Melbourne Urbanist Alan Davies has had a quick look at the phase 1 study of Australian high-speed rail, the one agreed to with the Greens.
This phase of the study appears to be mainly about plausible route and station options for more detailed study. As he says, the really interesting material will come in the phase 2 study, not this preliminary work. For instance, in the modeling, baseline patronage demand is estimated by simply assuming that the HSR will price-match airlines on long-distance routes, without attempting to calculate realistic operating costs.
Even at this point, however, I have some questions about the demand model they’ve chosen to use.
While the effects of carbon pricing have been (implicitly) modeled through relative pricing of the HSR and air options, the model does not seem to take fully into account the effects of HSR on regional development. While there is an allowance for induced travel demand, that does not appear to fully take into account the potential effects on settlement patterns of HSR development.
Take Albury-Wodonga, for instance, one of the smaller centres at which a station is proposed. The HSR would put that city within roughly an hour’s train journey of Melbourne’s CBD, a similar time to Canberra, and under two hours from Sydney. In terms of travel time to Melbourne, that’s comparable to Ballarat, Bendigo, and Geelong; heck, it will be quicker than the current express trains from Pakenham (in Melbourne’s outer south-east fringe) to the city, if rather costlier.
If that doesn’t have a substantial effect on the attractiveness of Albury-Wodonga as a place to live and do business, I’d be very surprised – though Alan himself is skeptical of this.
In any case, like Alan, I wait Phase 2 of the study with interest; that’s where the real meat will hopefully be.
Elsewhere: A poster at The Stubborn Mule does some back of the envelope calculations and finds the passenger projections optimistic. However, the question isn’t what the passenger numbers are now it’s what they’re likely to be in a future where Melbourne, Sydney, and South-East Queensland have considerably larger and wealthier populations than they presently do.
Well Bernard Keene doesn’t like it but I’m a bit of a fan of the idea of HSR. Besides the build cost which is likely to be sticking point (as opposed to the possible benefits, jobs, ease of use, efficiency, yada yada) I do think the biggest impediment to any HSR network getting of the drawing board will be the vested interests in the airline game. They will scream blue murder over a heavily subsidised government competitor, how dare there be an alternative to flying…
dave, I reckon a combination of carbon pricing and peak oil will put the airlines out of business within a decade, so the whining won’t last.
Have you seen James Glover at Stubborn Mule on the passenger projections: http://www.stubbornmule.net/2011/08/train-in-vain/ ?
Sounds like it is not a good idea.
@dave if it’s heavily subsidised, then screaming blue murder is entirely legitimate — I’d do the same as a taxpayer!
Noted, Tom.
By the time a HSR link actually gets built, Australia will be a much more populated and probably richer place. That changes these calculations somewhat.
I grew up in Gippsland and did school projects on the high speed rail proposals from grade 5 onwards – no train yet. Then again, my parents moved to Geelong in 1971 to work on the Geelong bypass and that’s finally happened, so maybe it does have a chance!
Tom Davies @ 3
Agreed. And as a Tasmanian, the last thing I want is a subsidised alternative to the airlines on which I depend.
I’m curious, if not a bit confused. Who would commute by HSR from say Albury-Wodonga, if the daily fare were anything like a proportionate share of the airline ticket? (Even given airfares are much less in real terms than in the past). I use public transport every day, but am aware how even large urban systems have to be subsidised to keep them affordable and achieve the extrinsic benefits of reducing vehicle congestion/pollution.
And yes, you do hear of the occasional academic or business type who commutes by air, but only as a stop-gap solution and never more than a couple of trips a week.
dave, I reckon a combination of carbon pricing and peak oil will put the airlines out of business within a decade,
Nah, they won’t go out of business. It’ll just go back to like it was in the 60s and 70s; really, really frigging expensive.
the HSR sounds good for sure, but not sure australia needs to place any urgency on it. tim fisher says we must act now before all possible ‘corridors’ are urbanely sprawled out, but we could simply plan and set aside the corridors needed, and i thought we we halting urban sprawl anyway.
also, as the conservatives would helpfully point out: do we need to go into another 100 billion debt? i can’t see funding coming from any other source and as john baron pointed out on the tv drum, a HSR in a sense defeats some of the purposes of the NBN.
