SAVING MINUTES BY TRAIN

~ Posted by Robert Butler, January 30th 2012

Two weeks ago a political columnist suggested there were two David Camerons, the rural one and the urban one, and the urban one was winning out. The two other most senior figures in the cabinet—Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, and George Osborne, the chancellor—were resolutely urban.

This observation was prompted by the news that the government had come out in favour of HS2 (or High Speed Two), a £33 billion rail link from London to Birmingham, which would divide at Birmingham, and head on to Manchester and Leeds. The new route would save 20 minutes of journey time. It would also damage beautiful stretches of English countryside.

The economic argument goes that if you cut journey time, you increase productivity. But The Economist pointed out that “a large part of the supposed benefits rest on assumptions that businessmen are unproductive in transit”. If business people are happily productive when in transit, the most effective way of assisting that productivity would be not to disturb them.

Last week on BBC Radio 3 the novelist Andrew Martin, who has written six railway thrillers, analysed the spread of tannoy announcements on trains. There are too many of them, they go on too long and they are full of maddeningly genteel compounds. It’s a “station stop”, not a “stop” or a “station”. It’s “personal belongings”, not “belongings”. It’s "platform surfaces", not "platforms". It’s an “at-seat trolley service”, not a “trolley”.

Everyone on the train knows that the buffet service offers a selection of hot and cold beverages, sandwiches, crisps etc, but the buffet manager runs passengers through this list over and over again. If each minute in our day is so precious, as proponents of HS2 suggest, let's win back a few minutes here.

Robert Butler is online editor of Intelligent Life