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Potholes, not HS2

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PR1Berske

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I agree with this request without hesitation. Anything which uses money where it matters, instesd of HS2, is right in my book. What does the forum think?


Some of the £42bn earmarked for the HS2 high speed rail link should be spent on fixing potholes in roads to prevent cycling deaths, a Labour MP has said.

Catherine West said the government had got its priorities wrong and should be spending more on roads in urban areas.

She said councils had been starved of cash for repairs.

The number of cyclists killed or seriously injured because of badly maintained roads has more than trebled since 2007.

In 2007, there were two fatalities and 15 serious injuries where the state of the road was a "contributory factor" - compared with four fatalities and 60 serious injuries in 2016, according to figures obtained by Ms West through a Parliamentary answer.
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Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-43428195
 
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NSEFAN

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PR1Berske said:
I agree with this request without hesitation. Anything which uses money where it matters, instesd of HS2, is right in my book. What does the forum think?

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-43428195
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This is not dissimilar from people asking 42bn to be spent on the NHS instead. Fixing potholes is a problem of recurring matinenance, whereas HS2 is an asset that could easily last a couple of centuries. Even if you completely cancel HS2 and spend £42bn on resurfacing the roads, sooner or later you will have to find something else to cancel to keep up the habit.
 
Ash Bridge

Ash Bridge

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NSEFAN said:
This is not dissimilar from people asking 42bn to be spent on the NHS instead. Fixing potholes is a problem of recurring matinenance, whereas HS2 is an asset that could easily last a couple of centuries. Even if you completely cancel HS2 and spend £42bn on resurfacing the roads, sooner or later you will have to find something else to cancel to keep up the habit.
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Exactly, and I wonder why this MP didn't suggest diverting funding from future new road infrastructure schemes rather than HS2?
 
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Dave_Cardboard

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It's a false dichotomy and a straw man argument. Consider the following analogy:

If a huge hole opened up in the ground outside your house preventing you getting your car off the drive, you have a transport problem that needs to be solved. No amount of money spent on schools, hospitals, nurses, teachers, airports, broadband, potholes or anything else you can think of (desirable as they may be in their own right) does anything to fix your transport problem. You still need to fix the hole in the ground stopping you getting your car out.

Same, it is argued, for HS2. The existing railways are "full" (or will be soon) - you cannot fix that by filling in potholes.
 
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Bald Rick

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It’s also an argument of the time. This is pot hole season - after a long hard winter, this is the time pot holes are most prevalent. The council highways teams only have capacity to fix a certain number per day / week. They will all be fixed by the summer. You wouldn’t see this argument in August.

Incidentally, I have met this MP a few times and she is actually reasonably sensible. She must have been put up to do this.
 
tbtc

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Dave_Cardboard said:
It's a false dichotomy and a straw man argument
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Completely agree.

Funnily enough, it's only the HS2 budget that people moan about in this way. Nobody points out that the ten million pound re-signalling project (at an existing station) is money that could be used on nurses, nobody suggests that the refurbishment of older trains should be spent on building schools, nobody says that it's on outrage that we are spending money on increased wages for train drivers when so many people are using food banks (etc etc), but the minute people start talking about building brand new infrastructure* people suddenly try to shame the railway - as if the number of cyclist deaths/ poorly paid NHS professionals/ cuts to Sure Start (etc etc) is only because of us building a new railway.

Absolute nonsense, but we'll keep on hearing it from people who have run out of other arguments against High Speed Rail

* - obviously re-opening quaint branch lines through rural Devon/ Norfolk/ Lake District/ Highlands is fine though? Nobody suggested that the Borders line was paid for by closing libraries or proposes that an Okehampton - Tavistock line be funded by removing "free" school meals - this is purely an HS2 problem in the eyes of some people!
 
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Taunton

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I regret that actual spending, and what it is spent on, at the NHS makes Network Rail's inefficiencies look like a walk in the park. Politicians seem to have a belief that additional NHS funds will all achieve actual patient care improvements. Alas with the current management structure I fear it would be spent on anything but.
 
MarkyT

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Taunton said:
I regret that actual spending, and what it is spent on, at the NHS makes Network Rail's inefficiencies look like a walk in the park. Politicians seem to have a belief that additional NHS funds will all achieve actual patient care improvements. Alas with the current management structure I fear it would be spent on anything but.
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Unfortunately I think you are correct. Rather like BR of old, the NHS seems to suffer from a curse of eternal reorganisations, from top to bottom, that far from introducing economies or improvements,usually results in at least two parallel management structures being paid for through transitions and with various expensive senior figures still working out notice periods (often on gardening leave) despite the fact their posts and organisations have disappeared. These problems are always driven by party politics. With a change in Government, new administrations tend to to take a year zero approach, convinced that the last organisation was stuffed with the previous Government's apparatchiks who must be purged from the system as they can't possibly be competent or trusted to tow the new line, so the easiest way for them to be seen to be doing something in political timescales is to reorganise... and bleed.
 
