Towards the end of this month, we will get the government’s White Paper based on the work by the HS2 team which will set out a route between London and Birmingham down to the last few inches. Everyone apparently wants a high speed line. The Tories, the Libdems and belatedly Labour have all embraced the idea. Environmentalists say it will be green, the CBI says it will be good for the economy and the unions reckon it will create jobs.

 There is much excitement among the media stimulated by squabbling between various towns in the Midlands and the North about where a line should go. The Sunday Times even ran a story complaining that the Tories had not funded the line north of Leeds and therefore it might not even go to Scotland.

 It looks, therefore, like a no-brainer. Given the political consensus and the universal approval, what can stop it? Well, actually, lots and the idea that the line could be built without serious damaging effects on the rest of the rail network is fanciful.

 The whole project is being caught up in its own hype and a reality check is urgently needed. Lets first put the overblown story in the Sunday Times to rest. The story is about a line which will not even start to be built until 2015, with a completely unquantified cost and- except you can be sure it will be more than any number so far quoted - and a purpose which has never been properly specified. The line, at best, would not reach Scotland till 2025. Yet, here they are getting up a head of steam over the details of something that may or may not happen in fifteen years time. That is like much of the coverage of HS2, quite literally much ado about nothing.

 The Tories are partly to blame. They claim that their proposal is fully funded and worked out. It is, wait for it, a line that will go from London, probably via Heathrow, to Birmingham, Manchester and then through the Pennines to Leeds. That is complete madness. If the line had an L shape, and stopped in the intermediary cities, it would hardly be faster than the existing two hour service between Leeds and London. It’s a typical politician’s plan, trying to include everyone but unable to stand up to rigorous analysis.

 Moreover, the Tories plan to fund the line partly through the private sector which will only make the scheme more expensive since it has no hope of being commercially viable. But even they admit that £15bn out of the supposed £20bn cost will have to come from the public sector, or £1.3bn per year during the 12 year construction period.

 Even if assuming that these figures are not underestimates, this shows the real danger of a high speed line. There is no way that it would be built without demands being made on the existing rail budget. During a 12 year period, there is almost bound to be an economic downturn and halfway through construction it would be impossible to cut back on the construction costs as the contracts would be let. This is not a zero sum game. The money for investing in the high speed line would ultimately come out of the budget for the maintenance and improvement of existing lines, especially in hard times.

 HS2 therefore represents a significant threat to the existing railway. You only have to go to France to see that while the TGV services are undoubtedly wonderful and far better than any services on this side of the Channel, their lignes classiques are characterised in many places by old trains, irregular services and rundown stations. France’s investment in high speed lines has been at the cost of the old railway.

 There are plenty of other reasons why a high speed line is unlikely to be built, Its environmental credentials are dubious, the state of the economy is unlikely to warrant it, rising energy prices will impact on the railway and new technology may well reduce the need for business travel.

 The focus of the investment programme should, therefore, be on improving and adapting the existing railway. Given that load factors on the railways are still load, except at peak times, there is plenty of spare capacity. You only have to look at the vast empty spaces in first class at most times of the day to realise that.

 Indeed, abolishing first class would create a vast amount of extra capacity, far more cheaply than building a new line. If capacity is the main problem, then investment needs to be targeted at bottlenecks. The priorities for the investment programme beyond 2014 has just been examined by the Commons Transport Committee in a report published on February 15. The report highlights the fact that investment in railways is currently at a historic high and most of that is untouchable because it is committed in Network Rail’s current five year plan. Rightly, the committee warns that the next five year period, starting in 1914 is likely to be much tighter and says that this requires prioritisation.

 That is undoubtedly right and my instinct is that the railway must focus on modest but significant schemes - infilling electrification, reopening lines on the cheap through the use of development money, boosting capacity by clever pathing and maximising use of existing track, reducing costs of running branch lines through flexible arrangements and so on.

 This may sound unexciting and modest but it isn’t. Quite the opposite. The railways could be operated far more efficiently than at the moment, and spending money on bottlenecks and small scale schemes could lead to radical improvements.

