Conservative Rail Plan
From The BBC:-
The Tories say they would scrap plans for a third runway at Heathrow and build a high-speed rail line instead.
They are proposing to create a new line linking London St Pancras, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds - saying it would cut Heathrow flights by 66,000 a year.
then…
He (BAA’s spokesman) said flights to Manchester and Leeds Bradford airport made up less than 3% of Heathrow’s total flights.
Who do you believe? Personally, I find the Conservative figure hard to believe. I just checked tomorrow’s flights for Heathrow to Manchester with BA and BMI and there were 16 flights. The likes of Easyjet and Ryanair don’t fly that route and I doubt that Leeds has the same number of flights of Heathrow.
So, the Conservative plan is to spend £15 billion of public money, instead of allowing a runway (which would cost nothing). The result of this is to deal with 3% of the capacity that runway 3 would provide.
RSS
They are mad.
Is there any study anywhere looking at the relative CO2 emissions of flying verses rail? Even assuming that CO2 emissions were a bad thing, who’s to say that flying isn’t actually not quite so bad per passenger mile, if you include all the steel for the rails, the fact that railway carriages are heavier than planes, the lighting at stations etc etc.
Until they do such a study and prove it one way or another, there is no reason to favour one form of transport over another.
I’m pretty sure that railways produce less CO2 from what I read, but I’m not sure about the numbers. It doesn’t really matter because it pays for itself (if you use Stern figures).
Whether you believe in AGW or not, the principle is simple - polluters should pay. Calculate it accurately and get people to pay and let the market work out the rest.
OK, but now I think about it, there’s no need to ‘calculate it accurately’ (even if that were possible).
If there is a straight CO2 tax at source, i.e. on coal, petrol, diesel, charcoal, whatever, and no further distortions in the tax system or no further subsidies (actually, I’d put a tax on landing slots at airports, different topic - this sort of evens up the fact that railways have to pay for physical land all along the stretch of track*) then it would sort itself out.
* In my perfect world, there’d be Land Value Tax on the railway stations (and on the tracks as well, why not), so there’d be a parallel airborne Land Value Tax to compensate people who live in flight paths and to pay for local transport links to and from airport etc.