Why are people opposed to HS2? (And other HS2 discussion)

TrafficEng said:

To achieve mode shift - rather than just an increase in total travel - there would need to be some corresponding disincentive to using motorised road-based transport. Since HS2 is a 'corridor' solution the benefits will largely be confined to that corridor, rather than achieving a wider mass mode-shift. In policy terms it then becomes hard to apply disincentive policies against road-based transport because the corridor(s) of benefit don't necessarily align with road use. It might be more feasible to disincentivise air travel for example by either legally restricting the number of flights, or by applying additional taxes to routes such as London-Edinburgh.

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Whilst HS2 does follow a corridor it should be remembered that it follows some key routes in terms of numbers of people being moved.

It should also be noted that circa 85% of people live somewhere where there's more than 10,000 people, which means that creating extra capacity for rail travel should be viable.

Now whilst HS2 on its own isn't going to fix all the problems it will go a long way to fixing some big ones as well as being a good foundation to build upon to fix many more.

Things like creating the potential to run a service from London serving Coventry and Nuneaton before heading north up the Trent Valley route, which would likely open up journey options which weren't easily done before.

For every new service like that which could run, for every route which is quicker by HS2 (therefore freeing up capacity on existing services), then that's more people who can use rail when before they couldn't.

By circa 2035 it should be possible to create policies which make driving significantly more expensive and not impact on that many people. Those who you do impact are likely to be fairly rural and so you could (as an example) provide a discount to their council tax if it's their primary home.

The Ham said:

By circa 2035 it should be possible to create policies which make driving significantly more expensive and not impact on that many people. Those who you do impact are likely to be fairly rural and so you could (as an example) provide a discount to their council tax if it's their primary home.

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Good try. It isn't going to happen though.

Better just to really tax those that think it's a good idea to have more than one house, but that isn't going to happen either.

Grumpy Git said:

Good try. It isn't going to happen though.

Better just to really tax those that think it's a good idea to have more than one house, but that isn't going to happen either.

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Quite probably not, however if you want to significant decrease the account people travel the best way to go about that is to provide extra rail capacity (and walking and cycling) so that you can then hit car drivers hard in the pocket to stop them driving whilst allowing some of their travel to carry on via another mode.

^ This would unfortunately be politically unacceptable as there are many more car drivers than rail and public transport users. It’s the same thing as ‘do you think we should spend more money on the NHS?’ ‘Of course!’ ‘By putting up taxes.’ ‘Erm...’

The Ham said:

By circa 2035 it should be possible to create policies which make driving significantly more expensive and not impact on that many people. Those who you do impact are likely to be fairly rural and so you could (as an example) provide a discount to their council tax if it's their primary home.

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Unless you are proposing reversing all the Beeching closures, and all the ones pre and post Beeching, and running services at a frequency and for a proportion of the day those lines never had in their history, then the impact on people is going to be far greater and more widespread than you suggest. It also won't all be in place (and fully electrified) in the space of 15 years. Buses will fill in some of the gaps, but it will still require vast public resources to provide similar levels of travel convenience to the ones people have grown used to.

As for implementing it nationwide by circa 2035, efforts to price people off the roads in London (with all the public transport facilities they have) have been deeply unpopular and even the attempt to extend charging to the west was reversed soon after.

Then when it comes to the council tax rebate, what about the people who already have council tax discounts for other reasons, or have all or part of their council tax paid through the benefit system? What about the neighbours where one of them drives 20k a year and the other 4k? Do both get the same level of discount? If not, how will you monitor their annual mileage? And does that mean local authorities will start having to send out revised council tax bills on a regular basis if the actual mileage travelled isn't the same as expected? And do two-car households get double discounts, three-car treble discount? If so, there could be an incentive to buy additional cars to game the system and earn more discount. It all sounds like the perfect way of introducing a grossly unfair and inequitable system.

TrafficEng said:

Unless you are proposing reversing all the Beeching closures, and all the ones pre and post Beeching, and running services at a frequency and for a proportion of the day those lines never had in their history, then the impact on people is going to be far greater and more widespread than you suggest. It also won't all be in place (and fully electrified) in the space of 15 years. Buses will fill in some of the gaps, but it will still require vast public resources to provide similar levels of travel convenience to the ones people have grown used to.

