There has been for a while tremendous rumblings about a high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham. Paul Marks of this parish has voiced many concerns over the destruction of forcing this 100%-reflective-across-all-wavelengths-of-the-electromagnetic-spectrum pachyderm through the countryside and people’s lives. That is Paul’s take. This is mine…
It is slated to cost £30 billion. I have a theory that most people are OK with millions - millions are in their intuitive calculational comfort zone - so let’s see what I can do with that stupendous sum armed with my trust Casio, a post-it note and Google…
The existing railway between London (Euston) and Birmingham (Newstreet) is delightfully recorded as 115 miles and 6 chains long or near enough 185km. As an aside it is worth pointing out this is the West Coast Line which continues on via Manchester to Glasgow and has had countless billions hurled at it to no appreciable result apart from making my life misery on the commuter section in South Manchester and enabling seas of tea to be drunk by contractors reading The Sun and wanking over “News in Briefs” on page three. Yes, Dickie Branson promised us high-speed tilting trains! They don’t tilt.
A quick Google reveals Bristol Street Motors are offering a 5-door Ford Focus 1.6i hatchback for a shade under £13,000. So, for the cost of the line 2,300,000 such cars could be put on the road. At an educated guess that is not dissimilar to the total number of cars of all makes and models sold in a year in this country. I could be wrong on that. More to the point the 2001 census gives the population of the entire Birmingham conurbation as 2,284,093 so that is a bright shiny new motor for every man, woman, child, and babe-in-arms in the Greater Birmingham area.
A Ford Focus hatchback is 4.2m long (near as damn it) so that is 966km of cars or, in the case of this railway, Ford Focuses parked nose-to-tail all along the route 5.2 cars high. Or a single line of cars of the same length costing about 67 grand a piece. The standard model Porsche 911 is listed by the official Porsche web-site as costing £67,270. Now the 911 is a bit more expensive than 5.2 Focuses (Foci ?) but it’s also about 20cms longer so let us not quibble the details eh?
London to Birmingham at £260 million pounds a mile is the same as paving the entire route with Porsches. Makes a person think doesn’t it? Well, it makes me think. They just call it “investment”.
I believe this (HS2) is, yet again, the EUs doing. There is a consultation document, which I have completed on line. I suggest as many people as possible respond and tell our socalled government to sod off, and emphasise the reasons as the EU interference in our country and that HS2 will never make money, let alone pay back the exorbitant capital cost. This isn’t investment, this is socialism.
Hands up, who wants to get from London to Birmingham, or vice versa, really really fuckin quickly?
No, thought not, so what problem are they trying to address here?
I googled it up and it takes Vigin’s fastest train currently 72 minutes to get there, the slowest service comes in at 126 mins. And depending on the byzantine rules and regulations of when you travel and what time you travel you are looking on average of £240 for a return ticket. That is a fuckin eyewatering amount of money!
By contrast, the coach journey comes in between two and a half and three hours, for £12.50 return. Doh! which would you choose?
So I repeat, what is the fuckin point here? Is cutting the journey time down to half an hour even, going to add the 30 billion this white elephant is calculated to cost (um, probably double that, knowing how clever govts are with sums and cost over-runs) to the British economy? In a fuckin pig’s eye it won’t!
Insanity, pure insanity!
We are governed by snake-oil salesmen, flim-flam merchants and bunco artists. (In fact, now I come to think of it, this springs to mind.)
We need to do more of this sort of breaking down of government spending figures. People don’t realise the waste; not in the sense that they’re unaware of all the pointless non-jobs and generous pensions - because generally they aren’t; unless they’re in the “public” sector themselves, in which case they don’t know they’re well-off - but simply in the way governments spend insane amounts of taxpayers’ cash that could be better, more economically, spent elsewhere.
I reckon most folk are now immunised against waste. The people I talk to take it for granted that everything ‘government’ will cost many times its original estimate and all seem to be of the mind there is nothing they can do.
If I mention starving the beast in any way shape or form even simply stopping their TVL payments they shit themselves. The more I read blogs like this and the more I talk to people who will not take responsibility for themselves and their actions the more I narrow down my options for what remains of my life.
I can run to another part of the world and leave the shit behind.
I can seek to disappear in plain sight (http://www.frankahearn.com/disappeararticle.html)
Or I can accept the fact that at some time in what remains of my life I will likely witness an armed rebellion upon these British Isles.
Nick, you’re gonna have to break out the Casio again because we all know that it’s going to cost a lot more than 30 billion.
So, what do you think about upping the ante from a Ford Focus to something like a Freelander? I’d prefer a diesel engine…
Yes he will won’t he Lynne. We have been here before, with the Channel Tunnel. Development costs came in 80% over estimate. It has never made a goddam penny, and all the predictions for its use were wildy overestimated. Freight traffic has fallen like a brick.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel
But our Masters never learn, do they? Well it’s not their money is it?!!
I saw a headline estimating 30 billion as the cost to insurers of the earthquake.
So who pays 240 quid to go to Brum, then? Are they all government employees? Does that mean railways are Britain’s equivalent to the Zil lane?
And don’t forget your “carbon footprint”.
What is the most fuel efficient way to get from A to B ? Four people in a little Toyota Yaris or four people in an, otherwise empty, eighty seat carriage powered by a diesel locomotive the size of a house. Hard one ain’t it ?