 There must, though, be room for some major schemes. By 2014, London will have benefitted from a huge proportion of the investment in the railways - Thameslink, Crossrail, HS1 commuter services, East London Line, the PPP on the Underground and so on. So rightly, the MPs - who of course have vested interests but never mind that - are seeking to see major schemes such as electrifying the Midland Main Line and improving the Manchester hub which has become a major bottlenecks.

 The railway is going through a fantastic period of investment which is bound to be cut back once these large schemes start to come on stream. After such a bonanza, it would be unrealistic to expect that a north south high speed line could be built without detracting from much-needed investment programmes. Sure there is a potential capacity problem, but it is not big enough to justify a scheme costing upwards of £30 billion. Let’s focus on Britain’s lignes classiques and forget the pipedream.

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It could have been a lot worse for the 152 passengers and crew when ice led to an engine failure. Indeed, they were lucky to escape alive but strangely the media coverage of the report into the incident was relatively muted - a few interviews with the heroic crew and a bit of technical explanation, but with only very minor injuries and no dead, the matter was soon forgotten.

 That, of course, was not the Eurostar pre Christmas breakdowns but the Boeing 777 which came down just short of the runway at Heathrow in January 2008 when its fuel lines were blocked by ice due to the unusual weather conditions. Even at the time of the accident, despite the availability of dramatic shots of the wreckage and harrowing tales of passengers expecting to die, the coverage was relatively short-lived. And when the final investigation findings were published a couple of days before the Eurostar investigation inquiry report there was very muted coverage mainly focussed on the ‘heroic’ pilot rather than on the basic failures which could so easily have caused a disaster.

 Contrast this with the Eurostar debacle also caused by unusual weather conditions, laced with bad luck: days of wall to wall coverage both of the event itself and at the publication of the subsequent review. I even did interviews for Ukrainian TV and Al-Jazeera, for chrissake, while Japanese film crews stalked St Pancras and there were no fewer than 20 film crews at the press conference to launch the report.

 OK, Eurostar did cock up badly but as Boris Becker famously said after losing when expected to win, ‘no one died’. Or was even hurt. In fact, there is, actually, much for the railways to be proud of about this incident. First, there is the fact that the Tunnel has shown itself yet again to be safe, even in difficult conditions. Despite three fires and other minor incidents, no one has been seriously hurt in any incident in the Tunnel. I’m sure had Mrs Thatcher got her way and a road tunnel had been built, we would not be able to say that.

 Secondly, the industry has shown itself ready to put its hand up and admit its faults. The decision by Eurostar to launch the inquiry and ensure it was carried out so quickly was highly commendable. The company has been able to lance the boil. I was asked repeatedly on the media whether there would be long term damage to Eurostar’s reputation and, more important, its market share and I simply pointed the questioner to the aviation industry. The Boeing 777 accident, the Terminal 5 opening mess, the pre-xmas disruption and, indeed, the general hassle of flying these days has barely dented aviation’s market. People still want to fly, and similarly, the basic service offered by Eurostar is so much better than the alternatives that it would take a lot more than one incident, however badly it was handled, to reduce the number travelling on its trains.

 That, however, is where the good news ends. Make no mistake, this report which pulls no punches is damning of a series of Eurostar failings which, I’m afraid to say, means that there must be management changes at the top. The report, which is well covered elsewhere in the magazine, does not suggest this, but highlights such a long catalogue of failings that it seems inevitable.

 First, there was the failure of anticipation. These kind of weather-related incidents had been happening right back to the early days of the Eurostar service. Sure, they were never quite the same and different electronic components failed. Nevertheless, there was no attempt to look at the issue of the effect of winter on these trains in a systematic way. This is reminiscent of, say, the series of SPADs in the Paddington throat which should have suggested that there was a fundamental failing in the signalling long before the Ladbroke Grove accident. A more proactive Eurostar management would have spotted the pattern and moved faster to prevent similar incidents.

 Secondly, the report makes clear that the standards of engineering in relation to ‘winterisation’ were patchy and that some trains had not been properly equipped. That again suggests a wider malaise that raises questions about the effectiveness of management.

 And thirdly, the lack of appropriate training for staff on the trains was nothing short of a disgrace. Apparently, while the bar staff had received some training for such eventualities, the catering staff had none at all - contrast this with airlines, which Eurostar has so often tried to emulate, where all staff have a high degree of safety training.