As for implementing it nationwide by circa 2035, efforts to price people off the roads in London (with all the public transport facilities they have) have been deeply unpopular and even the attempt to extend charging to the west was reversed soon after.

Then when it comes to the council tax rebate, what about the people who already have council tax discounts for other reasons, or have all or part of their council tax paid through the benefit system? What about the neighbours where one of them drives 20k a year and the other 4k? Do both get the same level of discount? If not, how will you monitor their annual mileage? And does that mean local authorities will start having to send out revised council tax bills on a regular basis if the actual mileage travelled isn't the same as expected? And do two-car households get double discounts, three-car treble discount? If so, there could be an incentive to buy additional cars to game the system and earn more discount. It all sounds like the perfect way of introducing a grossly unfair and inequitable system.

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Why would you reverse many of the breeching closures as many of them are in very rural areas?

Yes there would be a need for some to reopenings, but certainly not all.

As I pointed out 85% of people live in an urban setting, that is defined as a settlement with more than 10,000 people. However there's many places which have a train station which have populations less than this. Now whilst there's a few for which the opposite is true the overall picture is that most people live in an area where it would be viable to run a rail service to.

If we are looking to significantly cut the amount of travel which we are doing then we could take steps to significantly reduce car travel whilst still allowing some travel to happen if it is by rail, even if this is more rail travel than is currently the case.

There's a LOT of car travel (sub 3 miles) which could be replaced by walking and cycling. 3 miles from a railway station covers most of fairly reasonable sized towns (from my experience those of circa 40,000 would probably cover most of the town, even with a non central station location).

With quite a lot of small towns (circa 10,000) being within a mile walk if mostly central to the urban area.

Something like 40% of trips less than 2 miles are driven, this jumps to 55% of those trips less than 5 miles.

In fact on average of the 986 trips which we make per person in the UK (19/week), and whilst 100 of these (2/week) are walking less than 1 mile there's average distance traveled per trip (excluding these short walking trips) is 7.6 miles.

Now this is an average per person, and so a 50 miles to by a family of 5 is an average of 10 miles each, that would imply that there's still quite a few fairly short trips being made. Especially as car occupancy is generally less than 2.

If short distance travel was much more likely to be walking or cycling then we could cut a lot of travel milage without needing to alter the numbers using trains.

ExRes said:

What a strange comparison, I rather think that our Government has a few more pressing commitments than any of the average income people in Britain and those commitments are why many people are against the ever increasing costs of both HS2 and Crossrail

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You might find find my comparator helpful, but what has this got to do with the government's 'commitments'?

It might add an extra dimension to the HS2 price sweepstake. Rather than picking a number that it eventually cost, participants in the sweepstake have to pick an individual from the list of richest people (link). The added dimension: the worth of these people can go up or down just like that of HS2, making it a game of chance rather than skill. Place your bets now!

btw, As you can see I took the liberty of fixing your comment!

squizzler said:

You might find find my comparator helpful, but what has this got to do with the government's 'commitments'?

It might add an extra dimension to the HS2 price sweepstake. Rather than picking a number that it eventually cost, participants in the sweepstake have to pick an individual from the list of richest people (link). The added dimension: the worth of these people can go up or down just like that of HS2, making it a game of chance rather than skill. Place your bets now!

btw, As you can see I took the liberty of fixing your comment!

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It's really very simple, you directly compared a small group of rich people against the Government, unless you haven't noticed rich people only have to worry about themselves, Governments have slightly more responsibility

I have no idea what the moderator position is on members changing other peoples posts, my position is that I would rather you didn't interfere with what I've written without my permission

The Ham said:

There's a LOT of car travel (sub 3 miles) which could be replaced by walking and cycling

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Not going to happen. You only have to look at how people park to see that 100 yards is too far, let alone 3 miles.

Meerkat said:

Not going to happen. You only have to look at how people park to see that 100 yards is too far, let alone 3 miles.

