Reading Brother Blackburn’s post on high-speed rail I was, I admit, surprised to find so many Coffee House commenters backing the project. I had – unworthily! – assumed most would be against it. And if HSR stops at Birmingham I would oppose it too. Indeed, I think that if HSR is to go ahead it needs to reach Scotland as well as Manchester and Leeds while another line should link Cardiff and Bristol with London too.
David suggests that the idea of a Tory-led government ignoring local protests against HSR offends the “the gentle trinity of localism, decentralisation and the big society” and of course he has a point. Nevertheless, there are some infrastructure projects that can only be led by central government and in which utilitarian considerations must play a large, even dominant, role. Trains are probably one such example.
HSR’s critics have a number of good points to make. It’s not obvious that the country really needs this project. I think it possible to disagree in good faith on the merits of the case. Moreover, the government’s suggestion that HSR to Manchester is needed to cut down on domestic flights is pretty implausible. If that’s the case then HSR needs to reach Edinburgh and Glasgow. At present it’s pretty much impossible to make a business trip to London and back by train from Edinburgh in a single day. Well, not impossible but you’d have to leave at 6am and not return until close to 11pm. That’s the consequence of a train system that takes at least four and a half hours to travel 400 miles.
So, yes, building a proper HSR network is an enormous and expensive enterprise. While costly, the government’s proposals probably aren’t ambitious or costly enough. This is a smallish country which is why being able to move quickly from one part of it to another is actually more, not less, important than might be the case in larger places.
Outside the Boston-Washington corridor I’m not sure HSR has much of a future in the United States, not least because the east coast cities are just about the only ones built before cities started to be built with cars in mind. What’s the point of HSR taking you to Los Angeles or Houston when you’ll probably have to hire a car once you reach the city? It’s simpler just to drive. Or fly.
Which is also a reason why Simon Heffer* is – again! – mistaken to suppose we have no use for HSR in the UK because this is quite a small island. Our cities also predate the car. They are not built as Phoenix is. He argues that:
I fear Mr Heffer is being selective in his use of geography. The TGV from Paris to Lyons uses 254 miles of track and there are plenty of places served by other TGV lines that are closer to Paris than Lyons (Tours, for example. Metz too.). TGV Est, when completed, will halve the journey time from Paris to Strasbourg, bringing it under two hours.If France is our model, though, let us not stop at its financial lessons. If Mr Hammond looks at a map of our two countries, he will quickly notice some differences between us. The main one is that France is big, with more than four times the land mass of England (and I say England because there is no stated plan to extend the network to Wales or Scotland): 212,935 square miles against 50,337 square miles. Distances in France are large. Paris is 489 miles from Marseilles (and, incidentally, the train travels at an average of a mere 163 mph). Manchester is 166 miles from London, which Mr Hammond feels the need to eat up at a top speed of 250 mph. Why?
True, France is less densely-populated than England and this may make it easier for the French to build HSR; true too that perhaps the French enthusiasm for HSR – now connecting cities that aren’t called Paris – is misplaced but suggesting that England’s smallness is a reason to scrap HSR seems bizarre. Indeed, Paris-Marseilles is close to the upper-limit for HSR. Even with HSR any journey beyond 500 miles is likely to be better made using an aeroplane.
Nevertheless, connectivity matters as the manager of any regional airport manager, chamber of commerce or tourism office will tell you. The Chiltern Hills are lovely but unfortunately it is not possible to move Birmingham so that a railway can be built avoiding these blessed hillocks. Equally it may well be the case that the economic benefits of HSR have been exagerrated but the existing railway network (to say nothing of repairing the damage done by Dr Beeching) needs to be expanded to meet existing, let alone future, demand. HSR is one, admittedly expensive, way of doing that. Easing capacity on current lines is a decent, perhaps even sensible, start.
NIMBYism is a terrible curse. It has helped produce our present rickety transport network while also, thanks to its hostility towards housing development and, in London, skyscrapers, massively increasing the cost of housing. This in turn increases sprawl and lengthy commutes into London that, whether by car or by train, increase congestion, frustration and general miserableness. HSR certainly doesn’t solve those problems – and its boosters most probably overstate its worth – but it might in at least some places alleviate some of these things while also making it possible to move around the country more easily and quickly. I don’t think the case for HSR is a slam-dunk but its opponents make me think it might be stronger than perhaps it is…
*Mr Heffer – who, as bonus also refers to this government as “neo-socialist”! – also writes that he tried to get from Stansted Airport to Edinburgh by train and was told a return journey would cost £383.Easyjet offered the trip for £52. I dare say he could have paid that much but he can’t have looked very far since the standard open (off-peak) return from London to Edinburgh is £114. This compares pretty favourably with most flights to London.
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