 Eurostar has responded by arguing that the complicated structure of the company contributed greatly to these difficulties. That is no excuse. I have always liked Richard Brown, the chief executive, who is thoroughly nice and honourable man. But it is clear that as chief executive he should not have accepted a situation where he did not have the ability, say, to ensure that the French staff was better trained to deal with emergencies. He should have thrown his weight about, given his title of chief executive.

 There are other reasons why I have long felt that Eurostar has always been rather complacent and smug. And Mr Brown has not done enough to change that. Admittedly he has been hampered by a complex structure with the result that Eurostar has no direct control over train crew working for the constituent railways, SNCF and SNCB, and that the trains have been maintained in the three countries which contributed to the pre-xmas debacle.

 Nevertheless, Eurostar shown a lack of innovation and failed to use its strength to put pressure on the governments to improve its position. For example, trains going through the tunnel are still subject to ridiculous safety rules that specify they have to be at least 365 metres long - so that they always line up with a door to the third tunnel if they break down - and that they should be capable of splitting in half to be driven out in the event of a mishap. Both these are ludicrous rules. The first suggests that a train would stop uncontrollably and instantly, whereas a driver would always be able to have some control over where it came to a rest, and in any case, there is a platform inside the tunnel that would allow people to walk to the door. The second, as I have mentioned before, is so crazy that it seems to add risk to a dangerous situation rather than remove it.

 Eurostar has also put up with equally bizarre arrangements for its passengers to exit St Pancras, forcing them to go downstairs rather than simply walking straight out which is what many people would want to do as  a result of ‘security’ and customs arrangements. The 30 minute check in is another case in point - a loss of advantage over the airlines for no good reason. And why can’t people simply walk up to the platforms in the normal way, rather than having to queue downstairs until 10 minutes before departure? There is no sensible ‘security’ reason for that.

 A stronger organisation would not have put up with all this nonsense and would have tried harder to improve the product by insisting on changes. I suspect if it had been Virgin running the trains into St Pancras, or indeed BA, they would have forced through changes to these arrangements to improve the lot of their passengers.

 The safety rules, as I understand it, are being eased to accommodate more flexible working - though these incidents will make it more difficult for the intergovernmental safety authority to push through changes that to the uninitiated may appear to be relaxing requirements and possibly putting passengers at risk. It will only take one tabloid editor to get his or her teeth into it for panic to ensure. These changes will be necessary if Deutsche Bahn is ever able to operate trains through the tunnel with their ICE trains. (let us hope that ‘Krauts in tunnel danger move’ never gets written!).

 The management structure of Eurostar is, thankfully, being changed so that there will be one clear line of accountability. This was supposed to have happened back in the early noughties but was stopped by the constituent railways but now it will be forced through, greatly improving the situation for Eurostar’s top management. That makes it all the more necessary to start with a clean sheet and an entire new team at the top to bed down the new structure and throw their weight around more than their predecessors.

Ticket complexity must be sorted out

It seems that every time I take a train, I have problems over ticketing. In the past I have lost entire fares I have paid in advance because of the train companies refusal to reimburse such tickets, even long before the journey is due to take place. My latest problem has been over what ticket to buy from a machine..

 On both the last occasions I used a train, I was leaving London in the rush hour peak to go to speaking engagements in commuterland and I have been unclear about whether to buy an ‘anytime’ ticket or an ‘off-peak’ one. Of course, there was no staff available to help me and the queue for the ticket offices would have made me miss my train. I realise that given my knowledge of the railways, I should probably know the answer and am being a bit scatty, but there is no reason why less experienced travellers would have any idea of what ticket to buy in these circumstances. And then they risk a penalty fare through an honest mistake.

 The train companies try to have it both ways - to treat us all as potential fare dodgers, and yet not provide the information needed to make the right choice. The latest ‘simplification’ was nothing of the sort and Lord Adonis should ensure in his final days in office that he sets in train a process to sort out ticketing issues which are becoming a real deterrent to people using the railways.

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If, as has been suggested to me, the minimum cost of a high speed line between London and Scotland will be in the order of £50billion or more, the case for building it will have to be exceptionally strong, especially given the current pressure on the public purse.

