There are some questions which need answering about HS2:
- is the capacity HS2 would provide required? Lengthening Pendolinos to 12 coach sets and converting one First Class coach to Standard will release capacity for inter-city journeys. I understand that the busiest services are typically the first off-peak services - this artificial congestion could be avoided by amending the pricing system. Could more use be made of the Chiltern Mainline?
We are trying to build a network which will provide the capacity for a very long time to come. The HS2 network will not dissolve after the financial and economic modelling end date so it is a very long-term investment which will be used for as long as our existing lines have been to date. We know that there is no more efficient way of carrying lots of things for long distances at high speed than some kind of rail. The modelling used for HS2 predicts that when Phase 1 of HS2 is undergoing testing, the existing WCML will be full to capacity. Likewise, when Phase 2 opens, the more nothern WCML, the MML and the ECML will also be at the same stage. If passenger numbers continue to grow faster than they are today, these points will be reached even earlier. If the rate of growth drops, it is unlikely ever to drop below the rate of population growth which will eventually require us to build new lines. It is not the end of the world if it takes until 2055 for Phase 2 to fill up but this possibility is very unlikely economically as the fares can be reduced enough to make it happen.
There are short term measures which can be done on the existing lines, such as converting first to standard class and adding extra coaches. However, these are subject to the law of diminishing returns where more and more money will need to be spent to have the same level of capacity increase. Adding an extra coach to a Pendolino will add another 70 or so seats but when we build HS2, we can run entire extra timetables of trains on top of what we have today so we can have thousands of extra seats. As it is very possible that the passenger numbers will increase even more, it may even be necessary to do some of these enhancements for the short term until HS2 opens.
Rail is the only mode of intercity transport which will not become more difficult or more expensive in the future. Planes are entirely reliant upon liquid fuel and likely will be for many decades in the future. They do not provide a lot of capacity and they create noise and local pollution regardless of whether they are run on entirely bio-fuel or not. They also require people to go through security as they are physically fragile, and they are obscenely complicated machines which require absurd amounts of maintenance. They require large airports built upon otherwise useful land and there aren't many others which can be built if the opposition to Heathrow expansion is anything to go by.
Cars require motorways, currently need liquid fuels and they are always going to be slow. They are extremely inefficient uses of space as they require huge amounts of land for parking, fuelling, resting and travelling due to the need for braking distances between each vehicle which likely only carries a handful of people on board at most. Even if we get autonomous cars powered wirelessly by electricity from the road surface they will still be nowhere near the level of comfort, safety, reliability and capacity as a high speed rail link. The technology for the rail link exists today and is eminently feasible for this country and many others to do; the technology for driverless, electric cars is still in its infancy and cannot be relied upon for the capacity issues which we will face in the next few decades.
As a result, there is no real alternative to high speed rail for the highly used intercity corridors of London to Edinburgh or Manchester to Birmingham or the other pairs or strings of large cities in this country.
- should railways encourage discretionary travel or facilitate additional commuting? The size of rail's share of WCML London commuter or Birmingham/Manchester - London markets means that increasing passenger numbers means a lot more travel. The limited timetable and fare integration with other services or disincentives to use cars make modal shift through increasing capacity less likely. The HS2 business case states that most journeys will switch from conventional rail or will be new journeys. We face the enormous immediate task of hugely reducing greenhouse gas emissions and technology does not seem ready to solve the problem quickly enough.
It is true that additional discretionary travel or commuting will incur more energy usage but what is the alternative? Do we want to reverse the trend towards a more interconnected and interdependent world? People today do commute and do discretionary travel but using more environmentally damaging modes of transport - specifically by car and by plane. If someone believes that our only future can lie in a no-growth economy then obviously HS2 will seem to be a waste of time and resources but the marginal environmental cost of more travel along HS2, once built, is marginal compared to the cost of that same travel inevitably happening on more carbon-intensive modes of transport. HS2 can be powered entirely by renewable energy if we so wish. Planes and cars cannot.
