John Hearsch, president of rail advocacy organisation Rail Futures, believes Sydney’s second airport at Badgerys Creek could once and for all kill the proposal to build a high speed rail (HSR) line linking the major East Coast capitals. From News.com.au:
“In my view, the decision to go ahead with Badgerys Creek Airport has, in practical terms, set back the case for high-speed rail on the east coast for three or four decades,” Mr Hearsch said at the AFR National Infrastructure Summit earlier this month.
The key reasons are cost and capacity.
The new airport is swallowing billions of dollars that could otherwise be spent on rail. While its opening will dramatically increase the number of planes that can traverse the Melbourne to Sydney corridor…
Kingsford Smith, Sydney’s current airport, is constrained by curfews, flight paths and has little room for physical expansion.
“A second Sydney airport will to a very large extent overcome those deficiencies, and given what a large capital investment the airport is in its own right, it seems that the case for bringing on high-speed rail is now maybe not diminished, but differed,” Mr Hearsch said to news.com.au on the sidelines of the summit.
He added at the moment high-speed rail would be solving a problem that didn’t exist.
“It’s not as though people are having great difficulty travelling (up and down the east coast),” Mr Hearsch said.
“We have multiple airlines on that corridor; there is competition which generally seems to work; lots of choice, so it’s not the same problem as in some urban areas where people are actually having difficulty getting around”…
Australasian Railway Association chief executive officer, Danny Broad, also said there were hurdles to get over before fast trains would be seen shooting down parallel to the Hume Highway.
“You have 30,000km of high-speed rail track in China. If you put the map of China on top of Australia, we’re a bit smaller, but they have 1.4 billion people and we have 25 million people, so that gives you an idea of whether the business case will stack up”…
Infrastructure Australia (IA), the independent public body that assesses and ranks the country’s future infrastructure needs, doesn’t even call for the construction of high-speed rail.
Let’s hope so. Because the HSR project never stacked up financially, economically or socially, for reasons explained previously.
It was even parodied by satirical ABC series, Utopia, which speaks volumes:
