Following on from yesterday’s blog about the anti Hs2 campaigns false claims of ‘falling’ passenger numbers & no business case for Hs2 I’ve been crunching a few numbers.
When Virgin Trains started running trains on the West Coast Main Line (WCML) in 1997 there were 13.6 million passenger journeys. In 2014 that had increased to 34.5million – an increase of 153.6% or an average of 5.6% per year. The Hs2 business case is based on an annual growth of just 2% per year up to 2039..
We are already far, far ahead of Hs2’s conservative projections – and that’s just because of one TOC on the WCML.
According to the anti Hs2 mob, these people don’t exist. (or should just get an earlier train)…
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The maths doesn’t work like that. You can’t divide 153.6% by 17 to get anything meaningful because of compounding.
The correct approach is the 17th root of 2.536, which is 1.056, or 5.6% – still well ahead of the 2% figure that HS2 uses.
You can verify that by taking 1.056 and raising it to the seventeenth power – which gets you compound interest at 5.6% for 17 years – and gives you 2.53, a 153%. on the initial 1.