I can’t see how it makes sense (smaller areas do — like connecting Newcastle and Sydney or Melbourne and Geelong).
If you just add the numbers up you can see the cost just to pay the interest. Let’s say it costs 100 billion at 5% interest. So just to service the interest you need 5 billion a year.
How many people do you need for this? Let’s assume entirely optimistically that you can get $100 profit from each trip.
This mean to cover the 5 billion in interest alone you 50 million trips a year or about 140K per day. This seems unlikely to me — what are their estimates for how many trips a day it will take?
as far as I can tell at the moment, HSR in Japan costs about as much as an airline ticket if you go the full distance. e.g. Fukuoka to Tokyo is about 20000 yen one way by shinkansen, and about 20000 yen one way by plane. In fact often the plane is a bit cheaper (e.g. skymark are usually cheaper than an equivalent shinkansen ticket). The appeal of the shinkansen isn’t just its speed – anyone who has ridden in one can tell you it is absolutely the best way to travel. Also, it’s the intermediate distances that are the big money-spinners, I guess. For example, when I caught the shinkansen from Tokyo to Fukuoka after the earthquake, it emptied out completely at Osaka. A ticket the whole distance isn’t worth it, but it’s competitive with the plane (cheaper and a bit quicker) to travel half the distance.
Plus the HSR in Japan is connected to a really advanced network of express and semi-express trains that run off the backbone, so it’s used for short-distance connections. e.g. if I live near Okayama and want to go somewhere near Hiroshima, it really speeds things up. There’s a shinkansen every couple of minutes! But I can’t see this working in Australia.
All the above is anecdotal of course.
My guess for Australia is that with no large urban centres between the termini, it will be very hard to make it competitive with planes or free it up from subsidies.
As usual, everyone overlooks the possibility of recycling part of the uplift in land values to cover the capital cost. See e.g. this comment and the subsequent discussion.
(Yes, I’ve been banging this drum for years…)
Seems like the preferred route doesn’t include the Gold Coast, a city of almost 600,000, almost 200,000 more than Canberra. This strikes me as an ‘oversight’, but what would I know? I wish someone would pay me $20M to draw a few route maps.
List of cities in Australia by population
I haven’t read the paper in question, but if you’re right Robert about its failing to take into account the growth impacts of having the infrastructure, it’s rubbish. Of course being within a comfortable hour of central Melbourne will have a massive impact on the growth of Albury-Wodonga. Armidale would be within 90 minutes of both central Brisbane and central Sydney. Aviation cannot achieve those efficiencies, and indeed with the security obsession it can take easily four hours from Sydney CBD to Brisbane CBD, of which the actual flight is one of the shorter legs. Build the infrastructure, and regional NSW becomes part of the city growth story. The alternative is to spend a motza on a second Sydney airport within coo-ee of the CBD, offering a second class service for the hoi polloi.
The vision Gillard could articulate, if she’s got the nerve, is of an Australia with the best communications and transport infrastructure in the world. NBN and high speed rail, infrastructure owned nationally, converting our minerals boom into the basis of a 21st century winner among the nations of our region and indeed globally.
As someone from rural SA who has recently visited the Gold Coast I can understand why it was overlooked. Overdeveloped, large areas likely to be inundated by sea level rise, likely to be impoverished by peak oil, already an environmental disaster and becoming a social disaster.
Sorry if that offends.
If you can afford to pay the return fare from Albury Wodonga to Melbourne every day you can probably afford to live in a more attractive place within one to two hours door to door travel from Melbourne.
I can’t see an XPT between Brisbane and Sydney except via the Gold Coast. The current route via Kyogle is definitely not up to it, especially with the Cougar Spiral, where the line has to loop over itself to cross the border.
John, it’s not about daily Albury-Melbourne work commutes. Relatively few people would do those…though there’s a massive difference between commuting in a car and commuting on a nice high-speed train with allocated seating.
