The Government - applying it's usual strategy of stealing any Tory policy that's been announced, changing it slightly and spending more money - has announced a new high speed rail link from London to Birmingham. And the usual collection of politicians who wish they had better train sets and the rail network operators were frothing about the wonderment of all this...Network Rail chief executive Iain Coucher said high-speed rail was "a vital part of a modern, dynamic economy". He also said that it would "take cars and lorries off the road, cut domestic flights and release capacity on the existing rail network, transforming services even for those communities not served directly by a high-speed line. It is the low-carbon, sustainable transport of the future."
Inter-city trains are not the solution. They travel from one place you don't want to be to another place you don't want to be. They are expensive. The rails makes them inflexible and route-bound. They are inefficient carriers of small load freight. Yet we seem obsessed by them!
I'm all in favour of urban mass transit systems - trams, local trains...I could even persuade myself to like buses. But super fast trains are a waste of money - £30 billion in this case. When they can't get a train 9 miles from Leeds to Bradford in under 20 minutes and most of us a nowhere near a railway station, super-fast trains seem just another shiny toy.
If you want to spend £30 billion linking our cities. Can I suggest building some better roads?
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3 comments:
And who in their right mind wants to go to Birmingham anyway?
Agreed, about the Leeds Bradford comment and the rest. It would be nice to see a link from Bierley/Tong are direct to Leeds instead of There to Bradford and to Leeds.
The case for high-speed rail is that it's a better alternative to short-haul flights- London to Glasgow, city centre to city centre, no security, no extended check-in. So London to Birmingham makes no sense.
When trains are good they are very good - you can work or rest while you travel, you're not sitting in queues - but in terms of flexibility and value for money, it's the humble bus that wins hands down. Decent bus rapid transit systems (like Fastrack in Kent) are popular and inexpensive, and can be tailored to changing demand patterns. But we need to drag them out of the 19th century. A national Oyster card would be a start...
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