HS2 under review

[pete_mcfarlane]

BBC news article on the Public Accounts Committe report in to HS2. What strikes me (from my possibly biased viewpoint) is that the backbenchers seem to have pointed out that the costs have crept up and need to be kept under control or the cost/benefit analysis. will change. The BBC have turned this in to 'benefits dwindling' and the stop HS2 complainers have turned it in to 'devastating criticism'.

[DavidH]

In the world of media and PR, nobody ever "points out a problem" or "raises a discussion point", they "slam", or issue "devastating criticism" ...

Edited September 9, 2013 by DavidH

[Waverley West]

With the BBC seemingly now firmly out to stop HS2, I have a dreadful sinking feeling about it all these days.

 

It's hard to believe that we live in the very country that brought railways to the world and had such an entrepreneurial, visionary spirit at the time. As the rest of the world realises the benefits of high-speed rail and is building line after line, we have our head stuck in the sand coming up with all manner of mainly spurious reasons why the line shouldn't be built, around 30 years after it should have been built in the first place. The fact that it's going to take the best part of a generation to build really doesn't help the cause though, nor do the apparently escalating costs even before the project has really got going. 

 

Unless someone really starts setting out the reasons for building HS2 in a high-profile and clear manner and setting the agenda rather than allowing anti-HS2 campaigners to set it, I can see this project folding. And I doubt we'll get another opportunity like it.

With the way things are going right now, I don't think it can be taken for granted that it will happen. 

[The Stationmaster]

Hi Mike,

 

Doesn't passenger demand simply increase to fill the available capacity? Folks are going furiously to and fro between London and Birmingham because they can. If you built a brand new high-speed railway to say Swansea, they would all go there instead.

 

Freight growth surely depends on the arbitrary taxing regime decided by the government? Increase the lorry road tax and spend the proceeds on a subsidy to rail freight, and the A14 becomes a pleasant drive across England instead of the present environmental hell.

 

Martin.

Freight growth (or retention) on rail is an area surrounded by all sorts of ifs and buts Martin and it is, I think, very difficult, to get at the clear costs of road transport because the RHA and other road lobby folk spend a lot of time spouting headline figures which if you believed them would leave you wondering why anybody in their right mind would ever go into the road haulage business.  Rail costs - thanks to separation of infrastructure charges (honest!!) - are far easier to identify fairly clearly and it then simply boils down to politics.

 

Everybody says 'get freight off the roads and onto the railways' without realising exactly what is involved.  Some years ago I was involved in a project assessing use of the transport 'corridor' between Bath & Southampton, which in reality is of course a lot wider than a direct line between those two places.  At that time the average waiting time for a lorry in the queue to collect a container off a ship at Southampton was c.12 hours, in some cases it could be in excess of 24 hours - so who exactly was that an economical proposition for when a container train leaves Southampton heading northwards via Oxford on an hourly basis for much of the day?  Well it must have been economical for someone otherwise they wouldn't do it.

 

Equally the road vehicle census for part of the route which I knew very well - and always considered to be plagued by heavy lorries by virtue of the fact that I could see them with my own eyes - turned out to be most heavily used by Transit size vans/light goods vehicles in second place, per hour, behind private cars.  Our perceptions of what is using/blocking our roads can be very different from what really is happening believe it or not.

 

I realise I haven't addressed your proposal to clear the A14 of lorries but I hope I have shown how difficult it can be both in terms of what we perceive road use to be and how the economics are far from clear or even understandable.

[edcayton]

They said on t'wireless this morning that HS2 would cost every tax payer around £1800. Does anyone know if this is correct, or what the correct figure is?

 

Ed

[The Stationmaster]

They said on t'wireless this morning that HS2 would cost every tax payer around £1800. Does anyone know if this is correct, or what the correct figure is?

 

Ed

That sounds very reasonable to me.  according to a recent report the 'Boris bikes' in London cost each London taxpayer £1400 p.a.  Some of the stuff published by the Taxpayers' Alliance shows that we are paying far, far, more than that per household on a variety of things - for example the cost of funding pay & pensions for public sector workers above the private sector average costs around £2,000 for every household (which includes the households of public sector workers I presume).

 

The last of those figures show really how misleading such statistics can be while the cost to London taxpayers of bikes clearly makes HS2 an absolute bargain.  In other words it's all lies, d*mned lies, and statistics. There is an estimated cost for HS2 which obviously has to be subject to a + variation at this stage (all we hear about is the plus side of that) and costs are being increased by demands for tunnels and other 'environmental' measures at every turn.  Yet the land take, except at terminals/stations, would be less than for a motorway.  Overall it appears taht a lot of total nonsense is being talked by the 'antis' and folk are generally too disinterested or dim to take issue with such cr*p. 

[edcayton]

I'm not really either "pro" nor "anti", I'd just like to know as much as I can about the numbers. Just to throw a curve ball, it does seem to me that there are several airports which are not fully utilised, and a lot of spare planes in the desert in the USA.

 

Ed

[chris p bacon]

I'm not really either "pro" nor "anti", I'd just like to know as much as I can about the numbers. Just to throw a curve ball, it does seem to me that there are several airports which are not fully utilised, and a lot of spare planes in the desert in the USA.

