High speed rail is having one of its regular moments in the sun in Australia, with media articles attracting comments such as “just build it”, or seeing our lack of fast rail as evidence of a national incapacity to deliver large projects (see the NBN).
But the buzz is more than talk: a National Faster Rail Authority has been established, international engineering experts have been engaged, business cases are under way and funding commitments have been announced. The proposals promote a new role for HSR, shifting the focus from interstate travel to connections between major cities and their regional satellites, to address population pressures in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and to stimulate regional economies. But given the costs of HSR – Melbourne to Geelong has been estimated at $10bn to $15bn – we need to ask whether it can solve our urban problems.
First, what can international experience tell us about connecting regional cities to a larger metropolis? Successes in connecting similar-sized and complementary cities, such as Osaka and Tokyo, the cities of Germany’s Rhine-Ruhr region and the Dutch Randstad, are not relevant to Australia, given the size imbalance between our capital and regional cities. In China the number and scale of large provincial cities allows more for corridor and multi-centre network design than Australia’s sparse patterns.
Where HSR connects imbalanced cities, opinion tends to the view that it advantages the larger city more than the regional cities, as evidenced by the cases of Paris and London. In the UK Prof John Tomaney concluded that that the regional benefits of a planned High Speed 2 network are “ambiguous at best and negative at worst”.
The gains flow to the larger city in two ways. Improved accessibility reduces market access costs and increases competition. While this allows regional businesses to access metropolitan markets, specialised big-city firms with economies of scale can more easily outcompete regional firms in local markets. And reduced travel times between centres means a reduced need for regional offices and service replication.
France offers a useful comparison for Australia, given the primacy of Paris, which has a similar role to Sydney in New South Wales and to Melbourne in Victoria. The two regional French cities that have benefited most from France’s TGV high speed rail system are Lyon and Lille. This is because of their role as nodes between the international HSR links to the Paris main line and among conventional regional connections to the TGV: no Australian regional cities are positioned to be network nodes like this. Though Lyon and Lille have grown, this is seen as coming at the expense of their smaller, less well-connected neighbours rather than as them becoming an alternative to Paris for business locations.
The population concentration in Australia’s major cities also needs to be considered. Any redistribution that is large enough to mitigate metropolitan congestion and growth issues will create similar infrastructure demands and population pressures in regional cities. If growth slowed in Melbourne or Sydney by 200,000 people over 20 years it would not markedly change those cities, but such numbers moving to Geelong or Wollongong would create huge disruption. While it may be cheaper to provide infrastructure in regional cities, the difference would need to compensate for the high cost of the HSR line and the likely convergence in land values between the two cities. This also calls into question whether the regional advantages listed in the Faster Rail program could be retained:
The regional centres have cheaper housing, more open spaces and other lifestyle amenities such are [sic] less congestion. This makes them attractive destinations.
A final observation concerns employment. Regional population growth will generate some demand for population-based services, thus strengthening regional economies. But population growth alone won’t necessarily generate the development of a higher value-added economy, as exists in Sydney or Melbourne. For higher skilled workers, accessing cheap regional housing but commuting back to the metropolis where high skill jobs predominate will be an attractive option. Without efforts to develop a deeper economic base within regional cities, HSR risks creating highly subsidised long-distance commuters. This question of regional cities becoming dynamic regional economic hubs rather than just population dormitories remains untested in current HSR plans.
The increasing concentration of population Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane is a result of where the jobs and opportunities are, where most business, institutions and administration are located, where transport networks converge, and where decades of economic rationalist cost-cutting have centralised services. HSR does not alter this economic dynamic – and may make it worse. In the absence of an interventionist regional economic development program, HSR is unlikely to be a fix for the population pressures and infrastructure shortfalls in our major cities. We risk reaching to HSR as a solution to ill-defined problems, without considering whether there are better alternatives given the costs involved.
• Todd Denham is PhD candidate at the school of global, urban and social studies at RMIT University; Jago Dodson is professor of urban policy and director at RMIT University’s centre for urban research
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