High speed rail myths

Yesterday the government released its plans for High Speed 2, the next high speed rail line to be built in the UK, following on from High Speed 1, the new line from London to the Channel Tunnel.

Reading the reception in the press there are certain common themes that come up in comments to it, many of which lead one to doubt the intelligence of the reporter writing it, or at least whether they have actually bothered to research the topic they are writing about at all.

Here are a few pearls of reporterly wisdom that I have found particularly irritating, and my answers to them.

1. "Spending £X billion to save 30 minutes isn't a good use of money."
The main driver behind high speed rail in the UK is transport network capacity. We have a choice between building or expanding motorways, expanding airports, or building railways. Yes HSR trains are fast, but they are preferable to conventional speed rail because there is a much better business case for faster trains. They are more likely to attract travelers from other modes of transport.

2. "HS2 only goes to Birmingham."
Yes, in phase 1 HS2 only goes to Birmingham. Guess what, phase 1 of the M1 motorway only went from Watford to Rugby. There are two points here: Firstly the trains on HS2 will be able to run on to serve other destinations beyond the end of high speed line such as Manchester, Liverpool and Scotland. Secondly it's important to see HS2 as the first stage of a broader UK-wide network.

3. "Nobody will be able to afford a ticket."
I've no idea where this particular pocket of nonesense comes from. Perhaps this is because of the current high cost of tickets on routes like the West Coast Main Line where capacity problems lead to operators trying to manage excessive demand by increasing the cost of flexible tickets. Each train on HS2 will have up to over 1,000 seats and the line will have capacity for 18 trains an hour; that's a lot of seats! Tickets will be priced such that people use the service and fill those seats, otherwise the business plan wouldn't be viable in the first place.

4. "HS2 does nothing for communities between Birmingham and London."
No, it does a lot for communities between. Principally it releases an enormous amount of capacity on the overstretched existing rail network such as the West Coast Main Line, which can be used for freight - fewer lorries on the roads - and also for more local rail services.

5. "£30 Billion is too expensive."
£30 Billion is a lot of money, but the greater cost comes from not acting on the nation's increasing transport problems. As already states we have a choice between roads, air and rail. High speed rail is the best choice from both economic and environmental perspectives.

6. "Can't that money be spent on improving the trains we already have?"
£13 Billion has been spent in the West Coast Main Line upgrade program, and it will be at full capacity again by 2017. Incremental upgrades to existing rail lines are expensive, disruptive, and do not produce anywhere near the same levels of new capacity for the same amount of money as a new build line.

7. "We can't afford this in a recession."
Recessions come and go. We're in recession now, but most likely won't be when construction work actually starts in a few years time.

8. Why will it take 16 years to open just 130 miles of railway track? Surely it would take only a fraction of that time if this line was being built in France, Span, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, etc?
Oh, hang on, this is a question I too would like an answer to...