Not that many people do a daily commute from Geelong to the Melbourne CBD. However, the fact that you can makes a huge difference to people living there.
With a VFT, you could finish work at 5 in Albury, see an AFL match at the MCG or Docklands starting at 7:20, and get home again before midnight. The relationship between the Wodonga and Bundoora campuses of Latrobe University would become more like the relationship between Monash Caulfield and Clayton. And so on, and so forth.
“As usual, everyone overlooks the possibility of recycling part of the uplift in land values to cover the capital cost”
Gavin, apart from the fact your suggestion relies on changing the tax system, the CGT gains would be years upon years in coming, and they still wouldn’t be much of the total cost. For example, if you got 200K from 1 million houses, this would be 20 billion, so there is still 80 billion to find.
I love high speed rail, but 100 billion could make some desperately needed improvements in urban public transport which might have a bigger impact on carbon pollution
Conrad said:
Let’s put aside the politics of changing taxation of homes for a moment. You could get a lot more than 200k per house over the lifetime of the asset. The first full year of operation is projected as 2036 — so you could be drawing upon CGT on assets for 25 years before it even started, and then of course afterwards.
Of course, if a lot more people chose to move there, then the base you could draw upon would be a lot more than a million properties. Imagine all the medium density developments all chipping in.
@james
Granted, but in the end it ought not to be “either/or” — we should do things that are worthwhile regardless of what else is worthwhile. It’s not as if we can’t afford both to improve urban transport and build long distance HSR.
Yes, James, I agree.
As a point of comparison I’d like to see fast suburban commuter lines (to say Ringwood, Pakenham via Dandenong, Geelong via Werribee, and some equivalents in Sydney and Brisbane) and those subjected to equivalent analysis.
Throw in a proper conventional Newcastle to Sydney line (think 160 or 200 km/h rather than 350 km/h).
“Let’s put aside the politics of changing taxation of homes for a moment. You could get a lot more than 200k per house over the lifetime of the asset. ”
I guess it depends on how you want to calculate it — I didn’t try anything serious because it’s obviously complicated because you need to estimate when in the furture the capitals gains are coming (and indeed the tax rate and how much the asset will grow), whilst the pile of theoretical borrowed money is still growing due to interest before it comes. If for example all the gains were got 20 years after borrowing the money, with a 5% interest rate you end up owing a lot more 1.05^20 = 2.65 (i.e., 265 billion). I’m willing to admit this is wrong if someone can show me the evidence that capital gains would really put a significant dint in the entire cost. I personally haven’t seen it used as an argue to build such things anywhere (not that I’ve looked hard), including France where they have both death taxes and a CGT.
Umm. If you got 200K from 1 million houses you would get 200 billion.
Good point Greg. It pays to check one’s maths.
Interesting sidebar: My Android autocompleted “Greg” as Fergal, twice.
“Umm. If you got 200K from 1 million houses you would get 200 billion.”
A zero or two here and there
.
Actually, a second problem with the assumption that you will get more CGT is that presumably if you increase prices somewhere, you will decrease them somewhere else (and that one didn’t require adding
.
It’s probably associating me with my alter-ego, Fergal Devitt, Fran.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fergal_Devitt
I suppose that’s why they call it a smartphone Fergal
Recently rode the express, bullet and mainlines in Japan. All were exceptional, even decades on (though the mainlines were somnolent and crowded). But I would have thought Japan is a poor comparator.
The French TGV network is the best we could hope for, but even there you have 50m people in a smaller and more evenly clustered nation. The TGV seems to service: (a) tourists, (b) students and oldies (mainstays of public transport here) and (c) businessfolk who travel CBD to CBD and value the time saved in avoiding taxis to airports/screening etc. An impressive network, but it has hardly revolutionised French transport or weaned the country off the voiture and autoroutes.
A quick look at the atlas showed that Newcastle was the only big city between Brisbane and Sydney with Woolongong and Canberra the only big cities between Sydney and Melbourne.
The other obvious thing is that airlines would suddenly discover that they could handle passengers far faster if their business was ever threatened by a competitor whose competitive edge came from faster passenger handling.
