Christian Wolmar

In my opinion the picture says it all “No HS2 across the Chilterns”; but it OK in someone elses back yard !!

Meanwhile on Railway Eye – http://railwayeye.blogspot.com/2011/04/beggy-bites-tory-peer-where-next.html

The only argument the Nimbys seem to be use is that “the case isn’t made”. Yet, if they’d care to read the business case, rather then ignore it, they’d see that the case is indeed made.

Apparently the Chiltern Society has been around since 1965. Presumably when the M40 was built, they were all asleep.

If YOU’D ACTUALLY care to read the report you will see such numbers of guess work and trend analysis as not to prove anything. There are such massive cost figures excluded as the transport disruption to Birmingham whilst the spur is being built. According to informed sources the process for dealing with this has not yet been fixed and HS2 are only TALKING to the City Council

The hilarious part of it is the bit about stopping at Milton Keynes……when we all know that the preliminary route for HS2 doesn’t actually go anywhere near there!

The jury is out on the impact that ever improving information technology will make. 10 years ago I’d never have thought that you would have the abilities of a high-end PC in a pocket sized smartphone costing a couple of hundred quid – yet that’s what people have got in the latest Android/Blackberry’iPhone type devices. Who knows where we will be in 10-20 years time.

HS2 still won’t curb the amount of domestic flying that goes on between Scotland and London which is the most environmentally damaging. I still get asked the same old question whenever I say I’m taking the train:

“Train??? why don’t you fly, it’s only an hour….” Of course the “hour” is a complete fallacy as we all know, but….the other thing I get from anti-train people all the time who don’t use the railways is “it’s too expensive”, and the usual horror stories about turning up at the station on the day and getting shafted by punitive walk-on fares. I never pay these fares because I know how to play the system. A lot of occasional users don’t. Or simply can’t be bothered.

No-one is telling me that HS2 is going to uber-cheap or that situation is going to change any time soon – look at the premiums charged by Southeastern on the domestic Kent services.

On 30th March the DfT published a “scoping document” for Developing a sustainable framework for UK aviation:

http://www.dft.gov.uk/consultations/open/2011-09/consultationdocument.pdf

Under the heading “Alternatives to travel” are these two paras :-

3.23 Aviation will continue to have an important role to play in our transport system, but that role will change. We are consulting on proposals for a national high speed rail network, and expect that, in the longer term, much of the demand for domestic aviation and for near-European short-haul aviation could be met by high speed rail.

3.24 The Government’s investment of £530 million to provide Britain with the best superfast broadband network in Europe will support the development of options such as videoconferencing, telepresence and web conferencing, which have the potential to reduce some elements of the demand for flying.
However, we acknowledge that the CCC noted in its 2009 report there was some evidence suggesting that meetings based on videoconferencing might be additional, rather than substitutes for meetings which require air travel.
As outlined earlier, we are currently assessing the costs and benefits of different policy measures to reduce UK aviation’s CO2 emissions, and this includes increased use of alternatives to travel.

But I reiterate again that the lie that is in 3.23 is that what is being proposed is NOT a “national” high speed rail network; it is a regional one – the two regions being London & the Home Counties and the West Midlands. A national high speed rail network in my estimation would be one that went all the way from London to beyond the Central Belt of Scotland.

The problem is that up here, current Glasgow/Edinburgh-London services are sitting right on the crucial 4-5 hour tip-over point where people can make a choice between air and rail. The time saving argument is a fallacy as I said above, but as CW says – cost is the killer. Getting a cheap flight is much easier than getting a cheap rail ticket – and even rail die-hards like me get seduced from time to time by cheap deals on BA to Heathrow (free breakfast….).

North of the Central Belt – air wins hands down, high speed line or no high speed line. There will be the die-hards that will use the sleeper or are willing to sit on a train for 7 hours to go to Aberdeen or Inverness, but they are very much in the minority. Aberdeen supports a huge market to London thanks to the oil industry (the Aberdeen-Heathrow service iswas BA and BMI’s most lucrative domestic route apparently…).

Videoconferencing is indeed no silver bullet – no matter how good the technology gets. I work for a major multinational corporation with operations everywhere around the world, and it just isn’t practical to use it when you have timezone and language barriers to overcome. Hence we do a lot of long-haul business trips which is where aeroplanes come into their own.

