With local Sydney councils, NSW MPs and residents in full scale revolt over Queen Lucy Turnbull’s growth plans for Sydney, planning lobby – the Committee for Sydney – has come up with an alternative way to accommodate millions of extra migrants and to create a ‘mega’ Sydney region: High Speed Rail (HSR). From The ABC:
A fast train network connecting greater Sydney, Wollongong and Newcastle as a “mega region” could create more than 10,000 new jobs, according to a new report.
A planning lobby group, the Committee for Sydney, said such a rail network could slash the commutes from Gosford to Sydney, and from Wollongong to Liverpool, by half.
The report said even a moderately fast rail network, which reaches speeds of 200 kilometres per hour, could connect Newcastle, the Central Coast and Wollongong with western Sydney in less than one hour.
Building new housing along such rail corridors could take the pressure off the Sydney housing market, the report said…
It estimates that if an extra 40,000 homes were built along the new rail corridors, that could deliver more than $75 billion of housing affordability improvements…
The Committee said the area covered by the mega-region is already home to more than 70 per cent of the state’s population and nearly 25 per cent of the national population.
HSR is a nice idea in theory, but prohibitively expensive in practice. This is because there is currently no easy way for HSR to get from the outskirts of Sydney into the CBD.
These HSR trains are not compatible with suburban commuter trains unless they slow to the same speeds due to alignment and congestion. Moreover, the current commuter train system in Sydney already cannot cope with existing passenger demands. Therefore, it would not be able to cope with HSR sharing its already congested network.
The only way for HSR to work is if it had its own dedicated line. But given Sydney is already built-out with little spare land, HSR would require acquiring some of the most expensive real estate in the world or tunnelling beneath it, both of which are prohibitively expensive.
Moreover, if you build 40,000 homes along the HSR corridor, as hypothesised by the Committee for Sydney, then it is will no be HSR and instead resemble standard commuter rail.
With residents overwhelmingly rejecting Queen Lucy Turnbull’s ‘Big Sydney’ vision, growth lobbyists like the Committee for Sydney are desperately trying to develop alternative plans to keep the throttle on mass immigration. HSR is merely the latest ‘brain fart’.
Of course there’s a solution that requires significantly less infrastructure investment and will do far more to safeguard living standards: reduce Australia’s immigration intake back to the historical average of 70,000 from 200,000 currently.
Such a policy would be far cheaper and beneficial than delivering high-speed passenger rail pork in a bid to juice the ponzi economy.
