Training | 2010.01.11
High-speed rail will bleed us all for a few rich travellers | Simon Jenkins
The politicians can drool over their new trains, but a crowded island needs a well-managed network, not an expensive fantasy
Beware. We are entering the valley of the shadow of the pledge. It is a time of maximum danger. Politicians make wild pre-election promises, and feel obliged to keep at least some of them. The campaign has hardly begun, and David Cameron this week promised billions on family tax allowances and a new quango to regulate supermarkets. He knows no shame. But the horrors are the heffalumps, gargantuan projects to build aircraft carriers, supercomputers and railways. They win a headline for a day and cost a lifetime of money.
The largest such project in living history already has politicians drooling. It is for a new high-speed railway route from London to Scotland by various controversial routes. A year ago the transport secretary, Lord Adonis, set up a quango called HS2 to lobby in favour, which it duly did last month. He spent Christmas pushing it in the press.
Adonis on high-speed trains is like Jeremy Clarkson on Ferraris. They are the climax of the "incredible democratisation of travel", and will make Britain a "pioneer in low-cost, mass-market high speed transportation", as Adonis wrote ecstatically last week . His Tory shadow, Theresa Villiers , is no less enthusiastic. "If we win," she exults, "construction can start in 2015." Who could not thrill to big, sleek silvery things snaking across England\'s fields, especially when the French have them?
Business leaders reportedly believe the project would " generate £55 billion ", which is odd as no businessman will conceivably pay for it. We are talking £30bn-£50bn, the kind of money only a chancellor has in his back pocket. It is just possible that some new high-speed track makes sense somewhere, but it remains to be proved by independent, rather than interest-dominated, analysis. It certainly should be proved against the value of similar sums devoted to upgrading the existing track, eliminating bottlenecks and improving the reliability of rolling stock and signals.
Consider the similar case of London\'s Crossrail , which a more courageous Boris Johnson would have scrapped on day one of his mayoralty. It is his £16bn version of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper. Transport for London (TfL) executives wail at the project, which has parted company with all known economics.
When Tim O\'Toole , the outgoing boss of TfL, spoke at his farewell dinner last April, he warned that Crossrail was a disaster that would eat money, time and effort. It would jam up London, infuriate the public and distract everyone from improving the tube. And all this to benefit, at taxpayers\' expense, a cadre of City workers for whom the existing Central line gets a little overcrowded. Why not spend a fraction of the money on more trains and better management, and tell the bankers to shut up?
I love railways but have no illusions. Whitehall\'s combination of privatisation and over-regulation has rendered them wildly expensive to build and run: an abyss of engineers, health-and-safety inspectors and unions. The London tube is absurdly costly to maintain. Adonis\'s comparison of high-speed trains to competitive air travel is fantasy – largely through the doings of his own office.
Trains are romantic but not particularly green. No mechanised transport is that, least of all one that sends multi-tonne train sets trundling three-quarters empty across the country or racing city to city at 200mph. In addition, special tracks are unlikely to knock more than tens of minutes off existing high-speed journey times. Britain has not the long distances and dispersed destinations of France or Spain. In rail terms, England is one huge metropolis in which the chief constraint on time is not technology but the number of stops.
One HS2 route has the train to Scotland stopping at Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle. Even the Eurostar already stops at Ebbsfleet or Ashford, and may yet have to stop at Stratford. But frequent stops are what a crowded island demands, and vitiate the case for faster journeys.
Adonis bases his case for new track on a vague concept of "predict and provide", to meet rising demand from mass-market travellers. How this tallies with the astronomical cost of rail fares, and the even higher cost of high-speed fares, is not explained. Cars, coaches and jets are today\'s low-cost, mass-market transport. Yet Adonis builds few roads or runways for them. Why is he so enamoured of a transport mode that is essentially for the rich?
Britain\'s railways have, since pseudo-privatisation, consumed more subsidies and more top-down regulation than ever under nationalisation. Brown\'s government struggles to run them with roughly 20 times the number of bureaucrats needed for British Rail. Trains, even more than schools and hospitals, have been the graveyard of the Blairite thesis that public service is best delivered by private enterprises regulated by state targets constantly enforced at law.
This has put fares and service at the mercy not of professional managers, but of politicians, lawyers and officials at the Office of Rail Regulation, the Health and Safety Executive and the Department of Transport – all poring over hundred-page contracts and risk assessments, measuring costs against a complex structure of subsidies and fines. There is no room for inspirational leadership or commercial discipline. The recent east-coast mainline contract lasted barely two years before Adonis threw his toys out of the pram and banned National Express from running any trains anywhere. Today\'s rail directors are as good as their last Whitehall meeting.
Train services cross-country or to coastal Britain are deplorable. Stations are mostly miserable places. The Hatfield crash – the 9/11 of the railway – led Whitehall\'s hyper-safe inspectors to panic. They raised the cost of track maintenance by five times (according to Modern Railways magazine) as against British Rail. Meanwhile, 15 years after privatisation the west of England track is still not electrified, a contrast with Europe that is more glaring than the absence of a bullet-nosed glamour project. The trouble is that making services run on time is politically boring.
A sensible policy of rationing road-space by congestion has driven up rail passenger numbers some 40% in a decade. But it still needs to be proved that a project costing untold billions is better value for money than upgrading and properly managing the existing railway. Crossrail shows that one thing is certain. A new high-speed network would bleed the rest of the railway of money and care. Is that what travellers really want?
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]high-speed-rail-crowded-island