 Such a sum would involve doubling the level of spending by Network Rail for a period of ten years. The fundamental question, therefore, must be why build it. Nothing illustrates the confusion over the purpose of the line than whether it should serve Heathrow. The Bow Group, a centrist Tory think tank, has entered the debate on high speed line with a pamphlet imaginatively named The Right Track which warns that the government is likely to select the wrong route for the line because it will not run direct through Heathrow.

 The report argues that without a connection to Heathrow the line would have much less value to the economy and therefore recommends that there should be an airport interchange serving both the Great Western Main Line and the high speed line. This would not be directly underneath the airport but rather at a hub a couple of miles away from Terminal Five on the main line near Iver in Buckinghamshire, connected with the various terminals by a rapid transit system. The idea which has long been promoted by Ove Arup, the huge consulting engineers, is based on the notion that the high speed terminus would be at Euston - definitely the bookies’ favourite to be recommended in the HS2 report which is to be published in March. Its supporters accept that going to Heathrow would lengthen the journey time to Birmingham, but their claim that it would only add two minutes to the 43 minute trip is fanciful. Simply stopping would add five minutes, once acceleration and deceleration are taken into account, and since there would need to be extra tunnels in which trains travel slower, that would add yet more time.

 The pamphlet argues that Heathrow is a difficult airport to access by rail and therefore many travellers use other European hub airports. For example, if you live in Leeds and want to go to Singapore, you would probably either drive to Manchester to take a direct flight or go from Leeds-Bradford to Amsterdam or Paris. According to the Bow Group, a high speed line connection to Heathrow will allow them to fly from there instead.

 That is not very convincing. To be attractive to passengers using the airport from, say, Leeds or Birmingham, there would have to be frequent trains, probably at worst one per hour since that is the only way to attract people onto public transport. Now is there a conceivable business case that suggests it would be worthwhile to run trains to these provincial cities from Heathrow every hour or so when, at present, there are no flights to these destinations presumably because there is no money to be made out of them? I doubt it.

 The High-Speed-Rail-Heathrow debate is replete with such contradictions. The fundamental question is whether the high speed line connection is designed to reduce or increase the number of flights. Clearly if it is the latter, then its environmental credentials take a heavy battering.

 I asked this question of Tony Lodge, the author of the Bow Group report, and his answer was unequivocal: the idea is to encourage more flights from the airport in the long term as the airport will be more accessible. He argued that this was obvious since the aim was to make Heathrow more viable, which implies that the High Speed Line would need to feed people into the airport rather than the other way around. That clearly damages any Green case for the line as the extra flights generated by the railway would have to be taken into account in the environmental balance sheet.

  However, Mr Lodge defends this by arguing that there would be two sets of people who would contribute to a substantial shift to rail: those currently driving to the airport and those currently flying to short haul destinations. I am not convinced that either of these flows would be substantial.

 The Bow Group seems to confuse better accessibility to Heathrow in general with the specific provision of a high speed line. The pamphlet mentions Airtrack, the back door scheme into the airport from the south west which is a no-brainer except for the fact that Surrey County Council no longer support the scheme because there are no fewer than 15 level crossings in places such as Egham and Barnes, some of  which would have to be closed for more than half the time in order to accommodate the extra trains. However that has nothing to do with whether a high speed line is built or not.

 As for the second point, while there may be a few people who would take the train rather than drive on the M40 from Birmingham, they would probably be outnumbered by the extra travellers attracted to the airport by increase in flights. Moreover, the strategy would clearly undermine the economics of regional airports. That shows that whereas a high speed line is supposed to strengthen the economies of the regions, there may well be perverse economic outcomes in the opposite direction.

 In any case, I am also very dubious about releasing much capacity at Heathrow which suggests the extra flights would have to come from a third runway, an environmentally disastrous option. The only significant domestic destinations from Heathrow are Manchester and the two main Scottish destinations, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Manchester already has a fantastic train service with three trains per hour and a journey time of just over two hours. If people are flying on that route, it is because they are interlining and a high speed line is unlikely to attract them.

