"Looking at mainline railways, although I have criticisms of the route of HS2, a high-speed line from London to Birmingham and the North West is also a ‘no-brainer’."
I'm not sure what the opposite of a "no brainer" is but my perspective on HS2 is that it is almost certainly a waste of money. There's not really much benefit of cutting the time down from 82 to 49 minutes. Someone working at a company in Birmingham is not going to turn down a meeting because it's 82 minutes away. So, it doesn't create new opportunities. And it doesn't reduce costs. An occasional return trip of 82 minutes each way can be done comfortably in a day. No-one needs to stay over in a hotel for that. And while you can say that people have an extra 30 minutes, what are they going to do with it? Get back from London and go back into the office? No-one does that. The main benefits are that someone doesn't have to set the alarm so early, and perhaps has to warm up dinner when they get home. It's also not going to change it into a commuter journey because the end-to-end time is going to be over an hour and almost no-one wants to do over an hour, especially in the era of remote work.
Improved rail speed works when you can cut the other costs because of it. So you no longer need a hotel room for a night. Or if you can cut the time from a time where no-one wants to commute daily to a time where they do.
It's the same thing with transtlantic travel. Aircraft saved days over boats. So you didn't have to pay for a week in a cabin, and to be away from family. But supersonic flight didn't have those benefits. People didn't care much if it was 6 hours or 3.
It would probably make more sense to let the Asians get maglev good and then upgrade London to Birmingham to use that, where the journey time would be so much faster that it would be in commute range and hugely increase traffic
Capacity is the more important. The bit that is getting built, between London and Birmingham and also Handsacre Junction in Staffordshire, has the effect of adding another pair of tracks to the West Coast Mainline which is (by some measures) Europe’s busiest railway line. At the moment, it's got to carry intercity trains from London to Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Glasgow (i.e. our five biggest urban areas), plus interregional services e.g. linking London and Northampton, plus commuter services around those cities, plus freight.
The bit we're building will remove the intercity trains from the West Coast Mainline, which will create more room for commuter services around London, and around Birmingham. It's the equivalent of just adding another pair of tracks.
The other benefit is speed. I agree that the time savings just to Birmingham probably wouldn't justify the line in themselves. The real benefits will come from journeys north to Manchester and especially Glasgow. If HS2 were finished as originally planned, the journey time to each would reduce by ~an hour. If we ultimately build a high-speed line between England and Scotland then the journey time to Glasgow comes down further.
At some point I'll do a post about HS2 (i.e. the reasons why it's a good idea in principle, and my criticisms of the route).
Depends on whom you mean by “people”. The moment BA repositioned it as a super-premium offering for “people” to whom those 3 hours *were* important, it was profitable.
On 80 vs 40 minutes — one is a commute, the other is a journey. ~10% of a working day vs ~20% — each way!
But what you're missing is that people don't regain that extra time for work. They'll often do a few chats with a few people at the client, as they're there, and have the time. Not really important stuff though. They might get on the train at 3:30 and spend the 82 minutes just catching up on any emails they got while they were out, make a few calls, do a little admin. If they're doing that, they're using that 82 minutes. if you take it down to 49 minutes, they aren't going to get into Birmingham at 4:19, catch a taxi to the office, where they sit down at 4:40 and do 50 minutes of work. No-one ever does that. If someone has finished with a client and it's 2pm, they just go home and finish the day early. Or they maybe pop into the National Gallery for an hour. You can't really go back to an office and get yourself going again for the sake of an hour.
It's like the time I was delayed going to Runcorn. The train was late by an hour. So, I got into my hotel at 7:30pm instead of 6:30pm. So what? What was I going to be doing in a hotel at 6:30? Probably catching up on something, reading the news, watching TV. I could do that on the train. Didn't matter. I don't care that the coach to London takes me two hours instead of 1 for a leisure trip. I have my Kindle and phone. What would I be doing in the hour before I catch a coach otherwise?
It's very very clear that the proportion of people commuting longer than 40 minutes (compared to shorter journeys) just falls to near-zero -- meaning that while people are (clearly) OK with up to and hour and a half of their day being in transport, and will do so day in day out, once that becomes 2 hours plus, they just don't.
So, in fact, according to all available data, there is a dramatic, observable, and consistently observed difference between 40-something and 80-something.
And of course all this goes to (strongly) support the arguments in the article above about through-lines and the whys and why nots of where transport has produced desirable economic effects and where it has not.
OK, let's go over those numbers. An hour and a half in transport? That makes sense. Roughly 45 minutes home to office, 45 minutes home again. And I can add a personal anecdote that backs that up, that very few people get on the train at Swindon and go all the way to London (around 1 hour). They generally get off at Reading. And there's huge numbers of people who get on at Reading for the 25 minute journey.
