Bottoming Out or Approaching the Edge?

Apparently we're entering crunch time in the Dump Biden saga.  Biden, unfortunately, has caught COVID-19, taking him off the campaign trail for several days.  That has created another lever for those who are trying to get rid of Biden to use against him.  Apparently there are rumors "major donors" are now threatening to take their money away if he stays in, and as a result he is about to fold.  Of course, I am getting these rumors 3rd- or 4th- or 5th- or 27th-hand, so I have no way to verify them or what Biden's actual thinking is at the moment.  I'm just reacting to the flow of (potential) bullshit in my information streams.

Let me clear: I have thought Dump Biden has been a hit on Biden since day one.  There is not an organic groundswell among the Democratic primary voters based on the 6/28 debate to change who they selected in 50+ primaries.  This is a top-down, rich male-driven attack that does not have the country's best interest in mind,* blasted through a media that is owned by many of the same people but that also has its own parallel interests.  It's a one-way bet for both groups - either they cripple Biden and Trump wins, or they get a shitty replacement and Trump wins, or they get the exact replacement they (and not the Democratic base) want and that person wins, and is beholden to them.  Even Harris, if she survives this putsch and is the replacement candidate, may feel obligated to them (though I would like to think not), or at least very intimidated by what they just accomplished.  No matter the outcome, rich males will get tax cuts and the media will get a controversial, click-bait-ready president.  Everybody else will lose.

I very strongly prefer that Biden stays in.  I believe he can beat Trump - or at least could have beaten Trump before the hit on him was ordered.  Things have gotten murkier since the media blitz against Biden began, and the attempted assassination of Trump did not help.  Biden may be irreparably damaged among low-info swing voters who don't know much but do respond to the general tone of media coverage.  Of course, if the media decided to stop putting its thumb on one side of the scale and try the other one for a change, those swing voters would pick up different vibes.  That won't happen, especially now.  But it's also not clear to me that a replacement will suddenly surge in the polls, even with good vibes from the temporarily placated media.  For better or worse, even if the replacement is Johnny Unbeatable, some segment of the Democratic coalition will be bitter about what has transpired, rendering ole' Johnny eminently beatable.

No matter how it occurs, or why, any replacement for Biden other than Harris is absolutely unacceptable.  I will not accept "major donors" controlling the party in that way.  Yes, it may play into their hands if I don't vote for president.  And yes, I am a straight white male, albeit a poor one.  But I believe in democracy, and even if the Democratic Party's selection process is flawed, it is still little-d democratic, and should be respected.  If the Democratic Party won't stand for democracy within its own processes, what will it stand for at all?

So, we may be reaching an inflection point.  Or not.  I certainly don't know.  Whatever happens, it's going to be jarring for someone.

* I have ideas about the composition of this group which are circumstantially strong but otherwise unsubstantiated, so I won't publish them.

Blimey, Frenchies

French voters have just confounded both polling and the analysts by electing a somewhat more left-wing Assembly in the latest legislative election.  As in the 2024 UK general election, voters shifted away from the center and somewhat to the right, but due the geographic distribution of the vote, the left-leaning party (actually a coalition of parties) New Popular Front (NFP) made significant gains.  The main loser was the centrist President Emmanuel Macron, the head of Ensemble (ENS) who, in a classic case of being out of touch with the citizens, decided to call a snap election in response to the strong showing by the far-right (and possibly crypto-fascist) National Rally (RN) in European parliamentary elections.  The results from that election (in France) were not good, but EU elections are often venue where voters in various countries make a domestic protest vote, because the connection between EU governance and the average voter in EU countries is weak at best.  Nonetheless, Macron called an unnecessary election in order to basically berate French voters for making a protest vote in response to his unpopular government.  Initially, that looked like a bad idea, as RN led in the polls.  However, the outcome was a significantly different, as NFP won the most seats.

As in the UK, vote efficiency mattered significantly for the results.  French legislative elections are not strictly first-past-the-post (FPTP), but use a more complicated system (naturallement) where a candidate can win in a first round with over 50% of the vote, but a second round is held if there is no winner.  In that case, only candidates receiving 12.5% of the vote in the first round can advance.  The second round, however, is FPTP.  Voters in both France and the UK understand tactical voting, as do the parties, and in both elections the center and the left agreed to withdraw competing candidates in various seats (though it should be noted that Macron was hesitant about doing so, and his party subordinates revolted).  And in both France and the UK, the right-wing vote ended up being distributed inefficiently relative to other groupings in part because of tactical voting.