 A mere 8 per cent of journeys from Heathrow are on domestic flights - down from 18 per cent twenty years ago - and therefore there is very little for a high speed line to tap. As for Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam - they are, or will be, well covered with trains from St Pancras, far more convenient and with a shorter journey time than would be achieved from Heathrow hub. The only people who would schlep out to Heathrow to take a train are those in the surrounding area and again there is the issue of frequency - would the high speed trains to Brussels really run direct from Heathrow, which means people would have to change, or go via Euston which presumably would be a terminus station.

 You cannot attract people onto the railways if they have to change trains, which is why the very name ‘Heathrow hub’ suggests the idea is misconceived. The success of Ryanair, Flybe and EasyJet is based on the notion that they fly direct, point to point. Flybe, for example, has pinched a substantial section of the CrossCountry market by linking up pairs of towns previously were only linked through a long train journey. The Bow Group report itself admits that you lose up to 50 per cent of the potential demand if people have to change trains to reach their destination.

 Heathrow is a big bad elephant trap for high speed line advocates. Connecting Heathrow makes other journey times longer, attracts people onto airplanes rather than deterring them from flying and will strengthen the case for a Third Runway, not weaken it because it will make provincial airports less viable.

 The coverage which the pamphlet attracted shows the difficulty the Tories could find themselves in over transport issues. Since the pamphlet makes clear that a third runway is needed, which is counter to Tory policy, the local TV media jumped on the ‘split’. The Conservative opposition to a third runway has appeared rather opportunistic and populist, and one suspects that grass roots Tories, who have little interest in environmental concerns apart from those directly affecting their local area, are generally in favour of a third runway. Support for a high speed line does not get the Tories off this nasty hook. Indeed, if the arguments of the Bow Group are followed, the debate over a high speed line highlights the unanswered questions about the purpose of the proposed high speed line.

 Announcements still too noisy

There is some good news on announcements. A regular at Castle Cary, Maurice Hopper, informs me that there is an old fashioned human being who, without notes, provides a full list of stations for each train with ‘fine diction, clearly presented information, no script, notes or electronic gizmos’.  That’s what we need - people.

 However, this is an exception. For the most part my inbox and in tray are full of complaints which demonstrate the most basic lack of customer care: announcements every thirty seconds, ridiculously inappropriate requests, endless requests to mind your bags and so on. It is time it all stopped especially as it is costing the industry customers.  

 What is most disappointing about this issue is the refusal of the train operating companies to engage in any kind of meaningful discussion about the problem and their readiness to use the red herring of legislation. South West Trains have hidden behind the notion that the ridiculous number of announcements on its trains are required by health and safety, and European legislation.  

 This is not the case as I have checked with a reliable source within the industry. SWT has been told unequivocally by the Railways Safety & Standards Board that the only legal requirements set out in the Rail Vehicle Accessibility Regulations 1998 (RVAR) are that the next stop should be announced in the five minutes before arrival, and the destination and next stop should be announced while the train is stationary. Nothing else is required apart from announcements relating to delays, diversions, or emergencies, and European legislation has not changed the situation.

 So Michael Roberts of the Association of Train Operating Companies, you are ever ready to praise your members’ attentive to the needs of their customers - why not ask them to tone down the announcements for all our sakes?

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If you were hoping to come to a meeting tonight at Arup’s offices to hear me speak about rail privatisation to the London Branch of the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation, you will be disappointed. The meeting has been cancelled for reasons that reveal all too well why Highway engineers frequently create street environments that are cluttered, ugly and not fit for purpose. Unlike the implication in the email sent out by the organisers, the cancellation had nothing to do with me.

As I always do, I had asked if could bring a few books to sell to the audience. At first I was told ‘we don’t mind either way’ but then some committee members apparently thought that such activity would breach their charitable status because it was ‘commercial’. Quite apart from that being utter nonsense - I have sold books at dozens of meetings in village halls and for all kinds of organisations over the years and in any case they are offered at huge discounts - it demonstrates the kind of bureaucratic mind which appears incapable of seeing a large picture - for example, their audience would like the opportunity to browse and buy books from an author and I invariably get such requests if I fail to bring any. Moreover, the Charity Commissioners were hardly going to be at the door checking for ‘commercial activity’, even if it did breach their terms, which it does not.  They said reluctantly I could bring books but not display them. When I said ‘don’t be daft’, they cancelled the meeting, much to the embarrassment of the main person who had organised it.

