Albo hoses $2.2b on Dan’s Suburban Rail Loop boondoggle

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Two years ago, Inside Story’s Tim Colebatch labelled Dan Andrews’ Suburban Rail Loop – a 90 kilometre orbital rail system that would run underground between Cheltenham and Werribee at a cost of up to $120 billion – “the worst transport project Melbourne has ever seen”:

The government’s commitment to build the worst transport project Melbourne has ever seen: the so-called Suburban Rail Loop… Tunnels eat money, and the demand for this one is likely to be small. No business case has been produced, and no cost–benefit analysis, but it will cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars…

It appears that this emerged from his political circle rather than from the railways, let alone transport economists. As originally presented, it was intended to run for ninety kilometres around Melbourne’s middle and outer suburbs, largely in tunnels, with a number of stations in the southeast but very few in the west. The cost was claimed to be $50 billion, which no one believed…

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About the author
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.