Guardian

A good positive way to start the week. Humanity faces a crisis, and much angst is spent on the dithering of our politicians who seem to be incapable of grasping the importance of actually doing at least some of the things they keep talking about.

The Guardian organised a meeting in Manchester to review some of the “countless ingenious ideas for tackling the problem emanating from universities, thinktanks, front rooms and sheds across the planet” and to select some of the best of them.

Not all were technological. One or two I have actually heard of, and in one case an organisation I volunteer with is already implementing. innovativecommunities.org has been distributing the ONIL energy efficient woodstove to impoverished Mayan villages in Guatemala. Global warming was not our first concern – but a useful by product. Women who have the stoves do not need to spend so much time collecting firewood, their children are healthier since the stoves get the woodsmoke out of the house, and the damage to the forest  of fuel collection is reduced. There is also a much reduced risk of children burning themselves which happens a lot when there is cooking over an open fire.

Two ideas that I find immensely appealing are Rosemary Randall’s ““carbon conversations” in which she encourages people to explore their attitude to consumption, identity and status. People who have been on her course of six meetings typically reduce their emissions by a tonne immediately and then plan to cut in half within two to five years. Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation offered an even simpler prescription: consume less. It might even make us happier too.” But I am sure that you will have your own ideas and I encourage you to check out the links and learn more, a well as voting for your favourites.

The Vancouver Sun’s columnist Pete McMartin deals with the Burrard Bridge bike lane experiment.

Like me he lives in the suburbs and drives mostly. And the conclusions he reaches – as a suburban driver – are a refreshing change from all the fulmination and rage we have heard against this idea. I really have nothing to add – I have written more than enough about the Burrard Bridge. Please, go read what Pete has to say. And enjoy the sunshine today.

Globe and Mail

BC Ferries is in deep trouble. The financial model on which the “privatisation” was based had a number of assumptions that have proved to be faulty. You can download the pdf version of the analysis from Island Tides.

That traffic is down – in fact it is now less than it was in 2003 – is in part due to the shrinking economy but also due to rising fares. So the ferries now have spare capacity – and need revenue. In order to fill that space, they have been taking traffic away from other operators. They have been offering a service which carries trailers – without the tractor or driver – between the Island and the mainland. They are transferred using “hostlers” – drivers who run small tugs to pull the trailers on and off the barges and former rail ferries (like the one in my picture above).

This is a new service for BC Ferries but has been bread and butter for the companies for over forty years. What really causes them concern is that BC Ferries tempted away their drivers by offering them higher wages.  Not only that but the frequency of sailing is higher, so the service is faster and cheaper. What the companies are complaining about is that BC Ferries gets a subsidy from the province, so they feel they are being undercut by unfair competition.

Of course, BC Ferries doesn’t see it that way, and neither does Martin Crilly the provincially appointed Ferry Commissioner. They argue that the subsidy only covers the smaller, money losing ferry services “minor routes – links to the smaller islands and in the north” while the main routes between the mainland and the Island make money and in fact provide some cross subsidy.

“We’d need a SWAT team of forensic accountants to get into what the commissioner sees as what is subsidized or not subsidized. The simple reality is, we’re losing customers on rates,” Mr. Irvine [president of the marine division for the Washington Marine Group] said.

Pardonable exagerration. BC Ferries counter that they have offered to give up the small islands services – and their associated subsidies – but no other firm has expressed interest.

At one time, it was fairly common to experience one or two sailing waits on the main ferry routes – which is why BC Ferries can get away with charging a non refundable advance booking fee which replaced old books of guaranteed loading tickets. I do not travel those routes frequently enough now to judge, but I have noticed lately that the dot matrix signs on the highway now show “no waits” more often – as do the traffic broadcasts.

In good times, unaccompanied trailers were not desirable traffic – they take up a lot of space and do not add to sales in the cafe or shop. I think if the “self loading cargo” found themselves denied boarding but saw trailers being loaded instead they would be complaining.

Competition is tough – but then that is what the private sector keeps saying they are good at.  Although I notice as well, back in Britain, that at least one train operator has given back its franchise, now the expected profits are not there any more. BC Ferries accounting should be transparent enough to allow taxpayers to see where the subsidies are going: it should not need teams of forensic accountants. The barge operators can only complain if the subsidy BC Ferries gets exceeds the losses that accrue from operating the lesser routes. If there is in fact cross subsidy from the major ferry routes to the minor ones, then it is in the general interest that spare capacity on ships already operating be utilised. Of course, what that may mean is that the barge operators are no longer in business if the ferries passenger traffic returns. (Note the use of the conditional not future tense.)

