GW69 Debate
Debate - high speed
rail
A new
high speed rail service is being proposed by
the government, but should the Green Party
support it? Cathryn
Symons and
Alan
Francis debate
the specifics of the issue
Is high speed rail really
Green?
Cathryn
Symons
We should not oppose high speed
rail
Alan
Francis
London to
Birmingham in 50 minutes. Sauchiehall
St to the City in under four hours.
High speed trains zipping across the
countryside on dedicated tracks,
powered by electricity, joining North
and South in prosperity. From 2026,
this is the vision promised by the High
Speed Rail project known as HS2.
In March the Labour government released detailed proposals1 for a line from London Euston to Birmingham, via a new station in west London, and the Chilterns. This first stage will cost £17bn with later stages to continue on to Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow, and bring the total cost up to at least £30bn.
The project enjoys a remarkable cross-party consensus, although the Coalition wants to change the route, probably to take it through Heathrow. In our manifesto, the Green Party said we would “Support in principle a new north–south high-speed line, which would reduce the number of short-haul flights within the UK”2.
But what advantages will HS2 bring, and will it help to build a sustainable society? Will it reduce carbon emissions, or improve fairness? Is it a project, or even a concept, that the Green Party should support?
Once the line is fully up and running to Glasgow, the Department for Transport (DfT) estimate that the vast majority of passengers will come from existing train services, or new journeys which would not otherwise have been made. Only 8% will come from cars and 8% from planes, and then only after 2033 when the line goes all the way to Scotland. When they do switch, and the number of flights from Glasgow to Heathrow drops, the landing slots will be filled with international flights. It is very unlikely that flights will decrease at all.
The report is vague on carbon costs, giving a range of -25 to +26 million tonnes during the first 60 years of operation, and no estimate at all for construction, a serious flaw. Construction will create emissions early in the life of the project, perhaps before any significant improvements in construction technology allow them to be reduced. A report commissioned by the DfT in 2007 gave a very rough estimate of 10 million tonnes for construction of a London–Glasgow high speed rail line.3. If it does save some emissions, it will be because the electricity grid has been decarbonised, but does not include the huge investment needed to provide the extra low-carbon electricity needed. We’ll be struggling to provide low-carbon electricity to convert existing trains from diesel without this huge extra load.
High Speed Rail will not help reduce carbon by 80% by 2050, and may make matters worse.
The number of journeys on the West Coast Main Line is expected to double by 2033, and the business case for the project depends on this. As with building new roads, or runways, growth is assumed to be inevitable and good. Where is the call from government to reduce journeys, encourage local employment rather than long-distance commuting, or use new communications technology to replace meetings?
The Green Party should not support any scheme which encourages people to make more journeys.
Today, cities and towns as far afield as Cambridge, Peterborough, Coventry and Brighton are part of the London commuter belt. High speed rail will add Birmingham and Manchester to that list, probably not the development citizens of those northern cities seek. With no stops between west London and Birmingham International Airport, the counties of the Midlands become ‘fly-over’ places, ignored by the metropolises at either end of the line.
Of course, if passengers are not prepared to pay the high fares needed to fund the project, or growth does not happen, then we may be left with an expensive white elephant. The new high speed line from Kent into St Pancras has not proved as popular as expected4.
Meanwhile, commuter routes around Birmingham, London and Liverpool suffer from overcrowding and underinvestment. Already, the purchase of new carriages to ease overcrowding on trains of the TransPennine Express and other services in the north-west has been cancelled by the Coalition government as a cost-saving measure5. The huge amounts of money required for high speed rail could be better invested elsewhere, in local rail infrastructure, and to encourage cycling, walking and local buses.
The Green Party recognises that growth cannot go on forever, and seeks to build a society which improves wellbeing, focused on human values rather than consumerism. High speed rail encourages us to rush in frantic pursuit of never-ending growth, does not help reduce carbon emissions and will take money away from other, greater, priorities. It is not Green at all.
Sources
1. Department for Transport, High Speed Rail London to the West Midlands and Beyond: A Report to Government by High Speed Two Limited (2010) at www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/rail/pi/highspeedrail/hs2ltd/hs2report/
2. Green Party of England and Wales, Green Party General Election Manifesto 2010 at www.greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/resources/Manifesto_web_file.pdf
3. Booz Allen Hamilton, Estimated Carbon Impact of a New North-South Line (2007) at www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/rail/researchtech/research/newline/carbonimpact.pdf
4. Gilligan, A, For most of us, high-speed rail is anything but in The Daily Telegraph (2010) at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-rail-transport/7776341/For-most-of-us-high-speed-rail-is-anything-but.html
5. Liverpool Echo, New carriages for overcrowded North West trains axed by Tories (2010) at www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/local-news/2010/05/31/new-carriages-for-overcrowded-north-west-trains-axed-by-tories-100252-26554371/
Cathryn Symons is a member of Camden Green Party
In March the Labour government released detailed proposals1 for a line from London Euston to Birmingham, via a new station in west London, and the Chilterns. This first stage will cost £17bn with later stages to continue on to Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow, and bring the total cost up to at least £30bn.
