JP's Corner of The Blogosphere

I have been asked quite a bit recently about what I think of the plans for a new high-speed railway line between London and Birmingham, and so I thought that I would blog about it.  I appreciate that this may not be of interest to everyone, but then when is that ever the case with my contributions to the Blogosphere? As a Transport Researcher, I should probably know more about some of the hard facts than I do, so I apologise in advance if you think that you’ve got a more educated opinion than me.  However, on the basis of what I do currently know, I am not hugely in favour of the scheme.  My reasoning can be broken down as follows: Capacity The biggest argument for building High Speed 2 is capacity.  It is argued that the current transport links (chiefly the West Coast Mainline and the M6) are overcrowded and are not going to cope with predicted future travel demand.  This is probably very true, but is all of the predicted future demand necessary?  In an...

I hope you’re sitting down for this.  Perhaps you’d even like to prepare yourself by taking a few deep breaths.  I’d like to recommend that you read this article from The Guardian .  There.  I’ve said it. Although my feelings about said newspaper are generally well documented, I have to say that George Monbiot has written a particularly good article about the environmental impact of rail travel.  As you may know, this will be my area of research once I’ve got some exams out of the way, and it looks like there could be a few surprises and some tough decisions to be made.