The latest giant study for a high-speed rail service between Melbourne and Brisbane contains such disconcerting qualifications that the most tragic gambler would be given pause.
''Whether to proceed with planning for a future HSR (High-Speed Rail) program must necessarily be a policy decision, taking account of many factors that cannot be known with certainty, and in the context of risks which cannot be perfectly controlled,'' declares one of the key findings.
Unsurprisingly, Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese wasn't about to declare the speed rail an actual government policy when he unveiled the 500-page report on the fantasy choo-choo on Thursday, plus 1900 appendices and almost 300 maps.
Rather, he was opening up the subject for public debate and comment, admitting that it ''does pose a number of complex challenges''.
Challenges? Take your pick: along the 1748 kilometre route would be a mere 144 kilometres of tunnels; 67 kilometres of which would be under the city of Sydney alone.
Why, the high-speed Channel Tunnel from Britain to France is a mere 50 kilometres.
The only comparison with the proposed Sydney tunnel is the 67.3-kilometre metro running between an airport and a bus terminal in Guangzhou, China, currently the longest railway tunnel in the world.
Then there is the ticklish cost of the Melbourne to Brisbane line: $114 billion in today's dollars.
The cautious tend to be a tad lairy about cost projections on big projects. The famed Chunnel, for instance, ran 80 per cent over its budget, though it took only six years to build.
Work on the first stage of the proposed Australian Streak - a modest stretch between Sydney and Canberra - couldn't even get started for the next 14 years because of the need for planning and approvals and the unravelling of red tape, according to the report. And construction of the whole system, with branch lines to the Gold Coast, would take another 30 years.
Thus, even if all the federal and state governments agreed and the project got the whistle, it wouldn't be completed until 2058, not taking account of those aforementioned ''factors that cannot be known with certainty''.
On my recent honeymoon, we took the German ICE train from Munich to Venice.The trip takes 7 hours and was, at the time, much cheaper than direct flights.
It is a pleasant journey, if you ever get the chance. Hurtling through the snow clad landscape, watching one region melt into the next.
Sipping Paulanerbeer in the mealswagon as you wend your way through the spectacular scenery of the Brenner Pass.
It’s not hard to see why many Australians return from Europe with a romantic notion of high-speed rail wondering why we haven’t built a similar network here.
The answer is that unlike Europe, with its multi centric cities, Australia is dominated by our big five cities. Intercity travel is increasingly common - the Sydney-Melbourne route being the fifth busiest air passage in the world - but it is by no means a daily affair.
Yet.
Critics of the proposed high-speed railway down Australia’s eastern seaboard choked on their wheaties this week at the $114 billion price tag unveiled by the federal government.
At three times the cost of the government’s national broadband network, it certainly is an awe inspiring sum.
And if the history of large infrastructure projects is anything to go by, even this estimate is likely to be conservative.
In a paper titled “Survival of the unfittest: why the worst infrastructure gets built - and what we can do about it”, the Oxford University’s Bent Flyvbjerg estimates that of 258 major projects studied in 20 different countries, including the Channel tunnel and San Francisco Bay bridge, nine out of 10 suffered cost over runs. Rail projects are the worst offenders. Of 58 rail projects, there was a 45 per cent average cost over-run, compared to 20 per cent for road projects and 34 per cent and bridges and tunnels.
On this track record, it’s not unreasonable to assume the price tag of HSR could be more like $180 billion in today’s dollars.
But a crucial point of this week’s report - missed by most commentators - is that this cost of action must be weighed against the very real costs of inaction. The debate over HSR is not unlike the debate over action on climate change in this regard.
Already, Australia’s failure to provide adequate infrastructure to keep pace without growing population is creating costs in terms of congestion and lost productivity.
Consider this.
At federation, Australia’s population was a little under 4 million people.
In 1950, we topped 8 million for first time. In 2000 it was about 19 million and today the Bureau of Statistics population clock is hovering just below 23 million.
In the last decade, we have added as many Australians (4 million) as we accumulated in the first 50 years of federation.
We couldn’t and shouldn’t want to slow this population growth. But creaking urban infrastructure is increasingly imposing limits to growth.
Left unchecked, there will be an increasing cost to society from congestion on our roads and key transport routes. Not to mention the social costs of hostility towards new migrants.
The cost of action on HSR may be great, but the cost of inaction are great too, and climbing.
The government’s high-speed rail report argues strongly that we cannot afford to be sceptics when it comes to the long-term implications of population growth:
“It is most likely that demographic and economic trends will support a steadily improving case for HSR on the east coast rather than otherwise,” the report notes.
