This forum will bring together a group of experts and practitioners to
consider the proposal from employment, design, passenger and planning
perspectives. The forum will discuss whether the proposed station
locations are the right ones and the vision for how these future
stations will help to shape the urban fabric of Melbourne.

The program was:
3.30 – 4.00pm Pre-forum tea and coffee; viewing of Project maps
4.00 – 4.05pm Welcome: Professor Bill Russell (Co-Director of GAMUT)
4.05 – 4.10pm Overseas Metros Presentation: Professor Nick Low (Co-Director of GAMUT)
4.10 – 4.30pm Project Overview: Ms. Adele McCarthy (Deputy Project Leader, Melbourne Metro Rail Tunnel, Department of Transport)
4.30 – 4.40pm Economic and Employment Impacts: Mr. Terry Rawnsley (Associate Director, SGS Economic and Planning Pty Ltd)
4.40 – 4.50pm Redevelopment potential/MCC’s view of the Project: Mr. David Mayes (Melbourne City Council)
4.50 – 5.00pm How does Melbourne balance the aspects of Function, Form and Character? – Urban Design of Metro Projects around the World: Mr. Keith Brewis (Grimshaw Architects)
5.00 – 5.45pm Discussion and questions from the floor
5.45pm Close: Professor Bill Russell followed by refreshments

My notes of the sessions:

Prof Nicholas Low of GAMUT, on Metro systems elsewhere
Metros typically have their own track (not shared with any other vehicles), good service frequencies, consistent stopping patterns

“Our Metro isn’t here yet, really”

Metro maps have to become embedded in the minds of the residents

Metro stations need a surface level presence which is uniform and recognizable

Adele McCarthy, Deputy Project Leader of Metro One project, DoT
Growth is coming in the north and west of Melbourne. All the rail lines serving the area run through North Melbourne so managing the growth is a challenge.

Job opportunities in the north and west are less than in the south and east. Even with the Footscray and Broadmeadows Central Activities Districts (creating suburban employment) there will be significant emphasis on getting to the CBD.

The transport system today is not only carrying more people than it ever has before, but it’s carrying them further – long trips are more common than they ever have been.

The primary constraint on capacity in the north and west is coexistence with V/Line (hence the Regional Rail Link). The next biggest constraint is the inner city area.

The completion of the tunnel depends heavily on Federal funding. Infrastructure Australia have classed the project as ready to build (which is a relative term, we can’t get a shovel and start tomorrow).

The location of Parkville station takes into account Melbourne University’s planned growth, which is to expand south of Grattan Street (50% of functions will be on south side by 2020).

As a few people had to leave early the floor was opened for questions.
1. How will the interchange with Flinders Street work? A: We haven’t looked too closely at that yet, at this stage we just want to know where the stations will be, if people say yes to that location then we’ll tackle the interchange.

2 (from Jackie of MTF): This is subject to Federal funding, what if they consider that since we got funding for the Regional Rail Link they can’t give us any for this? A: All governments face infrastructure funding challenges, the best thing to do is to make sure it stays ready to go until the money arrives. Q part 2: Are there any plans for more tunnels, linked in with this, to places that need a metro? A: Some brainstorming has been done but there are no specific plans.

3: Is the route fixed from Kensington to Parkville, ie can we do more than just slide the beads along the string as regards station locations? A: Short answer is no. Lots of people have said we should interchange at North Melbourne or other places. But an interchange at North Melbourne would mean no station at Parkville. Since there’s an interchange at Footscray the only loss will be to the Craigieburn and Upfield lines, and they can easily take a tram to the area served by the metro; alternatively they can go to Melbourne Central (they’ll get a faster trip there) and backtrack along the metro that way.

4: Are there any contingency plans in case there’s a sudden loss of funding due to Global Financial Crisis Mk.2? A: Downturns always make things difficult. The government chose to fix the last one by spending more on infrastructure though.

Julian Szafraniec – economics and job creation aspect
Melbourne’s economy has changed in the last 20 years from being based on industry (which was hit hard by the 1990s recession) to professional, scientific and technical

The post-industrial sector needs to be close to things (“agglomeration”) – a highway to the port doesn’t boost the economy like it used to. Hence the growth of the CBD.

Agglomeration gives economies of scale, economies from narrowing of scope, access to customers, access to skilled employees, and knowledge transfer to related sectors.

Population growth in the west is much higher than job growth, therefore CBD will be a big driver.

