Tuesday 24 August 2010

Readers' Letters Of The Day

From the FT:

... With regard to compensation, many affected residents feel that the "preferred [High Speed 2] route" has been chosen precisely because the government believes it can minimise pay-outs on the simple premise that the fewer the number of houses deemed to be affected, the less will have to be disbursed.

They contrast this extensively rural "preferred route" with the route chosen for High Speed One (formerly the Channel Tunnel Rail Link). The latter was built almost entirely along its length directly beside high-capacity transport corridors – the A2, M2 and M20 – which generate a correspondingly high level of noise.

The same criterion was not applied to the choice of route for HS2. The effects of 225 miles per hour trains almost every two minutes will be far more acute in a rural setting rather than adjacent to a busy motorway...

Marilyn Fletcher, Great Missenden, Bucks.

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Also from the FT:

Sir, John Kay's article On guard against the robber barons of the Rhine (Comment, August 18) was clever in the tactful way it raised important questions. Are the hedge funds toll collectors or value creators? One feature of the toll collectors of the Rhine was that the travellers had no choice but to use the Rhine and pay up.

Hedge funds may be the ultimate "heads I win big, tails I do OK" contract for the manager. But we don't have to use hedge funds, so we can't call them robber barons...

Martin White, Chairman, UK Shareholders' Association.

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Correct - hedge funds may well fleece their investors, but nobody is forced to invest in them, so AFAIAC, they are neither toll collectors nor robber barons.

But it's a useful analogy...

The first letter turns all logic on its head. The area between London and Birmingham is nigh uninhabited anyway, so if you just drew any old straight line, only a few hundred buildings would need to be demolished. But all things being equal, is it not better to put a few curves in so that only a few dozen need to be demolished? Isn't it reasonable of the government to try and minimise disruption - for its own sake and to minimise compensation claims?

The idea of running the line along the M40 motorway (or using the old Great Central Railway) is not entirely without merit, but again, this goes closer to existing towns and villages (which in turn have grown up around the junctions), so it would require thousands, rather than hundreds or dozens of buildings to be demolished.

So I think we can dismiss the first letter as special pleading - what the lady wants is extra 'compensation' from the people who want to travel from A to B. Using the analogy in the first letter, put yourself in the position of somebody who wants to travel from A to B - what do you call people who demand money from you along the way?

Toll collectors, robber barons or even highwaymen? I'd hardly call them 'value creators'.

5 comments:

dearieme said...

"The effects of 225 miles per hour trains almost every two minutes": really? My golly!

Mark Wadsworth said...

D, as we well know, you can't hear trains from in front or behind, you only hear them from the side.

So if the trains are quarter of a mile long and go at 225 mph, then the actual noise disturbance lasts about five seconds.

Tim Almond said...

Paraphrased: why can't all the poor people around Banbury and Bicester who already suffer road noise suffer from some train noise as well.

The only thing in favour of HS2 is how much it's going to piss off the NIMBYs in their faux bucolic idylls. Not sure that's worth the billions it's going to cost, unfortunately.

Bayard said...

Mark, "every two minutes"? Are you sure?
That's 15 trains in each direction an hour. It seems very unlikely that there will be enough people wanting to travel from Brum to London to justify such a service, given that there are already two rail routes between the two cities. The DfT seem to have some sort of fixation about re-creating the old London and Birmingham line, even to the extent of starting and finishing it at the same stations, when surely the whole point of a high speed line is to lower journey times to cities in the north (although I dare say that anywhere north of Watford is "the north" to the mandarins of the DfT).
The point about the GCR route is that it only goes past two towns between Rugby and London, Brackley and Aylesbury, both of which are skirted by HS2 as well.

JT, Noise is not cumulative. Two noises of the same loudness have the same audibility as one when occurring simultaneously.

Mark Wadsworth said...

JT, if you gross up the economic value of the entire HS2 network with connections to Edinburgh, Manchester & Leeds then you might just about arrive at a value of £30 billion or something.

B, that 15 trains an hour seems highly unlikely to me as well. I have been on the London to Birmingham train a couple of times and it seems fine to me (in time and price). It's the eastern stuff up to Leeds that is outrageously expensive.