Reducing total time from 82 minutes to 49 is only just over 45, so OK there would still be high demand. But the problem is that HS2 doesn't mean a 49 minute total time. It means 49 minutes from Birmingham Curzon Street Station to London Euston. You then have to add in the time for someone to get from their home to Birmingham Curzon Street Station and then to get from London Euston to their office.
Some people are going to be living next door to Curzon Street and going to an office next door to Euston, so the minutes walk at each end aren't going to matter much, but a lot of people aren't going to be doing that. They're going to need to take a car or public transport to the station and from Euston to the office. Which could be 5-10 minutes at each end. This isn't an issue with a commuter from Reading. It's a 25 minute train, so you put another 5-10 on it and it's under 45 minutes.
That's before we get into the matter of how people with long commutes would rather work remote as there is a greater cost to it. There has been far less of a hit from remote work on London Overground than GWR or South West Trains. The cost savings are much greater for longer journeys vs remote.
This is a (very) simple set of google searches away from being settled, I suspect… but let me do the work for you.
Tl;dr: Concorde was not profitable for the governments who built it, but was for both airlines who ran it, even more so for BA after it increased prices.
Concorde ended because the very visible 2000 crash scared off the exact customers who valued it for long enough to make it non-viable.
OK, so yes, £30-50m of profit for some years. For a programme that cost £2.1bn to develop. Which is a something around a 1.5% return on investment for those good years.
BA used to boast -- including several times in my direct hearing -- and continued to boast until it became crass to do so, that they'd made £500 million running Concorde.
The "alternate history" where having done the initial hard and expensive work, Concorde continued to be developed beyond, essentially, the two dozen working prototypes produced, would no doubt have brought costs down dramatically, as it has done for every other type of aircraft (or indeed any other machine whatsoever) ever produced.
I'd argue the "what idiots we were" arguments often levelled against those who (poorly) estimated Concorde's development costs is better aimed at those who, having invested that money, then failed to invest a little more in (dramatically) improving the product.
"Looking at mainline railways, although I have criticisms of the route of HS2, a high-speed line from London to Birmingham and the North West is also a ‘no-brainer’."
I'm not sure what the opposite of a "no brainer" is but my perspective on HS2 is that it is almost certainly a waste of money. There's not really much benefit of cutting the time down from 82 to 49 minutes. Someone working at a company in Birmingham is not going to turn down a meeting because it's 82 minutes away. So, it doesn't create new opportunities. And it doesn't reduce costs. An occasional return trip of 82 minutes each way can be done comfortably in a day. No-one needs to stay over in a hotel for that. And while you can say that people have an extra 30 minutes, what are they going to do with it? Get back from London and go back into the office? No-one does that. The main benefits are that someone doesn't have to set the alarm so early, and perhaps has to warm up dinner when they get home. It's also not going to change it into a commuter journey because the end-to-end time is going to be over an hour and almost no-one wants to do over an hour, especially in the era of remote work.
Improved rail speed works when you can cut the other costs because of it. So you no longer need a hotel room for a night. Or if you can cut the time from a time where no-one wants to commute daily to a time where they do.
It's the same thing with transtlantic travel. Aircraft saved days over boats. So you didn't have to pay for a week in a cabin, and to be away from family. But supersonic flight didn't have those benefits. People didn't care much if it was 6 hours or 3.
It would probably make more sense to let the Asians get maglev good and then upgrade London to Birmingham to use that, where the journey time would be so much faster that it would be in commute range and hugely increase traffic
HS2 has two advantages: speed and capacity.
Capacity is the more important. The bit that is getting built, between London and Birmingham and also Handsacre Junction in Staffordshire, has the effect of adding another pair of tracks to the West Coast Mainline which is (by some measures) Europe’s busiest railway line. At the moment, it's got to carry intercity trains from London to Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Glasgow (i.e. our five biggest urban areas), plus interregional services e.g. linking London and Northampton, plus commuter services around those cities, plus freight.
The bit we're building will remove the intercity trains from the West Coast Mainline, which will create more room for commuter services around London, and around Birmingham. It's the equivalent of just adding another pair of tracks.
The other benefit is speed. I agree that the time savings just to Birmingham probably wouldn't justify the line in themselves. The real benefits will come from journeys north to Manchester and especially Glasgow. If HS2 were finished as originally planned, the journey time to each would reduce by ~an hour. If we ultimately build a high-speed line between England and Scotland then the journey time to Glasgow comes down further.
At some point I'll do a post about HS2 (i.e. the reasons why it's a good idea in principle, and my criticisms of the route).
