Despite my opposition to High Speed 2, I am quite a big fan of HS1, the line which runs from St Pancras to Ebbsfleet, Ashford and on to other towns in north and east Kent. I also think HS3 — a proposed line linking the cities of t’Northern Powerhouse — is a good idea.
Why the inconsistency? Well, I believe HS1 and HS3 are significant innovations whereas HS2, though it costs far more and covers a much greater distance, is not. In fact I would argue, counterintuitively, that HS2’s greater length is precisely what makes high-speed rail less necessary: the cost of the longer journey means that most people do not make it very often.
Two years ago, Stewart Butterfield, a Silicon Valley innovator and one of the co-founders of both Flickr and Slack, made the following comment in an email to his colleagues: ‘The best — maybe the only? — real, direct measure of “innovation” is change in human behaviour. In fact, it is useful to take this way of thinking as definitional: innovation is the sum of change across the whole system, not a thing which causes a change in how people behave. No small innovation ever caused a large shift in how people spend their time and no large one has ever failed to do so.’
I think he is right. The best metrics for technology are not engineering metrics — speed, journey time, processor speed or whatever. They are human metrics — specifically the question ‘Will this change what people do?’ It is easy to produce innovations that look significant on paper but have little effect on human action.
Concorde was a case in point: there were only ever 2,000 David Frosts in the world who crossed the Atlantic so frequently that a three-hour time-saving mattered to them.
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