Since then, give or take a few peripheral arguments over the succeeding decades, the notion that ‘generalised cost’ largely consists of these time savings, has become entrenched in transport planners’ collective psyche. It is comforting to us, like well-worn slippers under our desks. They are always there, these time savings, warding off the chill of unwelcome complications. But they’ve got a bit old now, and, quite frankly, are smelling a bit off.

When the metaphorical slippers were new in the sixties, it would take nine hours to drive from Penzance to London, and hardly anyone from Tunbridge Wells would spend the weekend shopping in New York. The world was a much larger place then and people lusted for ‘progress’. Just a few years before, in 1956, the Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee was set up and, in 1975, the Concorde started carrying paying passengers. The builders thought people wanted to go fast, but apparently didn’t bother asking them and most people went by Jumbo instead.

In 1981, the first section of the Paris-Lyon TGV Sud-Est was opened and it achieved a time saving of some 30% over the old network, down to 2 hours. Surveys at the time, revealed a demand elasticity in respect to journey time of between 1.1 and 1.6.

The current journey time of 3 hours 9 minutes from Newcastle-upon-Tyne to London will be cut by HS2 to 2 hours 37 minutes, the distance being about the same as from Lyon to Paris, but having six intermediate stops, whereas the TGV Sud-Est has only two. According to Appendix 1D of the Model Development Report to HS2, the business time elasticity for this journey would be 3.07.

This looks optimistic by comparison to the 1980s TGV figures, but let us suppose, for the moment, that the 32-minute saving will actually be that attractive and there will be an immediate switch of allegiance of, say, 3.07 x 32/189 = 52% of business travellers from the conventional rail services to the new railway. Yes, okay, there may be some new passengers from cars and planes, but let’s pretend the branding on the ‘High Speed’ train is Very Attractive and this will be additional.

The problem is that the TGV Sud-Est was not exactly what is now being called a High Speed Train. It operated at no more than 300kph, whereas the HS2 journey times have been based on a maximum speed of nearly 400 kph. Evidently, the HS2 designers have believed that ‘Very Attractive’ means ‘very high speed’.

Please stick with me because I am about to venture into climate change territory; I shall come back later.

Just suppose we have a new network, equipped with 300kph trains. It’s not, then, unreasonable to guess that we might achieve a time saving of, say, half that of the HS2, i.e. 16 minutes between Newcastle and London. Now, wind resistance is proportional to the square of speed according to the Association of Train Operating Companies in their report to Greengauge21.

So the energy consumption of a train travelling at 400kph is four times that of a conventional train at 200kph and nearly twice that at 300kph. And UK energy generation is not due to be 80% decarbonised until 2050, whereas the first stage of HS2 is programmed for implementation in 2027. So, to achieve Very Attractiveness, we risk damaging the climate even further. How do the HS2 promoters get around that one?

Let’s go back to journey time.

Since Beesley and Co undertook their groundbreaking economic work in the 1960s, apart from climate change awareness, three other important developments have taken place. The first, I have mentioned – in general, most of us can get anywhere quicker than we could in 1960 and so basic need is less acute. The second development is IT, and the third is consumerism.

Taking IT first; Lyons, Jain and Holley of the Centre for Transport & Society, University of the West of England surveyed the use of journey time by rail passengers in 2004/05, and revealed the remarkable extent to which rail travel offers useful time. This was followed, in 2007 by the well-known study entitled Travel Time Use in the Information Age in collaboration with the Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University. Then, in 2008, the Department for Transport commissioned The Value of Travel Time Saving for Travellers in the Course of Work, and this concluded: “The benefits now afforded by rail as a potential working environment are evident … There is a possible connection of developments in the last decade” (in terms of work practices and IT devices) “to the growth in rail demand which is unexplained by most current demand models.”

The third development has to do with the way that consumer-focussed organisations go about decision making. Perhaps it is best illustrated by the report commissioned by Virgin Rail entitled, The Railways Mean Business, Attracting Business Travellers from Air to Rail. Written by John Warren of Transform Scotland, it draws together market research that has been designed to discover the deeper desires of customers than can be got from the conventional transport planning ‘rational utility’ questionnaires and trade-off surveys like stated preference. Warren refers to research undertaken in the American Express and Barclaycard Business travel surveys and others, and concludes that, although business travellers value punctuality and reliability most highly of all attributes, they also value highly the ability to work in comfort on the train.

Whilst many people, prima facie, said they were attracted by faster travel, as anyone might if they’re not paying much for it, it was not the top priority, the reality being that balances needed to be struck between accessibility, waiting time and the ability to use travel time productively.

The Virgin Rail report implies that, if we were to provide a reliable new network, easily accessed with more stations than currently proposed, and we provide rolling stock that gives space to work in comfort, then we would be giving the punters what they actually want. By assuming that speed is the prime target, the designers have limited the number of stations and points of access – which is what travellers clearly don’t want – and, worse still, have specified an energy greedy system. It therefore looks likely that they’re going to have to cram us into this train to make it financially viable and to get the CO2 emissions per seat down to levels that deter green protesters from lying on the line.

At this point, I should like to refer to the Deutsche Bahn website blurb. It’s worth a look. The emphasis is upon comfort, space and wi-fi connectivity. There’s no mention of very high speed that I can see, so the German ICE 300kph network would seem to be fast enough to keep their little economy going then? I wonder how the advertising for the HS2 from Newcastle will read: ‘You won’t have space to swing a laptop, but – hey – who cares, you’ll get there a whole 16 minutes quicker.’

Peter Wiltshire has spent 35 years in transport planning was a member of the committee for The Transport Planning Society and was a Member of the Transport Board of the Institution of Civil Engineers.