Australia needs a staged approach to implement high speed rail.
Many commentators say that Australia’s cities are too far apart and our regional areas are too sparsely populated to support high speed rail. But this assumes that high speed rai is implemented using the approach of connecting two major cities commonly adopted by countries around the world. Instead we have to adopt a different approach that focuses on regional growth and development. This means implementing high speed rail in shorter, more affordable stages that progressively connect regional centres to a capital city and eventually capital cities to each other.
Most experts recommend that high speed rail should be initially implemented between two major cities of over one million people and about 400kms apart. This reduces travel time between the cities to about 1.5 hours (often down from about 4 hours), which allows the economies of the two cities to merge. Further lines can then be added to extend or connect the initial line (including fast rail at lower operating speeds) to create a network, which amplifies the travel benefits and enlarges the economic region.
But Australia’s population is dominated by capital cities which are separated by large distances with lightly populated regional cities (usually less than about 150,000 people) in between. This means we have to focus on maximising the benefits from each stage as we build an inter-capital high speed line. As we have shown, the benefits of regional growth and development justify the investment in high speed rail. Therefore each stage of new high speed rail should connect first one, and subsequently further regional cities to a capital city.
This has a number of implications for the implementation of high speed rail in Australia.
First, trains using the high speed line should be able to continue on the existing conventional line to provide travel benefits to cities along the line. This is a major difference to the typical implementation scenario, where it does not matter whether the line is dedicated or integrated with the existing network as long as the station is centrally located within each city.
Second, high speed trains must stop at central locations within regional cities in order to activate them economically and integrate with existing regional transport services, especially buses. Generally this can be achieved by implementing cross-overs to allow high speed trains to stop at existing stations, but may require new stations in some circumstances.
Third, it means that we will need a coordinated plan to introduce new rolling stock. Existing rolling stock can probably be used to provide services to the first regional cities to be connected. After that, new rolling stock will be needed to maximise the benefit of the new high speed line while continuing to use the existing conventional line. This will probably require dual-mode (electric and diesel/hydrogen/battery) power for long-distance services, and ultimately fully-electric trains for inter-capital services when the high speed line is fully implemented.
And most importantly, it needs coordinated investment by government and local stakeholders to maximise the wider economic benefits as each regional city is connected to the high speed line. Simply building a high speed line is not enough. It is only through the actions of each community to attract more people and investment into their region that we will get value from implementing high speed rail in Australia.
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