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Andrew1395

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It's a daft argument, switching money that won't be spent (and not therefore in HS2 budgets) this year on something else. It's not that there is £42 billion sat in a savings account waiting to be drawn down. The government has to invent and print the money to pay for the work as the project goes along. What the pothole issue is relevant to (and reminiscent of the reason Railtrack failed), is that when you cut maintenance and renewals, your capital assets don't stop wearing out, and it takes a huge amount of time and money to get back to where you would have been. If you had carried on doing just enough to keep the system functional. Of course funding the building of HS2 is one thing. Maintaining it, funding the renewals etc will require extra budgets over the decades, that hopefully won't impact on the legacy network. Let's hope HS2 is more successful than HS1 in hitting its predicted ridership and generative income targets. As an aside how many HS2 stations will have large car parks and supporting road improvements. And are they part of the £42 billion?
 
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The Ham

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Andrew1395 said:
It's a daft argument, switching money that won't be spent (and not therefore in HS2 budgets) this year on something else. It's not that there is £42 billion sat in a savings account waiting to be drawn down. The government has to invent and print the money to pay for the work as the project goes along. What the pothole issue is relevant to (and reminiscent of the reason Railtrack failed), is that when you cut maintenance and renewals, your capital assets don't stop wearing out, and it takes a huge amount of time and money to get back to where you would have been. If you had carried on doing just enough to keep the system functional. Of course funding the building of HS2 is one thing. Maintaining it, funding the renewals etc will require extra budgets over the decades, that hopefully won't impact on the legacy network. Let's hope HS2 is more successful than HS1 in hitting its predicted ridership and generative income targets. As an aside how many HS2 stations will have large car parks and supporting road improvements. And are they part of the £42 billion?
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The HS2 growth model has assumed 2.5% a year. However since 2009 (when HS2 was suggested), which is 8 years, rather than 21% growth that the HS2 model would have resulted in we're currently at about 41% growth.

Although in the last year growth has started to flatten we don't need much more growth to reach the 52% growth that the model suggested for the 2026 opening date (about 1% per year).

Even if we were to miss the 52% growth rate by the time it opens it's unlikely to be by very much.

However the recent years have seen little improvement in terms of long distance franchises (and not much change to date on all franchises). We're only just starting to see the 80x's being brought in and there's been no major changes to ICWC since 2012 when it's franchise award was challenged. As such it wouldn't be a surprise if were to see better growth in a few years time.

Even so, we are not likely to be looking at the same sorts of problems in lack of passenger numbers for HS2 as has been seen on HS1 for the simple reason that we've already seen 80% of the growth predicted and we're only 50% of the way through.

By the opening date of 2033 of the full network there would be to be a predicted 81% level of passenger growth, which would mean we'd need 2.3% growth to hit the target.

Again, however, even if we saw zero growth we'd hit 50% of the predicted passenger numbers.

However to see zero growth when HS2 phase one was open, Crossrail was open, the 80x's have provided increased capacity on two of the main long-distance routes and significant numbers of new trains over several franchises is probably fairly unlikely
 
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edwin_m

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Andrew1395 said:
What the pothole issue is relevant to (and reminiscent of the reason Railtrack failed), is that when you cut maintenance and renewals, your capital assets don't stop wearing out, and it takes a huge amount of time and money to get back to where you would have been. If you had carried on doing just enough to keep the system functional. Of course funding the building of HS2 is one thing. Maintaining it, funding the renewals etc will require extra budgets over the decades, that hopefully won't impact on the legacy network.
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Yes the pothole issue is a legacy of insufficient funding and an example of how trying to cut too far often costs more in the long term. Potholes are created when water gets into cracks in the surface and freezes. It's a bit different from Railtrack, where the problems arose due to a combination of ignorance and greed - had they known what needed doing and had the top management been convinced of the need to do so then the money could have been found. Whereas local authority people know this money needs spending but they are severely restricted in the amount they get from government and the amount they can raise through taxes, with more pressing priorities such as child protection tending to get first call on whatever money is available.

Can anyone recall if HS2 is expected to pay its maintenance and renewal costs from fare revenue?
 
deltic

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Yes HS2 covers its full operating and maintenance costs from fare revenue and then some
 
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achmelvic

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I've always assumed the plan is sell off HS2 once it's built, similar what ended up happening with HS1.

Whilst it may cost the tax payer £42bn over the next 15 odd years that's less than £3bn a year which in government finances is tiny, by my reckon that's about 0.15% of annual government expenses unless I've done the sums wrong!

