High project costs take another victim.
Regular reminder that I am but a humble Canadian, and while I am sad that HS2 to Manchester is dead, I am not directly impacted by it. Take my thoughts with that in mind.
The big transit news of the week (at least out of Europe) is that the HS2 leg from Birmingham to Manchester and Crewe has been cancelled, and not gently — British PM Rishi Sunak did not mince words when he discussed stopping the project and having the “bravery” to do so.
This is obviously a hugely upsetting thing for people living in the UK’s north, advocates, and people who worked on the project — but perhaps even bigger from a global perspective is how the English-speaking world is losing any remaining semblance of being able to execute big projects quickly and cost effectively.
To be clear, I don’t necessarily buy the line being trotted out that “every penny will be invested in other transport projects” (especially because some of those are road projects!). I don’t think people have a lot of reasons to have faith in the current government, and it’s also not clear that any other projects would not have very similar structural problems to HS2. At the same time, I do agree with people like Gareth Dennis, who for years made the case that the media and the project itself did a poor job communicating its very real benefits. This was particularly true recently when members of the media in the UK talked about the project in such a way as to not distinguish the infrastructure from the service — this is common in public transport journalism and communications in North America, but you’d hope media across the pond would know better.
With that in mind, I do think it’s worth mentioning that despite the very real issues with the projects cancellation, it is and was very expensive, and at least on the face of it, the general argument structure that “this project is very expensive, we could do many other valuable things with the same amount of funding as this project is set to get!” is valid, even if the funding couldn’t actually be decoupled from a given project in that way. Prioritizing projects is probably optimally done based on their value, and a very expensive project’s value is often not very high compared to smaller interventions.
What I find interesting about HS2 is that unlike some projects out there, it’s not hard to see why the price is so high. The line has the same expensive urban tunnels and urban stations as with HS1, with even more tunnels in the countryside — so much so that the prices are comparable with some metro projects! For the most part, other high speed rail lines do not approach major cities (Tokyo, Paris, Shanghai, Berlin) in long tunnels, and despite HS2 planning to do just this, it will not through operate trains onto HS1, instead using a space hungry and expensive terminal at Euston — costs are increased but transportation benefits are not increased nearly as much.
There are also a lot of smaller things that clearly didn’t help the costs that feel like concessions to NIMBYs — for example, allowing people to sell homes near the route at cost; or to (anti-electric rail) environmentalists, such as through trying to go diesel-free at HS2 construction sites. While some of these policies feel like good ideas, the macro-level sanity test worth running is asking: “do we want more high speed rail, which will have a huge positive environmental impact but potentially also some additional one-time carbon emissions to build it?”. I know what my answer would be, and that’s because when you step back from the level of a single construction site, it’s pretty obvious that the positive climate impact of big green infrastructure is huge.
What’s crazy is that I don’t see a ton of discourse out of Britain discussing what feels like pretty blatant overbuilding and cost inflating decisions, especially when there are probably less expensive alternatives that could have been used, for example for getting trains into the capital — albeit ones that might have meant accepting lower speeds, or — gasp — elevated viaducts like those seen on the Shinkansen in the Tokyo Metropolitan area.
Now, reading a CityLab article on the topic a quote from the chair of HS2 stuck out to me: “[the British are] more responsible builders than the French”. It seems absolutely crazy to claim that decision making which makes for more expensive and riskier projects is “responsible” just because it placates NIMBYs and special interests — is Paris blighted by all of the TGV trains running into it on the surface from all sides?
To be clear, there is a lot of this same general attitude all across the English-speaking world — somehow we have found ourselves claiming, or worse deluded ourselves into believing, that delivering a small amount of infrastructure that will bother nobody is better than delivering a large amount that will likely have huge benefits, in a sort of institutional NIMBYism.
I call it this because the logic feels the exact same; the benefit of affordable housing is a healthier, happier, and richer society — and the cost is neighbourhood change and people having to accept some level of built form change and the effects of population growth (things most reasonable people would agree are minor concessions); big benefits, low costs.
In much the same way, the benefit of affordable transit is better, cheaper, faster mobility — and the cost is some amount of noise and disruption (again, minor and mitigable concessions). To avoid small concessions from a small number of people, the public must pay a huge price, and risk delivering nothing at all if that price is deemed too high. This is not a good tradeoff, but much as with housing, it’s much easier to organize against large centralized projects than society being slowly boiled alive by high housing costs or poor transportation options!
A problem I often see when discussing these issues, particularly over around a decade of making YouTube videos, is that those trying to defend the status quo often look to micro-scale justifications for a project or intervention or simply the status quo being the way it is. A project had to be a certain way because of some specific technical constraint ad infinitum.
I actually think this is a pretty dishonest way of debating, and it leads to people missing the point. Saying “we needed to tunnel here!” but then seeing projects around the world in more or less comparable environments (you can see how localism and exceptionalism come in here — city X is nothing like city Y and could never learn from it), it seems pretty clear that on the macro-scale this is ridiculous.