John D: “A quick look at the atlas showed that Newcastle was the only big city between Brisbane and Sydney with Woolongong and Canberra the only big cities between Sydney and Melbourne.”
Not quite. There are a few tens-of-thousand-sized conurbations up the coast which would be worth a high-speed train stopping at: Coffs, Grafton or Ballina and Gold Coast are the obvious ones. Similarly, a Canberra-Melbourne leg would have natural pickups/connection points at Wagga and Albury-Wodonga, at least. The French, Japanese etc high-speed services are quite happy averaging about 1 stop per hour, and stop at fairly small towns if they are an important junction for picking up traffic from side lines: I’ve recently travelled St Malo-Paris (426 km, 3h 15m TGV) stopping at Rennes, Laval and Le Mans, and on a Marseille-Paris TGV stopping at Aix-en-Provence, Avignon and Lyon (854 km in the same time, a bit over 3 h). Out of the intermediate stops, only Lyon and Rennes are over 150k population.
Apart from that:
1. Wollogong is not really “between Sydney and Canberra”: there is a hefty escarpment in the way, which would prevent routing a high-spped line that way.
2. Disadvantages that airlines will never be able to overcome are:
(i) time and money costs to passengers due to the siting of airports out at the fringe of the city, with slow/expensive taxi/bus/train services to the CBD. Trains can drop you off right in the middle of it all.
(ii) lack of legroom and tight size/weight limits on luggage.
“The other obvious thing is that airlines would suddenly discover that they could handle passengers far faster if their business was ever threatened by a competitor whose competitive edge came from faster passenger handling.”
It’s not true of France. This is one of the reasons everyone prefers the TGV even if it is longer — there are very few incidental things that waste your time (e.g., get to the airport an hour early). I think the problem with many airports is that air travel has lots of things that waste your time that you can doing nothing about (e.g., safety checks), many airports are beyond capacity (e.g., Sydney) and many of the incidental things are done by other companies that want to save money, and this means less employees are better than more. Other advantages of trains (which is why I and many other people catch them in France even if they are slower) are that the seats are big so you can actually use your laptop, they are vastly more comfortable, they go on strike far less, you go from the city centre to the city centre, they are exceptionally reliable, you don’t get ripped off in the city centre for things like food, you don’t get travel sick on TGV style trains, your baggage doesn’t get lost, you can take as much junk as you want on the train, and perhaps most importantly you can buy your ticket 10 minutes before leaving and not get ripped off too much (no planning).
Its just such a wrong focus. $100bill – which doesn’t include $10s of bill for tunnels & stations in Sydney / Mel / Brisbane. (The current cross city tunnel slated for 2015 in Brisbane is budgeted around $15bill).
The focus should be on making slow rail faster – with a particular focus on freight. That’s where there’s some economic benefit to the nation as a whole.
For instance, the single permanent way between Casino & Beaudesert (including the delightfully archaic spiral at Cougal) was laid down in the 1870s thereabouts. Starting again could yield a substanial gain.
A VFT line doesn’t always have to go all the way and can be utilised for VFT commuter segments. Thus, for dormitory conurbations such as Central Coast and Campbelltown a very fast train would make life a lot easier for those who live there and work in Sydney. There would be some easing of pressure on real estate, too, rentals as well as buying. For Campbelltown to Sydney city commuters, the journey time would be cut from the current 1 hr 20 min to Central to about 30-40min. Gosford to Sydney is currently 90 min, with VFT it could be cut by half if not more. This would make an enormous difference in a lot of people’s lives. They’d be given 6-7 hours a week back for their lives, or about 2 years for a working lifetime. How do you put a price on 2 years of being able to smell the roses and potter about instead of sitting in a rattling metal box?
I agree with the broader points of Scotty and Sir H. To single out VFT as the panacea for transport is kind of putting the cart before horse. Considering the current pressing issues of transportation, freight and commuting needs have to be integrated to justify the investment.