Globe and Mail

The Supreme Court of Canada has given the green light to political advertising on the sides of transit vehicles, in an important test of free expression.

In an 8-0 ruling this morning, the court said two B.C. mass transit agencies were wrong to refuse political ads the Canadian Federation of Students and a teachers union attempted to purchase in 2004.

Good.

The policy was wrong headed. Freedom of speech is much more important than freedom from being offended. Indeed, the whole point about freedom of speech is the support for people to say things with which you fundamentally disagree.

“It is difficult to see how an advertisement on the side of a bus that constitutes political speech might create a safety risk or an unwelcoming environment for transit users,” Madam Justice Marie Deschamps wrote today for the Court.

Of course that means that now we can expect to see transit advertising by the parties than can afford to spend the most. Gordon Campbell’s sickly grin will be plastered all over the transit system at the next election – and probably before that too. The Canadian Federation of Students is going to find that all the available space has been booked and the simple, inoffensive message “Rock the Vote” will still likely be silenced. But that’s politics.

I suspect too that other groups – evangelists and atheists – will want to test out this new ruling as soon as they can. Let freedom reign.

Mark Hume’s column in the Globe raises a question but fails to answer it. Instead he gives a some stilted view of the history – and present state of the street. I would comment on the Globe’s web page as I do not have much to say – but need to correct him – but there is a glitch that will not let me log in there.

He wrote

In 1974, the city blocked off traffic to a six-block section, creating a pedestrian and transit mall. The idea was to recreate the walking streets so popular in Europe, but instead it gradually bled the life out of the area.

I disagree. What ” gradually bled the life out of the” street was the opening of the Pacific Centre Mall and the creation of a new covered pedestrian route that parallels the street. Indeed he even notes that “the pavement ends abruptly at a fence with a sign directing pedestrians to detour through Pacific Centre Mall.” There is only so much that can be spent in retail premises in  any given area at any given time. Retailers who open large new stores have to attract trade either from a wider area or from their adjacent competitors. At one time, I worked on retail impact assessments as part of an attempt to prop up a more comprehensive town centres policy in London. One of Mrs Thatcher’s remarkable achievements was to deprive the small retailers (the very class she came from) of the data that was needed to defend them. She cancelled the Retail Census. Even so it was not hard to show at planning enquiries that major new malls sucked the life out of London’s shopping streets. I wasn’t here in 1974 – but I would bet that the opening of a major pedestrian mall parallel to Granville Street was the main thing that reduced retail trade on that street. Just as the opening of the Eaton Centre in Toronto caused the decline of retail quality on Yonge Street – which remained open to cars but still became pretty tatty.

And it is also my observation that “fast-food outlets and porn shops moving in to the increasingly vacant storefronts” were more apparent in the section that remained open to cars – not the bit that was bus only.

One of the keys to revitalizing London’s High Streets was taking out the cars and creating spaces between the shops that people wanted to spend some time in. Of course, experience varied and different regimes tried different approaches – but keeping fast moving traffic in the centre while pedestrians were forced onto narrow sidewalks obviously did not work. Oxford Street – London’s main shopping street – was made bus and taxi only and the sidewalks were widened – and it remained successful despite the opening of many suburban car oriented malls. It is still a major destination and is very busy.

Putting a subway underneath Granville will change things. The new Canada Line stations will be the generators of pedestrian traffic – and will probably be more concentrated than the bus stops they replace. The street will still be a major transit interchange. And the Pacific Centre Mall will still be a route where people will be able to walk through and escape the rain and the wind.

The social problems that beset downtown Vancouver have also not been solved. The measures that have been introduced like downtown Ambassadors have simply moved people around a bit. There are still druggies and drunks, panhandlers and other unsavoury creatures – and, as in any city, crowds of people attract those who prey on them. Changing the street surface and the trees will have little impact on any of this.

It is also the case that Robson Street has also changed its character significantly in the same period – and that is where the highest retail rents are charged now. Is there room for two Robsons?

