My view is that Covid will end up delaying CR2 by 20 years.
Whilst it may take extra time to get to the point where train loadings are going to be as busy as they would have been at the opening of Crossrail 2, there's another potential outcome from Covid-19.
That being that people just won't tolerate being so crammed in as they once were.
Of that's the case then it could well be that there's pressure to fix train capacity for services into the London terminals.
For instance if there's a 50% fall in rail use into Waterloo, where often trains were 120% of capacity they'll then be 60% of capacity, however within 15 years that could be 70% of capacity assuming 1% growth. That's starting to get very busy, in terms of seated capacity.
Given that many services into Waterloo are 3+2 seating, which is likely to be even less liked for sitting 3 next to each other, especially during flu season, then it could be possible that extra capacity could be demanded much sooner than otherwise would have been the case.
However change any of those assumptions even a little and capacity limits could be hit much sooner, for instance annual growth of 1.5% (rather than 1%) and a starting point of passenger loadings of 128% (rather than 120%) and after 15 years you're at 80% (rather than 70%). Likewise a fall of 42% would leave us at 70% before considering an future growth.
As I've highlighted before to get a 50% fall in rail use would require a lot of WFH from a lot of people.
Even assuming that 100% of peak hour travel is work related commuting you'd need 75% of jobs being able to be done from home and 66.67% of all work days to do so.
The problem is that chances are (given that a lot would WFH between 1 & 3 days a week or between 1 & 3 weeks out of a month) the average number of working days would be much smaller than 66.67%.
Other factors which would impact on those figures would be those opting to work in the office as they would much rather do so (for reasons such as poor home working setup, living alone, needing to give or provide support between team members) or because they aren't aloud to WFH (lost productivity, need to provide oversight of others, etc).
Even a fall of 25% would require 63% of jobs WFH an average of 40% of the time (again assuming 100% work based commuting), which may be on the lower side for heading into places like Waterloo (although probably still fairly likely), however that would only mean a drop from 120% loadings to 90% loadings.
If in (say) 2025 Waterloo is seeing average peak hour passenger loadings of between 70% and 90% then I wouldn't rule out a sub 10 year delay. Especially if off peak passenger numbers are little changed.
Especially given that WFH could actually make such travel more likely as people WFH for an hour, deal with emails/report writing on their way into the office on an off peak service, do half a day in the office, before catching an off peak service back home (dealing with more emails, more report writing, other way to do with low internet speeds) to the finish off their working day at home (actually sending some of the emails, dealing with things that have cropped up whilst traveling, last few calls, etc.)
It's why I suspect that it's been paused rather than cancelled, as it could well be that it's back on the table rather rapidly (although still delayed from when it was due to open) of the falls in rail use aren't as significant as suggested.
That's before you consider any possible shift from road to rail due to cars being used less but many of the costs remaining unchanged or only reduced slightly. As VED, MOT, servicing for most people (i.e. those who don't do over 15,000 miles a year or whatever the service intervals are), insurance (again unless you're doing significant miles) and the like would remain unchanged. Whilst purchase cost, parking charges (unless paying to park at work) and the like would see falls, but not directly linked to the number of miles traveled. Combined this would increase the cost per mile of travel, and whilst this would be a saving compared to before Covid-19, could lead to people being more likely to have fewer cars and using rail for more occasional travel and/or for getting to work the days where their other half is using the car to get to work.
Whilst such shifts might be small compared to overall road use it could have a significant impact on rail use. As a 0.625% shift from road to rail would provide a 5% uplift (pre Covid-19 levels) in rail use. Therefore on trains which were 120% full could add 6% to the post Covid-19 passenger numbers, making it less likely that we'd see falls much above 25% in rail use between 2019 and (say) 2025.
