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news
Flax Bourton Greenway (picture credit Sustrans)HS2 line could 'obliterate' brand new £1.2m greenway
HS2 could decimate a brand new £1.2m greenway, a local cycle tourism programme, cut off up to ten interconnected cycling and walking routes, and destroy future active travel links in Derbyshire, by failing to plan bridges and tunnels, road.cc has learned.
Derbyshire County Council is still building the (£1.2m) Clowne Branch Greenway, a 7.4km long traffic free cycling and walking route on a former railway line, but it could become a dead end once HS2, is built, ‘obliterating’ part of the Greenway. Campaigners are concerned HS2 Ltd has failed to acknowledge cycle routes in plans, despite their being highlighted in earlier consultations.
Last year HS2 Ltd was accused of backing down on its commitments to 'cycle proof' the rail line by providing bridges and tunnels for cycling, while this year a freedom of information request revealed scrapped plans for a cycle network within a three mile corridor of the line would have reaped five times greater returns than the high speed rail route itself.
The Clowne Branch Greenway, linking Cresswell and Staveley, is a key part of the county’s cycle network plans, and one of around ten existing or planned cycling and walking connections in Derbyshire, some twenty years in the planning, under threat from HS2.
pdf map of above image here
Sleepwalking into obliteration?
Although it is not too late to save the network Steve Crapper, of Ride Bolsover, the local cycling campaign, told road.cc if action is not taken two branches of the HS2 line, the main route and a branch line to a depot, will together “obliterate a large area of the Greenway”.
Crapper says HS2 Ltd hasn’t yet taken these into account in plans, after being made aware of them in earlier consultation. Derbyshire County Council plans to link several cycle routes together, hoping cycle tourists will help boost the local economy.
“With a trend towards gravel biking and bike packing there’s a massive amount of tourism to unlock if you can connect all of these trails together. It’s an amazing opportunity that’s not being prioritised,” he said.
An as yet unbuilt route between Staveley and Hardwick Hall, a popular National Trust property, could be one of the most valuable links in the National Cycle Network, according to Sustrans co-founder, John Grimshaw. He says if built, a new 8km section would connect 40km of cycle route.
"Proper regeneration" on hold
A short section of the completed Chesterfield Canal is used by 50,000 walkers and 25,000 cyclists per year. Restored over the past 20 years, just eight or nine miles of unfinished canal separates a possible 46-mile, traffic free, flat route.
The Chesterfield Canal Trust says without adequate width on a tunnel for a towpath, users would be forced to make long diversions onto roads. The Trans Pennine Trail, which crosses the HS2 route at the same point, faces the same fate.
Rod Auton, from the Chesterfield Canal Trust, told road.cc HS2 Ltd is “ridiculously vague” when they discuss the tunnel. “Trying to get a written agreement is proving almost impossible”, he said.
“You’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of jobs being created. It’s not just pretty, it’s proper regeneration, it’s going through coal mining communities that still haven’t recovered from the pit closures of the ‘80s and ‘90s. The bits that have been restored are incredibly successful.”
“As long as there’s uncertainty we can’t apply for major grants”.
Both Steve Crapper and Rod Auton are concerned cycling links without planning permission, or that aren’t formally adopted by the council, are particularly at risk.
HS2: "seeking to enable connectivity"
An HS2 Ltd spokesperson said they are “seeking to enable connectivity along the whole of the Greenway route”.
“HS2 aims to be one of the most environmentally responsible infrastructure projects ever delivered in the UK”, the spokesperson said.
“Where possible, the railway will be designed so that public rights of way are carried over or under the railway.
“Along with continual engagement with Bolsover District Council and Derbyshire County Council, groups such as Ride Bolsover have a huge role to play in the development of our design. Their feedback to our recent public consultation will help us identify opportunities where cycling can be incorporated into the landscape of the UK’s new high speed railway. For example, we’ve been working with stakeholders on the Clowne Branch Line Greenway proposals and are seeking to enable connectivity along the whole of the Greenway route.”
A DfT Spokesperson said: “We want to make cycling and walking the natural choice for shorter journeys, and recognise the importance of the routes which connect communities across the UK. That is why we are investing around £2 billion in cycling and walking over the course of this Parliament, doubling spending per head compared to the last Spending Review period.
“HS2 Ltd is committed to retaining existing connectivity – including cycle paths – and we would expect this to extend to routes which are fundamental to achieving our cycling ambitions in the UK.”
Derbyshire County Council pointed road.cc to its consultation response, here (cycling from p228 onward)
Laura Laker is a freelance journalist with more than a decade’s experience covering cycling, walking and wheeling (and other means of transport). Beginning her career with road.cc, Laura has also written for national and specialist titles of all stripes. One part of the popular Streets Ahead podcast, she sometimes appears as a talking head on TV and radio, and in real life at conferences and festivals. She is also the author of Potholes and Pavements: a Bumpy Ride on Britain’s National Cycle Network.