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It happened quite quickly in the Netherlands. It's happening to an extent in Paris right now (ironically helped by the public transport strikes). There's nothing special about the UK that means it couldn't happen here. The necessary infrastructure changes can be made very rapidly and cheaply compared to building new railways or roads, and if it works (which experience would say it does when done properly) the period of objection can be overcome within a single political term.

PartyOperator said:

The necessary infrastructure changes can be made very rapidly and cheaply compared to building new railways or roads...

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What infrastructure changes did you have in mind?

The Ham said:

Why would you reverse many of the breeching closures as many of them are in very rural areas?
<snip>
If short distance travel was much more likely to be walking or cycling then we could cut a lot of travel milage without needing to alter the numbers using trains.

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You've lost me.

DynamicSpirit was calculating that HS2 can increase rail passenger miles by 25%.

squizzler was outlining the need to "double or even triple the proportion of journeys made by rail".

I thought you were arguing that HS2 facilitates expansion of rail services over much of the country which would enable punitive charges to be introduced for car use by 2035 without impacting on many people.

But the whole of your more recent post is a cogent argument for how substantial mode shift could be achieved by addressing short trips that are suitable for walking and cycling (and nothing to do with major expansion of the rail network).

Which returns us to the subject of the thread. People (not including me) believe HS2 will suck up so much funding that nothing will be left for the changes needed to achieve mode shift at the local level. You won't convince those people that HS2 is a great idea by trying to mislead them into thinking HS2 is the answer to modeshift at the local level. It isn't, and never can be.

And that goes back to my original point. Creating capacity for a 25% increase in rail passenger miles is a futile exercise if it isn't part of a strategy to use that capacity for good (mode shift) rather than simply increasing the total amount of miles travelled by people in the UK (bad).

TrafficEng said:

What infrastructure changes did you have in mind?

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Bollards, ANPR-enforced modal filters, segregated cycle paths on existing roads, double yellow lines, 20mph speed limits, zebra crossings... The kind of things even a local authority could pay for.

PartyOperator said:

Bollards

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What for?

PartyOperator said:

ANPR-enforced modal filters

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Bus lanes? Ok where you have the roadspace, but not all roads have the space.

PartyOperator said:

segregated cycle paths on existing roads

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Horrendously expensive, unpopular, and takes out space that other priority modes may need.

PartyOperator said:

double yellow lines

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Killing off what remains of town centres, not a popular policy.

PartyOperator said:

20mph speed limits

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Ok to indicate that people should drive more slowly, but impossible to enforce.

PartyOperator said:

zebra crossings...

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Policy now discourages the use of zebra crossings as they are difficult for blind and partially sighted people to use. You'd need to upgrade to signal-controlled crossings with a bigger budget.

PartyOperator said:

The kind of things even a local authority could pay for.

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Well yes, on a small-scale local basis, but not as a blanket policy applied everywhere. And to deliver the schemes and gain acceptance in a single political term is unrealistic - not least because the combined local and national election cycle reduces the period to something around 2 years at most.

London has experimented with all of the above over a 20+ year period. Some projects work, others are hated and subsequently removed. Gaining acceptance means taking time and achieving change through a natural progression. You cannot take the 'big bang' approach with people's lives.

TrafficEng said:

You've lost me.

DynamicSpirit was calculating that HS2 can increase rail passenger miles by 25%.

squizzler was outlining the need to "double or even triple the proportion of journeys made by rail".

I thought you were arguing that HS2 facilitates expansion of rail services over much of the country which would enable punitive charges to be introduced for car use by 2035 without impacting on many people.

But the whole of your more recent post is a cogent argument for how substantial mode shift could be achieved by addressing short trips that are suitable for walking and cycling (and nothing to do with major expansion of the rail network).

Which returns us to the subject of the thread. People (not including me) believe HS2 will suck up so much funding that nothing will be left for the changes needed to achieve mode shift at the local level. You won't convince those people that HS2 is a great idea by trying to mislead them into thinking HS2 is the answer to modeshift at the local level. It isn't, and never can be.

And that goes back to my original point. Creating capacity for a 25% increase in rail passenger miles is a futile exercise if it isn't part of a strategy to use that capacity for good (mode shift) rather than simply increasing the total amount of miles travelled by people in the UK (bad).

