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)…
Paul Bigland 
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.