“In that case, policy-makers, whether or not yet convinced of the merits of committing to HSR, may also legitimately weight the possible consequences of not taking actions to preserve that option at some point in the future.”
“In this regard, inaction is not benign. In the absence of a protected route, the spread of cities and other developments in the preferred corridor will gradually reduce the constructability and increase the potential capital costs of a future HSR program, rendering it increasingly more difficult to implement, even while the fundamental trends may become increasingly favourable.”
As the population grows, the economics of the HSR become even more compelling. Indeed, this is part of the reason for the long time frame proposed for the project, which is not completed fully until 2058. Critics say it must be done faster. But demand for intercity travel will take time to build. But build it will, pushing the economic benefits even further in favour of the project.
But there is a cost, too, in delaying.
Already the biggest cost factor of the proposed network is the required tunneling of 144 kilometres, or 8 per cent of the proposed 1,748 kilometre track. Sydney alone will require 67 kilometres of expensive tunneling to avoid the politically Herculean task of seizing land and removing tenants from the desired route.
If we had acted earlier to protect a route, the costs would have been lower. And every year we wait before marking out a route, these costs will escalate.
At a cost to the taxpayer of $37,543 per page, the government’s 534 page report into the feasibility of high-speed rail along Australia’s Eastern seaboard deserves more attention than it has got.
Nobody has said what we're going to do if we over populate our coastal towns.
Just more of the houses and holes economy?
stinkbug omosessuale Frank Castle is a liar and a criminal. He will often deliberately take people out of context and use straw man arguments. Frank finally and unintentionally gives it up and admits he got where he is, primarily via dumb luck! See here Property will be 50-70% off by 2016.
In some suburbs, the simple act of stepping out the front door and walking to a train station can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to the value of a house, some experts believe.
As Sydney's roads become increasingly clogged, being able to leave the car at home is becoming increasingly important.
Such is this importance that urban planners now want all new residential developments in Sydney to be within 800 metres of a train line, or some other form of public transport.
Agents agree that being able to walk to a train station makes a property more popular for buyers, but opinion is divided about whether that translates into higher prices.
Raine and Horne chief executive Angus Raine says this is hard to quantify.
''It's certainly a big tick in the box of the attractiveness of an area, that's for sure …,'' he says. ''But it's a bit of an intangible, it is hard to ascertain to what degree it makes a difference.''
Others, such as Peter Kelaher, director of buyer's agency PK Property, believe the premium for a house close to a rail line could be as high as 30 per cent, compared with similar properties further away.
''It's a major factor in buying a house … and it's getting more important because of the Sydney congestion,'' he says. ''Being able to walk to rail for people who work in the city is a really big thing …''
Perhaps the best example of that, he says, is the spike in prices after new rail lines have been opened, such as from Chatswood to Epping.
''When a train line is put in to an area, for instance when it was put in around Macquarie Park [on the Chatswood to Epping Line], it lifts property prices in the vicinity of 30 per cent,'' Kelaher says.
Anthony Trees First National principal Anthony Jasprizza has also seen prices rise for properties in walking distance of this new rail line, which opened four years ago, especially in parts of Marsfield and North Ryde, but he puts the spike at between 10 per cent and 15 per cent.
''You definitely get a premium,'' he says. ''But that's usually because these properties are also close to shops and other amenities.''
Kelaher says the same holds true on the north shore line, where properties that are about two kilometres or less from a station on the coveted eastern side of the line can be 25 per cent more than comparable properties elsewhere.
But being too close to a train line can have the opposite effect: it can turn buyers away.
Jasprizza says ideally properties should be no closer than a five-minute walk from the station, but no further away than ''an easy'' 20 minutes.
Kelaher believes 500 metres is about as close as buyers are willing to be before train noise starts to become an issue.
''Buyers don't like rail noise,'' he says. ''Freeway noise can be controlled to peak hours but trains go 24 hours.''
This was talked about in Canberra 15 years ago and as usual got no where. Still catching the 5 + hour train service to Sydney now if it still exists. Perhaps stinkbug could confirm.
Rail fans will have to go back to the 1990s if they want to take a fast train up the east coast.
Back then, it was a private group – not government – that was leading the push to establish a commercially viable alternative to air travel.
In 1998, the Speedrail consortium was proposing a Melbourne-Sydney fast train taking three hours from CBD to CBD for a predicted cost of just $3.5 billion. But in 2013, it has become a commercially unviable government project with an astronomical price tag of $50 billion. It has now been extended from Sydney to Brisbane for another $64 billion with a total project price tag of $114 billion – and that doesn’t include an extra $10 billion for the trains themselves.