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The point that I was making was that for a lot of local travel we don't need car travel. Mostly people use a car because they have access to one as they have already paid a significant amount of money to own the car as they have justified why they need one.

Quite a few people will justify car ownership on "I need it get my child to/from Uni", "I need a car for going on holiday", "I need a car to see family", and other infrequent travel. With HS2, and better rail provision in general, then the case for that car ownership gets harder to make. As it starts to be better to hire cars/vans for when you need them

Whilst there's quite a few who justify car ownership on the ability to get to more jobs, with the shift by companies towards remote working, this will further reduce the "need" for a car. As of you only need to go to the office once a week then you'll be more willing to travel for longer to get there.

The cost per mile of car ownership goes up if you're not using much for work travel and so again this will impact on people's ability to justify car ownership.

Especially if the cost per week of car ownership is £30 and your weekly travel to the office by train is £20, or if you need to go to the office twice a week and your other half goes a different two days a week. This would likely result in there only being one car on that household..

Meerkat said:

Not going to happen. You only have to look at how people park to see that 100 yards is too far, let alone 3 miles.

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The idea that people going to work will be happy to walk three miles to the station, sometimes in miserable weather, as a regular part of their day is absurd.

Railwaysceptic said:

The idea that people going to work will be happy to walk three miles to the station, sometimes in miserable weather, as a regular part of their day is absurd.

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I guess some might but I agree. I used to walk about a mile to the station before moving house - to about 3 miles away. Not a chance in hell i'm walking that.

The Ham said:

The point that I was making was that for a lot of local travel we don't need car travel. Mostly people use a car because they have access to one as they have already paid a significant amount of money to own the car as they have justified why they need one.

Quite a few people will justify car ownership on "I need it get my child to/from Uni", "I need a car for going on holiday", "I need a car to see family", and other infrequent travel. With HS2, and better rail provision in general, then the case for that car ownership gets harder to make. As it starts to be better to hire cars/vans for when you need them

Whilst there's quite a few who justify car ownership on the ability to get to more jobs, with the shift by companies towards remote working, this will further reduce the "need" for a car. As of you only need to go to the office once a week then you'll be more willing to travel for longer to get there.

The cost per mile of car ownership goes up if you're not using much for work travel and so again this will impact on people's ability to justify car ownership.

Especially if the cost per week of car ownership is £30 and your weekly travel to the office by train is £20, or if you need to go to the office twice a week and your other half goes a different two days a week. This would likely result in there only being one car on that household..

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All arguments I was making to businesses when visiting them 25 years ago encouraging them to adopt Green Travel Plans. Things have moved on since then.

And aside from a very few cases, none of the points have any relevance to HS2. These posts would be totally off topic, but for the fact that spending the money on local transport solutions instead of high speed rail is one of the reasons why some people are opposed to HS2.

Railwaysceptic said:

The idea that people going to work will be happy to walk three miles to the station, sometimes in miserable weather, as a regular part of their day is absurd.

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Facing Back said:

I guess some might but I agree. I used to walk about a mile to the station before moving house - to about 3 miles away. Not a chance in hell i'm walking that.

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Then add in the need to take the kids to school 2 miles in the opposite direction first....

TrafficEng said:

Then add in the need to take the kids to school 2 miles in the opposite direction first....

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Take them to work with you. Reduce your carbon footprint and earn extra money - whats not to like?

Railwaysceptic said:

The idea that people going to work will be happy to walk three miles to the station, sometimes in miserable weather, as a regular part of their day is absurd.

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It also depends whether you live in a fairly flat area London or Lincolnshire or in the pennines. 2 or 3 miles in the pennines is only for dedicated walkers or cycles which is why there are few people using cycle lanes in Huddersfield (apart from the tour de Yorkshire types).

TrafficEng said:

What for?

Bus lanes? Ok where you have the roadspace, but not all roads have the space.

Horrendously expensive, unpopular, and takes out space that other priority modes may need.

Killing off what remains of town centres, not a popular policy.

Ok to indicate that people should drive more slowly, but impossible to enforce.