Metro One will save on travel time to work; it will take the weight of travel needs to the CBD fringe away from the CBD itself; it will extend the agglomeration to the west.

Richard Smithers, transport planning, Melbourne City Council
MCC transport blueprint of 2006 had a plan for a more space-efficient transport spine from Royal Park to Domain, linking with the Upfield line. It was submitted to the EWLNA but Sir Rod Eddington decided that the East-West Link was what was needed.

The MCC plan of 2008 aims for 25% mode share boost to PT, cycling and walking. It also projects very strong population growth to 2030 but not as strong visitor growth (ie commuters).

50% of Southbank residents walk to work! Any new developments (eg around Arden station) will be designed with an even heavier emphasis on pedestrian traffic.

Keith Brewis, Grimshaw Architects
A metro should look like what it represents – the lifeblood of the future economy.

A metro needs to provide for a poly-centric model (ie multiple CADs, not just the CBD)

“A transport place has to work” – ie vehicles have to be able to get in and out. If not, the design style irritates the users.

Underground is unnatural, people feel uncomfortable there. Designers have to introduce above-ground elements (eg sunlight, plants, etc) to reassure people.

(Please note that this will be a Melbourne-based post as I know this system best – however the principles should be applicable everywhere.)

Our population is increasing steadily and despite the efforts of Dick Smith and his five hotties, I don’t see that stopping any time soon. The cost of private transport, both in direct costs and in the cost of congestion, is encouraging people to try public transport options. Growing environmental awareness is doing the same. These three factors point to a steady increase in the load on our public transport networks for the foreseeable future.

An evening with Google, various government web sites and a spreadsheet served me a figure of nearly 8 million people in Melbourne in 2050. That’s twice what we have now. How can we double the passenger carrying capacity of our infrastructure?

At peak time, our rail network especially (but also our tram and bus services) is carrying close to its maximum capacity in terms of passengers per hour – with current infrastructure. This can be overcome by:
- Altering the safeworking system to allow more trains per hour to run on the existing tracks (there are metro systems overseas that run 45 trains per hour on a single pair of tracks)
- Adding more tracks to separate stopping trains from expresses (including regional services)
- Redesigning trains and stations to allow passengers to board and alight faster

Bus and tram services are more difficult to improve as they (mostly) use public roads which are heavily congested at peak time. Traffic priority measures as applied to SmartBus routes are effective; increasing available road space by banning parking is even more so. Both should be rolled out system-wide as there are very few other improvements possible for on-street public transport services.

All these ideas have been around for a long time and many people have worked out plans based on combinations of the three options. However, I would like to put up the idea that they will be insufficient to support viable public transport services if Melbourne’s population doubles as shown above. Thus our problem can not be solved by “hard” improvements alone – some “soft” improvements will be needed as well.

Probably the most popular “soft” improvement is the “Transit City” plan – also known as Central Activity Districts, Multiple Business Districts, etc. Developing major centres such as Dandenong to be the focus of everyday activities such as employment and shopping means that not only can seats be “recycled” over the length of a single trip (ie people will board a train at Narre Warren and alight at Dandenong leaving a nearly-empty train, which will then fill again on its way toward the CBD), but it encourages counter-peak travel (ie people from Springvale will take a train towards Dandenong instead of the CBD) – leading to more even loads and less congestion.

This idea has been thrown around for quite some time and most readers will probably be familiar with it. I’d like to focus this post on another idea, which has been hinted at in Melbourne in recent years (and not-so-recent years, as Ninthnotch will no doubt give us the details on) but not fully developed. It’s the idea of encouraging off-peak and shoulder-peak travel. This was the idea behind the Early-Bird Saver Metcard – encourage people to travel outside of peak hour.

We can further develop this theme by:
- Providing more shoulder-peak services – or better still, defining “peak hour” to be a lot longer than it is now
- Encouraging businesses to offer their employees flexible hours
- Changing school hours so students aren’t travelling during peak hour

Long peak time
Today’s peak hour services cater well (overcrowding aside) for the stereotypical office worker, who works from 9 to 5 and then takes a train home (must – remove – song – from – head). Unfortunately, this now represents a shrinking percentage of our population – or rather, it would shrink if the poor quality of evening train services didn’t prop it up.

