High speed rail will re-shape settlement and economic activity in Australia.
High speed intercity and fast regional rail offer the best catalyst for reshaping Australia’s growth trajectory and settlement patterns by balancing employment and residential growth between congested urban centres and lower-cost, higher amenity regional areas. Faster, more frequent rail services would better connect our capital cities and regional centres, give more people access to essential services and skilled jobs, reduce population pressures on capital cities, enhance housing supply and affordability, and take advantage of Australia’s abundant natural attributes.
People living in regional areas in Australia intuitively understand the importance of faster connectivity. Faster and more frequent trains is their number one request for new infrastructure to improve the economy and liveability of their cities and regions. Unfortunately capital city dwellers do not share this understanding, instead focusing on increasing density of development in their cities to address housing affordability and congestion.
Faster rail connectivity has proven to be a fundamental driver of economic growth over the last 30 years. That is why so many countries are racing to introduce high speed rail, or to extend their existing high speed rail networks. They recognise the necessity of faster rail to connect cities and regions in the knowledge economy.
Faster connectivity ‘shrinks the distance’ between locations. It extends the distance covered in a 20-minute neighbourhood, the 1-hour daily commute for work, and the 2-hour business trip or visit to meet friends in the same day. Faster connectivity extends the reach achievable in these travel times. Most importantly, it expands job markets (commutable areas) and regional economies (same-day visit areas).
Initially, faster regional commuting services will expand the jobs market of a capital city. This will encourage population shift to surrounding regional centres, and allow businesses to open plants and facilities in secondary cities. Over time this will create an economic region linking business activity across all centres into a common economy.
As the faster services extend further from the capital cities, more distant regional cities will start to create linkages with other cities along the line. Over time these cities will form their own regional economies with business activity clustered across the centres within them.
Eventually, high speed intercity services will connect these regional economic clusters together. This will create a ‘network effect’, where greater connectivity increases the economic benefits of business productivity growth and simplifies the provision of services to regional cities. This in turn encourages greater population growth, which further drives economic growth, and so on.
Ultimately, the regional cities in the corridor will establish their own distinct economic and liveability traits in competition to capital cities. The economies in the corridor will merge to a create a linear mega-region that successfully competes with other mega-regions on the world stage.