs. To see what Atoc issued that day, visit
www.atoc.org/2012fares
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MARCH 2012 PAGE 17
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