The idea is to help improve airport capacity and avoid building new runways or new airports to achieve that. While I am not really clear how much capacity it could add the costs and benefits are worth investigating.
A CBA identifies all the costs and benefits of a project, both private and external, gives them a monetary value and then decides if the investment is worth the cost. Perhaps the strongest advantage of CBA is that it allows comparison of projects. So in this case the Heathrow-Gatwick rail link can be compared to expanding Gatwick, or Heathrow or building a new airport somewhere.
For those doing transport economics this year it represents an excellent opportunity to apply CBA. Also it is not too late for this to be included in the June Transport paper, and is a certainty for 2013 otherwise.
Without knowing the result of the CBA, it is hard to decide whether the rail link would really be a good idea or not.
ReplyDeleteBut I think that we need to think long term here. If the rail link is built, for how many years would this mean that capacity would be high enough? At what point would we end up saying 'actually, we need yet more capacity, so we're going to have to expand Heathrow anyway'. In my opinion, we would be better off building another runway at Heathrow, because however much environmentalists complain about runways at Heathrow destroying the countryside, the land around Heathrow isn't exactly idyllic as it is, and neither does it seem to be a haven for wildlife. In the long term, this would be a better solution than the high speed rail link, in my opinion.