A few speakers rely heavily on their data slides which I'll try to update when they're released over the next week or so. One of those is Nikolas Hill, a senior consultant with AEA, but he is also the one speaker to speculate - in response to a question - about where the UK Conservatives got their figures. Notably the one that says high-speed rail is 70X cleaner than air travel.
One of the day's most interesting speakers is not actually on the agenda, but Michel Leboeuf of the Systra consultancy arm of French rail operator SNCF gets plenty of attention when he speaks from the floor.
Michael Hayes, managing consultant for Atkins Transport Planning, puts out the question: "Is Heathrow important to the business case for high-speed rail?" And he continues: "If you are going to build this very expensive piece of kit, which markets do you want to serve?"
He points out the complexities of trying to serve the markets for Birmingham and also for Liverpool further north, and he suggests that only Scottish traffic would experience a "significant" shift from air to rail. It might lead, he suggests, to a solution with better conventional long-distance rail services with "occasional" high-speed trains on the longer routes.
"This comes across as saying there is not case for high-speed rail," he frets. "I think there is a case, but it has got to be part of a bigger solution."
Prof Robert Cochrane of Imperial College London, who was heavily involved in the the landmark Eddington study of UK transportation, also bemoans the inadequate data - particularly on non-aviation travel, and especially the roads.
Next up is Stuart Condie, BAA planning services director and the man whose show it is.
I'm just back from a small but perfectly formed conference in London organised by BAA and designed to help them, and anyone else, understand how Heathrow and the national rail system should be linked - or not. With particular emphasis on the case for high-speed rail. BAA plans to come out with its own proposals in summer 2009.
All of a sudden this has become a big deal after the UK opposition Conservative party announced, to the astonishment of just about everyone, that they would not go ahead with building the third Heathrow runway and would instead invest in high-speed rail. Their leader David Cameron personally put his name to this idea. As the Conservatives have at least an evens chance of being the next government, this is not a trivial matter.
At the conference, where there are something like 100 attendees from business, academia, consultancies etc, there is general bafflement at what the Conservatives are doing and where they sourced their supporting data.
It's kicked off by chairman Tony Travers, director of the Greater London Group at the London School of Economics. Drily noting that Heathrow is "a national treasure" - a very British, and decidedly two-edged description - he says: "High speed rail could make Heathrow easier to access and greener but, and there is a paradox here, easier to expand."
Recent Comments