At the end of February, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee issued the latest damning report on what it referred to as the HS2 delivery “mess”. It went on: “We are sceptical of government’s ability to successfully deliver even a curtailed scheme, one which we already know will…bring very poor value for money”. More recently, there have been rumours that a likely opening date is the end of the 2030s (possibly stretched out to free resources within existing public expenditure constraints for northern rail schemes). We are where we are of course but surely the question arising now, given the state of the economy and the emphasis placed on economic growth, is what form of future expenditure will bring the better return? What are the incremental costs and benefits of developing the existing right-of-way either as originally intended, for high speed rail, or as I have previously suggested as a motorway? The ‘fundamental reset’ of the project currently being undertaken provides an opportunity to examine such questions.
The HS2 design is not like a normal twin-line railway; anyone who has viewed the earth works will know the overall formation is of substantial width. The intended rail lines are set wider apart than normal on account of very high running speeds (fast enough to cause sonic shock waves as trains emerge from tunnels) and the resulting safety issues of trains passing too closely at very high speed. Running alongside these wider-spaced than normal tracks (and stanchions for electricity supply) are paths and roads to enable access for line maintenance and emergency vehicles. Overall formation width has been a disputed point between HS2 Ltd and protagonists and is difficult to pin down, partly because it depends, amongst other factors, on geology and topography at specific locations. Tunnels might appear pinch-points but in actual fact each track is in a separate bore of 9m diameter, and these twin tunnels are connected to each other at intervals for safety reasons.
So, what might be feasible by way of a road within the current HS2 formation, bearing in mind that the HS2 route is gradient free and very straight? Road design standards have tended to increase carriageway widths in recent years, but a standard two lane motorway (four lanes in total like the M26 and M50) with hard shoulders should be possible, albeit at a squeeze. An alternative design could have slightly narrower lanes than standard, restricted to light vehicles only (basically cars and light vans). This specification has its own appeal: there are indications that M6Toll, (where until recently cars dominate the traffic flow because early HGV operators were reluctant to pay tolls), is attractive to car drivers because of more relaxed driving conditions absent frequent heavy vehicles. It is probable also that it would reduce costs of construction because of cheaper foundations for running surfaces.
A comparative economic analysis of mutually exclusive uses of the HS2 right-of-way from this point onwards should focus on the incremental public sector costs and benefits, resources expended thus far on earth works, overbridges etc, are sunk. Incremental rail costs yet to be incurred include track formation (rail and track bed), electrification including steel stanchions at roughly 50m spacing, power supply apparatus (of which there is much), connections to the existing rail network, signalling systems, and station costs yet to be incurred. An important issue here is whether the net public sector costs of the yet-to-be-built London extension from Old Oak Common to Euston (and redevelopment of the latter station) should be included in the calculations (net costs because of the likelihood of private sector developer contributions). This in turn depends on whether the counterpart benefits of HS2 are calculated with or without that London extension.
For conversion of the right-of-way to highway, a relatively expensive and complex element would be constructing junctions connecting the proposed (light vehicle) motorway with the existing road network, the total cost of which would depend upon precisely where the highway route was terminated (points where HS2 crosses M25 in the south and runs close to M6/M42 in the north, suggest themselves) and how many intermediate interchange connections are made with existing roads (possibly the A43 and A47 at a minimum). Apart from that complex trade-off between forecasted traffic flow, junction frequency and construction cost, building carriageways, hard-shoulders and intermediate barrier, signage and communications, should be reasonably straight forward and no more difficult than laying track bed, rails, power supplies and signalling.
The benefits of each of the ‘either-or schemes’ depends in large part on respective potential demands for the final product. Inevitably, the economy has changed since the original forecasts for HS2 were made. Rail travel growth has shown signs of wilting during the last decade. Overall, demand has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels, which in turn had plateaued. Travel purpose has also changed, with less commuting/business and relatively more of the lower revenue yielding leisure travel. The comparable picture for road traffic is not dissimilar, growth particularly of heavy goods traffic lags, although overall motorway traffic has returned to pre-pandemic levels. For the M1 and M40 corridor this means substantial volumes, an average daily flow approaching quarter of a million vehicles per day moving north and south.
Demand for a specific facility depends amongst other matters on the level and structure of price(s) charged (a consideration far from evident in most infrastructure appraisals). The tradition in the UK is for roads generally to be free at the point-of-use (rather analogous to the NHS), M6 Toll being the chief exception. This raises the possibility of adopting the latter approach for the current proposal. Tolling brings potential advantages: principally the ability, by varying toll levels, to manage demand (bearing in mind both the large volumes of traffic on the M1 and M40 that parallel and envelope HS2’s route, and the modest addition to highway capacity that a two-laned motorway would introduce in the London-Midlands corridor); but also, the opportunity to introduce private finance.
It is certain that the fundamental reset of HS2 that is currently in train, will not consider these broader options. Indeed, a glaring weakness of the British administrative system is that although we now have an agency, the National Infrastructure and Services Authority to promote project delivery, most infrastructure projects emerge from sponsoring departments of state that naturally become advocates for them. This engenders a silo mentality, and a lack of creative challenge to problem solving. Although somewhat ironically the Department for Transport encompasses both road and rail in its divisional structure, it set up a separate enterprise at a very early stage, High Speed 2 (HS2) Ltd, a non-departmental public body, wholly funded by the Secretary of State for Transport and sponsored by the Department of Transport, as a promotion and delivery vehicle for the rail scheme.
What is missing in the administrative set-up is a body free and unencumbered by departmental responsibilities to consider and develop creative solutions addressing economic issues. For example, the shift to renewable energy has posed the problem of getting ‘green’ electricity to consumers not currently co-located with the new power sources. Instinctively this suggests reconfiguring the national electricity grid, at a very considerable cost, a cost that might, however, be eased by sharing use of the route thus far intended for HS2 only. Alternative, or supplementary, uses for the linear right-of-way include creating wayleaves for power distribution, telecommunications or an opportunity to trunk water to the relatively dry south east. As matters stand, the creation of a potentially valuable right-of-way raises the question of what, from an economics perspective, is it best used for: probably not for a railway?