Regional issues, such as pointed out by Scotty, have currency up here in Far North Queensland too. The total mismanagement and degradation of rail assets by State Government over time are a telling story. Since the glory days of when rail has opened up the country and enabled industries to develop, we have ‘progressed’ to the present remnant ruins in the landscape. Coupled with the lack in funds to maintain the existing road network, which is also way beyond the potential to keep up with the freight and commuting needs of this rapidly growing and strategic important region, transportation has become a major issue here. So, a flash and costly flagship down south will not go down well in this region.
Whether they use the time to smell the roses or do overtime, the time clearly has value.
“Throw in a proper conventional Newcastle to Sydney line (think 160 or 200 km/h rather than 350 km/h).”
Yeah I think the money is better spent on urban rail. Even if you just did say Newc-Syd at 350km/h I have two questions;
1. how much tunnel would that involve? you’ve got the Brisbane Water and Ku-ring-gai chase to deal with … that’s *rugged* territory and very fast trains like flat flat flat lines and gentle curves.
2. Lets say even syd-canb, well, nearly half that journey by car is just south west Sydney. Can you expect to let a train do 350 km/h in an urban area? how do you keep kids/dogs/shopping trolleys/bricks off the track?
if it costs $15b to put a few klicks of standard line and a couple of stations under the south brisbane and the river, i reckon the real cost of brisbane-melbourne VFT is gonna be many hundreds of billions.
T Rex @ 38: “2. Lets say even syd-canb, well, nearly half that journey by car is just south west Sydney. Can you expect to let a train do 350 km/h in an urban area? how do you keep kids/dogs/shopping trolleys/bricks off the track?”
Look at my examples from France above. Real high-speed trains are not committed to doing 350 km/h all the way: they reach that speed when they have a 150-200 km interval between stops. If they start a route with a few closely-spaced pick-up stops (e.g. through Sydney suburbia and exurbia), they average a lot less than that. There would be no expectation of reaching 350 k in the Sydney exurbs or anywhere on the way to Newcastle, particularly if there were a stop in the Central Coast on the way. But they still are not subject to delays from traffic lights, traffic jams, ridiculous security-and-baggage-checking times and having stations that are a $50 taxi ride from the city centre.
Kids, dogs and bricks are all easy to keep off the track, with appropriate fencing etc etc. Geez. Other countries do it, so why can’t we? Same applies re. negotiation of rugged terrain and incised coastlines, which other countries also have. State-of-the-art public transport seems to inspire this “can’t-do” reflex purely in the Anglophonie.
An Adelaide-Ballarat-Melbourne-Albury-Canberra-Sydney-Newcastle-Brisbane high-speed axis could put 60%-70% of the population of the country within an hour of their nearest high-speed station, with CBD-to-CBD travel times (and I don’t just mean state capitals) about the same as those currently available by plane, but much more sustainably. As a nation-building and future-proofing project, it’s a no-brainer. Whatever it takes, as long as it is done properly, with a lot of attention paid to lessons from other countries which have already made a go of it.
We are still talking about spending a lot of money on last century technology that will benefit the privileged few. NBN is 21st century technology that will dramatically reduce the need fo r business travel and may also have a significant effect on where the future population concentrations will be. The link in the article suggests that all the capital and most of the operating costs will have to be subsidized – there are a lot smarter, more urgent things to do in the early 21st century than this.
It would be interesting to know what the cost per tonne CO2 abatement would be in terms of replacing air travel. Suspect it would be pretty daunting.
Andy C, the point is in your second paragraph, I think:
Every advantage you list here on those short haul routes is possible with regular high speed rail. They already don’t stop for red lights, etc. you’re assuming that the only possibilities are road or high speed rail when there are other (some already existing) rail options. Why spend all that money (and its a lot of money) on a high speed rail system down the east coast when simply upgrading and extending the traditional rail system from each of the three centres to their exburbs will suffice – and provide probably equal utility to their denizens?
If you said spend $200 billion on linking Brisbane to Melbourne with a very high speed rail line or spend the same money make three cities’ urban transport systems much better and live with the two-hour plane flight for inter-city travel, I would opt for the latter.
