Cross posted at Beyond Zero Emissions.
The Australian Greens have put high-speed rail (HSR) back on the national agenda. Greens leader Senator Bob Brown has called on the Rudd government to fund a study identifying the best route for connecting Australia’s two largest cities, Melbourne and Sydney, with HSR.
The ambitious project represents the type of nation building that should be at the heart of national climate policy. The project has the potential to reduce Australia’s ballooning carbon emissions, and kick-start the development of a larger HSR network that can one day connect all of Australia’s mainland capital cities.
High-speed rail between Melbourne and Sydney would provide a viable alternative to flying. The carbon impact of air travel came to the fore this week when it was revealed that the European air industry is more carbon intensive than the Icelandic volcano that grounded European flights for a week (check out this infographic by Information is Beautiful). Given that the Melbourne-Sydney route is currently one of the world’s busiest, any reduction of flights between the two cities will deliver substantial carbon reductions over time.
Bob Brown’s request comes amid renewed interest in high-speed rail globally. The Obama administration invested $8 billion in last year’s economic stimulus—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—for HSR projects in Florida and California that will lay the foundation for a national network. And China has recently announced plans for HSR that dwarfs those of the US. The nation that built the Great Wall of China is set to spearhead the construction of the world’s largest ever engineering project: an intercontinental high-speed rail network connecting London with Beijing, and then to Singapore. China is now negotiating with several nations so it can complete the project by the end of the decade.
The rollout of HSR in North America and Asia is good news for Australia. These massive projects will lead to the increased production of HSR components and know-how. These economies of scale are capable of bringing down the costs of the HSR infrastructure, making it economically viable for Australia to undertake a nation building HSR project over the next two decades.
A national Australian HSR network will deliver larger carbon savings as domestic energy production shifts to renewable energy sources like wind, geothermal, and baseload solar. And of course, there are social and economic benefits too. The construction of the network will create thousands of jobs and open up regional centres for sustainable development.
The Beyond Zero Emissions team look forward to the day when Australians can fly by rail. The Rudd government’s support for the HSR study will bring us a step closer to that dream.
5 comments
Comments feed for this article
April 23, 2010 at 7:42 pm
High-Speed Rail Back on Australian Agenda « Breakthrough Generation
[...] 23, 2010 by Leigh Ewbank Cross posted at The Real Ewbank and Beyond Zero [...]
May 19, 2010 at 12:21 am
Henk Luf
HSR is not impossible in Australia provided the design criteria are carried out correctly and provided local operating conditions are taken into account.
Sydney-Canberra-Albury-Melbourne would be the most suitable route and speeds would be 320kph for passenger trains, 250kph for freight trains. A Sydney-Melbourne run would take 3.5 hours.
No diesel powered trains would be required as the majority of HSRs have overhead power supplies, except in the UK where the HS125, operated by various companies, still represents a substantial slice of the passenger market. Even in the UK, the trend towards overhead power appears to be speeding up. Examples of the most suitable HSRs would have to be France and Germany. Cost? about $6Billion. Offsets would be reduced air traffic and reduced truck/trailer and B-double traffic.
May 19, 2010 at 9:37 am
Leigh Ewbank
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on High-Speed Rail in Australia Henk. It sounds like you have considerable knowledge about HSR infrastructure.
A High-Speed Rail link between Melbourne and Sydney is technologically and economically feasible, and it’s a visionary project that the public support. Unfortunately, government and opposition senators have voted together late last week to reject the Greens’ call for a $10 million dollar feasibility study. See link:
http://greensmps.org.au/content/media-release/high-speed-rail-study-spiked-senate
Both the government and opposition have been reluctant to invest in the type of nation-building projects Australia needs to decarbonise our economy. Each project they reject represents a missed opportunity to create good Australian jobs, stimulate economic development, and mitigate climate change.
May 19, 2010 at 2:25 pm
henkluf
HST or HSR is not rocket-science these days. The french and the Germans have been running both TGV and IC trains for many years. In Australia, there appears to be a severe case of ‘false economy’ thinking. An example would be the ongoing upgrading of for instance the current Sydney-Melbourne line. This line can only be upgraded up to a point beyond which there are no further development options and the maximum speed that one would be able to get out of the line then would be 160kph, (by XPT), and even then only in small sectors. In the long term, by the the time all the Australia-wide upgrades are done, double the amount of money would have been spent than what an HST would have cost. In the US, major lines are being upgraded by basically beginning from scratch, in the disign terms, while in Europe, most of the new projects are mostly high-speed connecting with upgraded 160-200kph ‘low-speed’ lines. No doubt, by the time Governments wake up to the fact that they might have gotten things wrong, the cost will have doubled as by then, land corridors my longer be available neccesitating the development of underground pathway, also not rocket-science these day.
I hope this will give some guide.
September 18, 2010 at 5:07 pm
TrainFan
Did you see this new news report on HSR in Eastern Australia?
‘Melbourne to Sydney in 3 hours? With a bullet’ – http://www.theage.com.au/national/melbourne-to-sydney-in-3-hours-with-a-bullet-20100917-15gdl.html
It says the Melbourne-Sydney air route is the world’s 3rd busiest. Clearly Australia needs government commitment to this infrastructure. Especially with oil price rises on the horizon.