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carl mortished

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It was the sight of the first Eurostar gliding into London's Waterloo station in 1994 that started the political row about fast trains. The gleaming, bullet-nosed Alstom locomotive was as sexy a piece of Gallic engineering as ever sashayed down a Paris catwalk, and a world away from the frumpy toy train legacy of British Rail rolling stock. Since then, a political consensus has demanded more infrastructure. Billions were set aside for gleaming steel roads from London to the North, but suddenly and unexpectedly, high-speed rail seems like yesterday's fashion.

People are asking whether very fast is truly worth it and what might we otherwise do with the time saved and the money spent. A skeptical report from Britain's National Audit Office into HS2, a £40-billion ($64.4-billion) project to build a 320 km/h rail link from London to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, has posed an embarrassing question. Is it worth spending up to £17-billion (the cost of the London to Birmingham leg) to knock 23 minutes off the best available current rail journey time of 1 hour and 12 minutes? The behaviour of business people is key to this project, because the cost-benefit analysis assumes that more businesses will invest in the North if it is quicker to get there. It is also assumed that more business generally will be done if less time is spent travelling.

These assumptions are challenged by the NAO which notes that its own research found that business people worked on trains. Everyone uses laptops and cellphones and with wireless broadband they use them everywhere. It is just as naive to assume that the CEO is being more productive in the office than while travelling as vice versa.

Up until now, HS2 was opposed mainly by unfortunate suburbanites living in the proposed path of its route. But the NAO report and the latest Treasury spending plans (which outlined more cuts) have provoked more skepticism. Doubters include a former Labour cabinet member, Lord Mandelson, who says he has changed his mind about HS2 and, more importantly, admits that Labour's original decision to launch the project was based on economic analysis that was "neither quantified nor proved."

It's almost impossible to get this analysis right. The original traffic estimates for the Channel Tunnel were massively overegged and, even with the building of HS1, the new high-speed rail link that sends the Eurostar trains speeding into the beautifully restored St Pancras station in London, the tunnel still runs 40 per cent below capacity. Yet, today, it seems almost unimaginable that travellers between London and Paris once had to endure the ritual humiliations of Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle airports and the cramped seating of short-haul aircraft. Whatever the economic benefits of the tunnel, travellers are paying large fare premiums to travel on Eurostar because it is a less painful and stressful journey than the plane.

It's not the speed that matters or the minutes saved. What will persuade Californians to back high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco and what will support the case for a Toronto-New York-Montreal high-speed network is the absence (or not) of tedious queues, of intrusive security checks, of crowded lounges, bad coffee and cramped seating. For many people, three hours of rail is easier to bear than just one hour in the air and that is what should guide public investment in infrastructure: never mind speed, just make journeys more pleasant.

Carl Mortished is a contributor to ROB Insight, the business commentary service available to Globe Unlimited subscribers. Click here for more of his Insights .

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