Apparently, Tyro, the Gothard-Base Tunnel (57km under the Alps) was completed for about $US10bn. Some of it goes down 2km, and trains will be able to travel at up to 250km/h.
That puts the cost at about $175 million per km. I’m not sure where exactly you’d run the tunnel, but I fancy you could get out of the deal with a lot less than 57km of tunnel.
Tyro, if you can build a VFT from Fukuoka to Tokyo and another one from Tokyo to Aomori you can build one in that “rugged” NSW countryside. Japan actually has actual mountains, and they come down to the sea.
I can’T see it being worthwhile though. Whereas improving urban rail in Melbourne and Sydney is of huge value.
Apparently the Laerdal (road) Tunnel (24.5km, opened in 2000) cost $US125m — so about $5m/k. Obviously, laying the rail will cost something, but it does begin to give us a ballpark figure.
@ 34:
Get your facts right.
The Queensland “Main Line” was laid down in the 1870s. It’s the line that connects Ipswich with Toowoomba. It was the original railway connection with Sydney (via Wallangarra’s “break-of-gauge” station).
The line between Casino and Beaudesert is the NSW “North Coast Line”, which was completed and went into full commission in 1930.
Tyro Rex @ 41:
. [emphasis added]
I drive trains.
I can assure you that trains do stop for red lights.
This is what can happen when they don’t.
Roy, of course there is signalling on the train lines, we were discussing traffic jams.
And it doesn’t affect the point that normal high-speed rail upgrades from Syd-Newc, Bne-GC, Melb-Dandenong, etc and other urban transport initiatives would be of greater value to more people than a pie-in-the-sky super train from Brisbane to Melbourne.
Cos when one of those things goes through a signal or runs off the tracks it looks like this: http://resources1.news.com.au/images/2011/06/02/1226068/238757-eschede-train-crash.jpg
Fran, I take the rare opportunity to correct you – make it Gotthard.
sg @43 “I can’T see it being worthwhile though (tunnel through a “rugged” rural landscape). Whereas improving urban rail in Melbourne and Sydney is of huge value.”
I case you’ll ever make it to our part of the world, I invite you to a sip of the local Mango wine at the Peninsula Pub where you can watch the endless procession of road trains loaded with cattle, produce and mineral treasures rattling through the main street of Mareeba heading for the big smoke. And an equivalent impressive effort in return with supplies such as fertilizer, agricultural and mining equipment and the odd tourist bus in the mix. Cairns (approx pop 150k) having run out of space suitable for landfill, has decided to dump their rubbish in the hinterland. Hence they are literally pushing shit up hill and truck their refuse through our town to dump it in our backyard, on roads that probably transects some of Australia’s most geological unstable landscape. So most up here see tremendous value in ensuring appropriate safe and efficient transport solutions to ship gold into our banks, provide steak and sugar to city dwellers tables, as well as to take care of their rubbish!
Thanks Ootz …
Tyro Rex.
The Eschede rail disaster was caused by a wheel failure.
The way to avoid such disasters is correct maintainence of the track and rollingstock. Japan’s Shinkansen has been running since 1964 without any safeworking-caused fatalities (there is the occasional person who decides to throw themselves in front of a train — as I discovered at Mihara earlier this year).
As for signalling, VHSR trains use in-cab signalling and not trackside signalling.
As for the cost arguments and public subsidy: what amount of money has been, is being, and will be spent on constantly upgrading the Pacific, Princes and Hume Highways to cater for the trucking and bus companies? I’d argue that the cost of establishing a VHSR system linking Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne would be roughly equivalent to the cost of constantly upgrading and maintaining the existing inter-city highway network.
It could also ease urban pressures on the main cities by making it more attractive to commute from regional centres which would get a VHSR station.
For Brisbane, at least, I could see at least reasonably inexpensive route for a HS of tunnelling a line into the inner-city, if it were to run beneath the Pacific Motorway (which, for most of its route from Eight-Mile Plains, is built on top of an embankment).
And if a route via Toowoomba were chosen, a VHSR could run from Roma Street along the route of Newman’s road tunnel under Milton Road before coming out into the sunlight west of Mount Coot-tha.