Globe and Mail

This story appears in the paper’s real estate section – and shows how the region’s land use strategy is being ripped apart by the port. The people who run the new combined port do not report to anyone. Like the airport they are a publicly created agency but there is absolutely no oversight or control by any level of government. While nominally federal, the government of Canada now takes little interest in their activities, and there is absolutely no local or regional input. Metro has expressed its concern about the Port buying up agricultural land in Richmond, but it might just as well have saved its breath. Expansion is going ahead – even though there is currently no need for any expansion – traffic is down – but the port is confident it will recover.

It does not matter if the people of this region decide that they want to live in a place that has long term sustainability – or even livability. Because the port has decided that its interest is best served by expansion and they will do that no matter what. The tail is now wagging the dog – because both the PM and the provincial Premier have bought into the notion that the port will lead economic growth.

No one at the port (or either level of government it seems) is able to grasp the reality that continued economic growth cannot be pursued indefinitely on a finite planet. That the present economic dislocation is not simply a temporary set back in a trajectory of expansion – but a result of the fundamental flaws  of recent economic and political strategies. Capitalism has failed as badly as communism. The earth cannot support the way the rich countries now live – and which the developing countries wish to emulate. The carrying capacity in many important respects has already been exceeded. The temperature of the planet is increasing – and doing so more rapidly than anyone cared to acknowledge until recently. The growth that we have seen was predicated on lots of cheap oil – and we no longer have that. We are rapidly running out of fish – and a lot humans depend on fish for their diets. There is a serious crisis in the supply of drinkable water. Droughts threaten many of the places that we depend on for agriculture – as do rising sea levels.

But none of this bothers the port. As far as they are concerned “There’s just one hitch.”

Regionally, a study for the province last year found that 2,700 acres of land are required to support port capacity over the next 20 to 25 years. These sites have to be large enough to handle traffic volumes, have adequate servicing and be close to transportation infrastructure – both highways and airports.

“There’s probably only approximately 600 acres of suitable industrial land,” Mr. Winkler said. To protect its interests, the port has started buying up available properties.

What the Gateway program did was distort our transportation priorities. Now the land use priorities will be distorted too. Forget whatever we may have decided regionally or locally – the port has enough resources and no need to defer to any level of local government. Even if it is completely wrong and traffic levels do not start to climb again – which does not seem to be a possibility that they have even taken into consideration.  And cannot be required to.

BART saw circuit problem at center of Metro probe

“Railway Track & Structures” in their Breaking News feature provide some more information on the probable cause of the fatal crash on the Washington DC subway.

Metro officials said the malfunction that appears to be at the heart of last month’s deadly Red Line crash was traced to “flickering” in a track circuit that seemed to be a “freak occurrence” they had never before encountered or knew was possible, The Washington Post reports.

But that type of transient, intermittent failure is known to experts who work with automated transit systems and was flagged as a hazard by the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in San Francisco. Officials there installed a separate system as a protection against flickering track circuitry.

BART is considered a sister system to Metro because it was built about the same time using similar designs, technology and suppliers. Metro never installed the backup system, known as the sequential occupancy release system, that is used by BART.

The signal system used by both BART and Metro is quite different from that used by SkyTrain (and the Docklands LRT) which I referenced in my original story. It also seems that “intermittent failure of track circuits most often occurs when there is poor electrical contact between the steel rails and the wheels of the train.” This means that the equipment itself may not be the problem but the state of the track and the wheels. This wheel/rail interface has been found to be critical in a number of railway crashes – and is one of the reasons that the break up of British Rail into separate track and train operating companies was so much opposed by my former colleagues at HM Railway Inspectorate.

I am still bothered by the fact that the stationary train was being driven manually while the one that hit it was under system control. That seems to be a mix that ought not be allowed.

Alberta sees LRT, not HSR, as provincial priority

Light rail transit expansion for Calgary and Edmonton trumps provincial needs for high speed rail, according to Alberta provincial government officials, despite rising clamor for linking the two cities with intercity service. The stance follows the release Monday of a feasibility and ridership study, evaluating HSR service between the province’s two largest cities. “At this time, when we’re a little short of cash, show me the money. That’s what I would have to say because we’ve got a lot of other needs that will have to come first,” said Alberta Finance Minister Iris Evans.

source  Railway Age Breaking News

There is not much more to add. And in fact the link does not provide much more detail. That is in stark contrast to the wealth of information provided by the full report of the passenger demand analysis for HST which I provided a link to. I think it would be a very good idea for some of the most frequent commenters to this blog actually take the time to read that report – and indeed make a practice of actually referring to the source of any story before launching into comment mode. Even when a report is in the public domain, if it is available on the web I will not reproduce much of it here, though I will, of course, selectively quote the bits I am commenting on. But that does not mean there is not a whole lot of other information available from the same source -and often that would actually obviate the need for the some of the questions and comments I have seen – but not replied to – recently.