While on the subject of HEs, I will give one example of the results of treating the roadscape in a similar bureauratic way. There is a little cycle path running into the Caledonian Road from a side road, and despite being about 1.5 metres wide, it has two strips of ghastly double yellow lines to prevent anyone parking there - when there is not even room for half a car. The lines are ugly and unsightly, and presumably cost money to install. That is just a tiny example replicated around the country such as the famous sea of ‘cyclists dismount’ signs on  a cycle route in Harlow, thankfully now removed.

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These are strange times on the railways. On the one hand, there is plenty of investment, with promise of more to come. On the other, passenger growth has slowed almost to a halt, while train companies are struggling to make a profit.

 Ever since the start of the banking crisis two years ago, there have been fears that this strange juxtaposition of a massive investment programme with a declining or stagnant economy was unsustainable and now, at last, we have clear evidence of this. The decision by Lord Adonis to postpone the granting of a contract to build a new fleet of trains to replace the High Speed 125s that have dominated Inter City train travel since the late 1970s is the first sign that railway investment cannot buck the wider economic trend.

 However, while it is certainly bad news for Hitachi and the rest of the consortium that was going to finance and build the trains, and passengers may be aggrieved at the prospect of travelling on 40 or even 50 year old trains, there is much to commend the decision in the name of common sense, as well as bursting the air of unreality that has shrouded the rail industry. And taxpayers may well find they will get a much better deal out of any new proposals.

 The new trains, a project dubbed rather clumsily the Intercity Express Programme, were to be a completely revolutionary concept in train design with many of the trainsets having the capability of being powered by both overhead electric wires and on board diesel engines. They were to be delivered under ‘whole life’ contracts which included the cost of 30 years of maintenance, encouraging the manufacturers to factor in the long term maintenance needs of the trains into their design.

 The idea was first dreamt up in the Department for Transport three years ago when it dawned on ministers that the HST sets were getting rather long in the tooth and that a replacement would be needed unless it were possible to upgrade them comprehensively. However, the scheme had all the hallmarks of being designed by a committee which ended up producing an all-singing all-dancing concept that would have cost the earth and probably not been fit for purpose.

 The creators of the scheme failed to examine what had made the HSTs the best rolling stock on the British rail network. They are flexible, roomy, comfortable, have plenty of luggage space, are relatively cheap to run and are durable. The new trains were to be at the cutting edge of technology, usually not compatible with reliability, and were hugely expensive because of the DfT’s rather contradictory demands that the trains should be light and ‘green’ and yet be equipped with this dual mode of power.

 Worse, when allocating the contract, Geoff Hoon, the then transport secretary, gave it to Hitachi, which was to build the trains in Japan - with a bit of token assembly work here - rather than Bombardier which still has a plant in Derby. All in all, the £7.5bn scheme made little sense.

 The idea was a throwback to the days of British Rail when every region designed its own trains and almost perversely made sure that they were different from those of their neighbours and probably incompatible with older stock already running on the network. The much simpler expedient of simply buying existing trains off the shelf, with appropriate but minor modifications, was never properly considered by the Department. Yet, if the Pendolinos were suitable for the West Coast Main Line, why could not a version of them be introduced on all the other main InterCity routes?

 So the decision to postpone - and probably scrap - the idea is eminently sensible. In the mean time, passengers get to enjoy the old HST 125s which on most lines have been well refurbished with the exception of the First Great Western sets which have been designed with all the sensitivity and consideration for passenger comfort of Ryanair. Nevertheless, these are excellent trains and given that virtually all components have been replaced during their lifetime apart from the body shells, there is no reason to assume that they will not continue to be serviceable well into this century. Lord Adonis has asked for an independent review of the IEP project by Sir Andrew Foster, the former controller of the Audit Commission, who is highly likely to confine the scheme to the scrapheap.

 Then it will be up to the Department for Transport to come up with a sensible and affordable scheme to replace the HSTs. If the only price of recovering from the recession is that railway passengers are forced to sit on older, but comfortable, trains for a few more years, then we will have escaped lightly.