A particular reason why the business case states that most of the journeys will transfer from existing rail links is that HS2 Phase 2 does not go far enough to reach areas where air is currently a sensible travel option. The Phase 2 journey time from Glasgow or Edinburgh is still slow enough to make flying from there to London a possibility. The only way of stopping this is to make the route go even further, which is absolutely what is going to happen once Phase 2 is built because then the greatest benefit from the route will occur. Today, north of Preston the average WCML speed is only around 85-90mph if I remember correctly as the route is sinuous and slow. HS2 will relieve the sections of the WCML which have been engineered to the highest speed and capacity standards just because it is most needed there right now. Once it continues northward the journey time savings will be far greater and so the benefits will be even higher. There is no economicc point building the route only southwards from the Central belt though as then it wouldn't solve the most pressing problems capacity-wise at the south of the routes, between the Midlands and London. Building both ways simultaneously would provide the most benefit overall but would cost more than the three parties have politically agreed on so far. Maybe it might happen as a carrot for Scotland to stay in the Union - the plans for HS2 certainly don't help the Better Together cause by stopping less than halfway up the country and saying they're finished.
The technology for HS2 exists today but we need to build it now if we want to solve the problems which will exist just as it opens. If we try to escape the reality of the need for new North/South high-speed rail links then we will simply delay the inevitable and so lead to more environmental issues in the meantime. HS2 will take a long time to build because we don't want to spend that much of our economic output upon it - today we are spending the same amount on Crossrail and HS2 is timed to begin work just as work on Crossrail ends so we will not be paying any more per year on the infrastructure then as we are today.
- the speed of HS2 (as energy consumption increases faster than speed as speed increases) and the building of the line will cause huge increases in greenhouse gas emissions
HS2 trains are all electric so they can be powered by anything we like. Massive solar panels across the northern Sahara? No problem. You can't do that with planes.
A TGV Duplex running at 320km/h is as efficient per passenger kilometre as a Cl393 Pendolino running at 200km/h. On HS2 there is no need for complicated and heavy tilt arms and the trains can be taller, longer and wider so that more people can fit on each one in more comfort than they can on our current ones. Rolling stock is getting more and more efficient at the same time so I'm confident that the captive stock (i.e. HS2-only, no classic line running at all) will be as efficient at 360km/h per passenger kilometre as the trains we run today.
- are the rail passenger growth predictions for this corridor realistic? The growth rate has been slowing since the VHF was introduced. Fewer younger people owning cars due to the high initial costs of motoring, the growth of service sector jobs in big cities facilitating rail community and being able to use digital technology on trains are likely to have been major factors in the recent growth in rail use. How much more of an impact will these trends have? A large world population and climate change make a continuous increase in economic growth highly unlikely. Fuel and food prices are likely to increase hugely and people are likely to have less (or at least no more) money to spend.
Digital technology hasn't slowed the growth of rail at all. People want to be more mobile now and some of the wonderful predictions about digital working have proved to be complete rubbish. Yahoo! have started to roll back working at home because they don't believe that people are actually as efficient working at home with the internet. Building fast, high capacity and dedicated high speed rail between cities allows for companies to relocate from London to other places without losing access to the talent market and to other companies still in London. There are plenty of companies which already do this but they have to locate very close to London itself - O2 and other tech companies are strewn along the M4 corridor which has level of access to London and to the labour market as Manchester and Leeds will have after Phase 2. HS2 can insulate itself against fuel crises in a way that no other form of transport can. If we decide against HS2, and then someone creates another oil crisis, what is going to happen to the slightly-improved existing rail network as people abandon cars and planes? All HS2 infrastructure is built for 400m long double-decker trains at up to 20tph capacity (and maybe beyond when moving-block ETCS level 3 comes about) which is an obscene amount of capacity, well above what the passenger numbers are predicted to be for a long time. At the same time the existing rail network will continue to exist and will have its own massive capacity increases as the speed differentials between trains are reduced back down to the level of sanity. Platforms extended for 11-car Pendolinos or 12-car IEPs will take 12-car (16 for 12-car IEP) regional or commuter trains just fine and we'll be able to have many more of them going faster and closer together than we have today.
