Town planning is going to have to get to grips with a fundamental shift in the way we undertake and travel to work in the foreseeable future. This will knock-on into how we will live and play in the future and will significantly alter some of the long held planning precepts that still colour today's economic development and infrastructure initiatives.
Well, what a week for transport planners. The Government gave their support to new rail travel proposals with HS2 (High Speed 2) and a new London Airport in the Thames Estuary resurfaces for consideration (again). Both have naturally attracted considerable public comment - both positive and negative - and in either case, the benefits are likely to be long in gestation and delivery.
The first phase of HS2 linking London with that distant provincial settlement of Birmingham is not likely to receive its first fare paying passenger until 2026 and the track wont reach the northern wastes of Manchester for 21 years or so.
The business cases for each are largely formulated on the basic premise of, "more of the same". The economic justification reports highlight the extrapolation of past growth as a justification of need. And what is more it's all about enabling speedier business and economic growth. The fact that HS2 acknowledges the likelihood of modal shift from plane and car does cause an eyebrow to be raised momentarily, but perhaps this is inevitable.
We have a growing population, with increasingly footloose aspirations for work and play, so it would seem that such schemes are all to the good. Right?
I wonder.
21 years ago the height of modern business practice would see your average office operating with electronic typewriter/wordprocessors and fax machines. Top executives might have a wired-in carphone and at the very upper limits possibly a ticket on Concorde. The 'New York for Breakfast' meeting was the height of business sophistication and apparent success. The colour of the travel tag on your hand luggage was your mark of progress. Whilst telephone conferencing was emerging, in order to run your business, face to face meetings were still the norm, as they had been for millennia.
But just look today at what has happened with technology in that short period of time. The rapid and revolutionary emergence of the Internet has led to a fundamental shift in the way we do business.
Mobile and smartphones, reliable video conferencing/ skypeing, texting, Google, working in the Cloud and 24 hour around-the-world team operations are the norm. A year or so back I was impressed knowing that I could dictate a report in the afternoon, send it by email for formatting to a dedicated service in Australia overnight and have it back in my inbox ready to go the following morning. Tame. I now dictate straight into my PC using voice recognition software, print out as a pdf and email in one seemless operation. I can work anywhere using my iPhone and can access my client files in the Cloud without needing to lug them around. The days of stupefyingly repetitive copying of documents for planning applications has been replaced by the Planning Portal. The paperless office finally begins to emerge.
Manufacturers can convene meaningful real time meetings between teams with interactive video and online graphical interfaces to discuss product development without needing to pour over drawing boards (now replaced by CAD) or oily lathes and never leaving their offices. 3D models of almost anything can be emailed around the world and precisely reproduced in laser 'copiers'. Feature films are now regularly produced between UK and Hollywood studios online. I'm sure there are lots of exciting things about which I have no knowledge.
So if all this can occur in such a short time period, just think how technology is going to evolve further over the next 21 years. The question is, will we really need to travel for business in the way that we used to, and secondly, is speed crucial?
From the standpoint of aviation the equivalent to high speed trains would be a replacement Concorde. But forgetting any environmental consideration for a moment, the market began to feel that such speed was not essential. Cost effective, comfortable and reliable business travel was the way ahead. For the rest, cheap, mass travel is now the watchword. Why otherwise build the double-decked Airbus A380 or the truly massive Boeing 747-8 Intercontinental.
There is already anecdotal evidence of firms beginning to encourage employees to 'work from home' or from satellite hubs using modern telecommunications to interact between employees. And this is beginning to affect the demand for and structure of workspace. Hot-desking is becoming the norm. Why spend a fortune commuting to an office an hour or more away if you can work locally or from the kitchen table - at least part of the week. We don't even need to go down the shops for our purchases.
The students of today - the next generation of employees and entrepreneurs - have a wholly different approach to the way they interact with others. Much of their learning will have been 'online' with podcasted lectures and 'webinars'.
We are in a transitory phase so the real impact of these technological advances have yet to hit home widely, but rest assured a work revolution is evolving faster than we can imagine.
So I return to the point. Why do we need to shave an hour off the travel time between Manchester and London? How is this going to better enable business? Does a 30 minute time saving from Birmingham REALLY help?
I can see that a European network may have more credibility, given the distances. But in the UK?
Regularly travelling on the West Coast line from Preston to London I can now do the journey in just over two hours. Not bad really for 250 miles. If it were non-stop - as HS2 will be - this would be even quicker. I doubt it would pay me to travel into Manchester first just to save an hour, which would be largely used up in transfer times anyway. I might perhaps want to use it to get to Heathrow for an overseas flight (if it were linked there), but Manchester already has a well connected International airport. Perhaps if Manchester became the UK hub then some reason for HS2 might be more arguable, but otherwise it seems unnecessary.
Equally, HS2 wont be cheap; as HS1 isn't. If I can put the ticket on business expenses then all well and good, but as a tourist I would be happy to put up with an extra hour or so at an off-peak time to save some money. Why otherwise do so many people use the budget airlines in preference to the rapidly declining mainstream operators?
I could go on. But it seems to me that technology developments and working practices in the future could well negate the business case for ultra fast intercity travel. This is yesterday's thinking. Yes, of course we all want to go places quickly and efficiently. But should such travel 'luxury' be at the expense of the limited countryside through which we will travel - not seeing much of it anyway. In aviation the 'need for speed' era of Concorde (wonderful though it was) didn't last long. And this at a time when 'being there' was still vital in business.
Lets not kid ourselves that HS2 is really vital for business. Certainly not based on the economic case that has been presented to date. The money might be better spent properly enabling high speed broadband in rural UK to achieve a meaningful, deliverable (and probably faster) economic benefit.
Town planning is going to have to get to grips with a fundamental shift in the way we undertake and travel to work in the foreseeable future. This will knock-on into how we will live and play and will significantly alter some of the long held planning precepts that still colour today's economic development and infrastructure initiatives.
The future's bright. The future's online.
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