quantinghome
Established Member
- Joined
- 1 Jun 2013
- Messages
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Cost per km is a terrible metric to use on HS2 as it doesn't consider the capacity provided. Cost per seat.km (with the net increase used for upgrades) would appear to me to be a much better measure of a project's worth. Comparing HS2 with the transpennine route upgrade this way gives us the following:
HS2 - 225km, 10 x 1100 seats per hour: 2.5 million
TRU - 110km, 8 x 500 seats per hour vs current 6 x 300 seats per hour: 240 thousand
HS2's cost is now around ten times that of TRU, so cost per seat.km is about the same for both.
This has some drawbacks - it doesn't include the benefits of high speed for example. And it doesn't excuse the extremely poor decision making by HS2 ltd and the non-oversight by DfT. But at the end of the day, these errors have basically meant that the benchmarked cost of HS2 has increased to around the same as a major line upgrade.
HS2 - 225km, 10 x 1100 seats per hour: 2.5 million
TRU - 110km, 8 x 500 seats per hour vs current 6 x 300 seats per hour: 240 thousand
HS2's cost is now around ten times that of TRU, so cost per seat.km is about the same for both.
This has some drawbacks - it doesn't include the benefits of high speed for example. And it doesn't excuse the extremely poor decision making by HS2 ltd and the non-oversight by DfT. But at the end of the day, these errors have basically meant that the benchmarked cost of HS2 has increased to around the same as a major line upgrade.