HS2

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El Pollo Diablo
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Re: HS2

Post by El Pollo Diablo » Mon Nov 22, 2021 2:17 pm

On the plus side, I have just come across this post of mine, which made me smile. Totally wacko.
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Re: HS2

Post by IvanV » Mon Nov 22, 2021 2:51 pm

As I said at the start of my post on DAG, there's nothing wrong with HS2, except what it costs. It is some of the most expensive capacity in the world (urban metros aside).

You are right, it also creates commuter capacity, etc, on the existing lines, and so my argument is not quite right. The capacity created is not as poor as I suggested, it also includes some more valuable capacity. Nevertheless, we still have to justify, is this capacity really worth this enormous sum of money? Are there not ways of creating such capacity more cheaply? Is the upgrade of some of that capacity to such a high speed really worthwhile?

You show a report that considered alternatives. The sums involved in those alternatives are small in comparison to what we now think HS2 will cost. It only considers upgrades to existing routes, and no new double track leaving London. But clearly a new double track leaving London creates large amounts of capacity that these alternatives can never match. Are we sure that there is no sensible no new railway, which provides a new double track leaving London, that creates valuable capacity, and which avoids the massive cost of being HS2? None is offered in that reports. Part of the problem, I suspect, is that in 2013 they were still trying to think HS2 was going to be an awful lot cheaper.

And then, finally, when you have a sensible idea about what that costs, is it worth paying for?

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Re: HS2

Post by plodder » Mon Nov 22, 2021 3:01 pm

Loads of questions there Ivan.

I think you can produce a non-HS line slightly more cheaply than an HS line, but then you need to ask whether that's forward looking and future proofing the scheme. They've already stripped out lots of fairly cheap nice-to-haves, like cycle lanes, some of the environmental provisions etc, and have also stripped out the expensive nice to haves, like some tunnels.

You could change the law to make it much cheaper to compulsory purchase a straight line from A to B, to remove environmental obligations, to remove nuisance considerations like noise etc.

But what would be the point? Economists are often difficult to satisfy when it comes to infrastructure, but that's often because they're not able to cost all the costs (failure to transition to low carbon transport) or the benefits (increased cycling as a nice to have, for example).

Not saying the economics are not enormously important, just they're less enormously important than they think they are.

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Re: HS2

Post by IvanV » Mon Nov 22, 2021 4:27 pm

plodder wrote:
Mon Nov 22, 2021 3:01 pm
But what would be the point? Economists are often difficult to satisfy when it comes to infrastructure, but that's often because they're not able to cost all the costs (failure to transition to low carbon transport) or the benefits (increased cycling as a nice to have, for example).
And as the Green Book people will correctly tell you, it is wrong to be led by the economists. What a project needs above all is a well-defined strategic case, a clear idea of what it is for. And the design of the project, and the alternatives it is to be compared with, have to focus on delivering that strategic case. Then the economics can start trying to tell you if this is really the sensible way of getting what it is for, among the reasonable options that deliver that strategy, and whether the cost level can possibly justify such a case.

The particular trouble with HS2 is that what it is for keeps on changing. For the Blair/Brown government, it was about reducing carbon, which didn't really pass muster. Then the Cameroonians initially promoted it as an alternative to a 3rd runway to Heathrow, which never passed muster. Now we are apparently told its about the capacity. But the actual scope of the project hasn't really changed very much, not enough to reflect these various very different purposes. The headline of what it is for is the idea of getting from London to various places fast. So it isn't actually well matched to its true strategic purpose. If the actual main strategic case is growing physical capacity, mainly within the commuter belt of London, why are we building high speed railway tracks over 100 miles from London?

You mention low carbon, and that was an early idea of what it was for. But it fails to deliver. It increases the carbon intensity of rail. So you need to get a particularly large number of people out of other vehicles for it to show a net gain. It's particularly poor at getting people out of aeroplanes, and, as I explained at DAG, the rail modeshare on intercity trips up to 200-odd miles is already so high it is implausible it could increase much further. Electric railways of any speed can be low carbon when our electricity supply and concrete manufacture is low carbon. But a secure low carbon electricity supply is expensive, and something that increases electricity demand is therefore a problem when it comes to decarbonising.

It remains the case that with £100bn you could do so much for our railway. But you can't because HS2 is taking up most of the money and delivering so much less per £bn spent than the alternatives.