The project enjoys a remarkable cross-party consensus, although the Coalition wants to change the route, probably to take it through Heathrow. In our manifesto, the Green Party said we would “Support in principle a new north–south high-speed line, which would reduce the number of short-haul flights within the UK”2.
But what advantages will HS2 bring, and will it help to build a sustainable society? Will it reduce carbon emissions, or improve fairness? Is it a project, or even a concept, that the Green Party should support?
Once the line is fully up and running to Glasgow, the Department for Transport (DfT) estimate that the vast majority of passengers will come from existing train services, or new journeys which would not otherwise have been made. Only 8% will come from cars and 8% from planes, and then only after 2033 when the line goes all the way to Scotland. When they do switch, and the number of flights from Glasgow to Heathrow drops, the landing slots will be filled with international flights. It is very unlikely that flights will decrease at all.
The report is vague on carbon costs, giving a range of -25 to +26 million tonnes during the first 60 years of operation, and no estimate at all for construction, a serious flaw. Construction will create emissions early in the life of the project, perhaps before any significant improvements in construction technology allow them to be reduced. A report commissioned by the DfT in 2007 gave a very rough estimate of 10 million tonnes for construction of a London–Glasgow high speed rail line.3. If it does save some emissions, it will be because the electricity grid has been decarbonised, but does not include the huge investment needed to provide the extra low-carbon electricity needed. We’ll be struggling to provide low-carbon electricity to convert existing trains from diesel without this huge extra load.
High Speed Rail will not help reduce carbon by 80% by 2050, and may make matters worse.
The number of journeys on the West Coast Main Line is expected to double by 2033, and the business case for the project depends on this. As with building new roads, or runways, growth is assumed to be inevitable and good. Where is the call from government to reduce journeys, encourage local employment rather than long-distance commuting, or use new communications technology to replace meetings?
The Green Party should not support any scheme which encourages people to make more journeys.
Today, cities and towns as far afield as Cambridge, Peterborough, Coventry and Brighton are part of the London commuter belt. High speed rail will add Birmingham and Manchester to that list, probably not the development citizens of those northern cities seek. With no stops between west London and Birmingham International Airport, the counties of the Midlands become ‘fly-over’ places, ignored by the metropolises at either end of the line.
Of course, if passengers are not prepared to pay the high fares needed to fund the project, or growth does not happen, then we may be left with an expensive white elephant. The new high speed line from Kent into St Pancras has not proved as popular as expected4.
Meanwhile, commuter routes around Birmingham, London and Liverpool suffer from overcrowding and underinvestment. Already, the purchase of new carriages to ease overcrowding on trains of the TransPennine Express and other services in the north-west has been cancelled by the Coalition government as a cost-saving measure5. The huge amounts of money required for high speed rail could be better invested elsewhere, in local rail infrastructure, and to encourage cycling, walking and local buses.
The Green Party recognises that growth cannot go on forever, and seeks to build a society which improves wellbeing, focused on human values rather than consumerism. High speed rail encourages us to rush in frantic pursuit of never-ending growth, does not help reduce carbon emissions and will take money away from other, greater, priorities. It is not Green at all.
Sources
1. Department for Transport, High Speed Rail London to the West Midlands and Beyond: A Report to Government by High Speed Two Limited (2010) at www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/rail/pi/highspeedrail/hs2ltd/hs2report/
2. Green Party of England and Wales, Green Party General Election Manifesto 2010 at www.greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/resources/Manifesto_web_file.pdf
3. Booz Allen Hamilton, Estimated Carbon Impact of a New North-South Line (2007) at www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/rail/researchtech/research/newline/carbonimpact.pdf
4. Gilligan, A, For most of us, high-speed rail is anything but in The Daily Telegraph (2010) at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-rail-transport/7776341/For-most-of-us-high-speed-rail-is-anything-but.html
5. Liverpool Echo, New carriages for overcrowded North West trains axed by Tories (2010) at www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/local-news/2010/05/31/new-carriages-for-overcrowded-north-west-trains-axed-by-tories-100252-26554371/
Cathryn Symons is a member of Camden Green Party
Green
Party policy, as outlined in Policies
for a Sustainable Society (paragraph
TR244), is to support the principle of
high speed rail, and I believe that
policy should be retained. It should be
noted that this paragraph is just one
small part of our transport policy,
which is specified in several hundred
paragraphs in the PSS. Those other
paragraphs state that our transport
priorities are for the most sustainable
modes such as walking and cycling.