People’s lives are becoming busier, and most households have both parents employed. This means shopping and other normal errands have to be done on the way home from work. That’s why convenience stores are partially reversing the trend towards bigger and bigger supermarkets. But what happens when Joe Public had a meeting which ran later than expected and doesn’t leave work until nearly 6pm? If he tries to fit his shopping in he misses his train and has to wait 20 minutes until the next one. So instead he rushes to catch his train, squeezes on board and jams himself between five other people who also rushed to catch the end of peak time, and leaves the shopping to tomorrow.

Flexi-time
As some of you may know, I work in the retail industry. My store is open from 7am to 9pm so my working day can be any time within those limits (or even an hour outside them). Travelling at 6am is a lot less stressful than travelling in peak time! The bus is invariably on time (to within a couple of minutes), the trip is quick, and I can always get a seat. Likewise coming home at 9pm the only hassle is making sure I catch the last bus home (which is an issue I won’t deal with in this post).

There are a lot more people than we expect who work outside of traditional working hours. Most blue-collar jobs start at 7am, and most middle and upper management jobs are sufficiently intensive that regular unpaid overtime is the norm. There is increasing demand for 24-hour services in call centres for banks and IT helpdesks. My personal estimate is that only around 60% of Australia’s workforce holds to the traditional 9-5 working day.

In the coming decades, I would like to see that percentage drop to 20% or lower. There will be some industries where flexible hours won’t work; however I am convinced that a large number of businesses could move off normal hours but haven’t thought about it.

The question is how to encourage businesses to take the plunge and offer flexible hours to their employees. Hopefully some of our political and economics experts can suggest something here.

Changed school hours
A glance at mX will usually turn up an angry letter from an adult commuter complaining about school bags in the aisles of trains – or an equally angry reply from a student asking what else they can possibly do with them. Why should students travel during peak time? Again, it’s just a tradition that we maintain for no real reason and which is making peak time travel a nightmare.

Students, especially in high school, should be picking up habits and disciplines which will help them in their adult life. I would like to put the idea that learning to get up at 5:30am in order to get to school at 7am is a valuable discipline.

Conclusion
According to my spreadsheet, Melbourne in 2050 will be able to carry the commuting portion of its population of 8 million by running just seven to ten trains per hour during peak time on most rail lines. Of course I haven’t done any intensive population projections so I’ve assumed fairly even loading, but still, that’s easily within our infrastructure capacity, without resorting to a multiplicity of new tunnels or other billion dollar transport projects.

This gives us some breathing space – and with it, hope. Hope that there will actually be a time when a ride home after work doesn’t involve being packed like sardines into a train.

I have uploaded the spreadsheet so if anyone has a fetish for numbers, have fun: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkDXTfWtDy1VdGkwTW1CS25DaGlEZFJBeVFPSkI1eWc&hl=en&authkey=CNCPip8G

When Australia’s railways were being built in the 1850s-1880s they were almost completely influenced by British railway engineering. A typical British railway (at the time) had high quality main lines (with double track, gentle curves and gradients, and good quality ballast for high speed running) and an array of junction stations which served as jumping-off points for branch lines. Branch lines were generally based on single track working and had mixed trains running once or twice a day using uncomfortable four-wheeled rollingstock. Junction stations had large and complex yards, through which branch line trains would thread their way. The only way this arrangement worked was by relying on signallers with local signalboxes, and on low train frequencies.

Let’s translate this concept to the colonies. Most of our “main lines” were built to what would be called branch line standards in the land of fish and chips – with certain exceptions in each state of course. It was a natural decision to make given our smaller population, at the time. However, before our population grew to the point where we could afford to rebuild our main lines to the standard that would merit that title “up-yonder”, we transitioned to Apple Pie.

There were various North American influences on our rail systems over a period of time. Various Chairmen of Commissioners in several were either American or Canadian railway engineers brought out for the purpose – or were sent there to learn their way of doing things with a view to applying the philosophy here.

However, apart from the Webb Era in South Australia, it wasn’t until after the Second World War that significant American railway engineering made inroads into Australia. That was the era of dieselisation (mostly although not exclusively GM and Alco), the construction of a tunnel to replace the Lithgow Zig Zag, a heavier emphasis on bogie rollingstock over fixed wheelbases, coloured light signalling instead of semaphores, and the first moves towards automatic couplers, air brakes and all-steel construction (particularly for freight rollingstock).

Sadly the post-war economy couldn’t complete the job of Americanisation by duplicating single track main lines – even today there are large single track sections, although thankfully we have moved away from the breathtakingly inefficient electric staff safeworking in most places.

Now let’s focus on the suburban rail networks and see how this change affected them.