“A little short of cash” is a bit hard to swallow – Alberta may not be in the middle of a boom any more but it is a lot better off than most places. Intercity High Speed Rail should also not be seen as a competitor for funds with urban light rail – the markets are quite different. If HSR is – as the proponents seem to be saying “of investment quality” there should be private sector funds for it. Not that I would allow that to make my mind up but then I am not the Alberta Finance Minister. And if I were I would be looking at the longer term public interest – not just the short term cash flow.

Brian Lewis in the Province keeps up the pressure – and seems optimistic – that Hydro will “continue to protect its historical rights to run passenger-rail service on a section of railway line it sold to CP years ago.” This is based a press release issued by Langley Township Mayor Rick Green quoting a letter from Hydro.

Brian says that Canadian Pacific Ltd., is “the railway-based corporation that many have loved to hate throughout its century-plus history.” But CP is a corporation just like all the rest. That does not make it evil. It is required by its shareholders to make money for them – nothing more and nothing less. No matter what the corporate mission statement may say, or what the PR flacks would like you to believe, once a company becomes a limited liability public concern, its obligations to the shareholders override any other concern.  The great mistake was to treat corporations as though they were “persons” which, of course, they are not. When people (as individuals) behave like corporations they are diagnosed with mental illness. But it is people who control corporations and often the owners are us. Through our savings, pensions funds, mutual funds and so on we own the shares of these corporations. Every so often some group or other – or sometimes just an individual – uses their rights as shareholders to make a fuss at an AGM. Often to very little effect. But in general shareholders are largely passive and content to collect their dividends – and are pleased when the share price rises.

CP does indeed make a fortune out of allowing West Coast Express to use its tracks. But the provincially appointed negotiators made that deal on our behalf. BC Hydro was prescient when it put the provision to keep the right to run passenger services on the tracks from “232nd Street, near Trinity Western University, through the downtown cores of the township and Langley City, then west to Cloverdale.” Especially since they kept those rights for free. CP would not have been built at all if not for the generous support of the Government of Canada in both cash and land grants. But as we have seen with the Arbutus corridor that buys us nothing in terms of transit service.

according to the grapevine, CP is lobbying the Gordon Campbell government to block Hydro’s intention of exercising its legal option of renewing the agreement that will protect public use of the line for another 21 years.

Who do you think Campbell will listen to? His corporate buddies – big business in general is the biggest supporter of the BC Liberals – and Gordo still seems to be in thrall to the notion that somehow largesse to corporations “trickles down” to the rest of us – all evidence to the contrary. Or a few pesky Mayors with a bee in their bonnet about the InterUrban.

CP needs the line to get coal and containers to and from Deltaport – which is the key to the Gateway. Actually the rail movement of freight to and from the port is by far the most important way stuff gets to and from the port – the truckers are a bit of a side show. CP has just signed a new agreement with Teck to carry 17.5 million to 19.5 million tonnes of coal from south east BC to the port in a year long contract, down from 25 million tonnes a year at its  peak.

The BC Liberals are convinced that widening the highway – and promising to extend the SkyTrain to Langley by 2030 – is enough. Use of the interurban right of way is relegated to endless studies – there has never been any significant gesture towards recognizing that light rail will be necessary to the future the valley. Indeed light rail has been perpetually held in abeyance in BC – in Victoria as well as in Vancouver and their environs. Light rail is what other places do.

On the other hand allowing BC Hydro to renew its right costs very little and just keeps the option open. It does not commit the province to actually do anything. CP have managed to live with this arrangement for 25 years and may well be persuaded that they have little to worry about. I suspect much will depend on what is intended for BC Hydro in the future – and who might be the successor to these rights.

When you think about it is ridiculous that a phrase like that is a headline.  TOD is designed to reduce car use by making possible for people to get around by other means – walking and, of course, transit. But unfortunately it takes governmental systems some time to catch up to ideas like this. Especially when they are surrounded by lobbyists who continually push for more of the same and resist change.

