Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

What is the value of higher speeds?

A previous posting was criticised on the grounds that a Network Rail study found that revenues increase much faster than costs as speed increases, and also that benefit/cost ratios rise with speed. Pages 27-30 of the Network Rail New Lines Study were referred to.

The difficulty is that the conclusions drawn in these documents tend to be quoted without a thorough study of them. The Network Rail New Lines Study would take several days of careful reading in order to make a proper critique. In fact, it would take nearly as much work as was needed to produce the original report. Who has done this? Who has the time and other resources to do this? The consultants who wrote the report, Steer Davies Gleave are amongst the leading advocates of High Speed Rail, being also the authors of the Greengauge21 report. It is natural that they are going to present it in the most favourable light possible.

Any such study involves making many assumptions about the future and about people's behaviour. These may be wrong and events may turn out differently. There are also questions to be raised about the general methodology, in particular over how external benefits are measured. This might look like hard science but it is not. There is also, it has to be said, plenty of valuable business to be obtained by consultants and construction companies if the project goes ahead, so this is not advice from disinterested parties. There are no disinterested parties when a matter like this is concerned, since all options produce losses and gains for someone.

One point that is clear, however, is that it is assumed that premium fares will be charged for travel on the high speed line, which puts a different complexion on the whole project, does it not?

Kommentarer

Anonymous sa…
Figure 3.2 on p28 is interesting for the wrong reasons - it seems to show that whilst revenue increases with speed that "infrastructure and operating costs" remain almost constant from 125mph to 225mph - this appears to be pure fantasy.

In fact my assessment is that the whole document is a figure laden fluff piece - an advertorial.

There are no real links or references to the statistictical methods they used - just vague statements such as "PDFH methodologies have been employed to derive an overall growth factor for a combination of the following New Lines benefits" - PDFH is the "Passenger Demand Forecasting Handbook (PDFH) forecasting framework"

Welcome to disneyworld.
Physiocrat sa…
Thanks. Energy is proportional to speed-squared. This will apply to everything, including, for example, wear and tear on track, rolling stock and components. And there are some components that have to be specially designed for high speeds, so there are step changes as well, People have been taken in.

To say nothing of the special fleet of UK-gauge high speed trains

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...