Month: November 2021

 

 

I was in France for a couple of weeks before the Integrated Rail Plan was launched, so I thought it might be instructive to have a look at how Public Transport works over the Channel. 

High Speed Rail

We spent some time in Arcachon, a seaside small town on the Atlantic coast near Bordeaux, where I noted that if I wanted to I could catch the 05:45 TGV service to Paris and arrive at 08:45, in time for a morning meeting or a day’s work – a distance of 646kms. We were in Bordeaux on Sunday evening and noted 3 trains leaving for Paris at the end of a holiday weekend within 30 minutes, each doubled-up TGV units and full – nearly 1,000 passengers per train. 

ER train from Arcachon to Bordeaux

We took the direct TGV from Bordeaux to Brussels, avoiding Paris and changing at Lille for the Eurostar. France is now banning internal flights on many routes because there is no need for this wasteful high-carbon mode of travel.  When we got back to the UK we had the choice of a diesel train taking over 2 hours to cover the 165 miles to Sheffield, or a  cheaper journey on an electric train, changing at Doncaster. Britain’s failure to invest in rail has left us as a backward-facing, parochial laughing stock in Europe (although the people we met were far too polite to say so) and the HS2 debacle risks making matters worse.

Local transport in Pau

Pau is a smallish city in the Pyrenees region of France (but not in the mountains themselves) having a city population of about 85,000, and a regional population of 200k – so about half the size of Sheffield. 

The city centre has a transport problem that is by no means unique to Pau. The station is at the bottom of the valley, with rivers running beside and underneath, and there is a steep climb up to the city centre.  Sound familiar? So what has Pau done about it? Well, there’s a free funicular railway – it carries bikes of course, and is used by .5m people per year.

Once you are in the City Centre, the jolie free electric Navette bus will get you around.

Bikes, electric and normal, are very much in evidence including La Poste’s fleet of E-cargo bikes,  – they have at least 5,000 and Project Management types will be interested to learn that they use Lean/Six Sigma to maintain them. Where are the UK Post Office e-bikes?

Motor traffic is severely limited and the centre is a thriving, very pleasant place to stroll about, find a cafe, bar or restaurant, etc.

Voie Vertes (Greenways)

France has embarked on a programme of converting disused railway lines into Greenways. 

One such runs from Lourdes past Argelès-Gazost to Sonome, where bike paths and quieter roads take you up into the High Pyrenees and the famous cols. The path is surfaced with tarmac and has three types of access control in place:- 

All of these seem intended only to slow cyclists down or prepare walkers when there is a road to cross. They wouldn’t keep a motorcyclist out and indeed we saw no motorcyclists on the trail – it doesn’t seem to occur to French motorcyclists to try to use them! We did see La Poste on their e-cargo bikes – great for getting around this mountainous area. 

COVID Precautions

France has kept some COVID Restrictions in place. Masks are obligatory on Public Transport and you need a Covid passport, showing that you have been vaccinated twice, to enter restaurants, bars, museums etc. Consequently, as over-65s we felt much safer going into these places and using public transport. The rules were generally adhered to but less so in the quieter town we visited where we felt less at risk anyway. Coming back to the UK it feels like the Wild West where people are completely reckless with their health and that of others. All you can do is get your booster jab and hope for the best!

So I’ve actually read it, appropriately enough while travelling from Lille to Sheffield via Eurostar/LNER/Northern, I must say that it addresses a lot of the concerns that Greens have had about HS2 – that it has too big a land take, that it doesn’t serve the right places, that the journey time improvements don’t justify the expense, that decarbonising the existing network should be the priority, etc. For the East Midlands, instead of building a new interchange at Toton, it makes use of under-used East Midlands Parkway via a new High-Speed line from Birmingham (So the newspaper headlines that Phase 2b has been “axed” is a little bit inaccurate).

However, the new line won’t go into Birmingham itself so we will continue to rely on Cross-Country for that journey.  Parkway stations generate motor traffic, so the prospect that the trains will then be able to access Nottingham and Derby has to be a good thing. Arrival at Sheffield will be at the existing station. The report suggests that journey times would be similar to those predicted via a new High Speed  line throughout. There is however a focus on journey times in the report and not much on capacity – if we are to get more freight onto rail we need that extra capacity that HS2 would have brought. 

The Midland Main Line will be fully electrified – at last! Much is made of the decarbonisation aspects of this. They suggest that HS2 benefits can be brought to the region much more quickly by this option.The electrification stops at Sheffield though. It will be interesting to see whether the local improvements we have been promised come to fruition – Stockbridge, Barrow Hill etc. 

Doncaster, York etc would continue to be served by the ECML which is also to get some upgrades

So not too bad for Sheffield & the East Mids then. Not so good for West Yorks. The report says they will “look at” how the line can best be delivered to Leeds.  There was speculation that a high speed line would  be built between Sheffield and Leeds (I think most likely via the Dearne Valley) but I have yet to see that in the report. 

Leeds is to get, at long last, a mass transit system (the report doesn’t specify whether this will be bus, tram. Metro or something else)

Northern Powerhouse Rail instead of being a network of high-speed routes across the North, becomes an upgrade to the existing route, which was supposed to happen anyway, and the report suggests that under the previous plan they would have just finished that upgrade and then started building another line. Sheffield would have been connected to NPR that opportunity has been lost. 

Bradford loses the prospect of a through route under the city, although there was already some controversy over the siting of the station for this. The line from Leeds to Bradford via New Pudsey is to be electrified – I’m not sure what benefits that brings, since the trains using that route continue to Manchester via the Calder Valley and I’ve seen no hint that line is going to be electrified. 

Manchester & the North-West pretty much get what they were expecting  but the Mayors have been good enough to pile in to support those areas that are losing out.

So what do the pundits say? Christian Wolmar grudgingly seems to admit that it’s a pretty good plan, but doubts that we can trust Boris to deliver it, with some justification I feel. Paul Salveson thinks that HS2 is fundamentally flawed anyway, mostly for being too London-centric  However, we can blame the Romans for Britain having a London-centric transport system and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. Nevertheless, Northerners are seeing this as another betrayal from a government of serial liars who were never serious about “levelling up.”