As I've said before here, the facility itself will cause demand, people will, if the fares are reasonable use the facility and expand their personal footprints regularly. Passengers will undertake regular trips to other destination cities for shopping and leisure purposes. It will also encourage a much larger travel to work area for cities such as London, Birmingham and Manchester, resulting in the levelling out of property prices in the South East overtime.
I agree that more people will travel further if speeds are increased. The
HST▸ expanded London's commuter belt out to Chippenham and Bath,
HS2▸ could take it out to Manchester and Preston. But if you take that route of arguement you can't simultaneously argue that
HS▸ rail is green. The green solution is for most London workers to live nearish to London and Most people who live in manchester to have reasonably local jobs.
I hope that we will get some levelling out of property prices across the country, but HS rail will do no more than impose London prices on a few small parts of Northern England. less excessible parts of the country will be unaffected and HS2 will be inaccessible to most of the country. What really needs to happen to help the North (and other parts of the country outside the SE like Cornwall/Devon and parts of Wales) is to move decent jobs close to those places. Isn't that more sensible then subsidising movement of the workforce to existing job hotspots. You do need decent transport to help less-well off places develop, but improving local transport to local and regional centres is the answer. Moderate line speed increases in places like Cornwall and tram/metro networks to bigger cities are the answer. It would be better if the people of Burnley or Cambourne or Hartlepool were given decent transport to jobs and training in their local city (Manchester, Exeter, newcastle, respectively) than people in Leeds and Brimingham which are already regenerating are given better links to London. I sense that the Northern Way (a consortium of
RDAs▸ in the North of England) are begining to understand the importance of regional transport with their talk of regional improvements between the big cities of the North. It makes more sense for Liverpool, Manchetser, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield to come together in a regional grouping to develop an economic centre of gravity to rival London rather than for one or two of those places to become satalites of London. Some of Northern's line speeds are truely terrible. Much better (and cheaper and easier) to boost those by 20 mph than to build HS2. Also many of the post-industrial Northern towns have loads of disused rail formations which could be brought back into light or heavy rail use (ie reoppening the Woodhead tunnel as just one example) whereas there are real engineering problems in trying to run yet more raillines into London.
HS1▸ was hugely expensive because of the large distance of tunnels. Putting tracks onto overgrown formations in going to be much cheaper.
Industry Insider makes some very sensible points about integrating new HS lines with modestly improved classic lines in order to get more towns onto the network and improve losts of journeys not just a few point to point ones. If he were planning (and funding) the HS network I would support it.
My fear is that the reality is that we will get a vastly expensive very limited HS network benefiting a few journeys only and that the classic routes will suffer to pay for it.
The biggest compromise decision that will have to be made is to choose the speed for HS2. I would suggest that somewhere between 150 and 180 mph would be the answer (more like germany than France - our closer spacing of citie sin more like Germany's). We sould forget about 250mph running our geography is wrong. To get the benefits of though services running part on existing line, part on upgraded existing line and part on new line, the new line needs to be able to accept trains running at 140/150mph. If you mix those trains with 200/225/250 mph trains on teh HS section you really kill capacity.
If we build a 250mph track, as well being very costly most slower trains will be barred in order to run enough very fast trains to keep the track utilisation up in order to justity building it in the first place.
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