I've embedded a spreadsheet below that has the gory statistical details, but the summary is this: NFP earned a seat for approximately ever 89,000 votes, whereas RN earned a seat for every 144,000.*  Overall, right-wing parties picked up about 45% of the vote, but received just 36% of the seats.  The left got 30% and 33% respectively, while the center got 24% and 29%.  (<2% went to other assorted parties.)  Macron had previously appointed a minority government (France's governmental system is overly complicated, but that's the gist of what happened) based on the 43% of seats held by his party and his allies.  After this election, however, he will most likely (again, complicated) appoint someone from the left as Prime Minister.

As in the UK, the French should celebrate the outcome of their election, but nobody on the left or center in either state should be complacent for a moment about turning back the rising right-wing forces in their country.  The voters as a whole are moving in the wrong direction.  Macron may have slowed RN's momentum, but as of now there's no indication that will last.  The French center and French left will have to cooperate and prove the French government can work, or RN will make further gains.

* Note that this is the total of first and second round votes.  A more accurate analysis would take just the votes from the winning round, but I suspect the general point - RN had poor efficiency - would remain. 

Blimey, Limeys

My almost entirely uniformed take on the UK election results is that the while the party distribution in Whitehall shifted significantly to the left, British voters actually shifted away from the center and somewhat to the right.  The Labour Party of 2024 is not (for better or worse) Labour of 2019, and has shifted to the right while it rebuilt its appearance of competency and even-handedness.  On the whole, it picked up more voters on the right than it lost on the left, but the fact that it received roughly the same percentage of the vote as in 2019 can't be ignored.  And almost a sixth of the seats that it picked up came from the complete collapse (due to incompetency in the devolved government, and internal party issues) of the Scottish National Party, which has generally offered a very similar economic program to Labour.  The Green Party and assorted left-leaning independents picked up several seats, mostly from Labour, but also had a few oddball wins over Conservatives.  The Liberal Democrats rose from near death to capture the center by attracting center-right Conservative voters who couldn't stand the incompetency of the past few years, but who also would never vote for Labour or Reform.  However, its vote share was little changed as well, and like Labour, LibDem votes were distributed efficiently.  Reform UK - which should be "Reform", since it is more interested in revolution than reform - didn't capture many seats but did attract a huge protest/repudiation vote from people who thought that the Conservatives failed to deliver on the promises of Brexit and knew that the Conservatives failed to halt immigration.  And finally, the Conservatives collapsed, losing almost 44 percent of their 2019 vote share.  The punishment was entirely deserved given how poorly the party governed from 2010 to 2024.

If the Conservative and Reform votes were combined - as might be the case if the UK didn't use an archaic FPTP standard for parliamentary elections - the right-wing vote would exceed that of Labour.  That would leave LibDem voters as kingmakers, and given that the LibDems mostly captured seats from the Conservatives, the overall 2024 vote was more conservative than the outcome.  However, the UK system rewards "efficiency" - meaning that it rewards distributing enough votes to come in first across as many constituencies as possible, not the overall number of votes nationwide.  Given that the right-leaning vote was split 2 or 3 ways, Labour was the most efficient party in the election, and thus won the seat count handily.  (I'll have another post in a few days with the details of the vote distribution.)

Despite what some in America may hope, the Labour victory on 7/4/24 provides no lessons for Democrats beyond a generic "look competent", which Democrats should already know.  The dynamics are just too different this time for anything else to apply.

Predetermined

Unsurprisingly, a consensus emerged when given the opportunity.

 

 

I hope those people get what they are asking for, even if they don't understand what they've requested.

Cross-Chunnel Comparisons

The High Speed 2 fiasco in the UK has prompted me to update my map of high-speed rail in France.  Obviously the two countries are frequently compared, and here's more in that vein in relation to HSR.