Public transport such as rail is in the
middle priority and modes such as cars
and aviation are the lowest priority.
There is now a specific proposal for a new high speed line, referred to as HS2, being considered by the government. Because our policy is only to support high speed rail in principle, we can be critical of aspects of the HS2 proposal. I produced a briefing for general election candidates giving it a guarded welcome but with a number of caveats. It also suggested ways in which negative aspects, such as environmental impact on the Chilterns, could be reduced. Below is an extract:
“While HS2 is not our priority for expenditure we do support it in principle. Our first priority is for local transport schemes, such as safe routes to school, and schemes which will reduce CO2 emissions.
“We want to increase the capacity of the UK rail network so that it can carry more passengers and freight. HS2 would increase the capacity of the UK rail network. However our first priority for rail expenditure would be schemes to relieve bottlenecks on the existing network and schemes to provide more people with access to rail services. HS2 should not take away funding from such schemes.
“Not only would HS2 provide very fast journeys between London and Birmingham but journeys to Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow would also be faster, even with just the first phase. It increases the capacity of the UK rail network. The existing north-south lines are all at or near full capacity and so cannot accommodate more trains. It would also free up capacity on existing lines for more regional and local passenger services and freight trains. Initially this would be on the West Coast Mainline (WCML) but later on the Midland Mainline and East Coast Mainline (ECML) as well. It should get a lot of cars off motorways, particularly M1, M6 and M40. Phase 1 should see some reduction in domestic flights but phase 2 should significantly reduce domestic flights between London and the North/Scotland.”
It is important to keep the two issues, the specifics of HS2 and the principle of high speed rail in general, separate so that an objection to the specifics of HS2 does not become an objection to the principle of high speed rail. So, for example, we can be critical of the HS2 proposals in the Chiltern area but still support the principle of high speed rail.
Some party members who are opposed to high speed rail in principle claim that there is new evidence on the growth of domestic aviation in those countries introducing high speed rail services. However there is a considerable amount of evidence that shows that when high speed rail services are introduced the proportion of journeys by rail in that corridor goes up and the proportion travelling by air goes down, and in some cases is eliminated altogether.
Greengauge21 (a lobby group promoting high speed rail in the UK), in its A high-speed rail strategy for Britain report includes some statistics. In Spain on the Madrid-Barcelona corridor before the AVE (Spain’s high speed rail) service was introduced the rail/air market was split 16/84%. After the introduction of AVE it was split 48/52% and is forecast to reach 70/30%.
Part of our transport policy includes modal shift, away from cars and planes and onto more sustainable modes, including railways. However much of our rail network is already at, or close to, full capacity, particularly the long distance north-south routes on the WCML and ECML. The UK rail network is currently carrying 1.27 billion passengers per year, having risen year-on-year since 1994, up from 630 million in 1982. Generally speaking, the rail network is now carrying double the number of passengers since the 1980s, at a level never seen before since 1945 (pre-Beeching cuts). Current capacity constraints of the existing network mean that it is becoming harder and more expensive to upgrade lines to carry more passengers. For example, the West Coast Main Line upgrade cost about £9 billion and disrupted passengers’ journeys for almost a decade.
So if there is to be continued modal shift there has to be more capacity created on the railways in order to carry the increased number of passengers. Fortunately another of our transport policies is to increase the capacity and extent of the rail network.
It would be perverse for the Green Party to have one policy to increase the rail network and another that opposes in principle the only current proposal to do precisely that, HS2. It should also be remembered that a high speed rail line would release capacity on the existing rail network for both passengers and freight.
The HS2 report indicated that over a 60-year period HS2 might either increase or decrease carbon emissions by 25m tonnes or somewhere in between. However those calculations assumed that electricity generation would remain the same as it is today, largely carbon based. If electricity generation is decarbonised, which is of course Green Party policy, then HS2 would provide a considerable reduction in carbon emissions. That point is noted in briefing papers on HS2 by both Friends of the Earth and the Campaign for Better Transport.
The government’s background paper on HS2 indicates that CO2 emissions per passenger km for Eurostar, the only high speed trains operating in UK at the moment, are less than half of the emissions from an InterCity train and about one-tenth of the emissions for travel by domestic flight or single occupant car.
