I’m on holiday. Bloody hell, lads I’m literally on holiday. As I write I am on a high-speed train hurtling south through France to the Mediterranean. The last thing I should be doing right now is reading the dumb-ass tweets sent by an essentially irrelevant Tory MEP, let alone obsessing about them, let alone writing about the bloody things.
But it turns out 6.5 hours is quite long as train journeys go, and the fact I can take this journey at all is making me feel quite well disposed towards high-speed rail in general, and for heaven’s sake just look at it.
Just as Hyperloop and driverless cars become a reality, we are borrowing tens of billions of pounds to spend on HS2. https://t.co/ZN9KTt3Jgc
— Daniel Hannan (@DanielJHannan) July 23, 2017
That Tweet links to Hannan’s Telegraph column, of which this is an excerpt:
Hyperloop may or may not turn out to be viable. Driverless cars almost certainly will: some of them are already in commercial use in the United States. So why is the Government still firehosing money at the rather Seventies idea of high-speed trains?
The short answer is that firehosing money is what governments do.
Well, no, that’s not the only reason is it? I can think of some others. For example:
1. Trains are faster than cars, driverless or otherwise.
2. High speed trains are faster still. Hence the name.
3. The biggest problem with cars as a form of mass transportation isn’t either pollution or the fact you have to do the driving yourself and so can’t do anything else at the same time (problems though those are). The biggest problem is that they’re an inefficient use of limited space. Trains not only move people faster, they take up less room while they do it. So driverless cars, marvellous though they may be, will not render the train redundant.
4. The hyperloop is still unproven, as Hannan himself admits, so the phrase “become a reality” seems just a teensy bit of a fib.
5. Honestly, nobody has ever travelled a single inch by hyperloop.
6. At the moment, like Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, it’s basically one big fever dream backed by an eccentric billionaire.
7. Frankly, I am pretty stunned to see one of Britain’s leading Brexiteers buying into a piece of fantastical utopian nonsense that would require detailed and complex planning to become a reality, but which is actually nothing more than a sketch on the back of a napkin.
8. (That last point was me doing a satire.)
9. Even if it happens one day, a hyperloop pod will carry a tiny fraction of the number of people a train can. So once again Hannan is defeated by his arch nemesis, the laws of space and time.
10. In other words, Hannan’s tweet translates roughly as, “Why is the government spending billions on this transport technology that actually exists, rather than alternatives which don’t, yet, and which won’t solve remotely the same problem anyway?”
11. High speed trains definitely exist. I’m on one now.
12. I really shouldn’t be thinking about either the hyperloop OR Daniel Hannan if I’m honest.
13. I wonder why the French are so much better at high speed trains than the British, and whether their comparative lack of whiny MEPs is a factor?
14. It feels somehow typical that even in a genuinely contentious argument (“Is HS2 really a good use of public money?”) when he has a genuinely good point to make (“The way the cost of major projects spirals during the planning stage is a significant public concern”), he still manages to come up with an argument so fantastically dim that bored transport nerds can spend long train journeys ripping it to shreds.
15. He could have gone with “let’s cancel HS2 and use a fraction of the saving to sort out the northern railway network”, but no.
16. Somehow I suspect he’s not really bothered about transport, he just wants to fight strawman about debt.
17. Also, of course we’re using debt to fund the first new national railway in a hundred years: what else are we going to do?
18. “Unbelievable that at a time when I need new shoes we are borrowing money to buy a house.”
19. Can I go back to my book now?
20. I said I was going to stop this, didn’t I.
21. This is a cry for help.
22. Please, somebody, stage an intervention.
Jonn Elledge is the editor of CityMetric. He is on Twitter as @jonnelledge and also has a Facebook page now for some reason.
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