1) Population density is much lower in France than in the UK.  This can be seen by simply inspecting the existing and proposed lines in either country in satellite view, and it is backed by data.  The island of Great Britain is 80,823 sq mi (209,331 sq km) in area and had a population of approximately 64,500,000 in 2021, for an average population density of 798 residents/sq mi (308 residents/sq km).  Continental France is 206,665 sq mi (535,261 sq km) in area and had a population of approximately 65,500,00 in 2022, for a population density of 317 residents/sq mi (122 residents/sq km).  Great Britain is approximately 2.51 times as dense as continental France, and continental France is 39.8% as dense as Great Britain.

2) France is somewhat better at containing urban sprawl than the UK.  This is a qualitative observation on my part, and it isn't uniform across either country.(*)  Areas of France such as the wider region around Lille or the Mediterranean coast from Marseilles to the Italian border are very sprawled out, with little countryside between developed areas except where the geography makes building impossible.  And the UK has compact, relatively contained cities and towns, such as Norwich and Yeovil.  But, overall, I think sprawl is less of a problem in France.

3) The combination of the previous two points means that the French routing strategy of connecting HSR lines with existing urban stations via "off-ramps" to legacy lines works quite well.  The existing approaches to the central stations are fairly direct, and the off-ramps can be built fairly close to the cities.  France generally has avoided building new approaches or stations within existing urban areas.  Lille is the only exception so far.  In contrast, the UK has decided to heavily rebuild existing stations and build new approaches in Birmingham, London (completion uncertain), Manchester (recently canceled), and Leeds (canceled a few years ago).  The prices of those stations has become outrageous and are part of the reason HS2 has been so severely curtailed.

4) France has built a number of stations directly on new LGVs.  Some have been built because there is no classic line near the new HSR line, some because there is only a classic line on one side of a city, and some because the nearest city is too small to serve with off-ramps.  Some stations are connected to the nearest city with legacy rail or a tram system, but others are fundamentally car-oriented, with only limited bus service. Overall, I think the success of these stations is mixed.  A few stations serve an attraction directly, such as the CDG station and the Disneyland station, and these are more successful in terms of passenger counts.  However, the very rural "beetroot" stations are relatively cheap to build, so they may be successful financially.  In the UK, the inline stations at Old Oak Common and Birmingham Interchange are fairly complex and expensive, though they should have high utilization.

5) Paris is semi-central to the country, whereas London is closer to being at one end of the country.  France needs to build a lot more track-miles to fully connect the country, but as explained above, most of those miles were or will be much cheaper to build.  But the main advantage to being central is that the rest of the country does not connect to the capital through just one link that risks being saturated before demand is completely met.  Each link to Paris can absorb a large number of passengers coming from a smaller number cities.  In the UK, the rest of the country will be funneled through one link.

6) On the purely practical side, France has completed 1,699 miles (2,735 km) of HSR track starting in 1981.  The UK has completed only 70 miles (113 km) starting in 2003.  France simply has vastly more experience at everything related to HSR, including track design and construction, rolling stock design and construction, and operations.

7) Both of my maps are fantasy maps.  However, the French one is much more realistic because my suggestions use the same routing principles as the French have been using for decades, and the resulting alignments have been much cheaper to build than HS2 in the UK.

All of the above raises the question: is there any way for the UK to "catch up" with France?  No, not directly.  The UK will never need to build as many HSR track-miles as France.  Nor will it ever be able to build as cheaply as France given the substantially different human geography of the two countries.  The UK could and should learn a fair amount from France, but the former country should also look to places like Japan, South Korea, and Germany for lessons.   Those countries have population densities of 840, 1,340, and 600 residents/sq mi (326, 516 and 233 residents/sq km) and so have more experience in building around existing populations.  The UK also needs to look inward and try to understand why HS2 turned out to be so expensive.  If the UK adapts, it might be able to catch up with France qualitatively, connecting a large portion of its population via HSR, but the UK will need to change a lot to do so.

(*) The relative sprawl of each country probably has been analyzed quantitatively, but since I am an amateur, I don't feel the need to track the studies down.

Fantasy Isle

As a complement to the previous post, I have developed a map of high speed rail in the United Kingdom.  It is a combination of existing lines, lines under construction, projects canceled by the Johnson and Sunak governments, and my suggestions for lines the UK should build in the future.  Those categories are available as separate layers in the map.  A few notes on my suggestions:

1) It is a fantasy map.  A previous version of the map was somewhat more realistic, but I see no point attempting to be serious when the actual UK government has demonstrated it has no interest in a national system.  The Sunak government has even taken a scorched earth approach to the canceled segments of HS2 by authorizing the sale of previously purchased properties.  It has no interest in any future HSR projects, and any Labour government will find restarting the previous program difficult for practical and financial reasons.

