The transport secretary Justine Greening’s go-ahead for the £32bn High Speed 2 (HS2) railway to the Midlands makes it “the biggest public project in peacetime”, says Simon Jenkins in The Guardian, and “the worst”. Super-speed rail is suitable for countries with cheap energy – not England. HS2 will be “voracious of carbon”, “do nothing for the recession” and fail to ease congestion. Taxpayers must fork out £1bn a year in interest, so that from 2026, “a few rich business people can get to Birmingham half an hour earlier”.
The case doesn’t stack up, says Christian Wolmar in The Times. Other schemes, such as improving our roads, have benefit/cost ratios of up to six (a £6 return on every £1 spent). HS2’s is only 1.7.
But the cost and benefit assessment is flawed. It assumes business isn’t conducted on trains, yet most business people work on trains. Cost estimates – £16bn for phase one to Birmingham and the £14bn extension to Manchester and Leeds – may be “wide of the mark”.
Holland’s ‘Fyra’ service is discouraging, says Andrew Gilligan in The Sunday Telegraph. Costing more than £7bn, it’s near collapse. Passengers disliked the high fares and trains run up to 85% empty, costing £320,000 a day. Yet construction costs were much lower. French data suggest high-speed networks “suck economic activity into the capital” rather than the reverse.
Without it, expect decades of “expensive patch-and-mend”, says former transport minister Andrew Adonis, in The Times. “To provide two-thirds of HS2’s capacity from London to Birmingham… by upgrading existing lines would cost £20bn”. Journey times wouldn’t change.
Critics say HS2 saves only half an hour between London and Birmingham, but that’s a third off the current 82 minute journey. HS2 also “improves connections between England’s cities”. Modernisation is “urgently needed” and “no other project matches HS2 in benefits”. This dithering must stop. “Then at least some people now alive might actually get to travel on HS2.”