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Re: HS2

Post by Gfamily » Mon Nov 22, 2021 4:35 pm

As I think it's been said before HS2 is a Rorschach Test - and you choose your interpretation according to your preconceptions.
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Re: HS2

Post by plodder » Mon Nov 22, 2021 4:48 pm

IvanV wrote:
Mon Nov 22, 2021 4:27 pm

The particular trouble with HS2 is that what it is for keeps on changing. For the Blair/Brown government, it was about reducing carbon, which didn't really pass muster. Then the Cameroonians initially promoted it as an alternative to a 3rd runway to Heathrow, which never passed muster. Now we are apparently told its about the capacity. But the actual scope of the project hasn't really changed very much, not enough to reflect these various very different purposes. The headline of what it is for is the idea of getting from London to various places fast. So it isn't actually well matched to its true strategic purpose. If the actual main strategic case is growing physical capacity, mainly within the commuter belt of London, why are we building high speed railway tracks over 100 miles from London?
The problem I've had with Treasury business cases is that the people reviewing it bring their own preconceptions to the table. What the project is for doesn't tend to change much - it's a railway, it's a flood defense, whatever. But the organisation's priorities and strategies change all the time, so what the review panel looks for changes. One minute it's securing long term asset management, then a couple of years later carbon is the buzz word, then perhaps value for money. For large schemes that take years (or even decades) to develop the business case has to jump around, otherwise it'll get chucked out and delayed because "the business case doesn't stack up".

Making "the business case stack up" is shorthand for "find words to keep management happy with whatever their latest bright ideas and buzzwords are".

Perhaps if the UK had an actual transport strategy that had been stable for the past 20 years HS2 would have been able to align with it. As things actually stand though, millions will have been spent on writing and re-writing the business case only for it to be ignored or misinterpreted or sent back for re-writes on the whims of whoever happened to be in charge at the time.

It's frankly a ridiculous system.

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Re: HS2

Post by IvanV » Mon Nov 22, 2021 4:55 pm

plodder wrote:
Mon Nov 22, 2021 4:48 pm
The problem I've had with Treasury business cases is that the people reviewing it bring their own preconceptions to the table. What the project is for doesn't tend to change much - it's a railway, it's a flood defense, whatever.
"It's a railway" is not "what it's for" in this sense.

Is it for taking people fast from London to Manchester, which just happens to help with commuter rail capacity? Or is it for commuter rail capacity, which just happens to help get people faster from London to Manchester? You design these projects quite differently.

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Re: HS2

Post by paultheowl » Mon Nov 22, 2021 5:22 pm

IvanV wrote:
Mon Nov 22, 2021 4:27 pm
And as the Green Book people will correctly tell you, it is wrong to be led by the economists. What a project needs above all is a well-defined strategic case, a clear idea of what it is for. And the design of the project, and the alternatives it is to be compared with, have to focus on delivering that strategic case. Then the economics can start trying to tell you if this is really the sensible way of getting what it is for, among the reasonable options that deliver that strategy, and whether the cost level can possibly justify such a case.
I appreciate that this is how it's meant to be done, but my experience is that these things tend to be lead by the economic appraisal because government/the treasury is still obsessed with 'value for money', to the detriment of all the other parts of the business case. So we get crap business cases because the other cases are more-or-less ignored, and then the economic case becomes an exercise in trying to scrabble together as much monetised benefit as possible to make sure the whole thing doesn't fail.

For HS2, the basis of monetised benefits will be journey times, and the most valuable of these are business trips, so it becomes easy (lazy) to focus on that as it demonstrates clear benefits, even if that is not the purpose of the scheme.

[I have assumed quite a lot in the above that is probably wrong. But this stuff happens, and is even worse in business cases in a competitive funding environment.]

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Re: HS2

Post by plodder » Mon Nov 22, 2021 5:41 pm

IvanV wrote:
Mon Nov 22, 2021 4:55 pm
plodder wrote:
Mon Nov 22, 2021 4:48 pm
The problem I've had with Treasury business cases is that the people reviewing it bring their own preconceptions to the table. What the project is for doesn't tend to change much - it's a railway, it's a flood defense, whatever.
"It's a railway" is not "what it's for" in this sense.

