Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Reply to consultation questionnaire chapter 4

Do you agree with the principles and specification used by HS2 Ltd to underpin its proposals for new high speed rail lines and the route selection process HS2 Ltd undertook?

250 mph is not optimal for rail transport in the UK. Costs are proportional to speed to the power of X, where X is greater than 2. Thus, the costs of travel at 140 mph are more than double those at 100 mph. These extra costs comprise amongst other elements, energy costs, initial costs of equipment specified for the higher speed of operation, wear and tear, and maintenance.

Time savings, on the other hand, are less for each increment of speed increase. Thus a journey of 120 miles takes 2 hours at 60 mph, 90 minutes at 80 mph, 72 minutes at 100 mph and 60 minutes at 120 mph, giving successive time savings of 30 minutes, 18 minutes and 12 minutes respectively. For typical UK distances, speeds much higher than 100 mph achieve diminishing returns.

Minimising environmental impact by the measures proposed gives rise to one set of additional costs that would not be incurred if the railway operates at conventional speeds.

Operating fixed formation trains as proposed is wasteful. It gives rise to a constant supply which cannot be adapted to demand. Thus demand has to be managed using yield management techniques, resulting in complex fares structure which force people to make their travel plans far in advance and tie their journeys to particular times. This in turn adds to journey time since passengers must allow the best part of an hour for delays on the way to their point of departure. Which completely negates most of the time savings achieved by high speed running. From this point of view, a conventional speed walk-on service will give shorter journey times than a high speed railway with an airline-style booking system!

Trains should be specified so that their length can be easily varied to suit demand.

Most journeys are not city-centre to city-centre. The onward links are critical. Without them, the high speed rail is nothing but a vanity project. Providing good onward links will absorb most of the funds available for transport in the next 20 years.

Kommentarer

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...