Christian Wolmar

It's time to give up on expanding Heathrow, the world's least-loved airport. The High Court ruling yesterday that there had been insufficient consultation on the third runway was the second kick in the teeth for the airport in the past couple of weeks. The first was when Lord Adonis, the Transport Secretary, announced that the preferred route for the high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham would not connect directly with ...

  If, as has been suggested to me, the minimum cost of a high speed line between London and Scotland will be in the order of £50billion or more, the case for building it will have to be exceptionally strong, especially given the current pressure on the public purse.  Such a sum would involve doubling the level of spending by Network Rail for a period of ten years. The fundamental question, therefore, ...

Call me perverse, but all-party agreements make me smell a king-size rodent. Now that Labour has signed belatedly up to the idea of a north south high speed link after initially rejecting it, all three major parties support the idea of HS2. The revival of the high speed plan was started by the Tories who announced there support among much fanfare at the party conference in October and the Libdems soon ...

Lord Adonis rather lets the cat out of his bag by accepting that a High Speed rail connection to Heathrow would do little to reduce the number of flights from the airport. This is commendably honest but rather undermines the case put forward by his boss, Geoff Hoon, for the railway as a green alternative to flying which was the rationale for including it in ...

The decision to go ahead with the third runway at Heathrow makes no sense on any criterion. The business case is thin in the extreme. Most passengers are leisure travellers and in any case over a third are transit. All these businesses which support it should examine the proposal using their own economic models. If there were really a great shortage of air capacity in London, then the price of ...