2) My system nonetheless could probably built, though not economically.  A few of the lines might be close to economic viability if construction costs are reasonable.  "Reasonable" in this case would be £100M/mile and £1,000M per station.  HS2 has blown way past those numbers to £396M/mile and £4-6B for stations in London and Manchester (now canceled).

3) I have chosen to tunnel the lines into city centers in order to maximize train speed.  Long approaches to existing stations on existing lines would reduce the average speed along those lines.  Building new approaches would be very expensive in dense urban areas, and very disruptive to the existing urban fabric.  I have chosen tunnels for those reasons and because, as stated above, I don't have to be serious here.

4) A lot of England is basically suburban or exurban, similar to New Jersey, especially in the Midlands.  Cities and towns all connect, with very little actual countryside between them.  That is part of the reason the per-mile cost of HS2 exploded.

5) Stoke-on-Trent is a polycentric mess.  The existing station isn't near the center of the biggest constituent city, Hanley.  I have chosen to put a tunneled station under the center of Hanley because more bus routes run through there, but either location might work.

6) I've spaced out most of the stations, but Sunderland is an odd case.  It is very close to Newcastle, and the two are connected by existing rail and a joint metro system that partially runs in the rail right-of-way.   However, as it is near the end of branch, adding one stop wouldn't impact as many passengers as adding a stop between, say Stoke-on-Trent and Manchester at Stockport.  And I feel the benefits of having a station in economically depressed area would be significant.

7) I have not included a station at Heathrow or any other airport (apart from the under-construction station near Birmingham Airport).  The French TGV system does include stops at some airports, but they are generally ones that are outside of built-up areas, such as CDG, making routing to them easy.  Heathrow was well away from built-up areas when it was first constructed, but it has been swallowed by London's sprawl, and constructing a HSR link to it today would be very expensive.  Nor is there a need to build one.  HSR systems are replacements for short-haul flights, not glorified airport shuttles.  With a fully-built UK HSR system, nearly all major English cities would be within two hours of London.  Even the Scottish cities would be well under four hours away, making city center-to-city center times competitive with airlines.

8) I have included some projects such as a second Severn tunnel and a second Chunnel that aren't technically high-speed lines, but which I think will be needed as part of the overall rail system in the future.  The existing Severn Tunnel is already 137 years old, and a replacement will be necessary at some point.

9) The HS1-HS2 link - which was initially proposed as part of HS2 but rejected early on - won't be needed until there is more capacity across the Channel.  Then the limiting factor would be HS1.  The link might be technically impossible depending on how HS2 is constructed.

10) The 2100+ routes are pretty speculative.  Who knows what the state of the world will be by then, and there's a good chance that anything planned now will need radical changes.

That's enough scattered thoughts.  Enjoy the map.

High Speed Halt

In a move that is both eminently reasonable and entirely shortsighted, the UK PM Rishi Sunak canceled the northern section of High Speed 2, a high-speed rail project extending from London to several northern cities.  Specifically, he canceled the section from just north of Birmingham to central Manchester.  The reason stated was the rapidly increasing cost of the project, which had grown from estimates in 2010 of £17B for a ~335 mile-long network to £98B in 2023 for a ~230 mile network.  The network is now planned to be only around 130 miles in length, with a currently estimated cost of about £62B.  The responsibility for completing the final section in the south, from Old Oak Common in the London suburbs to the terminus at Euston Station in central London, has been removed from the purview of HS2 Ltd, the entity that had been supervising the construction.  Work on the section had already been paused earlier in 2023, and will supposedly resume, but the timeline has not yet been clarified.

This move is reasonable at one level, as the explosion in cost from the earliest estimates to the latest figures published this past summer means that the utility to the country in a standard cost-benefit analysis has declined significantly.  There is, of course, little point in building public infrastructure that is so expensive that the cost of servicing the debt undertaken to build the project outweighs the economic gains from whatever service the infrastructure provides.  That applies to water, sewer, road, and airport projects as well as rail projects.  The UK government, which has been run either in part or completely by the Tories since 2010, has been unable to control the costs of the HS2 project, and has decided to limit the project to the section where substantial construction has already been done.