 

Ed

I don't think that even Ryanair would try and use a B52.......or would they......

[Adrian Wintle]

If what you are saying is true then we'd still be walking everywhere or flying the Atlantic in Bristol Britannias or Lockheed Constellations and not Dreamliners or Airbuses. Why should leisure automatically equate with slow and business with speed?

Except the real comparison is conventional jets vs. SSTs, and the balance has come down firmly on the side of the (slower, but higher capacity) conventional jets. The business market mostly didn't want to pay for the extra speed. We aren't flying the Atlantic in Britannias or Connies for the same reason we aren't riding behind steam locos.

 

 

I'm not really either "pro" nor "anti", I'd just like to know as much as I can about the numbers. Just to throw a curve ball, it does seem to me that there are several airports which are not fully utilised, and a lot of spare planes in the desert in the USA.

The reason that a lot of them (the airliners) are parked in the desert is that they are either no longer economical to operate, no longer economical to upgrade to meet current noise restrictions, or both.

 

Adrian

[Edwin_m]

I'm not really either "pro" nor "anti", I'd just like to know as much as I can about the numbers. Just to throw a curve ball, it does seem to me that there are several airports which are not fully utilised, and a lot of spare planes in the desert in the USA.

 

Ed

 

 

If there was demand for more domestic air travel then the market is such that it would be provided - Ryanair manages to do so with a nearly-new fleet.  The fact this hasn't happened suggests that either the demand is already satisfied or it is constrained by factors such as runway capacity at Heathrow or other airports that people want to use.  I think we would all agree this isn't easy to increase! 

 

In the longer term there is the environmental downside of aviation, which is probably worse for short-haul flights because of the frequent takeoffs and landings.  There is also the risk of relying too much on fossil or biofuels which could become much more costly in the future, whereas an electric railway can be powered from any energy source (which ones we end up going for is another topic).

 

Plus all the cities on the HS2 phases 1 and 2 Y-network will be within the 3-hour limit of each other, where experience has shown that rail claims practically the whole non-road market because its centre-to-centre time is less than that of air.  In any future phase 3 to Scotland, rail speed becomes more important because it allows Edinburgh and Glasgow to be within this limit from London and Birmingham, and therefore achieves real transfer from air to rail. 

[GoingUnderground]

Except the real comparison is conventional jets vs. SSTs, and the balance has come down firmly on the side of the (slower, but higher capacity) conventional jets. The business market mostly didn't want to pay for the extra speed. We aren't flying the Atlantic in Britannias or Connies for the same reason we aren't riding behind steam locos.

 

 

The reason that a lot of them (the airliners) are parked in the desert is that they are either no longer economical to operate, no longer economical to upgrade to meet current noise restrictions, or both.

 

Adrian

You have forgotten that almost every country refused to let SSTs overfly at supersonic speeds which limited them to the trans-Atlantic market as they didn't have the range for non-stop trans-Pacific flights. Also their introduction coincided with a large hike in the price of oil. SSTs were priced as a premium product whereas there is no suggestion that I have seen that HS2 fares will also be more expensive than conventional fares. So your comparison is incorrect IMHO. You would be more correct to compare the induction magnetic trains to SSTs as both represent a step change in technology whereas TGV/ICE/Eurostar/HS2 rolling stock still use conventional steel wheels on steel rails.  There are no R&D costs to recover, it is all known conventional technology in use in many other countries.

[GoingUnderground]

I'm not really either "pro" nor "anti", I'd just like to know as much as I can about the numbers. Just to throw a curve ball, it does seem to me that there are several airports which are not fully utilised, and a lot of spare planes in the desert in the USA.

 

Ed

You need to take better aim with your curved ball. The popular airports are fully used because they serve destinations that folks want to visit. The underused ones are underused because that is the limit of the traffic that wants to use them. There's no point in flying to Inverness if I actually want to go to London. Also there are physical contraints imposed by flight paths which limits the proximity of airports to eachother and on the number of flights from each airport. BEA stopped using Northolt for UK domestic flights because the flight paths were too close to Heathrow and they didn't want the cost of supporting two bases when it was cheaper to have just one, Heathrow. 

 

Those planes are either too noisy to meet modern standards, too fuel inefficient, too polluting, have time expired airframes and so are no longer deemed airworthy, are being cannibalised for spares, or are military aircraft that may still contain classified equipment and are awaiting dismantling. These aircraft parks are the knackers yards for aircraft, not showrooms for new models. 

[Fenman]

That sounds very reasonable to me.  according to a recent report the 'Boris bikes' in London cost each London taxpayer £1400 p.a.  

 

Not sure if you meant each taxpayer pays £1,400, which is how I read it, but it is in fact each bike which costs £1,400 p.a.

 

There are apparently 4,000 bikes, and the meejah report the scheme has an annual subsidy from taxation of £11 million (though I'm not sure how that works, since £1.4k x 4,000 = £5,600,000. Or less than £1 per Londoner).

 

And I have no idea what proportion of Londoners are tax-payers, so I can't do the other calculation anyway.