I learned of the research that now shows that TOD in the US has reduced auto trips from the ITE Journal – and of course that esteemed organ is not available to ordinary humans. But fortunately the research was funded by the US government so the full report on which the ITE article was based is available on line as a pdf. “Effects of TOD on Housing,Parking, and Travel” TCRP Report 128 by G B Arrington and Robert Cevero shows that TOD produces about 50% of the car trips produced by conventional development.

ITE regularly publishes trip generation rates for all kinds of land use – and updates them as research becomes available. It is these figures that are used to determine how much transportation infrastructure is going to be required by new development. Or to be more precise, how many parking spaces and how much new road space. This is the key interface between planning transportation and land use in North America. And since the end of WW2 it has been mostly about making more space available for cars. “ITE trip generation rates overestimate automobile trips for TOD housing by approximately 50 per cent”. What that means is that when developers who want to do TOD go to municipalities for their permits, too much parking and roadspace is required – which raises the cost to developers and hence residents. One of the most significant short term effects of TOD – affordability – is lost. In a region like ours, where despite recent price drops affordability is still a major hurdle for many households. (Incidentally another article in the same edition criticizes the ITE trip generation rates: “These rates are limited as they are based almost solely on isolated suburban development with little or no pedestrian, bicycle or transit accessibility for ease of data collection.”)

But the second round effect is even more important. Because there is the additional capacity, other users can fill the new space provided. And, of course, it is not just the developers that we have to be concerned about. “Transit ridership is positively correlated to the extensiveness of the transit system, amount of traffic congestion and higher parking costs. Transit service headways of 10 minutes are ideal to support a transit lifestyle”. In this region “frequent transit service” is 15 minutes – so we are well short of the ideal even if  the current plans can be implemented. Since that is in itself uncertain, it can be anticipated that where there is TOD in this region but inadequate transit (Port Moody for instance) it will underperform. Indeed there is a sneaking suspicion that is the intent of the provincial government, which likes to pose as “green” but very obviously is not at all.

The transit funding is going to be a huge problem – but the highway funding was found easily even though the P3 fell through. That tells you all you need to know about priorities. It also means that the benefits the United States will see from conducting this research and implementing its findings through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act  (and the next surface transportation bill) will not be realised in BC – or probably most of Canada. Because we have a federal government that is not engaged in the same kind of process. There is no research based program – and it is not tied to federal funding. Transit projects are tied to the whims of Ministers and short term political advantage, and given the way that votes are distributed in Canada still favour major roads over other transportation projects.

The idiocy of the Gateway was to put freight transport ahead of everything else (trucks account for 8% of the traffic at the most – which happens to be the Port Mann Bridge) even when it looks as though international freight traffic is going to continue to decline for a while and may never recover its former pattern as the world’s economy adapts to new realities. But the effect is that TOD is simply not going to happen in  most of the new build areas of this region, because we have already built, or are in the process of building, much new major road infrastructure, but the future of transit is still very uncertain. And of there is one things that investors hate it is uncertainty.

Smart growth requires smart calculations; impact fees, parking ratios, and road improvements need to account for the likely trip-reduction effects of TOD. Research study results indicate that residential TOD parking ratios can be tightened and fees lowered to reflect the actual transportation performance of TODs. Given that TODs have historically been over-parked, the incorporation of research results into revised parking ratios is an important step toward national recognition of the expected community benefits of TOD.

And there is also this important insight

TOD type is less important than specific location within the region and the quality of connecting transit service

What has happened here in recent years is that transport investment has managed to overcome the intentions of the LRSP while seemingly being coherent with it. You can find lines on maps in the LRSP and point to them and say “there is the SFPR, there is the Golden Ears Bridge” and so on – and people do and have here. But the intention of the LRSP was not to encourage automobile use or build in auto dependency.  But for the majority of the region that is what has been and is being done. And great opportunity to change direction has, it seems, been lost.

On the Vancouver Sun website there is a report from the Edmonton Journal.

A 500-km/h high speed train that could travel between Calgary and Edmonton in an hour would attract nearly six million riders by 2021, says a report commissioned by the Alberta government and released Monday.

The report makes no recommendations on the feasibility of the project or whether government money should go into it, but suggests the possibility of a private-public partnership, also known as a P3.

Alberta Transportation Minister Luke Ouellette released the February 2008 report in advance of Monday’s federal-provincial Conservative caucus meeting in Calgary.