Policy now discourages the use of zebra crossings as they are difficult for blind and partially sighted people to use. You'd need to upgrade to signal-controlled crossings with a bigger budget.

Well yes, on a small-scale local basis, but not as a blanket policy applied everywhere. And to deliver the schemes and gain acceptance in a single political term is unrealistic - not least because the combined local and national election cycle reduces the period to something around 2 years at most.

London has experimented with all of the above over a 20+ year period. Some projects work, others are hated and subsequently removed. Gaining acceptance means taking time and achieving change through a natural progression. You cannot take the 'big bang' approach with people's lives.

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All this is really to say 'people in the UK don't want any kind of modal shift'. Give us transport improvements but not anything that will harm our ability to drive wherever we want. That might be true (although I'm not convinced anyone has really tried in the UK on a large enough scale to make a difference, certainly not London), but it doesn't mean the engineering would be difficult or expensive if political will existed. Absolutely not on anywhere near the same scale as highways and railways, which is why complaints that HS2 is taking away funding that could be better spent on achieving meaningful modal shift are misplaced - even with tiny budgets, the limiting factor is political will, not funding. We need funding for huge rail projects as well, but funding is not the issue when it comes to stopping short car journeys.

I get that the people have decided we are not European, but I don't honestly believe that people on the other side of the Channel are so much fitter, healthier, richer, more intelligent and more politically sophisticated than us that what works in towns and cities across the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark etc. would be impossible in the UK.

PartyOperator said:

I'm not convinced anyone has really tried in the UK on a large enough scale to make a difference, certainly not London

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A lot of my London based friends don't bother with having a car. Almost everyone else I know has to have one to go where they need.

PartyOperator said:

I get that the people have decided we are not European, but I don't honestly believe that people on the other side of the Channel are so much fitter, healthier, richer, more intelligent and more politically sophisticated than us that what works in towns and cities across the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark etc. would be impossible in the UK.

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Would it surprise you to learn with all the stuff that works in the towns and cities across the Netherlands (487) and Belgium (508) they still have higher car ownership rates per 1000 population than the UK (471). Denmark is a bit lower at 438. (2017 figures)
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Passenger_cars_in_the_EU#Overview

This is feeling very off topic now, so unless someone wants to start a new thread I'm going to make that my last contribution to this particular line of discussion.

TrafficEng said:

Would it surprise you to learn with all the stuff that works in the towns and cities across the Netherlands (487) and Belgium (508) they still have higher car ownership rates per 1000 population than the UK (471). Denmark is a bit lower at 438. (2017 figures)
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Passenger_cars_in_the_EU#Overview

This is feeling very off topic now, so unless someone wants to start a new thread I'm going to make that my last contribution to this particular line of discussion.

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Thank you for making the point that car ownership and car use are not necessarily directly proportional (except obviously that people without a car won't drive much!). We have two cars on the drive - I doubt they do 8,000 miles pa between them.

https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/car-ownership-vs-car-use.198252/

for further discussion of that point.

Railwaysceptic said:

The idea that people going to work will be happy to walk three miles to the station, sometimes in miserable weather, as a regular part of their day is absurd.

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Firstly the DfE expect children as young as 8 to be able to walk that far to school.

Secondly, and more importantly, I agree that few would be willing to walk 3 miles which is why I said walk and cycle for trips of less then 3 miles. Cycling 3 miles takes about the same as walking just over a mile whilst cycling less than a mile can often not actually save that much time compared to walking depending on security procedures at each end. As such there's an good case for giving people the option of both.

TrafficEng said:

All arguments I was making to businesses when visiting them 25 years ago encouraging them to adopt Green Travel Plans. Things have moved on since then.

And aside from a very few cases, none of the points have any relevance to HS2. These posts would be totally off topic, but for the fact that spending the money on local transport solutions instead of high speed rail is one of the reasons why some people are opposed to HS2.

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The point is that, in reality and much against what those who want more regional funding rather than HS2 may want to happen, there's a lot of travel which is fairly short distances (schools, shops, etc.), is off peak (so isn't subject to capacity constraints, so wouldn't benefit all that much from better local transport) or is long distance (so will benefit massively from HS2).

