What do you do? Why, you start work on another scheme just like it, only worse.
Even as she publishes a report criticising her predecessors for rushing into immature schemes for political reasons, and making promises they could not keep, Alexander is about to do precisely the same.
Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram said journey times between Liverpool and Manchester Airport could be reduced to 32 minutes with a new railway (Photo: ilbusca/E+/Getty)It will be a high-speed railway on which trains will never be able to reach high speeds because the stations are too close together.
The distance between the two cities will be a third greater than the current line.
The price? According to the people pushing the project, the line will cost £17bn. This is enough to electrify every existing rail line in the North and give four cities a new tram system. In reality, perhaps £30 or £40bn.
The real reason, almost certainly, is that those first eight miles in the wrong direction were also slated to carry the northern leg of HS2, Phase 2a and 2b, which were cancelled in 2023.
Rishi Sunak axed HS2 north of Birmingham in 2023So as well as Liverpool-Manchester, we could be on the hook for a third disastrous high-speed scheme, a reinstated HS2 northern leg.
Yet for most of the last decade, long-distance high-speed rail has dominated, distorted and damaged British transport policy – at the direct expense of things which matter far more.
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Between 2010 and 2015, it added 58 new stops. In the last decade, it has added only six.
But public transport is a network. Creating better public transport means creating a better network – allowing people in thousands of places to travel easily door-to-door, often by connecting from a train to a tram or bus. It does not mean grafting one or two new high-speed lines, serving a handful of places, onto an otherwise decrepit system.
But the key capacity problem of the North’s railway is at nodes – chokepoints, like central Manchester, where all the trains converge.
Could Manchester and Liverpool follow London?
A two-track tunnel could, like its London sister, run 30 trains an hour, five times more than the service proposed for the Liverpool-Manchester high-speed track.
The Government will make some kind of commitment to a high-speed rail project between Liverpool and Manchester within weeks (Photo: Ceri Breeze/Getty)
It would be both transformative and deliverable. It would, admittedly, make less money for the likes of Arup and Balfour Beatty.
Andrew Gilligan is head of transport at Policy Exchange.
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