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32 comments
https://www.greenparty.org.uk/news/2019/02/11/greens-time-to-put-hs2-out-of-its-misery/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49048823
Ho-hum...
There's a way of managing software projects that I think should be applied to other areas as well. Basically, projects should be allowed to fail early as soon as there's a reasonable expectation that it's not going to deliver the required results on-time and within costs.
Unfortunately, people get emotionally attached to big projects and they (projects) are often seen as too big to fail especially after quite a bit of money has been spent on them. This is a common fallacy, though as sunk costs are no indication of whether it is worth continuing or not - you need to look at the expected return on future costs.
It's far better to fail fast and early and the HS2 seems to be a perfect example of this.
I'd like to see a lot more freight transported by rail, between ports and hub terminals around the country and then to smaller lorries for local distribution.
By which I mean, I'd like to see a lot fewer HGVs on the roads.
HS2 will never cover its operating costs without ongoing subsidy from the taxpayer, let alone make any kind of return on the initial investment. However, fortunes will be made by a select group of influential and well positioned people along the way.
A bit like the old British railways then! Small 3 wheeled delivery trucks, goods vans, bikes alowed, I wallow in reminiscence!
Yep, scrap HS2 and spend the cash on cycling infrastructure instead.
And let the WCML grind to a halt . Great plan.
It'd make far more sense to add capacity to WCML as a separate, new project than carry on with the farce that HS2 has become.
The word decimate means to kill by 10s. In WWI, the Italian generals were so incensed at the failure of their soldiers when fighting Austrian forces, that they ordered every 10th Italian soldier who was retreating to be taken out and shot. Apparently this policey, called decimation, was intended to incentivise the remaining troops.
There you go, a bit of horrible history. That's where the word comes from.
Think you will find it is a bit older, Roman army.
Interesting, so the Italian generals of WWI reintroduced something horrible from the Romans?
"A cohort (roughly 480 soldiers) selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten. Each group drew lots (sortition), and the soldier on whom the lot of the shortest straw fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning, clubbing, or stabbing. The remaining soldiers were often given rations of barley instead of wheat (the latter being the standard soldier's diet) for a few days, and required to bivouac outside the fortified security of the camp for some time.
As the punishment fell by lot, all soldiers in a group sentenced to decimation were potentially liable for execution, regardless of individual degrees of fault, rank, or distinction."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)
Never heard the WW1 reference, as Grahamd says, I've always heard it related to the Romans. I have heard the Italian performance in that war described as 'the fastest retreat in history'. Probably the birth of a stereotype right there, but to be fair, 'not being keen to fight in WW1' sounds perfectly sensible to me. After all, if the British and Americans had done that, the Germans would just have conquered France (again) and we'd have had a Europe united with Germany as the dominant power. Which is where we've ended up anyway, but with millions more deaths along the way.
But also I've always thought it was pedantic to argue the word means 'losing 1 in 10', because, really, that's not how the term is ever used now. I don't think we even need a special term for '10% loss' because that's not in most scenarios a particularly high loss rate, for troops or anything else.
We do seem to need a word to mean 'reduced to 10%' because that's really dramatic and worth remarking on. So as far as I'm concerned, that's what the word now means.
Cycling lanes might be a no-brainer but that doesn't mean they will happen. HS2 looks to me like a staggeringly expensive and highly destructive white elephant based on a discredited business plan. If it ever gets built its main effect will be to provide more commuting capacity for people working in London.
Spot on. HS2 has never had an economic case, and just think what would happen to cycling if they spent the £56bn on that instead; we could have the best cycle network in the world, and it would have huge economic benefit. HS2 is an ego scheme not an eco scheme.
Some people are saying it's going to be closer to £100Bn! The whole idiocy of this project beggars beliif. When you have people travelling by car to get to node stations thus actually travel times will be longer so any speed/time gain on the track itself is lost. Not to mention you'll have more driving miles to get to the node stations, more pollution and more crashes, the whole thing is a fecking tip off dogs dinner.
Yeah, but government-lobbying people-who-know-the-right-people will all make a lot of money out of it, so it's all good
tbh, some people will have made a fortune out of it already, even if it was cancelled tomorrow
Mmm, 50:50. Part of it is a vanity project and MPs like those. Garden bridges, estuary airports, millemium domes. Some sort of legacy. None of the MPs seem remotely concerned that the project might be beset by delays, rising costs etc and a whole load of negative publicity - every single time anything like this is propsoed there are always MPs jumping straight onto the bandwagon.
