I thought that hs2 was supposed to be bringing huge benefits to the North? The various vindications on frequency and pricing above seem to me to be terribly close to my belief that hs2 is primarily a commuter route to benefit london.
Let's take Manchester as an example, it is said that there'll be a need for 2tph (was Virgin) to be retained and so there'll be no released capacity as there's already 2tph from London to Manchester in the morning peak.
However that fails to acknowledge the 3rd service each hour from Manchester to London during the morning peak.
That one extra service creates space which could be used for two trains which could be 6 coaches long.
If those trains were previously 3 coaches elsewhere within the station then that allows a further two trains to be lengthened (say from 3 to 6).
That's 4 extra trains which could be 6 coaches long rather than 3 coaches.
However that's 8 services (1 in and 1 or for each train) which would see a benefit.
That's in addition to the extra capacity created by people shifting from the likes of XC to HS2. As I've stated before those traveling from Reading, Southampton, Bournemouth, etc. will have the option for a faster journey time by using HS2 to get to Manchester and broadly comparable to Birmingham. (If you don't believe me look up the journey time from those places to Paddington and add that to the journey time from Euston using HS2 and compare it to the existing journey time, if I'm wrong in sure someone will highlight my error).
Although both of these are fairly small improvements the big advantage is when you then build NPR and switch a load of other services away from the existing platforms. Without the construction of HS2 the cost of the new platforms would then need to switch from HS2 to NPR which would then sufficiently impact on the viability of NPR.
The cancelling of HS2 could therefore result in NPR not being built.
Now whilst HS2 would see 40% of the benefits being seen by London (actually what is meant is that 40% of passengers will start/end their journey in London, this also means that 60% of passengers won't start or end their journey at London), the future benefits of building HS2 to other regions could be significant.
Now I know I go on about the growth rate seen to date, but it is important. In that if we aren't on target to hit the expected passenger numbers then that would be a significant problem.
Now I've always talked about the 2.5% growth year on year to reach the rail passenger numbers and how we're significantly above it.
However how do we compare if we assume that rather than rail being 75% of passenger numbers we assume that it's 100% of passenger numbers.
To achieve that we'd have to have had growth of 3.6% each and every year. In the 9 years since HS2 was announced in 2009 (even though actually the base year for HS2 passenger numbers is 2008) to be on track we'd have had to have seen 38% growth. Yet we've seen 49% growth between London and the region's which will benefit from HS2. (This would mean that even against this harder to achieve passenger number figure we could still have 2 years or of the next 17 which are flat, alternatively it would allow the growth rate to be 3.2% each year).
That would indicate that actually we're likely to exceed predictions, especially given that the majority of transfer from air or car would likely happen once the speed improvements happen (i.e. once HS2 is at least partly open).
However even if we're off on the numbers by a little bit (and you have to remember that there's supposed to be several years of HS2 phase 1 in operation which is likely to attract more people through improved services, so is expect us to be a little under at the opening of Phase 1) then the switch from other modes (air and car) would likely make up any shortfall.
However if we end up being over, then this would cover some of the extra costs.
Again I'm willing to let someone challenge the data and highlight where I've gone wrong (as I'm not foolproof). However, for some reason few try.
Some do try to argue that growth is trending downwards unfortunately the latest growth figures show that the increase in growth rates is rising again (not that there had been much of a fall, and virtually none outside of London, but rather that the increase in growth is getting bigger again).
This is likely down to the recent investment in rolling stock and capacity compared with the fairly low levels between 2012 and 2017.