Whitelegg on high speed rail

I have to agree entirely with the equity arguments. Good point about
the referendum John!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/29/high-speed-rail-travel-europe-uk

Something very unusual is happening at the moment. Labour,
Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Green politicians are competing to
be more enthusiastic than each other in support of high-speed rail
(HSR). But their approval stands in stark contrast to the poverty of
detail, evidence and justification for this lurch to a high-speed
world that would be centred on London. So why do they all want it to
happen?

There is something quite seductive about speed. It sounds good, and
economists cling to the misleading idea that saving time saves money
and produces an economic bonus that the whole of society can share.
The supporters of HSR argue that it will increase the capacity of the
rail system to move people and freight, stimulate the economy, steal
passengers from domestic aviation and reduce greenhouse gases.

High-speed rail will indeed increase capacity, especially if it
proceeds on German and French models and produces new lines across
open countryside. But what is not addressed is why we need the
increased capacity, and whether or not this is the right way to go
about it.

Capacity is routinely increased in mainland Europe by using double-
decker trains for passenger travel. Trains in and out of Zurich or
Paris are frequently double-decked and give passengers a non-cattle
truck ride that we can only dream about in south-east England or on
Manchester-bound platforms at Leeds railway station at 5pm on a
weekday. Capacity can be increased by running night passenger trains,
as is common in Germany.

We could even have a policy about developing strongly independent
cities, such as those in Germany. The "need" to travel to London is a
result of decades of public and private policy and cash to centralise
functions there and to avoid the idea that Newcastle upon Tyne, Leeds,
Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool could operate as high-level
attractive financial, cultural, corporate HQ and media centres, just
as Frankfurt, Munich and Hamburg do in Germany. We do need to move
more freight around the UK by means other than road, but the links
with HSR and better rail opportunities for freight are tenuous.
Alternatives to HSR include reopening lines closed in the 1960s for
normal rail running, using coastal shipping, inland waterways and even
planning our industrial and logistic sites so that they were located
near to ports, waterways and rail logistic centres.

The HSR plan is a large and expensive sledgehammer to crack a modestly
sized nut. We could stimulate the economy by building 1,000 miles of
HSR, but the sums would not stack up in terms of how many jobs this
would create per £100,000 spent.

If we really want to create jobs in all local economies, rather than
drain them away along a very fast railway line, we could insulate 20m
homes; make every house a mini-power station to generate and export
its own electricity; sort out extremely poor quality commuter railway
lines around all our cities; improve inter-regional rail links; and
build 10,000 kms of segregated bike paths to connect every school,
hospital, employment site and public building to every residential
area.

These projects would deliver real jobs on a large scale in every city
region and local authority, but do not have the high-speed sexiness of
new railway lines. HSR is promoted as something that can sort out
nasty carbon-producing aircraft on domestic routes. It has done this
on the Paris-Lyon and Madrid-Seville lines, but this ability to trash
a single air route should not be interpreted as something than can
dent the growth of air travel. Germany has one of the largest HSR
systems in the world, yet has seen an explosion in internal air
travel.

HSR does not reduce the fuel consumption of domestic aviation or
reduce annual carbon emissions from aircraft.And it produces twice as
much CO2 per passenger kilometre as a non-high speed train. If we are
serious about reducing our carbon emissions by 80% by 2050, we should
not move towards higher speed, more carbon intensive forms of
transport and a policy of increasing the mass of travel.

Supporters of HSR talk about a total bill of £11bn from public funds.
This is likely to be a considerable underestimate, but even if correct
it is a huge commitment to something regressive. HSR is used by high-
income passengers, and the £11bn would be a public investment from all
taxpayers to encourage wealthy individuals to travel to and from
London more often and at a higher speed. This is far less important
than sorting out local travel in all cities, commuter travel around
all cities, and inter-regional travel.

Switzerland offers a vision of what a rail system in the UK could look
like if it celebrated all our cities, reflected the need to offer
attractive rail services to all social and income groups, and set out
to avoid cattle-truck conditions. The double-decker trains running
from Zurich to Basle 60 times a day offer comfort, reliability, and a
pleasant journey on a major commuter route.

This could be the future on the Liverpool-Manchester-Leeds route, and
on many routes in the south-east of England, but there appears to be
no well-oiled machine lobbying for these passengers.

This is an occasion when a referendum would be useful. Hands up those
in favour of providing an £11bn subsidy from taxpayers for very rich
people to travel very quickly to London - and hands up those who would
prefer something like the Swiss have.

John Whitelegg is a research leader at the Stockholm Environment
Institute, York University
.

Relevant Pages

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    (uk.railway)
  • Re: Whitelegg on high speed rail
    ... So the economists are all-wrong then or is it that we should just ... rail system to move people and freight, stimulate the economy, steal ... The "need" to travel to London is a ... with HSR and better rail opportunities for freight are tenuous. ...
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  • Re: Whitelegg on high speed rail
    ... justification and London centric are all basically putting ... Economists like to talk about agglomeration benefits ... is that Whitelegg is asking whether HSR is the only way of solving the ... I probably agree with you there - night travel isn't for everyone. ...
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