However, the statements by the Sunak government on the changes to HS2 don't explain how it plans to get the costs for the parts of HS2 that (currently) survive under control.  There is no reason anyone should believe that current estimates for the project will turn out to be any more accurate than previous ones.  The Sunak government claims that up to £36B that was going to spent on HS2 from Birmingham to Manchester will be invested in other projects.  I expect that number to be both reduced by further cost increases in HS2 and by future budget issues that will "require" diverting the previously diverted funds to existing programs.

It should be no surprise to anyone that the Conservatives have failed to control their own project.  Fundamentally, the UK Conservative Party - along with many conservative parties elsewhere - does not believe that government can do anything well, and that the private sector is inherently more efficient at everything.  This has been proven wrong over and over again.  The private sector is not reliably competent at delivering complex public works in many countries, including the UK.  But the Tories outsourced not only the actual implementation of HS2, but also a lot of the design and high-level management of the project, to entities that are not working for the public good, but for private profits.  Some of the cost increases have been exogenous (inflation, COVID), but I suspect a lot have been due to complications that come from not having the incentive to make accurate estimates or figure out the least costly way of doing a particular task.

Despite the questionable of utility of HS2 at the current cost, cancelling the northern sections is nonetheless short-sighted.  HS2, at least on the western side of the Pennines, had two purposes. First, it would reduce the travel time between Manchester, Birmingham, and London.  Reduced travel time would increase economic activity in areas affect by the project.  Second, it would free capacity on the West Coast Main Line for local and freight services.  In train operations, mixing high- and low-speed trains reduces the number of trains that can run per hour significantly.  With the high(er)-speed intercity passenger trains removed from the WCML, the number of other trains that could run would increase by more than the number of high(er)-speed trains removed.  But the need for increased capacity on the WCML north of Birmingham will not disappear because HS2 P2b was canceled, nor will Manchester get any closer to the south, where most economic growth in the country has occurred in the past few decades.

The response of the Sunak government should have been to slow the construction down while it examined the root causes of the cost increases and developed in-house government expertise to manage the future portions of HS2.  Stopping and starting construction disrupts supply chains and employment pipelines, as does long gaps between major projects.  High Speed 1, aka the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, was completed in 2007; HS2 construction did not begin until 2020.  Both institutions and individuals will naturally lose competency over periods far shorter than 12 years.  And when there are future projects in the pipeline, companies are less likely to try to milk current projects, as they have incentive to do a good job in order to get the next one.  Now there is no clear future after 2033, when HS2 is (currently) projected to be completed.  Though project names are being thrown about by the Sunak government, they are largely just old plans that haven't gone anywhere, or minor if necessary upgrades.  The UK needs to commit to a national HSR system that it will build out over the next 75-100 years in order to signal to companies and individuals that it is worthwhile to make long-term invests in education and equipment.  So far the Sunak government hasn't done that, and probably won't given that it has decided that pro-car and anti-environment rhetoric is a useful electoral tactic.  What a Starmer government might do is unclear at this point, and unimportant unless Labour actually wins the next election.

Slowing construction of HS2 would have a downside, of course, which is that financing would have to be carried for an even longer time before farebox revenue and economic benefits start to cover debt repayment.  Nor is there any guarantee that much could be done by the government at this point.  A lot of the increases could be exogenous, or they could be political, meaning that the specific details of construction have been (and continue to be) altered to buy off specific opponents.  It may be that too many bad decisions are locked in, and nothing can be done.  But the Sunak government should try, and then should apply those lessons to future projects.

As a distant observer I don't know exactly how the UK returns to a point where it can build rail projects at a reasonable and predictable cost.  But I believe it should.  Otherwise, the country have difficulty increasing productivity as congestion will continue to increase as the population rises.  The UK's recent experience is in contrast to countries like France, Spain, and Italy, where national HSR systems are moving forward at close to estimated costs.  But those countries have been building more regularly, and have been more judicious in their outsourcing.  Whatever the problem in the UK ultimately is, I hope they identify and resolve it soon.

(1) A side benefit of completing the line between Manchester and London would have been the reduction of flights between Manchester and London area airports, some of which are runway slot-limited.  However, I don't believe it was part of the project's cost-benefit analysis.