And then once it's up and running it can be sold to some one like a large pension fund meaning the tax payer would get the cash back anyhow. In effect it's like a savings account or investment with a return in 15-20 years time.
 
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Bald Rick

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achmelvic said:
I've always assumed the plan is sell off HS2 once it's built, similar what ended up happening with HS1.

Whilst it may cost the tax payer £42bn over the next 15 odd years that's less than £3bn a year which in government finances is tiny, by my reckon that's about 0.15% of annual government expenses unless I've done the sums wrong!

And then once it's up and running it can be sold to some one like a large pension fund meaning the tax payer would get the cash back anyhow. In effect it's like a savings account or investment with a return in 15-20 years time.
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You have done the sums wrong, total government spending last year was just short of £800m, so £3bn a year is about 0.38%. Still a small proportion though.
 
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aylesbury

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Road spending is largely down to local government and has nothing to do with HS2 it is going to be interesting watching the construction locally as we have a large viaduct near by.Also we have been informed that seven hundred lorries a week will be passing through our town with spoil etc not sure if this is correct but we will be inconvenienced so watch this space(HS2 is just over half a mile away from me)
 
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The Planner

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They have to remove as much spoil via rail as far as I am aware, they will be building railheads at West Ruislip and Willesden for that purpose. I would have thought the vast majority of cut and fill would be moved by haul roads along the trace.
 
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Shaw S Hunter

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The Planner said:
They have to remove as much spoil via rail as far as I am aware, they will be building railheads at West Ruislip and Willesden for that purpose. I would have thought the vast majority of cut and fill would be moved by haul roads along the trace.
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One of the huge advantages of being able to build from scratch as opposed to upgrading an existing route in-situ.
 
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jon0844

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When I saw this thread I thought the OP was asking for the money for HS2 to be spent on making potholes. Our local council seems to be doing a grand job of allowing them to appear all over the county with no money spent at all.

I swear our highways department every year has this problem. They stated they'd only do proper repairs (cut out the hole with a larger square and do a proper fill and seal) and would respond to serious ones in 24 hours. Now they just fill with what looks like sawdust and can take a week or more. Obviously, as the same council said just a few years back, temporary repairs are a false economy... yet that's what we now get!
 
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Silverdale

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£3bn per year may be a small slice of total government spending, but is that the right way to look at it?

The way the budget is currently sliced, £3bn is more than 10% of government spending on transportation as a whole and more than 30% of government spending on rail.

And the point has already been made about the difference between capital spend and current/revenue expenditure, so surely we should look at £3bn a year as a proportion of annual capital spend.

So, would anyone like to hazard a guess as to what proportion of the DfT's annual capital spend on rail HS2 will represent? Because for the rail industry, that will be the key figure, as any cost overruns on HS2 would have to come from the same capital pot as other rail projects.


Reference has also been made to HS2 being sold once it is complete. If that's to be on the same basis as HS1, it would be in the form of a concession for a number of years rather than an outright sale. The deal the government did for HS1 provided an interesting assessment of the private sector value of the project versus its public sector cost. The concession was for 30 years, valued at £2.1bn, so a fag packet income for the government of £70m per year. If you take just the construction cost of HS1 as (roughly) £10bn, that's an annual rate of return of just 0.7%. The overall public sector cost of HS1 was far more that £10bn, probably about £16bn, so as a return on that investment, the government achieved an APR of less than 0.5%. The government has to pay far more than this to borrow the money it invests, so overall, even after selling the concession, HS1 is an annual loss-maker for the Treasury.

Of course HS1 will be delivering some public sector benefits, so it should be justified on those terms, rather than as a speculative public sector investment.
 
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6Gman

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Silverdale said:
£3bn per year may be a small slice of total government spending, but is that the right way to look at it?

So, would anyone like to hazard a guess as to what proportion of the DfT's annual capital spend on rail HS2 will represent? Because for the rail industry, that will be the key figure, as any cost overruns on HS2 would have to come from the same capital pot as other rail projects.
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Can you provide evidence for this claim?
 
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Silverdale

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Just the observation that when NR's costings for electrification projects were realised to be on the low side versus outturn, additional money was not made available from within the totality of government spending.

It was not even made available from within the DfT's overall spending. It was rail projects that were re-scoped or cut.
 
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Silverdale

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Crossrail is a £15bn construction project, but only £5bn of that has come directly from the DfT, in the form of a grant. DfT is also contributing £175m towards Network Rail's works.

The funding for construction of HS2 will be provided by HS2 Ltd, which, like Network Rail, is an arm's length company sponsored by the DfT.

So the DfT has a completely different relationship with Crossrail than it will have in relation to HS2. In the first case (apart from the work being done by Network Rail) it is providing a grant, in the second it is sponsoring the company which will deliver the project.
 
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