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Walking in a Soho street on a January Saturday night with my partner and a couple of friends, I was stopped by a policeman: ‘Please walk on the pavement’ he barked at me. I was in no mood to obey. Lisle Street, which runs parallel to Chinatown’s main drag, Gerrard Street, has tiny pavements and little traffic. There were hundreds of pedestrians and virtually no cars. In any case, I had got used to walking in streets as they were safer, because they were gritted, than the pavements in much of London during the freeze.

 Moreover, Special Constable Pyle had touched a raw nerve. There are no rules governing who uses streets. People are allowed to walk on them providing they are not obstructing the highway. I wasn’t since there was no traffic.

 Pyle, who was all of 19 and with his ridiculous glasses bore such an uncanny ressemblance to Austin Powers that I could not help feeling he might be part of a reality TV show, ordered me onto the pavement where he took all of five minutes to fill out a stop form to the embarrassment of his fellow PCs. Pyle handed me a copy of the laboriously completed form together with a leaflet asking me to help combat terrorism. Not the best way to do it.

  The Pyle world view is clearly that cars must have priority and pedestrians are a nuisance who must be got out of the way. This is a very fundamental aspect of the attitude of highway engineers and town planners which is only now beginning to change and even then only very patchily and incoherently.

 Examples of this attitude abound. On the crossing on the A1 Holloway Road near my house, it takes up to a minute - it seems longer - for the signal to change to let through cyclists and pedestrians. Similarly, in Bristol, according to John Grimshaw, the founder of Sustrans and now a freelance engineer, such lights always take 40 secs to change ‘because they are worried that there will be rear end shunts if they change too quickly and they don’t want the lights to stop if there is just one cycle or pedestrian’.

 Yet in Woking, where I visited recently to see what progress the local cycle team was making, they have installed Toucan crossings for bikes and pedestrians which stop the traffic instantly. They have also put in crossings which are not staggered and consequently without a pedestrian pen in the middle . That is a design that is opposed by many highway engineers because they fear it will disrupt traffic - but there is no doubt that it is better for pedestrians. Those pens have proliferated in London, often on busy crossings putting people at risk as they have to push past people to get away from the traffic.

 The most obvious example of the wrong priorities has to be Oxford Street. A report just produced by the London Assembly, Streets Ahead, highlights the nightmare quality of the environment and the dangers posed to pedestrians. There are a staggering 300 buses - all double decker or bendy - per hour in peak hours. The street has an accident rate 35 times higher than the London average and pollution levels nearly five times above EU limits. Yet, unaccountably, taxis are still allowed to ply their trade in the street - because TfL has been too scared to boot them out.

 The report’s conclusions are rather mealy-mouthed. It says solutions are not easy and it suggests possibly a part pedestrianisation. However, the report rightly found that there has been no examination of a long term strategy for Oxford Street and calls for the Mayor to be involved in such a process, but it does not sufficiently consider the only realistic solution, total pedestrianisation.

 Peter Hendy, the Transport Commissioner, and his colleagues at TfL always respond from a similar hymn sheet, arguing that caution is necessary and that closing the street would disrupt the whole of London’s bus system and overcrowd the Tubes. Steve Norris, the chair of TfL’s surface transport panel, warns of ‘unforeseen circumstances’ from large changes to the transport system. It’s all negative nonsense. Kick out the taxis tomorrow, and remove the buses. Allow people to walk in the street since there are flows of 29,000  per hour.  Already Oxford Street is closed for one day per year, and London copes, so why not make it permanent?

 The notion that all this is impossible and we need to wait for Crossrail is just defeatist. Oxford Street has five Tube lines serving it already, and of course there might be extra congestion on them. Yes, rerouting buses is complex but doable. TfL planners need to treat the issue as if bombers had blown up Oxford Circus and blocked the whole area. Then, just as Network Rail built a new station in Workington in under a week, rather than the five years it normally takes,  solutions would be found.

 The real issue is that pedestrianisation might make people walk a bit further but that is what happens on every equivalent shopping area in European towns. By all means allow a few mini buses, preferably electric, to circulate in the otherwise closed streets as they do in Vienna - which should not be allowed to go faster than walking pace - put in lots of taxi ranks on the side streets and reroute buses. But take radical action or the street will die, especially given that two more huge shopping areas are being built in London at Stratford and Kings Cross to add to the recently opened Westfield.