Is it for taking people fast from London to Manchester, which just happens to help with commuter rail capacity? Or is it for commuter rail capacity, which just happens to help get people faster from London to Manchester? You design these projects quite differently.
Often, no. It’s a widget, all the client people and technical experts agree exactly what kind of widget will be best, they consider budgets, stakeholders, risk etc. They then shoehorn this into whatever flavour of the month business case it needs to go through. An arms length panel will then ask the bog standard awkward questions to justify their position, and eventually after a couple of iterations and several months delay (during which period the team has dispersed) the funding is approved.

I have never once, in almost 20 years of doing this stuff, seen a project designed around the business case. That way madness lies.

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Re: HS2

Post by nekomatic » Mon Nov 22, 2021 11:35 pm

I don’t disagree with Ivan lightly because he clearly knows a lot and has thought a fair bit about this but I can see three assertions above that I don’t see evidence for:

1) that building a non-high speed High Speed 2 would have been significantly cheaper,
2) that whatever the government of the day, or whoever, say about it bears a close relation to what is driving the actual planning processes, and
3) that the actual outcome would be significantly different under each changing scenario if 2) were the case.

This evidence may exist but I haven’t seen it, whereas I have seen the contrary asserted by people who also clearly know a lot and have thought a fair bit about it.

I should say that this in no way goes against the suggestion that it may have been badly handled, specifically as a project and/or systematically in the way we build big things in the UK. Also that I tend to agree there’s limited scope for modal shift off flying, largely because (in my own unevidenced assertion) most people flying Manchester or Birmingham to London are doing so to connect with another flight at Heathrow, so to change that you’d have to impose integrated rail/air ticketing on British Airways. People genuinely do drive rather than take the train because the trains are too expensive though, which ought to be alleviated by more capacity.
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Re: HS2

Post by Gfamily » Tue Nov 23, 2021 8:56 am

Under the 'this never happens' category:
A FB friend posted this:
Screenshot_20211123-084056.jpg
Screenshot_20211123-084056.jpg (273.34 KiB) Viewed 6494 times
Thanks to the info picked up here I was able to put this in response:
Screenshot_20211123-084222.jpg
Screenshot_20211123-084222.jpg (205.71 KiB) Viewed 6494 times
The OP thanked me for giving information that they simply hadn't appreciated and it has helped to change their mind.
On Facebook!

NB "Ben Reid" is the author of the original text, not my friend.
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Re: HS2

Post by El Pollo Diablo » Tue Nov 23, 2021 9:18 am

I think the strategic purpose for HS2 has actually been reasonably stable for about ten or so years, until the other week. People appear to be confusing the existence of multiple strategic benefits with a failure to focus on one for that entire time.

Building a new line allows huge amounts of new capacity and encourages regional development
Making the new line high speed makes it more attractive for passengers and encourages regional development
Getting people to move from cars and planes to the railway is better for the environment and this should facilitate that

There is more but those are the main things.

All three of these things have been there from the very start. As plodder says, what people choose to focus on of these is what they bring to the table. And those things have been steady since about 2009, when Labour got on board.

What has changed in the last two weeks is that Boris Johnson and the rest of the government have forgotten about the capacity argument and have focused entirely on the speed bit. The IRP almost completely ignores capacity, and so in ten years' time when the sh.t trains between Birmingham and Leeds continue to be full, governments will stand in awe and scratch their beards and wonder what could possibly be the reason for this.
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Re: HS2

Post by nezumi » Tue Nov 23, 2021 12:47 pm

El Pollo Diablo wrote:
Tue Nov 23, 2021 9:18 am
People appear to be confusing the existence of multiple strategic benefits with a failure to focus on one for that entire time.
Just an aside, not intended to derail the thread but that seems to me to be a general problem with humans. It strikes me that giving multiple reasons for something (even if they're all true) is less persuasive than one big singular reason. Perhaps the issue isn't that the focus has changed, perhaps it's that people in general have badly wired brains.
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Re: HS2

Post by plodder » Tue Nov 23, 2021 12:54 pm

nezumi wrote:
Tue Nov 23, 2021 12:47 pm
El Pollo Diablo wrote:
Tue Nov 23, 2021 9:18 am
People appear to be confusing the existence of multiple strategic benefits with a failure to focus on one for that entire time.
Just an aside, not intended to derail the thread but that seems to me to be a general problem with humans. It strikes me that giving multiple reasons for something (even if they're all true) is less persuasive than one big singular reason. Perhaps the issue isn't that the focus has changed, perhaps it's that people in general have badly wired brains.
In the case of something like HS2, decision makers want a clear "strategy". Not a clear "strategies". Of course, the preferred priority strategy changes over time. So words get written and re-written and spreadsheets get shuffled around and non-expert decision makers (who can't help but get involved - otherwise why would they be needed??) get in a muddle.

