Scrap Crossrail 2 and use the cash elsewhere

How can Crossrail 2 be made more affordable? asks Michèle Dix ( RAIL 834).

The simple answer is: don’t build it. Instead of worrying about how to save £4 billion on a project that will probably end up costing nearer £50bn than £30bn, why not use the money for something that will actually make a difference? Midland Main Line electrification springs to mind.

Crossrail 2 won’t make much of a difference because it replicates existing routes and provides few useful new journey opportunities. Some journey times will even increase because of its wriggling worm contortions in south London.

It will overload rather than relieve the Northern Line; it stuffs yet more people into overcrowded Zone 1 (even if they don’t want to go there); it provides no regeneration benefits south of Angel (increasing the profits of West End property developers and boosting house prices in Surbiton isn’t the same as regeneration); and it fails to serve London’s growth areas in the west around Heathrow and in the east along the Thames Gateway corridor.

Our ever-expanding capital does need new transport infrastructure… and fast. But Crossrail 2 is based on an outdated model of London. Merely bolting some branches onto the protected route of a 1940s scheme ‘because it’s there’ is no way to solve 21st century transport problems.

Worse, it will suck the life out of every desperately needed transport project in the UK, many of them in places where new infrastructure can deliver genuine regeneration benefits.

Stephen Spark, London