260 million per mile
thats 1700 pounds per centimetre
Greenies often protest about ‘obsession with economic growth’. I think most of us on this website agree that putting economic growth before property rights is immoral, regardless of the size of the economic benefits. Some common ground could maybe be found between the environmentalist movement and the libertarian movement. We both believe in the organic growth of economies and societies. If only they would see that the high speed rail projects of this world are just another manifestation of non-organic government meddling in the economy, exactly like windfarms.
Sometimes sympathy for hard headed left wing commentators (I forgot the website that was mentioned either here or on ‘the other website’) who have doubts about wishy washy environmentalism and favour nuclear power and industry. While we might appreciate their views on global warming and religion, I think the similarities there stop, and that actually we are rather nicer people.
I dunno about now, but way back the coach journey London to Brum did a piss-stop at a little place that had the best bread pudding I’ve ever come across. All nice and burnt on the outside. Real sultanas.
“We both believe in the organic growth of economies and societies.”
I beg to differ. I see nothing even vaguely libertarian in Greenism. Indeed if we take (I think this is difficult to argue against) libertarianism as being essentially a philosophy of the individual then Green which stresses “Global Issues” above everything else is in principle antithetical.
alongwayfrom kansas,
Or 170 quid a millimetre. That really does put it into persepective.
Also,
“I think most of us on this website agree that putting economic growth before property rights is immoral”
I think I for one regard property rights as not an either/or with economic growth but an absolute requirement for it.
Nick, I think you missed my point.
As you say most greenists are of the watermelon kind.
However, there is common ground. There are infrastructure projects that do add value, in terms of improvements in long term GDP. Motorways in particular have been proven strong generators of economic growth in many studies. Rail by contrast has been a total failure in this respect. While the rational socialist might then conclude that motorways are a good thing and we should build more of them, maximising the utility of society and whatnot, as libertarians we don’t care about this. Neither do environmentalists; for their own reasons. Our belief in the sanctity of property rights means that change in society is usually gradual and ‘organic’. These big rail and road projects would be impossible in a libertarian society.
I think the watermelon analogy is apt, for in fact there is not that much that is green about the global warming alarmists. But if we do find ourselves in discussion with environmentalists, I think we would do the ‘movement’ (ha!) a service to make these points to them. If they disagree then we should expose their true colour.
And on the economic growth point, a general adherence to property rights is necessary for economic growth, but there could potentially be projects such as roads, the building of which requires trampling on property rights, that nevertheless add value on the net. Not a philosophical point.
The Taxpayer’s Alliance are fighting hard against this madness - but the “consultation” is in bad faith.
A very good post Nick.
On roads - the canal network was built without massive COMPULSORY sales.
So why not roads?
Paul,
It was also built very cheaply (relatively speaking) and with a business model that would actually provide a return on investment by and large.
PeterT,
The C19th railways were not socialist mega-projects. They were large-scale though. The two are not part and parcel of the same thing.
Talking of property rights (and lurching off topic)…
Here in Ecuador the govt are fond of referring to independent TV broadcasters as “concesionarios de las frecuencias del Estado”, i.e. “holders of a licence to use the State’s frequencies”. The idea is that while all the actual broadcasting equipment, transmitters and so forth may belong to the company, the frequencies they transmit on belong to the State (they have to, else people would fight over them and jam each other all the time), which benevolent entity can give people permission to broadcast on them, or not, at a whim. I was wondering if this was actually normal, something that is actually recognised elsewhere as a State prerogative. It strikes me as faintly bizarre that a frequency could have an owner. A bit like me saying that the number 28,236.309 is mine, because no one else has ever laid claim to it before, and finders keepers and all that. So if you ever want to use that number you will have to get my permission from now on. I dunno, I don’t think I could get away with that.
Endivio,
Yes it is. Before 3G phones were introduced in the UK the government raised a fortune by auctioning off the frequencies. This is one of the major drivers behind the analog/digital TV switch. More frequencies to sell! The deranged fuckers are even mooching around the idea of selling off analog radio frequencies and forcing everyone to have a digital radio which I find obscene on a number of levels.
I think numbers cannot have IP rights exercised over them but equations can. Most famously the RSA encryption algorithm. Genes have also been patented.
Anyway, Firefly got it wrong. They not only can take the skies away from you but have and sold it to T-Mobile and Vodaphone.
So the UK govt sold the frequencies (thus relinquishing all property claims), leased them, or just licensed their use? There’s a big difference.
The problem with neofascistic regimes such as the one we have here is that the govt will frequently want to stop someone broadcasting something they don’t like, and being able to say “well, we own the frequencies” is thus highly convenient. One is tempted to counter with “no one owns those frequencies, any more than anyone owns ‘once a week’ ” but I begin to think that’s untenable, if we are talking about a scarce resource. Elsewhere (USA?) I read some courts have upheld property rights over frequencies on the basis of finders keepers and established use. I dunno, the whole question bugs me.
I think (could be wrong) they were leased for 3G services (with no real restrictions) for (I assume) a fixed time period.
Any finite resource has to have an organisation to record users, The Land Registry and ICANN are two obvious examples. In general, the state doesn’t control abuse by invoking ownership, but through a licensing mechanism. If a broadcaster in the US transmits something objectionable, it’s their FCC license that’s at stake, not their bandwidth.