They’re playing games with high-speed rail plans

Illustration: Johannes Leak.

Here we go again: Labor’s infrastructure spokesman, Anthony Albanese, has dusted off his support for a high-speed rail link between Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane. Not to be outdone, Cities and Urban Infrastructure Minister Alan Tudge is not ruling out the project, but says it’s really up to the states.

What’s with this obsession with high speed/very fast trains? Is it a boy thing? Is it a grown-up version of their love of the Hornby train sets from their formative years?

To be brutal, high-speed rail is yesterday’s technology based on yesterday’s lifestyle patterns. It may work in a small number of countries — Japan, China, one major trunk line in France — but the more typical scenario is planned projects that never proceed, incomplete projects or projects that lose vast sums with inadequate patronage.

To think that Australia can be an exception is to kid ourselves. Indeed, everything about our geography, population and the absence of a capacity to deliver large engineering projects on budget and on time mean that we shouldn’t waste our breath talking about high-speed rail projects, let alone committing millions of dollars to more feasibility studies.

You may not have caught up with the fact that California’s high-speed rail project has been shelved after many billions of dollars have been spent on it.

In a vision conceived in the early 1980s, the state’s largest cities would be connected, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, by very fast train services.

It would cover 1300km (much shorter than our proposed project) and would displace a great deal of air transport, particularly between LA and San Francisco. Bear in mind that the population of California is almost 40 million.

In announcing the suspension of the project last month, the Californian governor said the “the project as currently planned would cost too much and take too long”. The project is 13 years behind schedule and $US44 billion over budget.

Notwithstanding the co-ordinating effort of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, a series of errors have been made, including failure to secure appropriate easements, the mishandling of local protests, underestimation of costs, including bridges and elevated viaducts, and poor contract management.

The director of the University of Southern California’s transportation engineering program expressed the view that the project “is an unambiguous money-waster. It’s economically clear that it’s not going to turn to a profit, even if we take all construction costs out of the project, even if we just focus on operating costs. The fares that would be necessary to begin to recover cost will be so high that there will be insufficient demand for that mode of transportation’’.

Mind you, we don’t have to go overseas to see how these ambitious rail projects can go awry. Take, for example, the Regional Fast Rail Project, implemented by Victoria’s Bracks Labor government. It commenced in the early 2000s with the aim of significantly cutting the passenger rail travel times between various regional centres to Melbourne, including Ballarat, Bendigo, Geelong and Traralgon. It was anticipated, for instance, that the Bendigo-Melbourne trip would take one hour.

The initial costing put the project at $80 million. It eventually cost $750m and was completed in 2009.

Here’s the thing: rather than shave precious minutes off the travel times, in a number of cases, it now takes longer to get to Melbourne.

In the meantime, the Victorian government embarked on another ambitious rail project: the Regional Rail Link Project to separate freight and passenger rail transport close to Melbourne. It was expected to cost $500m; the final figure was close to $4bn.

Just in case you think that it is only in Australia that projects don’t go well, consider Spain’s ­example.

Its high-speed rail project commenced in 1992 and most of the regional centres are now connected to Madrid. The overall cost was about €40 billion but the operation bleeds money because the fares that can be charged are insufficient to cover operating costs.

And here’s an interesting feature of the Spanish experience: rather than foster regional development, the high-speed rail connections have concentrated economic activity in Madrid since it is now easier for those living in the regions to work there.

This is an important point for Australia. The high-speed rail option is often seen as a way for the regions to grow and for the big capital cities to shrink, at least relatively.

Indeed, this was the (misguided) pitch of the Victorian Liberal Party in November’s state election: decentralisation was going to be spurred by very fast train links to the regional centres.

Environmentalists also favour high-speed rail projects because of their scope to replace air travel, thereby reducing the emissions intensity of travel. The problem with this advocacy is that it ­ignores the embedded emissions associated with the construction phase as well as assuming that the emissions intensity of air travel won’t decline. In other words, the case is not clear-cut.

When thinking of the Melbourne-Canberra-Sydney-Brisbane high-speed rail project, it’s time to get real.

We can’t justify the project on the basis of regional development. And let’s face it, if there are too many stops along the way, it won’t be a very fast trip in any case. Using environmental concerns is also a long bow.

The all-up costs would be well north of $100bn and the project could be finished somewhere around the middle of the century. Private sector investment is extremely unlikely, although the contracting firms will be there with their ears pinned back to participate in the construction phase.

In the meantime, the new airport in western Sydney will be up and running, which is likely to alter the attractiveness and cost of travelling by air between Melbourne and Sydney. This is by far the busiest route that could potentially be replaced, in part, by rail travel.

The only conclusion to draw is true-blue Australian: tell ’em they’re dreamin’. There may be some shorter routes that can be serviced by faster trains — Newcastle-Sydney is a possibility — but we shouldn’t waste any more time (or money) on the big vision. If overseas experience is any guide, we can save a lot of money by binning this nation-building colossus now.