Leicester’s City Mayor Sir Peter Soulsby joined Midlands Connect and business leaders to pledge their support for the proposed rail link between Coventry, Leicester and Nottingham. At the meeting, at the station, attendees were told that 13.5 million minutes could be saved by people travelling by train on the route.
Last week, Midlands Connect submitted a business case to government asking for support to progress the project. New analysis shows that if the link between Coventry, Leicester and Nottingham is delivered an additional 600,000 trips per year will be taken by rail.
At the moment, only 3% of people who travel between Coventry and Leicester travel are using rail, with the vast majority going by road, even though it’s only just over 20 miles as the crow flies. Travelling via train could become a more attractive option, with journey times from Coventry to Nottingham being cut by almost one hour under the proposals, reducing travel time from 117 to 65 minutes. Those travelling from Coventry to Leicester will also see a reduction in travel time, changing from 56 to 32 minutes.
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Have we learned nothing from HS2 in the overreliance on “time saved” on the journey as a business case metric? As seen here, as a “clickbait” massive number which is somewhat meaningless practically
My view is the better metric is to consider what journeys would be specifically enabled by the improvement (especially for non-drivers): considering jobs, education (on a live at home basis), but also social/cultural, taking the “golden” travel time of 45 mins (really 45-60 mins) as the benchmark, (calculated to include 50% of relevant headway times for the whole journey, single seat and interchanges and walk time to create a “pedshed” around the relevant stations/stops).
[Disregarding use of bikes in the journey as not adding materially to the discussion]
This approach optimises better for span and frequency (taken from Jarret Walkers 7 requirements); “go as fast as necessary not as fast as possible”.