All the state capitals had some form of suburban rail network, based loosely on the British branch line system. The capital city station was the junction station and each suburban line was a branch off the interstate main line. We can still see evidence of this philosophy in the complex arrangement of tracks in our inner city areas. If we want them to, we can have trains running from just about any suburban line to any platform at the city station, and then out on any other line.

The branch line setup has been partially Americanised – for instance, we no longer merge all our lines down to a single pair of tracks using flat junctions, we do have multiple pairs of tracks available. However this process is incomplete (with the possible exception of Perth).

Now if we were running branch lines each with three mixed trains a day, and the trains were broken up to move wagon loads of goods onto different trains on the main line, this arrangement would be perfect. But we don’t do that. We are running a metropolitan passenger transport service. We have fixed train consists (more or less). Passengers want to be able to predict which platform their service will run from. Our payload has its own legs and can manage the through-trip question by itself. Therefore the advantages of the branch line model are of no value to us.

Not only that, but the two factors I mentioned above which make the branch line model viable – local signalboxes and low train frequencies – are not features of our suburban systems. Is it any wonder punctuality is at an unsatisfactory level?

So let’s look to the future. Obviously we need to complete the transition to apple pie. How do we do that?

The American mindset is that bigger is better – which, applied to metro rail systems, means make the trains longer and faster, grade separate the junctions to avoid conflicts, put in more platforms, avoid delays. The goal is to end up with a true metro system, with each line (more or less) on its own pair of tracks, which allows for higher frequency, better reliability and punctuality, and more convenience for passengers (as they know their train will always use the same platform).

That means we have to stop doing some of the things that somebody no doubt thought clever many years ago. For example:

• Operating Salisbury Interchange as a single-platform station on weekends to save on staff wages
• Running a cross-town Cumberland line on tracks used by other suburban lines which happen to meet each other
• Carrying quarry products to suburban Westall
• Running every second train express from Caboolture to Bowen Hills

These are not easy decisions to make – but they are necessary if our system is to run in apple-pie order.

They went to all the work of drawing tiny fine lines for every rail track, even the ones in North Dynon that are nothing to do with the project. And they took the original aerial photos and drew on their own street names etc instead of using Google Earth/Maps. That’s at least a quarter of a million taxpayer dollars in employee time, unless they already had the maps for some reason. Using free resources and tweaking them slightly to provide 90% of the effect we’re after is how Smart Passengers manages to run on a shoestring.

Map 1: There’s some land acquisition going on at the left – but there’s vacant land on the north side! I realise the new line wants to be south of the suburban lines, but really, how difficult would it be to lay a new suburban track on the north side and make the southern one the RRL.

Map 2: Again we have unnecessary land acquisition. Why does the Werribee line have to cut through the container park? Presumably since the lines cross, there’s also going to be some tunnelling or bridge work involved. More cost blowouts.

Map 3: I can’t criticise the need for some land acquisition here as the space is too tight for any more than four tracks. However, it should be possible to run everything on four tracks. Trains which stop at South Kensington use the southern tracks. Trains which don’t use the northern tracks. If we need to resignal either pair for tighter headways, that’s going to be much cheaper than acquiring all that land.

Map 4: Wow, looks like Footscray station is due for a big change. It’s no real loss to get rid of the station car park, buses in the area have improved drastically in the last few years and people shouldn’t be driving to the station. Something I noticed from the Maribyrnong Council’s plan for (re-)visioning Footscray was that the plans left the railway station area completely untouched. To what extent was that plan taken into account when looking at options for the RRL? This is a prime opportunity to bring the station into line with the rest of the area – by which I mean not what it is now, but what it will be. In this case the amount of land acquisition required is actually a positive – although it will add millions to the cost of the RRL, it will give the opportunity for some real urban renewal.

Map 5: I think enough has been said about the houses on Buckley Street. Again I don’t know why property is being acquired when there’s vacant land on the other side.

Map 6: it would be easy to avoid acquiring any houses simply by closing Middle Footscray. The locals won’t enjoy that, but they’ll prefer that to having their houses acquired.

Map 7: Moving West Footscray is actually a great idea, it respaces the stations between Footscray and Sunshine for optimum coverage. After all, they’re Metro-style stations, with most patronage being walk-up and feeder buses mostly going to Sunshine or Footscray. Being next to Geelong Road is no advantage. Presumably the rail works yard adjacent to the proposed site will be either moved or abolished and the space used to extend the car park.