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I was rung early this morning by the Today programme and ended up doing a small turn as the warm-up to Theresa Villiers on a story which highlights the Tories’ disarray whenever their policies are seriously challenged. The Guardian’s front page this morning highlighted the fact that the Tories are refusing even to look at the Government’s HS2 report through fear that they would then be compromised over the route which the new high speed line will take.

On first reading, I thought this was a bit of a non-issue but actually Dan Milmo has got himself a good story - or rather I somewhat sense he got fed it from an office not very far from Marsham Street. Theresa Villiers has indeed refused to accept Lord Adonis’s invitation to have a preliminary look at the HS2 report in case this compromises the Tories with local voters who might be opposed to the line going anywhere near them.

This was hardly a tenable position and not surprisingly on the programme she struggled not to sound completely daft.  She denied that this was the old narrow-minded politics but rather cleverly Adonis has pushed her into a corner and she could not summon up a good reason why she should not at least examine the report if given the chance to do so. It was was rather like the tale of the three monkeys.

Adonis is right that if a line is ever to get built - something I don’t believe will ever happen but the issue will certainly be in the political firmament for the next few years - it  will need a long term cross party consensus. Having committed themselves to the line first, the Tories gained a political advantage but with performances like that of Villiers on the Today programme, that momentum has been all but lost.

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While the precise cause of the Halle train crash is obviously not yet known, it does appear that a red light was passed at danger. The Belgian railways are in the process of installing equipment that would prevent such an error but the scheme has not yet been completed.

A row is now emerging which suggests that the Belgian rail authorities are saying that stringent EU requirements on new signalling - presumably a reference to ECTS - means that recommendations made in 2004 to install fail safe equipment have not been carried out. This is clearly one of those cases where the search for perfection is the enemy of the good.

That fully justifies the decision to install the TPWS system in Britain. It was relatively simple technology that could be introduced quickly and at a reasonable cost. Sure, it is not perfect and there are circumstances where a crash might still be possible. But it was excellent value for money and has proved itself, with a reduction in SPADs and, crucially, no subsequent accidents.

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The independent report on the Eurostar pre xmas breakdown is being released on friday with a press conference - itself a rarity these days in the rail industry - and hopefully a full exposition of what exactly went wrong. Chris Garnett, one of the two independent authors of the report, has promised that all aspects of the fiasco will be examined but one suspects that he is too much of a nice bloke to be hardhitting enough.  Garnett is one of life’s gents and he is certainly no one’s poodle but can he bare his teeth like a Rottweiler, which is what is needed in this instance.

Will, he for example, dare to criticise the Eurostar management in general and Richard Brown in particular if, as it appears, they have erred? And will  he be prepared to question Eurotunnel’s performance, given their hostile approach to the inquiry as revealed in their Christmas press release. Or will he pull  his punches.

It is commendable that the report has been produced so quickly and that it is being done independently. So let’s hope my instinct is wrong and we get the Garnett growl.

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It is only a few months away from the launch of the London cycle hire scheme, provided there are no delays - there is still no precise date, but only ’summer 2010′. I am desperate for the scheme to work, but I have severe doubts about it. Will the bikes be used, will they soon all end up in the Regents’ Canal or Hampstead pond, will there be enough pick up points to make it worthwhile, will people find spaces in which to park them, will the management of the scheme be flexible enough to accommodate disproportionate flows and so on.

It has by all accounts worked well in Paris, but there major improvements to the basic cycling infrastructure were made. It used to be perilous to cycle in the French capital, but a few years ago the mayor simply decreed that there would be cycle lanes along the boulevards, and these were installed with typical Gallic efficiency and little consultation. Here, making such changes is a laboured and endless process. Consultation is so often an excuse for inaction.

However, not all is perfect in Paris. A friend of mine, Liam, was there  last weekend and tried desperately to hire a bike, but his Visa card was rejected even before he put in his Pin number, and so were his other cards. Is there discrimination against foreigners? Have other readers of this blog had the same experience as Liam or have they managed to use the bikes?

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