I suspect that at least all the WCML oriented parts of HS2 would be built, why? Due to the passenger growth seen. Therefore any such discussion about the canceling of Phase 2 is a little premature.
The rest of this post provides some of the training behind this statement (so feel to skip over it if you're not interested).
Based on 2.5% growth year on year the opening of Phase 1 (2026) would have reached 152 passengers for every 100 in 2009.
By 2018/19 this had reached 175.
That's virtually the figure for the opening of Phase 2 (2036) 177.
Only there's a problem, the business case from 2013 is based on passenger growth of 2.2% from 2010 onwards. This drops the phase two opening (2032) to 165 of the 2009 figure. As such all opening year predictions have been exceeded.
That's before any growth from faster trains or extra capacity.
With that sort of passenger growth already set the overall likelihood of phase 2 bit being built is going to be fairly low.
Now obviously future use can't be relied upon based on past data. With the being much said about working from home reducing overall travel.
However, this is where looking at that in isolation causes a few problems.
Firstly there comes a point where cars are too costly to run for the limited number of miles which they are used for.
Therefore if you were doing 10,000 miles a year and you then do all your work from home, your miles per year could well fall by 6,000 miles a year (~13 miles each way to work).
That's potentially going to change the cost per mile of your car significantly, making it less viable to run. Especially if you then cut a load more miles by getting more if you're shopping online. As if it previously cost 25p/mile you'd have to be quite a long way from the supermarket to recoup the cost of the delivery slot. However at 53p/mile that's going to be a much closer call, even if it's not cheaper the inconvenience of going out is going to factor (staying in isn't as you'll be doing that for work anyway, so lunchtime delivery slot wouldn't be a problem).
Quite a bit of the remaining <4,000 miles is likely to be shorter than 3 miles, so very suitable for walking/cycling, especially if aided by the use of an e-bike.
Some may well still be undertaken by car (either taxi or hire car), but fairly easily 1,500 miles could be done by rail.
If we saw a 6.25% shift from road to rail that would increase the use of rail by 50% of that seen in 2019.
That compares to a maximum of a 25% fall in rail use (as 25% of people would look to work from home). The reason that's a maximum, is that for that to be the case that would require:
100% of rail travel to be related to work, and it's not. WCML is about half.
0 days in the office a year, it's highly likely that most people would still be required in an office 23 days a year (the equivalent of 1/10 days) or more frequently than that.
Therefore even is we assume a 10% drop in rail passengers then all that would do is drop those 175 passengers seen in 2018 to 157, which so isn't that far off the 165 of the opening of Phase 2, and still ahead of the opening of Phase 1.
Even if there's no growth until Phase 1 opens, then there's likely to be an increase in passenger numbers again due to the reduced journey times.
All this excludes any impact of Covid-19 on air travel and any further limits placed on car travel to reduce our carbon emissions.
On carbon emissions, the current rail network averages 0.59 tonnes of CO2e emissions per 10,000 miles per passenger of traction emissions whilst EV's create 0.60 tonnes on the same basis.
Whist that may assist a tiny amount there's a few key things to beat in mind:
EV's can only reduce their emissions by greening the grid, rail can do that and reduce the number of miles traveled by diesel trains (2023 is likely to be much lower with the removal of 221's from Avanti services and the revival of 222's from EMT before then).
Not all travel by car is possible by rail, as it's hard to travel a mile or two by rail, as such 10,000 miles by car is likely to be less than this distance by rail if you have to your car and went by rail everywhere. Not least because of the extra distances often traveled just to park.
The maintenance, per route mile, is lower for rail over the strategic road network. Network Rail (9,800 miles) have a baseline of 300,000 tonnes, which they are bettering (I believe last year this was by 17%), this compares with a minimum from the last 5 years of 330,000 tonnes (total for the 5 years was 2,100,000 tonnes) for the strategic road network (4,800 miles).
Therefore, of we are going to reach our net carbon emissions rail is likely to need to take a bigger role, even if overall miles decrease.
As such, unless rail use plummets, then I suspect that any discussion about what might happen in phase 2 is cancelled is a bit of a waste of time.
If course if anyone has any evidence or a theory as to why rail use would fall, then feel free to share it here.