Not splitting hairs at all – the problem is that the line won’t actually get to Scotland (if at all) for a good while beyond 2026……let’s see I’ll be 49 then if I’m spared – assuming another decade or two I might just get to travel on it before I have a senior person’s railcard (which probably won’t be valid on high speed services anyway….knowing this country)

So when does the jury decide exactly? When all of Europe has moved to HSR and no-one wants to cite a business here because of the ancient transport system? Rail travel is going up and video conferencing etc has been around for ages. Fact. I’ve worked in IT for over 20 years, most of it for large corporations and I haven’t seen one shred of evidence to suggest that any of them are gearing up to let more and more people work from home. I’m sorry but this just drives me up the wall. Anyone using this as a case against HS2, hoping that something *might* happen is giving the game away – they just don’t want it built for whatever reason. This isn’t an argument about of economics, but something that *might* happen. I can’t help noticing that HS2 critics will confidently tell us the figures don’t “stack up”, and then see nothing wrong in going into fantasy land with this working from home rubbish, for which there is zero evidence and actual figures to suggest otherwise.

Bottom line for me is this – HS2 will be around for centuries. The population growth is set to be fairly dramatic with people living longer and immigration, something like a major city every 25 years or whatever it is. We should be providing for generations to come, not just selfishly looking at what’s in it for us or hoping that we won’t have to travel to work any more in the future because it’ll all be like an episode of “The Jetsons”, and turning down this opportunity in favour of a make do and mend approach (when we don’t even have any evidence that money will be spent on it instead of HS2 anyway), is just ridiculous and IMO, irresponsible. We’ve been patching up the rail network for god knows how long and the time for the journey form my gaff to London has barely improved since it was steam-hauled. Time for a brave bit of vision and forward-thinking, as Europe is now doing, and less moaning about anything which requires a bit of ambition like we always sadly seem to do these days.

Typo error in above; the 80% CO2 reduction target should be 2050

I don’t agree with your comment “The problem is that a lot of people want both (massive investment in the existing network and HS2) and the financial reality of the situation is that we can’t have both”.

At present we have Thameslink and Crossrail underway, as well as removal of rail bottlenecks, increasing capacity, further electrification, develoment of the national rail freight network and work to encourage modal shift from car and plane to electric train.

The truth is that HS2 is intended to follow-on from Thameslink and Crossrail with continued major project annual spend averaging £2Billion+ / year.

So why do you and CW have to frighten people into thinking that non-HS2 spending is suddenly going to dry up, if HS2 goes ahead ??
Do you have any evidence for this or is it part of a campaign of lies and mis-information to discredit the government’s HS2 plans ??

No-ones claiming that road vehicles will disappear, and since when did this become all about rural communities? I appreciate that the likes of “Stop HS2″ believe that the world revolves around them, but is there any chance that just once, a bit of public money could be spent on people who live and work in major cities, in other words, most people? It’s not better to develop local transport links because a) that doesn’t address long distance capacity issues for both freight and passengers, b) it doesn’t address being joined up to a Europe-wide shift to HSR which we *have* to be a part of to remain competitve, and c), as Philip Hammond has already stated, there isn’t a large pot of money sitting somewhere to be spent on whatever we want, which is what anti-HS2 people seem to believe. Hammond has stated that HS2 will not detract from other investments so why anti-HS2 people keep peddling this is beyond me. The stuff below about dithering and how long past infrastructure projects have taken – you’ve lost me with that. Not sure what the relevance is. Nor the suggestion of petrol at 70p a litre and climate change being wrong – things which just like tele-working reducing rail travel, clearly won’t happen. Sorry, but you appear to be conjuring arguments up here out of nothing. From what I can see the only thing presenting a threat to the propsed HS2 timescale is people kicking up a fuss about it for no good reason.

You seem to spend a lot of time dismissing arguements that are not used in support of HS2! And very little evidence is actually presented to support your arguements, even to the point of mentioning figures (such as carbon) which you can’t remember and therefore dismiss as being insignificant!

Demand – Gordon Pettit recently wrote that usage has increased by 70% since privatisation, rather more than the 60% figure you quote. You do not make any mention that rail demand will increase because of the population increase predicted by the ONS – 0.7%p.a. which will see UK population exceed 65m by 2018 and 71.6m by 2033.

Air travel – at present end-to-end journey time from London to Edinburgh or Glasgow is fairly close when flying or travelling by train (I know as I have done it). So reducing rail journey times will reduce air travel by making rail more attractive. Increasing rail usage means rail capacity is contrained and there is little opportunity to reduce journey time without significant investment and disruption.