A pox on rail fanatics

Stage 1 from Gungahlin to Civic has been built at a cost of about $1 billion. Stage 2 from Civic to Woden is going ahead at a further cost of about $2 billion (without an adequate business case). There are proposals to later build further lines from Civic to Canberra Airport, and from Civic to Belconnen.

The problem with public transport in Canberra is that the city is very spread out and low population density does not facilitate economical public transport. Consequently the existing Canberra bus network is the most subsidised in the country, and light rail is not economically viable in the ACT. This, however, did not stop the Territory Labor/Greens government from going ahead with light rail, and facilitating substantial medium rise apartment developments along the light rail corridor (to increase potential patronage).

With Stage 1, the ACT government calculated a benefit-cost ratio of 1.2. The ACT Auditor General said almost 60 per cent of the "benefits" were wider economic and land benefits, whose inclusion was debatable. The transport benefits were said to amount to just 49 cents for every $1 spent. The Productivity Commission further noted that bus rapid transport would have provided similar benefits to light rail for a quarter of the cost.

Overall, the ACT will be stuck with at least a $3 billion light rail network funded by public debt, and likely to generate substantial operating losses into the future.

The Sydney Monorail was another flop. Experts had warned (even during its inception) that it was a foolhardy idea since monorails have low carrying capacity, and the one in Sydney was not integrated with the city's wider public transport. Clive James, in his 1991 Postcard from Sydney television special noted that "the monorail runs from the middle of downtown Sydney, to the middle of downtown Sydney, after circumnavigating the middle of downtown Sydney". It was pulled down in 2013, fifteen years after its construction.

There are quite a number of hare-brained rail proposals, that thankfully (to date) have not been built.

Every 10 years or so, for example, there is a grand proposal for high-speed rail linking our east coast cities but to date (thankfully) no one has been prepared to fund it.

Anthony Albanese recently promised that, if elected, a Labor government would start work on establishing a High Speed Rail Authority to oversee planning for a route running from Brisbane to Melbourne via Sydney and Canberra. A feasibility study that found a service could be profitable, but would require significant government investment towards the expected huge ($114 billion) construction cost.

The Grattan Institute has rubbished these proposals saying that:

Australia should dump the decades-old dream of building a bullet train from Brisbane to Melbourne via Sydney and Canberra, and we should be wary of expensive promises to upgrade regional rail. 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.

An even more crackpot scheme is a proposed Canberra to Eden railway. The plan proposed to rebuild the existing (unused) rail line to Bombala, as well as extending it north to Canberra Airport and south to the Port of Eden. The proposal is totally crazy because current travel (passenger or freight) between the two centres is minimal, and the only obvious reason why it was dreamt up is because the remains of the old rail line between Queanbeyan and Bombala still exist.

The NSW government in 2018 announced $1 million in funding for a feasibility study. The executive summary, which estimated the project would cost $6.3 billion, found there would be "little if any, return on investment".

So there we have it! Rail construction, especially of regional and inter-city lines, nearly always has been unsuccessful in this country in recent decades. Road, sea and air transportation have been out-competing rail. Voters therefore ought to be extremely wary of governments proposing to build new rail lines dependent on taxpayer funding.