If TikTok is to be believed, all the cool kids are trainspotters these days. Luckily, economists can get in on the act, because transport connections are crucial to cities’ growth.
But not all train stations are equal. If you’re a size matters person, you want your station to be a terminus – the end of the line. Specifically, you want it to have been a terminus for a good chunk of history. Research finds that the longer a town’s station has been an “all change” kind of place – even if decades back – the larger its population and economy today. It examines railways spreading west from Brazil’s São Paulo from the mid-19th century. They often developed in fits and starts, with a line built to one town but not going on to the next for some time. Such stop-start nonsense would never happen in Britain…
Being at the end of the line saw cities become larger, serving bigger local markets reliant on it for cheaply transporting goods (often coffee) back east. And bigger cities become more competitive – making it harder for other towns to compete, even when the trainline was extended.
These railways promoted the settlement of the Brazilian wild west, so direct parallels with HS2 are limited. Birmingham and Manchester aren’t exactly frontier towns. But major transport projects are central to cities’ economic strategies. If being a terminus is what matters, then the madness of HS2 running from Birmingham to west London is good for that 21st-century metropolis, Old Oak Common. Less so for Manchester.
As the National Infrastructure Commission notes, the chopping and changing “leaves a major gap in the UK’s rail strategy around which a number of cities have based their economic growth plans”. National chaos has local costs.
• Torsten Bell is chief executive of the Resolution Foundation. Read more at resolutionfoundation.org
