As we were saying, Just Say No to HS2

Madsen Pirie describes our work here as to be those howling in the woods - shouting out those truly weird ideas and concepts which a decade later become the commonplaces of the political discussion. Which brings us to HS2:

The number of trains running on HS2 will be almost halved and services will travel more slowly in a proposed shake-up of the £72bn line as ministers scramble to save money.

Whitehall officials are considering reducing the number of trains from 18 to 10 an hour, insiders said.

Meanwhile, plans to run services at up to 360 km/h (224 mph) are in jeopardy as officials weigh whether to reduce maximum speeds.

Dropping the H is indeed one way to reduce costs. But in the newspaper report there is also this:

Lord Berkeley….He said: “Why do you need to get to London 30 minutes quicker when you have Wi-Fi and your laptop on the train?

“I suggest that ministers should look at options for radically cutting the costs of what is left of HS2.”

Ah, yes, as we pointed out just over a decade ago:

The economic case for HS 2 is dead

Unlike the trains themselves - or even the project - the truth is arriving just on time.

On-train wireless internet connectivity is growing fast in Europe - but even faster in the UK, which now has more than 2,000 Wi-Fi equipped carriages.

If people are productive while in a train then the benefit of getting them there faster disappears.

That's bad news for High Speed Rail though, as the justification for HS2 (the £17bn high-speed London/Birmingham connection) assumes all travellers are entirely unproductive during transit and thus the 30 minute reduction in travelling time benefits the economy.

We did get one part terribly wrong, that £17 billion was terribly naive. But the base point, once we have WiFi on trains then the economics entirely fall apart was and is true.

Of course, having been right isn’t enough, even if unlike Cassandra some now believe. It’s still necessary for someone to act on that rightness and cancel the thing.