Long distance will benefit from HS2, which then reduces the "need" for people to have a car. This in turn means that for the short trips, with fewer cars per household, people are more likely to walk and cycle.

For quite a few non commuting travel trips this is off peak and so is less likely to be impacted by public transport improvements and so is unlikely to improve much of there was more spending on the existing rail network.

Unless it allows new journey opportunities such otherwise wouldn't have been possible. However with the network getting busier and busier this is unlikely to happen, with most improvements likely to be train lengthening of increased frequencies. However HS2 would allow TOC's the potential to provide new/different services and so create the potential for new journey opportunities which would be needed.

Whilst I haven't listed commuting, this is likely to change, what with more working from home, flexible working, IT, etc. (again something which those opposed to HS2 highlight as why we shouldn't be investing in rail). However such changes are likely to make rail more attractive than car travel. Why would you spend £1,500+ a year on owning and maintaing (i.e. the fixed costs of car ownership, and so any fuel is on top of this) a car when you may only use it twice a week for work and the rail fair is £12 each day (£1,250 a year). As such chances are that all those secondary journeys then are less likely to be done by car (mixture of walking, cycling and public transport).

The point is that it's entirely possible that rail travel could continue to see significant growth even at a time of a massive fall in the overall amount of travel which we all do.

Given the development of electric cars (many with decent ranges on them) I wouldn't be surprised if taxes on petrol/diesel and the VED could see some significant increases applied to them in the not too distant future. As the backlash could be fairly limited as more people like people like you and I get electric cars the more normal it is and the more people find out that they can be used fairly much like a "normal" car. However those changes could lead to fewer cars overall as well.

Car ownership amongst younger generations isn't as high as it was in the past, as they get older some will adapt to life without a car (you don't need a car to do a large supermarket shop, you don't need to own a car to get your new flat pack kitchen home, etc.) and so will be able to drive but will just hire a car/van as they need it.

For the vast majority of my life I've lived in a household with one car. It's not that hard to do. For parts of my life we could have coped without a car at all, even now with kids in tow there's little that they do which couldn't be done without owning a car (although bits of that would be more attractive if there were many fewer cars in the roads, but it could still be done).

The things which would have to change to no longer own our own car would be:
- that my other half would need to have a different job
- I might need to work slightly different hours
- visiting family wouldn't be as easy
- we'd have to either not go camping for our holiday, go glamping so that we didn't need nearly as much stuff, or hire a vehicle to do so

However the result would be that we used trains more. Which is likely to be a similar result for a lot of people.

TrafficEng said:

What for?

Bus lanes? Ok where you have the roadspace, but not all roads have the space.

Horrendously expensive, unpopular, and takes out space that other priority modes may need.

Killing off what remains of town centres, not a popular policy.

Ok to indicate that people should drive more slowly, but impossible to enforce.

Policy now discourages the use of zebra crossings as they are difficult for blind and partially sighted people to use. You'd need to upgrade to signal-controlled crossings with a bigger budget.

Well yes, on a small-scale local basis, but not as a blanket policy applied everywhere. And to deliver the schemes and gain acceptance in a single political term is unrealistic - not least because the combined local and national election cycle reduces the period to something around 2 years at most.

London has experimented with all of the above over a 20+ year period. Some projects work, others are hated and subsequently removed. Gaining acceptance means taking time and achieving change through a natural progression. You cannot take the 'big bang' approach with people's lives.

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Regarding the cost of bike lanes:

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...00-miles-of-cycle-lanes-or-one-big-roundabout

Also reminds me of these myths:

https://mobile.twitter.com/AsEasyAsRiding/status/1144599060583763970?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed&ref_url=https://d-7579647123085820641.ampproject.net/1912180046560/frame.html

It will take decades to achieve significant modal shift.
Decades have been spent building for cars - sprawling housing estates with density and road layouts unsuitable for buses, out of town shopping, workplaces on the edges of towns spread over wide areas.
Public transport can not provide for this.
Sure many young people manage without cars in the cities. Then they have kids, move to the suburbs, and need cars.