Back in the good old days extremely driven people would just push through glorious overly ambitious vanity projects. I wonder sometimes if that was so bad.

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Re: HS2

Post by Woodchopper » Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:03 pm

plodder wrote:
Tue Nov 23, 2021 12:54 pm
Back in the good old days extremely driven people would just push through glorious overly ambitious vanity projects. I wonder sometimes if that was so bad.
The problem with HS2 in that respect is that its taken so long. Vanity projects need to be built during the vain leader's term in office, else they do all the work and their successor gets all the glory. But HS2 has outlasted three Prime Ministers already, and likely several more.

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Re: HS2

Post by plodder » Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:06 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:03 pm
plodder wrote:
Tue Nov 23, 2021 12:54 pm
Back in the good old days extremely driven people would just push through glorious overly ambitious vanity projects. I wonder sometimes if that was so bad.
The problem with HS2 in that respect is that its taken so long. Vanity projects need to be built during the vain leader's term in office, else they do all the work and their successor gets all the glory. But HS2 has outlasted three Prime Ministers already, and likely several more.
Yes, but isn't that because we're so leery of vanity projects? So people kept shouting "slow down, we need to check all this"?

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Re: HS2

Post by plebian » Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:15 pm

plodder wrote:
Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:06 pm
Woodchopper wrote:
Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:03 pm
plodder wrote:
Tue Nov 23, 2021 12:54 pm
Back in the good old days extremely driven people would just push through glorious overly ambitious vanity projects. I wonder sometimes if that was so bad.
The problem with HS2 in that respect is that its taken so long. Vanity projects need to be built during the vain leader's term in office, else they do all the work and their successor gets all the glory. But HS2 has outlasted three Prime Ministers already, and likely several more.
Yes, but isn't that because we're so leery of vanity projects? So people kept shouting "slow down, we need to check all this"?
If anything, not leery enough, see le pont du jardin

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Re: HS2

Post by plodder » Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:23 pm

But (dons tin hat) that would have been cool, at least in principle. What's wrong with a garden bridge? We're a wealthy nation, why not splash out on something fun?

Lots of early railway projects (including the precursor to the tube) were projects that would have been in the same mire as HS2 if they were delivered nowadays. I can imagine someone humming and hah-ing over Bazelgette's sewers asking for an improved economic appraisal and risk assessment of the impact of cholera and asking if there was sufficient strategic need in this regard, given that outbreaks only happened every few years.

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Re: HS2

Post by El Pollo Diablo » Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:34 pm

The construction of the Midland Mainline involved clearing the Somers Town slum without any form of compensation given to those turfed out. Lots of bullshittery went on back then.
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Re: HS2

Post by plodder » Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:47 pm

El Pollo Diablo wrote:
Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:34 pm
The construction of the Midland Mainline involved clearing the Somers Town slum without any form of compensation given to those turfed out. Lots of bullshittery went on back then.
I'm not advocating the worst excesses, just a relaxation of the "governance" that is stifling UK infrastructure at a time when we urgently need transformational mega projects. It could be far lighter touch without opening the floodgates to that kind of behaviour.

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Re: HS2

Post by El Pollo Diablo » Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:58 pm

Oh yes, of course, I was just throwing in an airy anecdote without much connection to context.
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Re: HS2

Post by plodder » Tue Nov 23, 2021 2:01 pm

I mean, the wider context (maybe the widest context) is that it's very easy to find fault in something, but it's far harder to suggest a positive improvement.

So asking for permission almost always comes back with a "make a couple of tweaks here and there, answer these questions and come back to us". Which in the case of big infrastructure projects happens over and over and over again, costs millions and takes years. And adds f.ck all value after the first couple of iterations.

eta but of course saying "yes" or "no" takes balls. And we're talking about a committee here.

