Rethinking High-Speed Rail

Previously, I’ve supported the government’s plans for High-Speed Rail, even though the “business case” for them has always struck me as being pretty weak*. On reflection, I’m not sure I was right. The case for HSR in Britain is weaker than I allowed. Not because HSR is undesirable (I still think it could be useful) but because reducing train times between London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds is, though useful, not enough to justify spending £33bn on the project. Or, to put it another way, I suspect it really is a misallocation of resources since this money might more usefully be spent alleviating congestion in the south-east of England while also increasing capacity (as everyone agrees is needed) on the main north-south routes. So, Matt Sinclair, I concede the case to you.

Still, the case for HSR makes much more sense in the UK than it does in California. Via Kevin Drum, here’s an extraordinary claim put forward by the people backing $100bn of HSR between San Francisco and Los Angeles:

The rail authority has relied heavily on New York-based Parsons Brinkerhoff, a contractor that helped fund the political campaign for the $9.9-billion bond measure passed by voters in 2008….In October, Parsons submitted the analysis that came up with the $171 billion [it would cost to upgrade air and road networks], a number that initially appeared in the authority’s draft business plan released Nov. 1. In the study, Parsons first estimated how much passenger capacity the system would have at completion in 2033 and then calculated the cost for providing the same airport and highway capacity.

Parsons said the high-speed rail system could carry 116 million passengers a year, based on running trains with 1,000 seats both north and south every five minutes, 19 hours a day and 365 days a year. The study assumes the trains would be 70% full on average.

As Kevin says,

This is just jaw-droppingly shameless. There’s not even a pretense here of providing a reasonable, real-world traffic estimate that could be used to project the cost of alternative infrastructure. A high school sophomore who turned in work like this would get an F.

Quite. Meanwhile, back in Blighty it seems as though David Cameron is interested in backing Boris International – the Mayor of London’s plan for a new airport in the Thames estuary that would replace Heathrow. It’s simplistic to suppose that it’s a choice between a new airport for London or HSR but since expanding Heathrow appears impossible (largely, admittedly, for political reasons) a new airport may be the least bad option.

It if happens, however, there’s the question of what to do with Heathrow. Well, if the land at Heathrow were built upon so it had the same density as, say, Kensington & Chelsea there could be room enough to house perhaps 200,000 people. A new mini-city just 15 minutes by rail from Paddington would go some way towards meeting London’s projected housing needs.

*That said, if it actually did only cost £33bn then, since it is a 20-year project, the annual costs are not as scary as the upfront figure might have you believe.