Transport Forecasts can go awry

I spent a happy half term virtually rewriting the Tutor2U OCR Transport Q&A which has been out of print for a few years now. Details to follow.

And these are exciting days for us Transport Train Spotters as there is an awful lot of context to be gleaned for the just published High Speed Rail: Investing in Britain’s Future.

So I feel a series of blogs coming on. Here is the first. Transport forecasting.

Traffic forecasts estimate how many passengers, vehicle and freight are likely to travel by a given mode in the future.

Here are some projections published back in the day in 1996 when assessing the economic case for Eurostar.

Forecasts give a broad indication of behaviour based on past trends and best understanding of future events but are bound to be uncertain. For instance, assumptions about future fuel prices, GDP income and population may prove inaccurate

So why were the 1996 projections so wide of the mark- unexpected external events. I quote:

A further reason for the lower than expected passenger revenues is the success of the low-cost airlines in competing with Eurostar on price, and their much larger range of destinations. These events illustrate the difficulty of accurately forecasting revenues on novel major projects. The Link is moreover the only high speed railway in the country and the first new railway line for a hundred years, so there is no recent national experience with which to compare it Source: Forecasting of passenger traffic

Can we trust the HSR projections of passenger numbers?