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Re: HS2

Post by IvanV » Tue Nov 23, 2021 2:18 pm

nekomatic wrote:
Mon Nov 22, 2021 11:35 pm
I don’t disagree with Ivan lightly because he clearly knows a lot and has thought a fair bit about this but I can see three assertions above that I don’t see evidence for:

1) that building a non-high speed High Speed 2 would have been significantly cheaper,
2) that whatever the government of the day, or whoever, say about it bears a close relation to what is driving the actual planning processes, and
3) that the actual outcome would be significantly different under each changing scenario if 2) were the case.

This evidence may exist but I haven’t seen it, whereas I have seen the contrary asserted by people who also clearly know a lot and have thought a fair bit about it.
International unit costs of building railways suggest that conventional railways are a lot cheaper to build than high speed railways. That slab track, the signalling systems suitable for high speed operation, is all very expensive.

The stupid position we have got ourselves into in this country is that we have made building a railway line so very expensive that probably the slab track and special signalling is no longer a very large part of the cost. Nor the land. It's all the buggering about and numerous poor value niceties that costs so much. Which is why TfL managed to spend about £55m (excluding the train) on 3 miles of 55mph railway without even starting. And cost it at over £300m to finish, even though all but 500yds was on an existing formation. That is high speed rail cost to build a simple conventional railway.

So I can believe that, in this mad country, just building 500km of 225km/h conventional railway wouldn't cost so very much different than building 500km/h of 320 km/h railway (or whatever the actual number is, or the higher speed that HS2 has passive provision for).

Network Rail has already identified that at current railway construction delivery costs we cannot afford to keep our existing railway going, as renewal is too expensive. It has a project to reduce signalling renewals to 45% of their current cost, which it believes is the kind of cost necessary for the railway to be sustainable. And that's just the signalling.

So it ought to save a lot of money to have a conventional railway. And basically our railway is stuffed unless we relearn how to do it at a sensible cost.

Meanwhile, let me repeat my key point, there is basically nothing much wrong with HS2 except what it costs. The massive problem that vastly excessive cost creates comes from the fact that money for railway investment is in far from unlimited supply. Spending so much on HS2 removes from the rest of the railway huge sums of money that are both necessary for long-term stewardship of that railway, and also could have been much more effectively used. Our railway is going to fall apart through being starved of renewal investments. And there are many much better alternative new/upgrade railway investments to make, in terms of the value per £bn you get out of it.

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Re: HS2

Post by wilsontown » Tue Nov 23, 2021 2:22 pm

The IRP almost completely ignores capacity, and so in ten years' time when the sh.t trains between Birmingham and Leeds continue to be full, governments will stand in awe and scratch their beards and wonder what could possibly be the reason for this.
Assuming that usage continues to increase, those trains are going to be at unsustainable levels of overcrowding in ten years unless something happens capacity-wise. TPE had the same issue - trains that were far too short and were wedged all day everday - but they have now done something about it. The pandemic might have helped, but I read somewhere that Leeds station is now above pre-pandemic passenger numbers.
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Re: HS2

Post by tom p » Tue Nov 23, 2021 2:24 pm

plodder wrote:
Mon Nov 22, 2021 5:41 pm
IvanV wrote:
Mon Nov 22, 2021 4:55 pm
plodder wrote:
Mon Nov 22, 2021 4:48 pm
The problem I've had with Treasury business cases is that the people reviewing it bring their own preconceptions to the table. What the project is for doesn't tend to change much - it's a railway, it's a flood defense, whatever.
"It's a railway" is not "what it's for" in this sense.

Is it for taking people fast from London to Manchester, which just happens to help with commuter rail capacity? Or is it for commuter rail capacity, which just happens to help get people faster from London to Manchester? You design these projects quite differently.
Often, no. It’s a widget, all the client people and technical experts agree exactly what kind of widget will be best, they consider budgets, stakeholders, risk etc. They then shoehorn this into whatever flavour of the month business case it needs to go through. An arms length panel will then ask the bog standard awkward questions to justify their position, and eventually after a couple of iterations and several months delay (during which period the team has dispersed) the funding is approved.

I have never once, in almost 20 years of doing this stuff, seen a project designed around the business case. That way madness lies.
Have you been spying on my organisation's internal project approval process?

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