“People didn't care much if it was 6 hours or 3.”
Depends on whom you mean by “people”. The moment BA repositioned it as a super-premium offering for “people” to whom those 3 hours *were* important, it was profitable.
On 80 vs 40 minutes — one is a commute, the other is a journey. ~10% of a working day vs ~20% — each way!
Well, it's 82 minutes vs 49.
But what you're missing is that people don't regain that extra time for work. They'll often do a few chats with a few people at the client, as they're there, and have the time. Not really important stuff though. They might get on the train at 3:30 and spend the 82 minutes just catching up on any emails they got while they were out, make a few calls, do a little admin. If they're doing that, they're using that 82 minutes. if you take it down to 49 minutes, they aren't going to get into Birmingham at 4:19, catch a taxi to the office, where they sit down at 4:40 and do 50 minutes of work. No-one ever does that. If someone has finished with a client and it's 2pm, they just go home and finish the day early. Or they maybe pop into the National Gallery for an hour. You can't really go back to an office and get yourself going again for the sake of an hour.
It's like the time I was delayed going to Runcorn. The train was late by an hour. So, I got into my hotel at 7:30pm instead of 6:30pm. So what? What was I going to be doing in a hotel at 6:30? Probably catching up on something, reading the news, watching TV. I could do that on the train. Didn't matter. I don't care that the coach to London takes me two hours instead of 1 for a leisure trip. I have my Kindle and phone. What would I be doing in the hour before I catch a coach otherwise?
With respect, Tim, this reads like argument by anecdote. Look at the figures. E.g. here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/journey-time-statistics-england-2019/journey-time-statistics-england-2019
It's very very clear that the proportion of people commuting longer than 40 minutes (compared to shorter journeys) just falls to near-zero -- meaning that while people are (clearly) OK with up to and hour and a half of their day being in transport, and will do so day in day out, once that becomes 2 hours plus, they just don't.
So, in fact, according to all available data, there is a dramatic, observable, and consistently observed difference between 40-something and 80-something.
And of course all this goes to (strongly) support the arguments in the article above about through-lines and the whys and why nots of where transport has produced desirable economic effects and where it has not.
OK, let's go over those numbers. An hour and a half in transport? That makes sense. Roughly 45 minutes home to office, 45 minutes home again. And I can add a personal anecdote that backs that up, that very few people get on the train at Swindon and go all the way to London (around 1 hour). They generally get off at Reading. And there's huge numbers of people who get on at Reading for the 25 minute journey.
Reducing total time from 82 minutes to 49 is only just over 45, so OK there would still be high demand. But the problem is that HS2 doesn't mean a 49 minute total time. It means 49 minutes from Birmingham Curzon Street Station to London Euston. You then have to add in the time for someone to get from their home to Birmingham Curzon Street Station and then to get from London Euston to their office.
Some people are going to be living next door to Curzon Street and going to an office next door to Euston, so the minutes walk at each end aren't going to matter much, but a lot of people aren't going to be doing that. They're going to need to take a car or public transport to the station and from Euston to the office. Which could be 5-10 minutes at each end. This isn't an issue with a commuter from Reading. It's a 25 minute train, so you put another 5-10 on it and it's under 45 minutes.
That's before we get into the matter of how people with long commutes would rather work remote as there is a greater cost to it. There has been far less of a hit from remote work on London Overground than GWR or South West Trains. The cost savings are much greater for longer journeys vs remote.
As far as I'm aware, Concorde was never profitable. Why did we stop it, if it was profitable?
This is a (very) simple set of google searches away from being settled, I suspect… but let me do the work for you.
Tl;dr: Concorde was not profitable for the governments who built it, but was for both airlines who ran it, even more so for BA after it increased prices.
Concorde ended because the very visible 2000 crash scared off the exact customers who valued it for long enough to make it non-viable.
OK, so yes, £30-50m of profit for some years. For a programme that cost £2.1bn to develop. Which is a something around a 1.5% return on investment for those good years.
BA used to boast -- including several times in my direct hearing -- and continued to boast until it became crass to do so, that they'd made £500 million running Concorde.
The "alternate history" where having done the initial hard and expensive work, Concorde continued to be developed beyond, essentially, the two dozen working prototypes produced, would no doubt have brought costs down dramatically, as it has done for every other type of aircraft (or indeed any other machine whatsoever) ever produced.
I'd argue the "what idiots we were" arguments often levelled against those who (poorly) estimated Concorde's development costs is better aimed at those who, having invested that money, then failed to invest a little more in (dramatically) improving the product.
But as you said, the crash killed the market. So, where do you go with that?