The government’s policies to increase rail capacity are looking increasingly foolish when Covid-19 is already leading to long-term changes in travel habits.

Office workers may choose to waste less time commuting and work a day or two each week from home. Business people will increasingly use video conferencing software rather than wasting the whole day travelling down to London for a routine meeting.

At the same time, the government’s finances are likely to be strained over the next few years. Rather than wasting roughly £100 billion on High Speed 2, policymakers should consider more cost effective ways of addressing rail capacity issues. This would be a far less reckless approach to spending taxpayers’ money than a horrendously risky megaproject that is already massively overbudget.

Here is a list of alternative measures. A big advantage is that unlike HS2, they can be implemented incrementally, specific to locations where they are practical and cost-effective, offering far more flexibility in the context of huge uncertainty over future passenger numbers.    

• Introduce more flexible pricing to flatten the peak. Passengers would have greater financial incentives to travel during the “shoulders” of the peak, or indeed off-peak, thereby making more efficient use of existing infrastructure and rolling stock.
• Phase out government subsidies and price controls so that fare levels better reflect industry costs.
• Convert first class carriages into standard class carriages to accommodate more passengers.
• Introduce high-capacity “economy class” coaches with more standing room instead of seating, offering lower fare options. (This is only likely to be a practical option post-Covid).
• Lengthen trains by adding more carriages and extending platforms. Double-length trains could even be used on busier sections and then split part-way through the journey.
• Deploy improved signalling technology to reduce the necessary gap between trains.
• Consider using double-decker trains where the engineering costs would not be prohibitive.
• Address bottlenecks by re-engineering junctions: relatively expensive but still much cheaper than building brand-new infrastructure.
• Divert freight onto quieter routes, enhancing loading gauges where necessary. For example, intermodal traffic from Felixstowe to the Midlands and North can be sent via the Ipswich-Nuneaton route rather than the southern West Coast Main Line.
• Allow full vertical integration to end the artificial separation between track and train, and between different franchisees and open-access operators. This should improve the financial incentives to make more efficient use of spare capacity.
• Finally, in some locations there may be a strong economic case for lifting the railway tracks and converting the route into a busway or road, the former typically providing higher capacity at much lower cost than rail transport.

Richard Wellings

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