The UK government has now given the go-ahead for only the second high-speed railway in the country (HS2: High-speed rail network gets go-ahead). Called, rather unimaginatively, HS2, this would provide a link between London Euston and Birmingham at a projected cost of £17bn and reduce journey times from 1 hour 24 minutes to 49 minutes.
This is envisaged as the first phase of the project, which would later connect to both Manchester and Leeds in a ‘Y’ network at a total estimated cost of £33bn. Eventually, high speed rail would be extended to Scotland although there are no firm proposals for this yet (and a referendum vote for independence might mean this actually becomes an international link).
Since a Victorian golden age of engineering – with large chunks of our present infrastructure based on the pioneering work of Brunel, Bazelgette and others – the UK does not have a very impressive track record with major projects (no pun intended). We are often seen as lacking in vision, looking to make do and mend rather than building something to be proud of. That said, purely as construction projects, both HS1 (the Channel tunnel rail link, including the reconstruction of St Pancras station) and the Olympic park have been rather successful.
But the planning process means that actually coming to a decision to proceed can be interminable, giving plenty of opportunity for cost escalation in the meantime. Opposition to the new line is vociferous, partly from people living near the proposed route, who see a lot of pain for no gain, and partly from those who don’t believe there is a sound economic case for the project. Justine Greening may have announced the government’s intention to press ahead, but that’s no guarantee that HS2 will actually be built.
Criticism has come both ahead of the announcement, for example in a report by Nigel Hawkins for the Adam Smith Institute (High Speed Fail – Assessing the case for High Speed 2), and in reaction to it, as in a press release from Transport Watch (www.transport-watch.co.uk). To quote from the latter, “The losses for the ‘Y’ amount to £37.7bn, equivalent to £1,450 for every household...The corresponding values for HS2 are £18bn or £700 per household”. In other words, by this estimate, the net present value of the project at the year of opening is a loss greater than the (probably under-)estimated cost of construction. The figures are worse if rolling stock is taken into account.
The government, on the other hand, sees projected benefits of up to £47bn. But to do so, it seems to have made two key assumptions. The first is that journey time is unproductive and so shorter journeys boost the economy. For road travel, this is probably true, up to a point, but a rail journey can be very productive: witness the laptops and reports being taken out on a typical commuter train (until it gets too crowded to work, of course). And while this may apply to business travellers, who will mostly be on the train at peak times, reasonably full trains will only be achieved by attracting large numbers of off-peak leisure travellers.
Which leads to the second assumption: that passenger numbers will grow very significantly. According to Nigel Hawkins, the project promoters are predicting an increase from 45,000 passengers per day in 2008 to 136,000 in 2043 on the West Coast Main Line, from which HS2 would take large numbers. To quote again from the Transport Watch press release, “The passenger forecasts require a 250mph train every three minutes 20 seconds in each direction all day throughout the year – which is unbelievable.”
Even if you don’t entirely agree with this, the precedent of HS1 is not encouraging. Passenger projections made for the line in the 1990s turned out to be about three times higher than the actual uptake. This is reflected in the financial history of the line. The original developer failed to find enough backing to build the line as planned (surely a sign that the private sector saw no economic case for investment) so it was built with public money, at a cost of £5.8bn and brought into operation in 2007. In 2010, a 30 year concession to operate the line was sold to a private consortium for just £2.1bn.
The government intends that HS2 should be operating by 2026, but this depends to a large extent on how long the project is delayed by opposition, enquiries and route changes (all of which will add to the cost). The extension to Manchester and Leeds is projected to be in operation about 2033, again subject to inevitable delays. What the demand will be by then is anyone’s guess. Commuting between Birmingham and London might become a viable option in terms of time, but the present cost of £6,700 for a yearly season ticket is likely to be considerably higher for the HS2 route, and it is hardly likely to be a mass market.
We also need to consider what else the projected investment could be used for. The 140 mile stage one route would cost the equivalent of £120m per mile. In 2005, the Highways Agency put the cost of building a motorway at £6.8m per kilometre, per lane. For three lanes in each direction, that comes to about £65m per mile. Even allowing for inflation, it should be possible to build a completely new motorway about 400 miles long between London and Edinburgh for the same price as the ‘Y’ line. This would be more flexible and arguably provide benefits for far more people. As importantly, it would not need fare-paying passengers to be subsidised by taxpayers. Motorists using the road would instead be paying considerable amounts in fuel duty.
Or, for about £50bn, we could build a new airport in the Thames estuary, allowing the Heathrow area to be regenerated and London to re-establish itself as a major hub for air travel. Of course, the people who might benefit from this would not be the same ones as who would gain from HS2, but the overall benefits to the economy could be much greater.
In a crowded island, building new transport infrastructure is bound to be difficult and expensive. High speed trains certainly have their attractions from a passenger point of view, but with some of the highest fares in the world already, are we really likely to be able to have a new line which can provide affordable fares for the majority of travellers? The government estimates optimistically that the project could eventually save 9 million road journeys and 4.5 million plane journeys each year. This is highly unlikely, given the probable price of tickets and the fact that most people are not travelling between city centres, which is where the train has a clear advantage.
Comparisons with the high-speed networks in continental Europe and Japan are unlikely to be particularly valid: different countries have different needs and one solution is not necessarily right for all. If HS2 is finally built, we have to hope it is not just an expensive prestige project. Whether or not it’s built, we need some visionary thinking about appropriate infrastructure to allow people to travel affordably during the 21st Century.
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