Soup of the Day

MyUK : Transport revisited

This week Sir Rod Eddington delivered his report on transport in the UK. As we near the end of the first decade of the 21st Century large social change is taking place in our lives. BT have been busy updating the phone network to 21st Century standards (read more: http://www.switchedonuk.org/), free wire-less networks are popping up in cities across the country and our television is going through some sort of digital evolution. But while our digital lives are being transformed on almost a daily basis, our ‘real’ world infrastructure is left wanting.

In Sir Eddington’s report, he has basically said that we need to charge per mile on our roads, add a few new carridges to trains while extending existing platforms and finally, increase the capacity of a few key airports without investing in smaller hubs (such as Stansted). He has also announced that the UK should not invest in new High Speed Train lines or build any new lines on a network that will reach capacity in seven years in certain areas.

Luckily this isn’t a formal government review, but part of their fact finding excercise that they feel they must do in order to delay actually having to decide anything for another five years, by which time they’ll probably not be in government and it will be the Conservatives’ problem. One thing we do not want is the Conservatives deciding this for us, as it was they who put our railways into the state they’re recovering from now.

So onto the report itself. I am writing this critique from a very pro-public transport standpoint, having no car anymore and relying on rail travel on a regular, almost daily, basis.

From the outset, the Eddington Report stated that it was a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ with regards to road tolls throughout the UK. This is a not an unwelcome suggestion. Just like London five years ago, Manchester is now nearing grid lock in the city centre, especially as we run up to Christmas. Just like London, there is a reasonably good public transport network in the Greater Manchester area. The city centre is already considering congestion charging to support the final phase of the Metrolink Tram Network development. Road tolls on our motorway network would certainly help push traffic away from carbon burning personal environmental disasters. (This is me trying not to be too biased)

Firstly I don’t think cars can be completely abolished, but I do believe hundreds of millions of road journeys could be transfered to public transport if there was impetus to do so. As we stand this is not an option as most of our major rail arteries are almost at capacity. There is the air option, but this is generally fround upon in Europe regarding aircraft’s awful carbon emissions.

So why do I believe we need a new, or new railways? New railway capacity relieves pressure across the transport network, whether on the roads, in the air or the city centres (CrossRail and Cross River Tram will relieve London’s bulging underground network). More rail capacity on the existing network would also allow increased freight traffic, removing hundreds of lorries. A lot of flack to Sam’s email tray from outraged truck drivers is no doubt about to follow that statement. Frankly, sod them! Trucks are dangerous, polluting, killing and wasteful. In our day and age there are better ways of transporting goods and containers don’t need to ride on the back of trucks until the last ten miles.

I have yet to hear a convincing argument not to begin building a high speed network connecting London to the North of England. Most are related to cost, but we have already built one high speed line to budget and on time. High Speed 1, connecting London to Europe, via Ebbsfleet and Ashford, will open fully on 14th November, 2007. High Speed 2 has already been completed, although its current route starts at Kings Cross and travels 200 metres across to the North London line where it terminates and connects to the West Coast Main line one mile away. The government built the HS2 link in anticipation that High Speed 2 would eventually extend out of London up the West Coast Main Line to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Preston and eventually Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Why would the West Coast get the first High Speed line that serves the UK exclusively? Simply capacity issues. Without any action, the West Coast Main Line (WCML) will reach operational capacity in 2015, despite massive investment in the line by Network Rail over the past six years. When Virgin began operating their new Pendolino’s they had eight coaches, now they have nine and there are plans to extend them further to twelve or thirteen coaches. Even with this extra capacity, Virgin will postpone the current fate by a year or two at the most. Elsewhere in England, their are plans to re-introduce dual-deck trains to the Southern network, similar to the Netherlands, Switzerland and France. England has actually had dual decked trains in the past, running prototypes of a new class 4000 in 1949 between Charing Cross and Dartford. Currently this solution is not a real option as the UK’s standard loading guage is too small to allow double decker trains, unlike the rest of Europe.

The UK High Speed 1 line is the only line that could accomodate dual level trains such as we see in Europe.The UK standard loading guage (SLG), a system that specifies the maximum width and height for trains running on a particular line, is considerably smaller than the standard loading guage in Europe.

The standard loading guage is dictated by the size of all bridges, tunnels and cantenery systems supplying the line. To upgrade the UK standard loading guage would require billions of pounds of investment. However, the rewards would be huge releasing lots of new capacity for passengers and frieght. A SLG programme coupled new signalling would add extra capacity, but for long-haul passenger transport, anything other than building new high speed lines is very short sighted. Double-decking existing routes will relieve capacity, but we only have to look across the Channel to see that this is a short lived solution. The other advantages of high speed lines are obvious, increased frequency of services, shorter travelling times and of course, more capacity. London to Manchester would be reduced from 2 hours and 15 minutes to 1 hour and 20 minutes city centre to city centre.

This beats all other forms of transport and would be the natural choice for all passengers over road and air. Virgin have already dented the Manchester/Heathrow traffic heavily with the upgrade of the WCML, with TGV style trains serving the city, the train would be the only option for getting south. Other routes, such as London/Edinburgh would be severely effected by High Speed rails reducing travel time from 4 hours to 2 hours, once again city centre to city centre beating road and air .

Hopefully the government will look properly at all the options and High Speed 2 will eventually be longer than 200 metres, however with reports like Sir Rod Eddington’s diluting the debate, I can see the rail-philes will be lobbying for a long time to come yet.