Well actually the report says a great deal more than that – and it looks at a variety of possible speeds from the UK style 125mph High Speed Train, US style Acela,  French TGV and the German MAGLEV. The good thing is that the full report is available at www.transportation.alberta.ca/3940.htm – from where you can download the hefty pdf files. They make interesting reading.

A disclaimer of my own – I was recruited by Dr Alex Metcalf in 1988 from the UK to come to Canada. So we have some history – and I want to be very careful to be objective in my comments. He is one of the lead authors of the report: one his earlier projects was the demand forecast which supported the construction of the bridge to Prince Edward Island.

Secondly, I wonder why this report has taken so long to emerge: February 2008 to July 2009 is a very long time indeed to consider a consultant’s report.

The study is refers to itself as “Investment Grade”  (”meets the requirement of Investment Grade Analysis as proposed by the High-Speed Rail Association”) – in other words it was intended to examine whether or not a private sector investor would put money into the project. What this means is that it is concerned with familiar issues of mode choice – and would enough people be willing to pay enough for a faster trip between the two cities. The answer is yes, and the faster the train runs the more would be willing to use it.

There is a lot in the language of the report which contrasts quite strongly with all the other things I am reading at the moment. The report is very optimistic about the economy of Alberta – after all that province has lots of oil and the rest of world is going to be increasingly short of it so there will continue to be economic growth for the foreseeable future – subject to the cyclical nature of a resource based economy. The words “peak oil” or “climate change” do not appear in it – so far as I can determine. Nor is there any sense that our perception of the world changed dramatically between then and now. So it is bit like reading BC government studies of the need for new highway and port expansion. Much of the stuff I read these days talks about the end of “business as usual” and the need for a steady state, no growth economy – or even the inevitability of dealing with the need to reduce our per capita energy consumption. Quite a lot of macro-economics seems to be turning away from GDP as a way of measuring how we are doing,and recognising that exponential growth is unsustainable.

I am not going to challenge the demand forecast – I am just going to suggest that there are other reasons why the Governments of Alberta and Canada should consider the case for building a new electric high speed rail line between Edmonton and Calgary. The idea of utilising the existing tracks or just upgrading them is not a good long term proposition. The private sector railway companies in Canada have little or no interest in running passenger trains and do not normally afford them priority. Freight railways have a rather different configuration to high speed lines – and the best separate them out. Since that means a new right of way, an electric railway is not that much more expensive, but gives a great deal of flexibility for the future as well as significant operational and environmental advantages for the present. Electricity can be made from a variety of sources: Calgary’s LRT runs on wind power.  Both France and Japan determined early on that a dedicated track was a prerequisite for high speed rail and both countries  now lead the world in the field.

One thing the current report seems to accept is that the line would not be integrated into the airports. This is a profound mistake. While a lot of business travel is city centre to city centre, the report recognises the need for suburban stations: that is, after all where most people live. But there is also a significant synergy to be had from integration with national and international travel which at present is by air. Of course air travel has seen significant declines – for economic reasons – and it long term future is highly uncertain, since it is currently completely dependent on oil as its energy source.

It is a bit depressing that the only way we seem to be allowed to think about these projects is if they are commercially feasible – not desirable from an environmental or quality of life perspective. One argument that Alberta should consider is the extent to which a new service would reduce the need of highway expansion in the future – and also the much better safety record per passenger kilometre of rail over road. The reduction in the demand for health services alone – even if the lower death toll is not thought good enough reason of itself – should appeal even to conservatives.

On the whole I am not persuaded that there is a good case for MAGLEV. It seems to me to be one of those “best is the enemy of the good” cases. I would be reluctant to recommend a technology that is not widely in use. French style TGV, on the other hand, has shown itself to be very successful and is being steadily expanded in the countries where it has been adopted. The British have tried Italian tilting trains on existing sinuous track (Pendolinos on the West Coast Mainline) but the success of the first French style TGV line from St Pancras to the Channel Tunnel has now got them thinking of new dedicated french style high speed lines.

I think railways should be a priority for our governments – if only because we know that relying on air and highways has brought us a whole lot of unintended consequences. Hopefully, now that this report has finally seen the light of day, the discussion can start in earnest.

Oh, as an afterthought, perhaps check out the newest Japanese shinkansen too.

Shinkansen