The Wardman Wire

Theresa Villiers’ transport policy announcement on rejecting a third runway at Heathrow and instead building high speed rail, as you may have gathered, has not gone down well with me at all! For some reason the Tories are linking high speed rail with Heathrow expansion when the two are unrelated. The Tories say that it will be more environmentally friendly and provide extra capacity for the reduction in flights. Hmmm, interesting. Read this extract from a transport report:

A high speed train at 200kmph uses 60% of its energy requirement to overcome air resistance, a figure which rises to 90% at 300kmph. Increasing train speeds from 225 to 300kmph on the West Coast Main line would mean a 90% increase in energy usage for a 15% decrease in journey time.

When everyone is so conscious of not wasting energy is this a good use of scare resources, let alone environmental damage? Two other questions need to be answered. Raising line speeds decreases capacity yet the main problem with the UK’s rail network is shortage of capacity, not lack of speed.

So high speed trains actually increase energy use by 90% (not to mention the environmental damage) and decreases capacity, not the other way round as the Villiers is claiming. And who says so? Why, the Conservative Transport Group of course in paper titled “Transport: where the Conservatives have the better moves”.

The Tories still have some way to go before they can be taken seriously on policy. While I don’t think the Tories need be too worried about losing their lead in the polls, as Sean Locke said on 8 out of 10 Cats the other night “Gordon Brown could walk out of Downing Street with Bin Laden on a lead barking like a dog, and the electorate would still tell him to go away, you’ve blown it”. But as an election does get closer, they are going to have to start putting together coherent and sensible policies not ones that appease sections of their core vote in key localised areas.

Let’s see what Cameron has to say this afternoon…