That said, there are a couple of points about it. One is that you can get away without building a third runway at Heathrow if you can use Birmingham and Manchester as "London" airports via a high-speed rail link. and the other one, as mentioned above already is that without HS2, the economic case of HS3 and 4 is much less persuasive and the North desperately needs more rail investment. Crossrail alone has got 9x the investment of every northern rail project combined. That's how bad things are up north and HS2 is widely seen as the gateway to opening all that extra investment.
However - in the rush to get HS2 built and faced with spiralling costs, no-one seems to have really considered the integrated transport approach, cycle routes, walking routes, greenways etc. Which is a criminal waste of opportunity.
Duplicated - ignore!
I agree with everything that crazy-legs has said there. There will have to be an access road built along most of it, and with a little bit of thought, especially around tunnels through hills and bridges over valleys, wouldn't add to much to the massive budget, the same with pedestrian and cycle bridges and tunnels that cross it. Penny pinching, as I understand it, a cycle route alongside was part of the original plans, but got to save tiny amounts.
Yes it is a money pit, but it is an investment in the future, and you never know, it might be appreciated in a century, because rail is the future. I bet the French aand Japanese really regret investing in high speed rail. And the Chinese, Germans and Italians.
Without HS2 you cannot have HS3, or 4, or a high speed rail network we could be proud of, with less desire to fly, and all of the benifits it could bring.
I'm beginning to think the Govt is just like a cyclist. Bear with me.
We have a perfectly good bike in the garage/shed/utility room, and it's served us pretty well for quite some time now, but it needs a bit of TLC to bring it up to scratch again. But what do we do? We leave it to rot and spunk a load of cash that we can't really afford on a shiny new one.
Oh...it'll make me faster, it'll be more efficient, it'll get from A to B 10% quicker..etc..etc..etc.
The only difference between a brand new carbon beauty and HS2 is that I don't expect the UK taxpayer to buy it for me!
Time to bin the White Elephant, and invest in the existing rail network in the North of England.
The slight problem is that the existing rail network is already at or very near capacity and you have the often ridiculous scenario where intercity and local stopping services are trying to use parts of the same line (not to mention freight services). The theory of increasing capacity via HS2 is pretty good although obviously it all needs to be implented...
Personally I'd say that the entire track should have a cycle network alongside it linking into cities, towns, villages en route and there should be absolute guarantee that any crossing points are maintained. I bet they've taken the roads into account - they're not going to put a dead end on a main road if the HS2 goes over it, they'll include a bridge or underpass or tunnel so if it can be done for roads it should be done for ALL rights of way - farm tracks, footpaths, bridleways etc.
And if you're ripping up all that land for train tracks, it's easy to pop a cycle lane in alongside it too so there should be the option to create new linking bits of network to a good and consistent standard right the way along the length of HS2.
Except that HS2 is nothing at all to do with expanding rail capacity and everything to do with creating a super expensive luxury premium service for those who can afford it.
(I agree with the rest of your post, about building cycle lanes alongside it
)
Er yes it is. It’s exaclty do do with that. The WCML will be full by the early 2020s, and the extra capacity provide by HS2 is desperately needed.
You really think that? Aww, thats so sweet
WCML filling up? OK, so invest in the WMCL.
HS2 is a luxury vanity project - a Garden Bridge with rails.
How exactly do you invest in West Coast Main Line? You can't fit more trains on it - it's already full of a mixture of freight, intercity passenger and local passenger service. You can't build more stations or put in more platforms because the stations are already there in towns and cities so expanding is incredibly complex. The bridges, tunnels etc on the route are already there so you can't add more rails alongside because you then have existing pinch points (bridges over / under motorways etc).
Something needs to be done to increase rail capacity. HS2 is currently that "something".
Regarding costs and expenses, there's an argument to say that transport should all be subsidised as it's for the benefit of the entire country. It should not be there to make a profit necessarily.
But HS2 is sod-all to do with the 'normal' rail network. They're not going to be running the normal trains - the ones that have filled up the WCML - on it, because they'll just hold up the super speedy luxe HS2 Trains.
As on your final point, I think that once upon a time this entity called "British Rail" ran the railways. A bit rubbish, but centrally/nationally owned and run.
Then some people decided that it was far better if we had competition (except that they thought of it as COMPETITION!!!!), and that didn't work too. Well, it worked fine for the shareholders taking money out of it, and it was still massively subsidised by central government...
Of course HS2 is to do with the "normal" railway. It will take strain off the WCML, which is the point of it. And track and infrastructure are already nationally owned and run.
I don't "think" that, I know that, because that is what has been stated by NR.
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