High speed rail: Bullet or boondoggle?

The concept of high speed rail travel was dismissed by 19th century scientist Professor Dionysius Lardner, who warned that “passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia”.

The passage of time (and the development of physics) has proved Lardner wrong, with the proliferation of extensive high speed rail networks on every inhabited continent - except for Australia.

That’s not to say it has not been considered here. Far from it. Australia has been through at least three serious considerations of High Speed Rail (HSR) in the past 30 years.

Continue reading "First build the rail corridors, then the fast trains" »

So we’re a step further down the track to blowing $110 billion of taxpayer’s money on a new high speed rail network which will do exactly what planes do, only three times slower. Woohoo for progress.

Yesterday’s $20 million feasibility report was enthusiastically greeted by many, even though Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese admitted our relatively small population meant the price tag could be hard to justify.

He’s not wrong. Every other country with high speed rail, like Japan and China and France and Spain, has a far denser population than ours. In Australia, economies of scale mean this thing would be unlikely ever to pay for itself.

Continue reading "Hugging the rails on a fast track to nowhere" »