This week, Newsnight grew impatient that HS2 Ltd were taking a little too long to come up with their updated HS2 business case, so got a couple of people who had been on the HS2 analytical challenge panel to do it for them.
One comment to “Newsnight expose more problems with HS2”
Good to see Newsnight catching the tide of opinion and taking a critical view of HS2.
Unfortunately there still seems to be this misunderstanding about the value of time for rail users. Critics of HS2 often cite the “fact” that HS2 assumes that people cannot work on trains. However this is not the case. Just because rail users have a high value of time this does not mean that they are not working.
What you need to do is look at the values of time for different travellers:
Car Driver: £33.54 per hour
Car Passenger: £24.17 per hour
Rail passenger:£47.18 per hour
The higher the cost per hour, the lower the productivity – so what this is saying is a car passenger is twice as productive as a train passenger.
Or a car driver is 30% more productive than a train passenger.
I think the idea that car drivers can supposedly work better than people on a train should be sufficient evidence of how unreal the HS2 case is.