Shrinking Britain is Good. So We Need Fast Trains.

I can’t decide whether Matthew Sinclair thinks High-Speed Rail too ambitious or not ambitious enough. I’m happy to share his scepticism towards the economic and jobs numbers put forward by the plans’ backers but trust he will not be offended by the suggestion his own figures should be treated with comparable scepticism. Who knows what the impact will be? All estimates, on each side of the argument, involve hefty assumptions and some amount of guess-work.

But when and why did we decide that we no longer need to spend money on infrastructure? At this rate there’s a chance Britain will end up like the eastern seaboard of the United States: motorways as car-parks, slow trains and overcrowded skies. HSR is unlikely to be the solution to all these problems but it may be part of one.

Equally, the fact that France, Spain, Germany, Belgium and Holland all think high-speed rail links are a good thing doesn’t mean they are or that Britain would benefit from comparable investments. On the other hand, it might be thought odd that Britain is quite so exceptional a place as to have little need for fast and frequent transport services. So when Mr Sinclair writes:

Marginal improvements in the journey time on an already fast and frequent service won’t have a dramatic economic effect. Madrid to Barcelona took seven hours and high speed rail cut the journey time to less than three hours. There just aren’t the same kind of gains to be had here as the existing service is better and the journey is shorter as we live in a smaller country.

I can’t help but wonder what “already fast and frequent service” he has in mind. The railways are over-burdened and over-stretched as it is. Even allowing for the extra capacity produced by existing projects additional capacity will be needed soon. As for this “Britain is wee so we don’t need fast trains” idea, well, most trains on the East Coast Main Line take five hours to travel the 400 miles from London to Edinburgh. A proper high-speed service could cut that journey time in half – exactly the same impact as on the Madrid-Barcelona service that Sinclair concedes, implicitly, is fine for Spain.

True, shaving 15 to 20 minutes off the trip from London to Birmingham is not so dramatic, but halving the time it takes to get from Manchester or Newcastle to London certainly is. Or would be if HSR ever ventures north. Moreover short distances are also suitable for HSR: a track that cut the Edinburgh-Glasgow journey to 20 minutes would go a long way towards effectively merging the cities, making them a single labour and housing market. This could feasibly produce enormous benefits, especially for Glasgow.

It may seem paradoxical that mobility has become even more important in an internet-connected world but there you have it. “Shrinking” Britain is a logical response to both current and predictable trends and becomes even more important when future population growth is accounted for.

Of course it is expensive but so are the consequences of not investing in infrastructure. If anything it may be that the problem with the government’s proposals* is not that they are too ambitious or too expensive but that they are not ambitious or expensive enough.

*This assumes – heroically perhaps – that we can actually still manage large-scale infrastructure projects. If we can’t then things are going to look pretty bleak, pretty quickly.