Basically, these kind of debates suffer from the same fundamental issues that housing or transport does from NIMBYism: It’s very easy in all cases to identify a “fatal” issue or a specific thing for the dissenting side to take issue with, while the constructive side needs to assemble an argument based on things which are far more dispersed. Maybe you really do need one specific tunnel, but when you start saying you need to tunnel everything, I will raise both eyebrows.
And at the same time, as with many expensive projects in other parts of the world, those who are invested in the idea behind a project often grow stubbornly defensive of a particular instantiation of that project, often citing the “inevitability” of the current state of a project, despite it not being entirely clear that this was the only valid way to build. I think in general when it comes to politics and public works projects, supportive advocates too often fall prey to the common planner rebuttal “it’s impossible!”. So often, things are “impossible” until suddenly given different high-level direction they are not! The relevant example for HS2 might be that tunneling so much of the route to Birmingham was seen as necessary to satiate project opponents, but it’s not clear to me that 1) it was the only way to satiate them, and 2) they necessarily needed to be satiated. Of course, only the chosen alternative gets “tested” — “we build tunnels, NIMBYs don’t complain!” but of course, it’s also totally possible that trains could have run… above ground, like with the vast majority of the UK rail network, and people still mostly wouldn’t have complained.
All of this goes back to what ultimately feels like a bad case of the Nirvana Fallacy for many transit advocates in the English-speaking world. We believe that we can deliver a perfect, bother-nobody project, but that often just means delivering… no project (which, helpfully, only bothers people who want transit built and never NIMBYs). The reality is that until we build up more institutional capacity, which necessarily means building things, it doesn’t seem to be the case that we can afford to bother nobody even a bit.
Now, does all of this mean that the HS2 cancellation was somehow a good thing? No!
The current Conservative government is clearly being short sighted, and I think the way you know that is that they didn’t commit to overhauling plans for HS2, or trying to get costs for future legs down. High speed rail from London to the north and midlands is obviously a good idea, but instead they are just dropping the project, which is utterly insane. Worse still, it seems like plans might actually be to sell off lands safeguarded for HS2 (something the UK is good at) infrastructure, which feels malicious at this point.
Fortunately, there is something positive to take away from this. A big part of cost inflation in the English-speaking world seems to be our stubborn attitude towards slowly pushing hugely expensive projects forward without reforming them or trying to bring costs down. While a very strong desire to build stuff is clearly not the only reason we pay more for infrastructure, it doesn’t take much thinking to know why an “at any cost” attitude leads to… more costs!
The same problem is being faced all around the Anglosphere — big projects often with big benefits are coming back with huge price tags. Usually local advocates want these projects to go forward, even understanding the issues with high prices, because that’s a problem that has future implications. It’s a bit like an addiction: the desire to get something now leads to us sabotaging our future.
To bring it to Canada, selfishly speaking I wouldn’t be happy if say the Ontario Line — a project we’ve known we should be building for decades — got cancelled; I would lose something that mattered a lot to me and it’s not clear what I would gain (it’s not like the government will send me a cheque for “saved” tax dollars). But I could certainly entertain a reasonable argument that it should be canned and rethought, given its extremely high prices (what’s worse is that those prices are high despite a route that’s supposed to be a rational and fiscally prudent one that isn’t all underground — something which I wouldn’t exactly say about HS2). Pushing reform off into the future just means bigger and bigger problems today; cancelling projects because of high costs (I recently saw an interview where an official mentioned HS2 costing far more than projects in France, so it’s at least in the mind of policymakers) sends a signal that you will not build “at any cost”.
This brings us back to the top. Ultimately, high prices are bad, and I am growing sympathetic to calling them a “virus”. Had HS2 been half the price, I think it would be much less likely that it would be cancelled — the government would take just as much heat, but would be “unlocking” a lot less funding. At the same time, if the project was functionally the same but cost a lot less, its value (taken as benefits/costs) would be even higher — potentially by a multiple factor!
Of course, the UK Conservatives don’t seem to care about any of that, and I am sure that “replacement” projects for HS2 will also suffer from the same cost issues (which do seem to originate in large part from the deconstruction of state capacity a generation ago during the Reagan/Thatcher era) — just with less value to unlock in infrastructure that had already been built! The Conservatives are not cancelling HS2 to Manchester for good reasons, and their talk of a “war on motorists” should tell you as much.
In writing this article, I was reminded of parallels between HS2 and California High Speed Rail: I will probably do another article in the future about the strategy in building a railway. I’ve been critical of CAHSR starting in the central valley, but I am also critical of building an expensive urban approach to London for HS2. While this may seem inconsistent, there are real factors and differences in conditions that lead to this divergence. Stay tuned for more!
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