HS2 - Government proposals, alternative routes and general discussion

[whole diary]

[Red Squirrel]

So how much would the Borders Railway have cost per mile with knitting at the same time it was re-instated?

The Borders Railway is, of course, the least apple-like of the projects I compared.

IIRC^▸ (if I recall/remember/read correctly) borders railway did not include long lengths of new tunnel or work in dense urban areas and land values for any land purchases were probably a tad less that extending Euston Station. 

Indeed. There were some fairly substantial civils at the Edinburgh end where it crossed the A720, but after that the route and some significant structures were there for the recycling. Also - very significantly - the cost of new (or not-so-new, as it happens) trains (which can constitute a very significant chunk of the budget for this kind of project) were not, as far as I am aware, factored in.

If it's cancelled, I will be very interested to see how the alternative plan to tackle future rail growth takes shape...

That's the crux of the biscuit. It may be that there is another way of knitting together the maze of Stephensonian cart-tracks that currently struggle to hold England together - when Ulster, Scotland and Wales have left the union we may need it more than ever - but if we cancel HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)), it'll be a generation before there's any prospect of getting it moving. And as TonyK pointed out elsewhere, it would be unlikely to cost less than twice what we're now looking at for HS2.

[ellendune]

I do wonder if there is any sum of money at which the HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) fan club would eventually admit that it's too much.

Since you put it like that...

On the anti HS2 side we have:

1. the nimbys who don't want a new railway in their back yard (though I think most of them would find it a lot less intrusive than they think)
2. the anti rail transport zealots who just hate railways (followers of the Thatcher view of public transport - which they regard as socialist because they have to mix with the plebs or because they run a road transport business) - Is the SoS in this group?
3. and some who just think it will cost too much and won't do anything for them.

Groups 1 & 2 don't care about the cost they are united in that they just don't want it.  However propose a new motorway instead and they would be fighting each other to death.  I suspect the Daily Telegraph are representing the views of groups 1 & 2 and are just trying to use the legitimate concerns of group 3 to bring the project down.   

[lympstone_commuter]

I do wonder if there is any sum of money at which the HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) fan club would eventually admit that it's too much.

A good question put in a slightly patronising way.

Indeed. "How much is too much?" is a good and interesting question. The answer may be complex, and there is always a danger that costs can be made to 'seem' large, or 'seem' small according to people's pre-existing views and how they choose to frame the numbers.

As an example, expenditure of £1bn can be made to sound large (by calling it £1bn!), but it is (approximately) equivalent to £20 per person in the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) (which doesn't sound nearly so bad), or 40p per week per person in the UK (which sounds positively affordable).

I find that '£1bn is twenty quid a head' is a good ready reckoner to carry around in one's head.

So - what to make of the cost of HS2? Let's work with a round £100bn.

£100bn is - roughly - 1 year's total UK govt education spending, or 3 year's total UK govt transport spending (see  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_United_Kingdom  ), or Network Rail's total budget for about 14 years ( https://cdn.networkrail.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Annual-report-and-accounts-2019.pdf ) . To put it another way - it is roughly 10% of annual UK govt spending.

£100bn is - roughly - £2000 per person, or £40 per person per week over a year, or £4 per person per week over a decade, or 80p per person per week over half a century. So - near enough 10p per person per day for the next 50 years.....

Is that too much?  Well, I suppose it depends on the benefits - which I don't feel qualified to quantify, but must surely include uplift in GDP due to greater connectivity, north-south rebalancing of the economy and savings from work that would otherwise have to be done on WCML^▸ (West Coast Main Line) / MML^» (Midland Main Line. - about) / ECML^▸ (East Coast Main Line) to provide capacity.

My own (current) hunch is that HS2 is well worth it. Does anyone have any quantitative arguments to suggest that it isn't?

[TonyK]

But how do we know that figure is correct? 

We don't. The only way of finding out what it costs is to build it. Even then, we won't know. Should we include the cost of the trains? After all, in a supposedly privatised railway, somebody else is paying for them. Do we include the cost of the stations, and if so should we add in the cost of the W H Smiths at Curzon Street? I suppose the answer depends on whether you want to build it or not. Truth and accuracy are scarce commodities these days.

