One of the things I like in Top Gear is the races, where Clarkson has to get somewhere by car and Hammond and May have to do it by public transport. And almost every time, the car wins. And it generally wins because whilst a train can travel a lot faster, once you add in all the dead time waiting for connections and the slow connections at each end of the fast bit, the overall journey time takes longer.
Many years ago, I used to go to Glasgow on business. I'd leave home, get a train to London, train to Heathrow, plane to Glasgow and then a taxi to my final destination. But in reality, it wasn't that much quicker than driving to Glasgow. And that was because of all the bits of dead time in there - waiting for my train, allowing enough time to get to the airport, time after check-in, baggage reclaim etc.
We ended up driving to Disneyland Paris recently because despite it being 2 and a half hours from London to Paris on high-speed rail, you then add in the time at Swindon station, the time waiting for the tube, the time to check-in at St Pancras, the time to get out from the middle of Paris to Marne-la-Vallee and you're up to 6 hours, and you can do the journey by car in just over 7 for a quarter of the cost.
It's why I'm rather sceptical about many of the benefits about high speed rail and how it connects London and Manchester and Birmingham and will facilitate trade. If you're going from an office in central Manchester to an office in central Birmingham, that might be the case. But if any of those are slightly outside the city centre, and not very far out, you have the extra connection times, and the train being 30 minutes faster than a car is going to dissolve rather quickly.
Debate Magazine
