I'm sorry but I just don't see the Scotland connection in all this. Surely that is a historical political thing just as the 'Irish Mail' to Holyhead was. Scotland will have assumed full independence long before this project is finished (or even started I suspect) so who pays for the very long and environmetally damaging Manchester to English Border stretch? As the Scots direct their focus more towards Europe than London surely air travel will be more relevant to them than a high speed connection to London. Westminster politicians are locked into a UK view of things instead of an English-centric one.
Or am I missing something?
Well its not just connections to London, its connections to potentially the rest of the mainland UK. Even if Scotland gains independence, this will still be important.
Actually there were murmurs that the line might not go to Scotland, and it was Scottish politicians that objected to that and wanted it to go all the way.
Environmentally damaging need to be put into context. All human development, from agriculture to water supply, to building cities, to making things, has an environmental impact quite obviously. If we are looking at transport capacity what would you prefer, bearing in mind were not just taking about reducing the need to fly internally? Rationing travel by congestion charging or higher rail fares?
The classic routes can be freed up for commuters and freight, which obviously has an environmental effect. But leaving that aside the current capacity being looked at is 18,000 people per hour per direction. Each lane of a motorway takes approx 1800 cars per hour max, with average loads of 1.5 people each lane moves 2700 people. Yes I know there are buses and trucks making up some of that, but we're looking at overall typical real life passenger loads, and the figure of 2700 is pretty typical. That's actually half the current WCML pendolino load for the fast lines to put it into context. If you wanted to shift 18000 people, we're looking a new 14 lane motorway (taking into account both directions). Spilling this amount of traffic onto outer urban roads, and city centres where there is no space to build more, has serious ramifications for congestion for local journeys too. Roads are still reliant on a finite oil supply, and we are increasingly relying on foreign supplies, often from difficult areas of the world.
Air travel is an option, but its only really relevant on the Scottish stretch. Nevertheless Heathrow airport takes up about the same land space as a new HSL. Flying, even taking into account the carbon cost of building the new line (for which you add aprox 10% to the rail CO2 per pass km with HS1 according the people that have looked into this) is still significantly more polluting, especially taking into account radiative forcing. And of course is even more reliant on petroleum than roads. Airports also tend to screw up road networks around where they are built and you need transfers to get people into city centres.
This is not to say new airports and roads are irrelevant, but rail is ideally suited to this sort of application and should be seriously looked at. People need to look at transport as a whole and stop polarising the debate and acknowledge everything has its part to play.