- should we be focusing on modal shift and distinguishing between additional travel and journeys transferred from the private car or air? If so, that would mean focusing on routes where rail's modal share is low and increasing services, lengthening trains and possibly building new sections of conventional line (e.g. across the Pennines) to increase speeds and relieve capacity. Integrating timetables and fares with other modes would be a first priority. Most journeys made are very short journeys and so to increase public transport's share of these it may be wise to invest heavily in public transport in metropolitan areas. In particular the less well off are much more likely to benefit from this than a high speed line.
HS2 is the target of the minority of rail infrastructure investment over the same time period. We only know what is planned until the end of CP5 and the start of CP6, which corresponds to early-mid Phase 1 construction period. By the time Phase 2 shuts I would doubt there wouldn't be wires all the way from Inverness to Penzance and everywhere in between - Pacers and 150s long replaced by 345/380/387/700/801s running at twice the length and twice the frequency at speeds well beyond what is done today. The rail map will be redesigned around the HS2 service hubs - already happening around Manchester with the Northern Hub and the Ordsall Chord but in general anything is possible. GLC-GLQ tunnel? Bradford Crossrail?
- are HS2 Ltd's plans for 18 tph are realistic? I seem to remember that evidence given to the Transport Select Committee included the fact that nowhere in the world does a high speed line run more than around 12 tph and the technology for 18 tph has not yet been invented. This means that relieving the ECML and MML significantly and providing services to Heathrow and HS1 destinations seem unrealistic.
Phase 1 starts at 14tph and that is more than a decade away. By two decades away we might have got ETCS level 3 sorted so 18tph might seem provincial in comparison. HS2 will also have the benefit of operationally being more isolated from the classic network than many other networks as the new terminii platforms and tracks are operationally isolated from the old network. Extending the captive routes further will only be able to help this.
- do other lines such as the Thames Valley section of the GWML or commuter routes into Manchester or Leeds which have worse congestion than the WCML need a capacity increase more desperately?
Oddly enough they actually do and that is why they are currently getting them. The Anti-HS2 crowd whinge that it is Paddington and Waterloo which have the highest overcrowding rates without mentioning that both of them are planned to be relieved by Crossrails. Electrification, Crossrail 1 and IEP will solve Paddington for many decades to come. Waterloo will be getting Crossrail 2 & 3, conversion to 25kV (eventually, but needed in part for CR2) and more immediately are gaining five extra 400m long platforms from the former Eurostar terminus. Manchester, Leeds and so on are the greatest beneficiaries of our new continuous programme of electrification as they have the most un-electrified routes around and through them. HS2 tracks don't ever intrude on the existing network around the cities so there will be no capacity loss when it opens either as it will allow the current intercity platforms, tracks and timetabled paths to be used for more essential local and regional services.
- what potential exists for increasing maximum line speeds on the ECML and WCML to 225 km/h and increasing speeds on the Cross Country routes? Would improving line speeds, building strategic sections of classic line, four tracking key routes and optimising connections (currently seemingly not a major part of timetable planning) bring significant journey time and capacity improvements to almost most users of the network for a lower or similar cost?
The metals might be there for 225km/h but that doesn't mean the timetable would allow it. In cab signalling does not help the fact that a faster train will get stuck behind a slower one if it is unable to overtake. Increasing the number of tracks through a section is much easier said than done as entire bridges, tunnels, stations and junctions need to be fixed for them to make a difference. When a route has been singled or narrowed to two tracks the bridges and tunnels will still be there for a relatively easy re-expansion but when you've got it out to the size it was originally built for it becomes a disaster trying to expand it more. Unlike HS2, which passes on the surface almost entirely through empty farmland and industrial areas, the existing routes have lots of houses and roads and schools and other expensive-to-demolish things on either side. Even if there is a short area where it may be possible to increase the number of tracks, it won't be much good if trains have to slow down to be overtaken in them and it won't help at the stations where the most chaos will be needed to add more tracks beyond what the Victorians intended.