Pave over the railways to improve transport

Is it time we abandoned railways and converted them to express coach ways? Paul Withrington, director of Transport-Watch says it would cut pollution, costs and increase capacity.

London’s crushed commuters will be dismayed to know that, if the railways were not a kind of religion, their fares would be up to 50% cheaper, seats would be guaranteed, the service would be more frequent, the speeds would be similar except for on the longest journeys, fuel consumption and carbon emission would be reduced, and so would casualties. Tens of thousands of lorries and other vehicles could divert to the railway from the unsuitable city streets which they now clog.

Unfortunately, this benign state depends on paving over the railways and replacing the trains by express coaches and lorries. This initially seems so counter-intuitive as to be barking. The challenge is that the gulf between the railway myth and reality is so large as to beggar belief. However, it is not my fault if the arithmetic comes out the way it does.

The idea is not mine, nor is it new. Instead it is Brigadier Lloyd’s. His paper, “The British Railways' System as a Reserved Roadway System”, was read to the Institution of Civil Engineers on 26^th April 1955. It led to exhaustive correspondence in the Engineer at the time.

Here are some snapshots:

• The width between tunnel and viaduct walls on a double track line is 7.3m, the same as required for the carriageway of a two-way trunk road. Elsewhere, 8.5m is available, more on bends. On the approaches to towns and cities the widths are huge. Roads on those alignments would be vastly superior to the tarmacked cow trails which double as A-roads for so much of the UK’s road network.

• One lane of a motor road may carry 1,000 express coaches per hour at 60 mph. Headways would then average 100 metres. Given 75-seat coaches, we would have 75,000 seats per hour. That’s more than double the 30,000 crushed peak hour passengers arriving at Victoria Main Line in trains requiring four inbound tracks. For proof, see the express coach lane in New York. It is 11 feet wide, a foot less than the standard in the UK, yet it carries close to 700 45-seat buses in the peak hour, offering 30,000 seats. Likewise the nimble bus uses terminal space many times as efficiently as does the lumbering train. The truth is that, in the peak hour and in Central London, that vast grade-separated rail network is, in highway terms, used to only one seventh of its capacity. Outside the peak the network is a place of dreams – try any platform at lunch time.

• If the national rail function were discharged by express coaches and lorries then the flow, averaged over the rail network, would amount to some 450 vehicles per day per track, a flow so trivial it would be entirely lost in one lane of a motor road.

• Replacement express coaches and lorries would use substantially less fuel and emit less carbon than do the trains. That saving would be dwarfed by the saving from the tens of thousands of lorries and other vehicles which could divert from the unsuitable city streets which they now clog.

• Amazingly, if trespassers but not suicides are included, the deaths per passenger-kilometre by rail is the same or above that of the strategic road network, let alone the saving of life and limb which would arise from diverting tens of thousands of vehicles from the historic road network to a segregated and well aligned system.

• The strategic road network is roughly twice as productive per lane-km as is rail per track-kilometre and carries four times the traffic. Despite that the government spends roughly twice as much on rail as it does on strategic roads.

• It costs the government seven times as much to move a passenger or tonne of freight by rail as it does by the strategic road network.

• The cost of converting the rail network to system of motor roads would be roughly £20bn; a mere peanut compared with the anticipated expenditure on national rail for the decade to 2018/19. That amounts to £90bn including finance charges or to £76bn excluding those charges. Till income to Network rail (not the fares to the TOCs) may be circa £24bn. Hence the implied subsidy is £65bn, excluding Crossrail and HS2. Debt will then amount to over £40bn.

Detailed arithmetic substantiating these claims can be found at www.transport-watch.co.uk.

As Mark Twain said “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”

This article follows the publication by the Institute of Economic Affairs earlier this year of the report “Paving Over the Tracks”, which can be downloaded here.