High-speed rail: tracks through the haze

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/28/high-speed-rail-future-transport

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No one knows where exactly the new high-speed train is headed. That is not for any want of detail in the route maps unveiled by the transport secretary, Patrick McLoughlin, but rather because the new trains to the north will arrive into the Britain of the 2030s, a country as remote from our own as that forgotten land where rail's decay appeared inexorable.

In the 1980s, the challenge of the railways appeared to be the challenge of Dr Beeching – managing decline. But then came an unforeseen twist around the tracks, and passenger numbers steadily doubled. When the great slump caused purchases of everything else to fall away, ticket sales held up. The cry to move freight off the roads and on to rail once seemed hopelessly nostalgic but now big businesses such as Tesco are starting to act upon it. All this is good news. It makes more remote the noisy, congested and fumy future that lies down the road of too many cars. Strong demand for train travel also bodes well for Mr McLoughlin's London-Birmingham-Manchester/Leeds expressway. For, as he explains, the name of the game is not just faster journeys but relieving capacity in the rest of the system, which should allow for all sorts of other improvements. The niggling caveat, however, is the proliferation of known unknowns.

The reasons for Britain's unanticipated rail renaissance remain barely understood. On the sunniest scenario, the advent of laptops has simply made trains a more attractive way to get about, by breathing productive life back into once-dead travel time. If so, the fall in private vehicles in London recently recorded in the census could soon prefigure a wider decline from "peak car" use. But what if the next great technological wave does not require more train travel but instead enables many more of us to work from home? This is already feasible far more often than it is actually done, and as corporate culture catches up with things like Skype, fewer treks across the country may be required. If so, sinking £32bn into HS2 would soon seem a weird thing to do. Monday's announcement was about links to Leeds and Manchester, but further uncertainties attach to claims of regenerating the regions. Speedier travel to the capital should bolster provincial businesses but could also lead London-based companies to judge they no longer need regional offices, and thereby worsen the metropolitan slant of UK plc.

All these uncertainties make it tricky for HS2 to justify all the funds involved in advance. The cautious thing to do would be to muddle through with a far cheaper incremental programme of improvements – a longer platform here, an extra bit of track there. But such crippling caution ignores the way bold transport policies can redraw the map. Think of east London, where the Docklands light railway, overground and Jubilee extensions combined to spur a boom that is resetting the centre of the capital's gravity. And for all the vagueries about the dynamics between north and south, a better connected country ought to be a more efficient one. Even if HS2 can't encourage business north, it should encourage commuters in that direction, thereby reducing London rents and easing Britain's great imbalance through another means. Since the 1930s many regional policies have been tried and failed, and HS2 may not work out as intended either – but it will at least bequeath something valuable.

Legion practical questions remain. Out-of-town station locations can and should be challenged. So too should the shunting of building work into a distant future – where finance may be costlier, and fewer workers may need a job. Even Nick Clegg now airs frustration at the way in which accounting rules are hampering the public investments needed to end the depression. Above all, there is the prospective effect on the climate. The source of HS2's electricity is one pressing matter; another is whether it will link sufficiently smoothly through to the continent to replace not merely domestic flights but some European ones too. All this must be got right, but – on the principle of HS2 – the right answer is full steam ahead.