And, being a government project, it contains the usual warning: “The key risks to the HSR program and its successful performance are common to all major greenfield infrastructure projects; most notably, a lack of certainty about future demand and revenues, and the potential for cost over-runs during construction.”
And almost all of that money would have to come out of our pockets because the project doesn’t stack up commercially.
“If potential commercial funding were maximised, a funding gap in the order of $98 billion, or 86 per cent of the up-front capital cost of the HSR program, would remain,” says the high-speed rail (HSR) report released last week.
In other words, if the entire 1748-kilometre dual track railway from Melbourne to Brisbane via Sydney can’t be built for $16 billion, it isn’t a goer commercially.
In the 1990s, it was a goer because the competition was a bloated two-airline system that looked like it would go on forever. A business class Melbourne-Sydney air ticket was around $400 one way and the cheapest economy seat was $120 if you were prepared to book weeks ahead.
But the industry began fracturing in 2000 when regional airline Impulse bought some big jets and Virgin Blue backed by Richard Branson took to the skies, precipitating the Ansett collapse in 2001.
Fares went south with $50-$100 interstate specials available regularly for the first time. Jetstar’s invention by Qantas in 2004 and Tiger’s arrival in 2007 introduced crazy specials of $39, $19 and even $1 to get many people flying for the first time.
Even with two airline groups divided into four brands – as now looks likely depending on the deliberations of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in the next few weeks – sub-$50 fares on most intercapital routes will stay in the market, meaning the best the fast train can do is match the total city-to-city travel time, probably with better comfort, but losing its price-competitiveness.
Envisaging up to three trains an hour in each direction, last week’s HSR report projects that the system, once it was built, would pay its own way with a spread of fares like Brisbane-Sydney for $83, Brisbane-Melbourne $169, Newcastle-Sydney $31, Sydney-Canberra $42, Albury-Melbourne $42 and Sydney-Melbourne $86, with business class fares pitched around 50 per cent higher.
That’s enough to take about half of its business from the airlines. “It is not expected that airlines could, or would, respond to HSR competition by reducing their fares on a sustained basis,” the report says. “Rather, it has been assumed that airlines would quickly reduce capacity, either by reducing frequencies or aircraft sizes, to locations within the HSR corridor where there is significant passenger diversion to HSR.”
You can imagine the impact on regional cities like Newcastle, Goulburn, and Albury-Wodonga if they were less than an hour from their capital cities by train. There would be a regional real estate boom that not only would entice home-buyers out into sticks to grab an affordable country base; it could also help pay for the project itself.
When John F. Kennedy saw a challenge worth taking he decided to get on with it as quickly as humanly possible, and in eight years Neil Armstrong was walking on the moon. On the other hand, our federal transport minister would have us believe building a high-speed railway from Melbourne to Brisbane will take 45 years.
The economic windfall which high speed rail will deliver to Australia has finally been recognised by the federal government, and that's a good thing. But political delay and gold-plating could leave this as just a dream for another two generations of Australians.
Forty-five years is laughable.
Much has been made of the ‘technical and logistical challenge’, but we must get some perspective. Australia is in large part flat and vacant – a luxury that no other country operating HSR (high-speed rail) can boast. While there are some challenging points on the alignment, such as from Sydney to the Central Coast, a high proportion of the route is flat fields.
Spain and China have been rapidly constructing HSR in order to reduce the huge cost to those countries of imported oil and have completed 3,000km and 15,000km of track respectively in the past decade alone.
Indeed, these findings are an insult to the capability of Australia’s construction industry.
Beyond Zero Emissions has done its own study on the HSR route in partnership with the German Aerospace Centre (DLR). The research, which will be published in full in May, indicates that the chosen HSR route could instead be built for around $70 billion.
By making this project a life’s work no doubt adds considerably to the financial challenge as well as the gold plating which is evident in the cost estimates.
The notion of $114 billion is questionable to say the least.
The savings come from careful attention to the rail pathway to avoid the most difficult terrain along the corridor. Where every kilometre of avoided tunnel saves $160 million and bridge saves $100 million, every little bit adds up to big savings for a 1,750 kilometre alignment. This analysis has been a collaborative effort by BZE and the DLR.
Trains travelling up to 400km/h are restricted to curves of around a 10km radius. This is a very gentle curve but allows enough flexibility to avoid many challenging obstacles. In mapping out a route based on the design limitations of high speed trains the BZE-DLR work has resulted in close to half of the 144km of tunnel suggested by the government study.