So, in conclusion, I believe that we should retain our existing policy, only passed by conference four years ago, to support high speed rail in principle. High speed rail would not be our top priority for transport but if it is being proposed by the government we should certainly not be opposing it.
Alan Francis is the party’s Transport Speaker
There is now a specific proposal for a new high speed line, referred to as HS2, being considered by the government. Because our policy is only to support high speed rail in principle, we can be critical of aspects of the HS2 proposal. I produced a briefing for general election candidates giving it a guarded welcome but with a number of caveats. It also suggested ways in which negative aspects, such as environmental impact on the Chilterns, could be reduced. Below is an extract:
“While HS2 is not our priority for expenditure we do support it in principle. Our first priority is for local transport schemes, such as safe routes to school, and schemes which will reduce CO2 emissions.
“We want to increase the capacity of the UK rail network so that it can carry more passengers and freight. HS2 would increase the capacity of the UK rail network. However our first priority for rail expenditure would be schemes to relieve bottlenecks on the existing network and schemes to provide more people with access to rail services. HS2 should not take away funding from such schemes.
“Not only would HS2 provide very fast journeys between London and Birmingham but journeys to Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow would also be faster, even with just the first phase. It increases the capacity of the UK rail network. The existing north-south lines are all at or near full capacity and so cannot accommodate more trains. It would also free up capacity on existing lines for more regional and local passenger services and freight trains. Initially this would be on the West Coast Mainline (WCML) but later on the Midland Mainline and East Coast Mainline (ECML) as well. It should get a lot of cars off motorways, particularly M1, M6 and M40. Phase 1 should see some reduction in domestic flights but phase 2 should significantly reduce domestic flights between London and the North/Scotland.”
It is important to keep the two issues, the specifics of HS2 and the principle of high speed rail in general, separate so that an objection to the specifics of HS2 does not become an objection to the principle of high speed rail. So, for example, we can be critical of the HS2 proposals in the Chiltern area but still support the principle of high speed rail.
Some party members who are opposed to high speed rail in principle claim that there is new evidence on the growth of domestic aviation in those countries introducing high speed rail services. However there is a considerable amount of evidence that shows that when high speed rail services are introduced the proportion of journeys by rail in that corridor goes up and the proportion travelling by air goes down, and in some cases is eliminated altogether.
Greengauge21 (a lobby group promoting high speed rail in the UK), in its A high-speed rail strategy for Britain report includes some statistics. In Spain on the Madrid-Barcelona corridor before the AVE (Spain’s high speed rail) service was introduced the rail/air market was split 16/84%. After the introduction of AVE it was split 48/52% and is forecast to reach 70/30%.
Part of our transport policy includes modal shift, away from cars and planes and onto more sustainable modes, including railways. However much of our rail network is already at, or close to, full capacity, particularly the long distance north-south routes on the WCML and ECML. The UK rail network is currently carrying 1.27 billion passengers per year, having risen year-on-year since 1994, up from 630 million in 1982. Generally speaking, the rail network is now carrying double the number of passengers since the 1980s, at a level never seen before since 1945 (pre-Beeching cuts). Current capacity constraints of the existing network mean that it is becoming harder and more expensive to upgrade lines to carry more passengers. For example, the West Coast Main Line upgrade cost about £9 billion and disrupted passengers’ journeys for almost a decade.
So if there is to be continued modal shift there has to be more capacity created on the railways in order to carry the increased number of passengers. Fortunately another of our transport policies is to increase the capacity and extent of the rail network.
It would be perverse for the Green Party to have one policy to increase the rail network and another that opposes in principle the only current proposal to do precisely that, HS2. It should also be remembered that a high speed rail line would release capacity on the existing rail network for both passengers and freight.
The HS2 report indicated that over a 60-year period HS2 might either increase or decrease carbon emissions by 25m tonnes or somewhere in between. However those calculations assumed that electricity generation would remain the same as it is today, largely carbon based. If electricity generation is decarbonised, which is of course Green Party policy, then HS2 would provide a considerable reduction in carbon emissions. That point is noted in briefing papers on HS2 by both Friends of the Earth and the Campaign for Better Transport.
The government’s background paper on HS2 indicates that CO2 emissions per passenger km for Eurostar, the only high speed trains operating in UK at the moment, are less than half of the emissions from an InterCity train and about one-tenth of the emissions for travel by domestic flight or single occupant car.
So, in conclusion, I believe that we should retain our existing policy, only passed by conference four years ago, to support high speed rail in principle. High speed rail would not be our top priority for transport but if it is being proposed by the government we should certainly not be opposing it.
Alan Francis is the party’s Transport Speaker
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