Following Anthony Albanese’s pledge to build a High-Speed Rail (HSR) line linking the east coast capitals if Labor won the next election, the Albanese Government has now committed $500 million toward a high-speed rail authority to get the project moving:
A board made up of rail and infrastructure sector experts will oversee the new authority, which will provide independent advice to governments on planning and delivery.
It will also be the lead agency to co-ordinate the project with states and territories.
But its first priority will be to plan a Sydney to Newcastle link, backed by an initial $500 million federal commitment, Infrastructure Minister Catherine King says.
“The time is now, we need to stop procrastinating and start taking action to actually deliver high speed rail,” she told parliament.
“This is a long-term project with significant benefits and it’s not just about a political cycle but rather a focus on Australia’s future”…
“A high speed rail network along the east coast of Australia will truly be a transformational project that has the ability to touch the lives of all Australians,” Ms King said.
For years I have vehemently opposed the construction of HSR linking the east coast capitals for three main reasons:
The exorbitant cost associated with building and operating the rail line;
Lack of population density to support the project; and
Lack of competitiveness against air travel unless there are massive ongoing operational subsidies from taxpayers.
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Possibly the biggest barrier to HSR is getting from the outskirts of Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane into the CBD.
These trains are not compatible with suburban commuter trains unless they slow to the same slow speeds due to alignment and congestion, in which case they are no longer HSR. Further, the current commuter train systems in Sydney and Melbourne are already at capacity and cannot cope with existing demands, let alone imposing a HSR network.
This means HSR would need to be separated from the existing commuter network via new train lines and stations. And since our major cities are already build-out, this would necessarily require acquiring some of the most expensive capital city real estate in the world or tunnelling under it, either of which would cost a fortune.
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Similar barriers are faced with respect to stopping in major regional cities like Albury, Wollongong or Newcastle. To properly service regional cities and towns, HSR would need to stop in the centre. But this too would involve either expensive land acquisition or expensive tunnelling.
Australia should dump the decades-old dream of building a bullet train from Brisbane to Melbourne via Sydney and Canberra…
The east-coast bullet train advocated by the federal ALP would be an expensive folly: Australia’s small population and vast distances make it unviable; it would add to greenhouse gas emissions for decades; and governments could help many more commuters by improving public transport in the booming outer suburbs of the capital cites…
Around the world, it is very rare for bullet trains to span a distance of 1,000km or more. When they do, they usually serve populations of at least 50 million. By contrast, the total population of the cities and towns on the proposed Melbourne-to-Brisbane bullet train route is about 15 million. The longest existing lines that serve a similar population are from Madrid to Barcelona, Turin to Naples, and Paris to Lyon and Marseille. Those lines are all about 800km, less than half the length of the proposed Australian line… Even the Melbourne-to-Sydney segment would be the second-longest stretch of fast rail between two cities with a population larger than a million anywhere in the world. The longest is between Lanzhou and Ürümqi in China’s north west.
And most bullet trains overseas required significant public subsidies to build, and often still require significant subsidies to operate.
International experiences suggest that bullet trains need strong demand at both the origin and the destination. They work best when there is significant congestion on existing road and air connections, because this creates a need for speed that businesses and individuals will be willing to pay for.42 Australia does not meet these conditions…
East-coast business travellers would be the biggest winners from a multi-billion-dollar bullet train, but taxpayers from Broome to Perth, Darwin to Adelaide, and Launceston to Hobart would have to stump up an average of $10,000 each to make the dream a reality…
And taxpayers who might never ride the train might reflect unfavourably on what other infrastructure projects could have been built if the bullet train had not gone ahead…
The global story is stark: good bullet trains are expensive, and bad bullet trains are very expensive. It’s time we Australians put this idea to bed.
The alternative of renovating rail lines to boost train speeds from capital cities to surrounding regions is less expensive and might be worth doing – but these renovations are unlikely to fulfil all the wishful thinking of their proponents.
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It would be far cheaper for the Albanese Government to abandon its ‘Big Australia’ mass immigration policy than proceeding with this project. Doing so would eliminate the need to spend copious billions on expensive infrastructure projects to relieve congestion (caused by said mass immigration-driven population growth).
Sadly, nothing much has changed since Utopia ridiculed HSR all those years ago:
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.
