Transcription
I was having a brief quibble with the idea that it was necessarily a great idea spending 6 billion pounds reducing the journey time between London and Paris on the Eurostar by about 35 minutes by building completely new tracks between St. Pancras and Folkestone.
And my point was that actually the task at hand was not to make the Eurostar faster. It was to make traveling on the Eurostar more attractive than traveling by plane. Now planes are always going to be faster than trains. I think that's kind of a law of physics, basically. So maybe the best thing to focus on is not actually speed, where you're always going to lose a bit. Instead, the thing to focus on is not quantity of time, but quality of time. You can have a big table.
So I merely made the half-joking suggestion that for 0.1% or 0.01% of that 6 billion pounds, you could have Wi-Fi on the trains and maybe achieved exactly the same effect in terms of making the journey more desirable versus making the trains faster. If you really want to spend a billion quid, you can hire all of the world's top male and female supermodels, get them to walk up and down the train handing out free shadowy patrus to all the passengers. You'd have saved yourself 5 billion quid and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down.
If you give engineers a problem, they'll define it in terms which are most amenable to be solved by engineering. But the real problem is not how do we make the Eurostar faster. That's merely a means to an end. And it may be the most expensive means at that. And it reminds me of Einstein's point. He said, "If you gave me an hour to solve a really important problem, I'd spend the first 55 minutes defining the question and then only the last five minutes answer it."