[TonyK]

By the looks of it m not the only one who would like to see the return of Yes Minister 😁

Groups 1 & 2 don't care about the cost they are united in that they just don't want it.  However propose a new motorway instead and they would be fighting each other to death.  I suspect the Daily Telegraph are representing the views of groups 1 & 2 and are just trying to use the legitimate concerns of group 3 to bring the project down.   

So:
The Telegraph is read by the people whose stately homes will be demolished for HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s))
The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people whose stately homes will be demolished for HS2
The Financial Times is read by the people who will own HS2
The Guardian is read by the people who think HS2 should be owned by the country
The Morning Star is read by people who think HS2 should be owned by another country
The Mirror is read by people who think it already is
The Star is read by people who don't have a clue what we're talking about
The Times is read by people who will enjoy doing the crossword on HS2
And The Sun is read by people who don't care either way, so long as the train staff have big knockers.

[Red Squirrel]

And (sorry to lower the tone!) the Express?

[JayMac]

The Express is read by people who think HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) killed Diana.

[Celestial]

and the Evening Standard is read by those that think HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) should end at Watford (despite not even going there.)

[TaplowGreen]

Well, the messenger is riddled with bullets, but strangely enough the message seems unscathed! 

Still not even a scratch!   

[IndustryInsider]

Should we include the cost of the trains?

I'd be interested to know what other 'optional extras' included in Michael Byng's submission to the enquiry.

[Red Squirrel]

Well, the messenger is riddled with bullets, but strangely enough the message seems unscathed! 

Still not even a scratch!   

OK, how about if we turned this on its head: How low would you have to reduce the price before the anti-HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) camp agreed that it was money worth spending?

Perhaps if we excluded the cost of stations, or land acquisition - these are after all assets, and will actually be worth more than the cost of building them. The trains will, presumably, be leased; their cost will be defrayed at least to some extent by ticket revenue won't it?

What is the message that is unscathed? I think we all agree that it is possible to make up a number which seems absurdly unaffordable, but where does that get us? What is the alternative?

[Robin Summerhill]

So:
The Telegraph is read by the people whose stately homes will be demolished for HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s))
The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people whose stately homes will be demolished for HS2
The Financial Times is read by the people who will own HS2
The Guardian is read by the people who think HS2 should be owned by the country
The Morning Star is read by people who think HS2 should be owned by another country
The Mirror is read by people who think it already is
The Star is read by people who don't have a clue what we're talking about
The Times is read by people who will enjoy doing the crossword on HS2
And The Sun is read by people who don't care either way, so long as the train staff have big knockers.

The late 1960s called. They'd like their joke back...

(I was actually given a typewritten copy of that gag when I lived in a bedsit in Wells Road, Totterdown, Bristol, between 1970 and 1972. The only difference was a substitution of the word knockers for a word that was in more widely-used parlance at the time )

[JayMac]

(I was actually given a typewritten copy of that gag when I lived in a bedsit in Wells Road, Totterdown, Bristol, between 1970 and 1972. The only difference was a substitution of the word knockers for a word that was in more widely-used parlance at the time )
The late 1960s called. They'd like their joke back...

Are you saying that the joke was written around 20 years before it was broadcast in the 1987 Yes, Prime Minister episode, A Conflict of Interest? Did the typewritten copy you saw attribute  the joke to Anthony Jay and Jonathan Lynn?

I'm sceptical that the joke originated in the late 60s as The Sun didn't start publishing pictures of topless women on page three until November 1970.

I also can't find any source online that suggests the joke has been around since the late 1960s. All the sources I've found attribute the joke to Jay and Lynn for that particular episode of Yes, Prime Minister.

Your typewritten copy of said joke could be worth a bit of money if it proves Jay and Lynn plagiarised it.

[didcotdean]

The 'newspapers and their readers' joke was not original to Yes Minister; Dave Allen for one did something along those lines on TV in the early 1970s. Jay and Lynn discovered it by reading the quote in a media handling book. They may well have repurposed it though.

[JayMac]

The 'newspapers and their readers' joke was not original to Yes Minister; Dave Allen for one did something along those lines on TV in the early 1970s. Jay and Lynn discovered it by reading the quote in a media handling book. They may well have repurposed it though.

Thanks. The dangers of online only research. Sometimes Google isn't omniscient.