 

Statistics, eh?

 

Paul

[Fenman]

 

Doesn't passenger demand simply increase to fill the available capacity? Folks are going furiously to and fro between London and Birmingham because they can. If you built a brand new high-speed railway to say Swansea, they would all go there instead.

 

 

You may have been joking but, if not, I'm not sure that's right, as the Spanish have found to their cost with some rather under-used high speed lines.

 

Paul

[pete_mcfarlane]

You may have been joking but, if not, I'm not sure that's right, as the Spanish have found to their cost with some rather under-used high speed lines.

 

Paul

 

But Spain probably isn't a good example - it's current economic problems are due to spending vast amounts of borrowed money on infrastructure it didn't need. So their high speed lines were probably built to pretend to keep up with France and Germany, rather than because they were actually needed.

[Fat Controller]

You may have been joking but, if not, I'm not sure that's right, as the Spanish have found to their cost with some rather under-used high speed lines.

 

Paul

The Spanish have discovered a similar situation with new airports as well, I believe- certainly, I've heard of at least one being on the market at a fraction of the construction, without ever having been used.

The French have discovered the rate of return tailing off considerably with some of their newer lines, in comparison with the LGV-SE; not surprising really, as some are more 'Inter-Village' than 'Inter-City'. Hollande's government has cancelled quite a few projects already.

[martin_wynne]

You may have been joking but, if not, I'm not sure that's right, as the Spanish have found to their cost with some rather under-used high speed lines.

 

Only half joking. It depends on the time scale. Spain is in the midst of a severe economic downturn, so you would expect its railways to be running below capacity at present.

 

Over the period of several stop-go economic cycles, economic activity moves to wherever communications are best. If you build a new fast railway to Aberystwyth and wait a generation, Aberystwyth is where all the new offices and business parks will be found. But not in only 5 years. The first few trains will be running empty.

 

It's about planning the future infrastructure for a nation, and distributing its wealth evenly among its people. Or am I still joking? 

 

Martin.

[Edwin_m]

Only half joking. It depends on the time scale. Spain is in the midst of a severe economic downturn, so you would expect its railways to be running below capacity at present.

 

Over the period of several stop-go economic cycles, economic activity moves to wherever communications are best. If you build a new fast railway to Aberystwyth and wait a generation, Aberystwyth is where all the new offices and business parks will be found. But not in only 5 years. The first few trains will be running empty.

 

It's about planning the future infrastructure for a nation, and distributing its wealth evenly among its people. Or am I still joking? 

 

Martin.

I think this is only partly true.  Good communications can encourage development of an area but there are always going to be areas which still don't have what it needs even with the best communication possible. 

 

Comparing Birmingham with Aberystwyth, the former has a large workforce and many brownfield sites suitable for development, and it is arguable that better communications will encourage economic development with relatively low environmental downsides. 

 

Aberystwyth has limited workforce and wouldn't be readily commutable from any larger population centre even with a hypothetical high speed rail link.  So any major business development would have to be accompanied by housing, both of which would have to be on greenfield sites in countryside that most people would wish to preserve.  Whatever form of transport is used, communication to a more remote centre will be more expensive and environmentally damaging than to one closer to existing centres of activity.  So large-scale development in Aberystwyth is unlikely to be acceptable and unlikely to happen. 

 

Obviously this is an extreme case but the same will apply to some degree in other places. 

[Ron Ron Ron]

The Spanish have discovered a similar situation with new airports as well, I believe- certainly, I've heard of at least one being on the market at a fraction of the construction, without ever having been used.

 

The airport in question is Región de Murcia International Airport, at Corvera, Murcia.

This new airport was built to replace the current Murcia San-Javier airport, but has remained unopened.

 

Although subject to central government approval, this project was entirely a regional government affair, using various EU and government grants and mostly other private funding.

Development was predicated on the building boom and rapid economic growth in the late 90's and early 00's, but the economic crash and collapse in the development bubble have left huge debts and political recriminations.

 

IIRC, the airport is finally going to open next year, if all the legal wrangling's can be sorted out.

Edited September 10, 2013 by Ron Ron Ron

[Edwin_m]

There's another empty Spanish airport at Castellon-Costa Azahar. 

[melmerby]

IMHO the government should go back to the original plans, ditch all the extra tunneling and deviations (put in at great cost to placate the antis, who still aren't satisfied) and build that.

S*d the protesters.

(You could put the whole lot in tunnel 100m down and the protesters would still find something to gripe about)

 

Costs would be much lower than the revised plan, keeping it within certain (now anti) politcos tolerances!

Constantly revising the route is playing straight into the hands of the antis who no doubt reckoned spiralling costs would help put paid to it.

 

Keith

[lmsforever]

Or better still to drive down the cost CANCEL THE WHOLE THING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[melmerby]

Or better still to drive down the cost CANCEL THE WHOLE THING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And where does the extra capacity come from then?

 

Keith

[martin_wynne]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24040674

[pete_mcfarlane]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24040674

They've missed out the usual rabid frothing from the stop HS2 people. Shurley shome mishtake?