Another area for large cost reductions is the challenge of accessing the major city centres. The reason this is so high in the government study is due to the inoffensive but very expensive approach of tunnelling from the fringe to the centre of each city and underground stations.
This is largely avoidable, even in Sydney, by exploiting existing infrastructure corridors (existing rail, freeways, or transmission lines) and also adds markedly to the savings.
The options should be made available for the public to think about.
Considering the stages broken down by the government study, each could be delivered for a cost in the same order of magnitude as many of the long list of projects each of Australia’s big cities is currently considering to deal with further congestion.
When commuting from Wagga Wagga to Melbourne or Sydney would be faster than from the edge of suburbia, HSR would address the root cause of congestion in each city as well as dramatically improving the service level of transport to regional Australia.
The importance of HSR is underlined by the high concentration of domestic travel along the corridors between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, as shown in the image below.
Air travel between Australia’s three major cities is among the world’s highest. In terms of aircraft movements, the Sydney-Melbourne route is ranked number 4 in the world, Sydney-Brisbane, 13, and Melbourne-Brisbane, 36. These are statistics that only Qantas would be proud of.
HSR not only withdraws the domestic pressure on Australia’s major international airports, at the same time it also brings regional Australia within range of the economic centres and delivers visitors to the truly unique outback and coastal areas Australia is renowned for.
Today’s transport planning is for the years ahead. The time is now to be building transport infrastructure that matches Australia’s travel activity, scales easily with growing demand, eases the congestion on our cities and can be powered by renewable energy. High speed rail is a real solution.
It's a big project, but it will deliver big savings – whether you count them in dollars or carbon emissions.
Gerard Drew is a researcher for the Zero Carbon Australia Transport Plan with the climate change solutions think-tank Beyond Zero Emissions.
This was talked about in Canberra 15 years ago and as usual got no where. Still catching the 5 + hour train service to Sydney now if it still exists. Perhaps stinkbug could confirm.
The train CBR/SYD does exist, but doesn't run very often, takes an hour or more longer than the bus, and costs about twice as much.
There's this scene in the film The Castle where Eric Bana and Sophie Lee get back from overseas and immediately start telling the family about the movies they saw on the plane, the complimentary sleeping masks - ''they were for free'' - and the selection of beef wellington or fish the stewards were offering.
It's funny - and it's kind of true. People do often want to talk about their plane trip; I often do. If you don't catch planes all the time, how you spend the hours and what you watch when you're tucked into those weird little unnatural plane-spaces seems to matter more than it should.
But the plane trip as a staple of post-holiday conversation is probably, and perhaps sadly, drifting from fashion in this part of the world. People are travelling more. The dollar is high. A lot of us can at least pretend to be more sophisticated and knowing.
What hasn't gone from fashion is the inevitable post-holiday comparison of how they do things overseas and how we do things here.
For Australians, one of the main subjects of comparison - the deficient state of transport in this country - was placed in the foreground this month with the release of a $20 million government report into high-speed rail down the east coast.
They've had these fast trains in Japan for decades. You couldn't get around the place without them. They've got them in Europe and they're the best way to see the continent. But why, in a place like Australia, are they seemingly no chance to happen?
First up, and to be clear, no one is going to be building high-speed rail in Australia any time soon. The Gillard government isn't putting up any money. And Tony Abbott seems to have the misguided view that the motor vehicle is the last word when it comes to moving people around. He's not going to stump up the billions. But the fact is, we taxpayers spent $20 million on this report that looked into the economics, the finances, and the engineering required to get a high speed rail system up. We might as well see what it says.
One point that emerges from the study is that, in convenience terms, the fast trains would be brilliant.
The study compared the experience of a business traveller making their way from Melbourne's inner east to Sydney's central business district on train and plane. At the moment, that traveller would need a taxi or to drive to Tullamarine Airport. At the airport, checking-in and waiting around would take about an hour or more. The flight would be about 85 minutes. After landing at Sydney, you'd be lucky to get into the CBD by train or cab within 40 minutes of touching down.
But the experience with the hypothetical fast train could be about 20 per cent faster. You could take a much shorter cab ride or public transport to Melbourne's Southern Cross Station, arriving there within 15 minutes or less to departure. The trip would be longer, at about 2 hours and 45 minutes. But if the fast train made it all the way to Central station, the business traveller could get from there to Sydney's CBD in 10 minutes or so.
In fact, the report pretty much shows that if a system like this were ever erected, the domestic airline industry would be gutted.
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