Map 8: It’s all fairly straightforward, the vacant space on the south side looks ideal for an extra pair of tracks. The only thing that could be more ideal would be to use some of the tracks currently full of dead wagons we call Tottenham Yard (or no longer full, according to what I’ve heard from some PN drivers). Again, convert two roads to spark standard, make the current spark lines the RRL.

Map 9: Nothing to see here, move on.

Map 10: This is where the cost of building on the south side starts to bite because we need a new bridge. However if we move the spark lines over we need a new station so it’s swings and roundabouts. Although I’d like to know why it was decided to build the RRL on the south side of the spark lines – the north side always seemed like a better option to me.

Maps 11-13: It’s all fairly simple here. Although I note Sunshine station isn’t included – and that’s going to be fairly tough. Like Footscray it will probably take some land acquisition to fit in the necessary infrastructure, and again like Footscray the urban renewal will be a good thing.

On the whole: The route as currently drafted looks much more expensive than it needs to be – land acquisition is going to be unbelievable, and earthworks are going to add considerable time and cost to the total also. According to what I see here, we’re in for Regional Fast Rail the second.

Whether a better solution can be found, bearing in mind today’s requirements for new rail infrastructure which are more demanding than what is allowed for pre-existing infrastructure, is another question.

126 years down the track, let’s look back and see whether we can call Octopus a success or a failure. Has it served the state well? Was it the right policy at the time but now out of date? Was it simply wrong?

Please note, I realise the Act authorised the construction of a number of rail lines as well as decreeing the future of transport planning. I’d like to focus mainly on the planning and philosophy, more than the actual fact that lines were built.

Also, I’m focusing on suburban public transport systems as I understand them better than either country passenger or freight systems.

All Roads Lead to Rome
It may be simply that I’ve grown up with it, or it may be something fundamental to the human brain, but there is something inherently clean about the Octopus layout – everything centres on the major city, and all services (unlike Douglas Adams’ elevators) can only run either up or down. Once you get to the city you can get to anywhere else without having to change trains.

Redundancy for reliability?
The most obvious downside to the Octopus layout is the lack of any backup plan. If the Gippsland line is blocked, there’s nothing else you can do. If the Ballarat line is blocked, at least you can go round via Geelong. Cross-town lines can provide a useful function like this.

However, I want to put the view that this idea is flawed in the context of a modern high capacity rail system. It is uneconomic to maintain a high quality rail line if it’s not being used to at least 50% of its capacity. And obviously if a line is already more than half full, it can’t act as a backup for another line that’s more than half full.

Overseas experience
This is where I need some help from our well travelled members. I have seen a few examples of rail systems interstate and overseas but never for long enough to make an in-depth analysis of their efficiency or otherwise. Please weigh in with your findings, and correct me if I’m wrong on any of this.

1. Perth – Octopus. Everyone knows the Perth system as a model for efficiency and good design – an interurban system rather than a metro, with an emphasis on the network of feeder buses rather than walk-up or park-and-ride passengers. Is this due to the Octopus layout? If not, at the very least we can say that they have proven that Octopus can be the basis of an excellent public transport system if the rest of the pieces are in place.
2. Adelaide – Octopus. Adelaide has rail, interurban tram (actually a hybrid, interurban to the city centre then urban) and O-Bahn lines, all arranged in an Octopus-like manner. The rail system is relatively under-patronised, but this is most likely due to the low service frequencies rather than any consideration of Octopus vs Spiderweb layout.
3. Sydney – Spiderweb. CityRail hit the wall a few years back, with service reliability low and falling, while punctuality was around 50%. This was blamed, rightly or wrongly, on the Spiderweb layout – which meant that delays on one line could ripple throughout the system. Rather than waste the cross-town links and rebuild the network in an Octopus layout they decided on the Clearways program, to ensure trains on separate lines wouldn’t interfere with each other. This has been successful, proving that the Spiderweb layout, unless compounded with other problems, is not in itself a recipe for disaster.
4. Toronto – Octopus. Toronto is held by many people to be the ideal model for a well run public transport network for a city the size of Melbourne. However it has only a small metro rail system, and the bulk of the transport task is undertaken by buses.
5. London – Spiderweb. The London Underground is highly regarded by the locals for its high frequency services, conveniently located stations and overall speed (compared to the available methods of transport above ground, in an Old World city where streets are narrow). However, when locals can casually talk about picking up a few extra pounds selling IT network topology maps to French tourists as Tube maps, or invent games like Mornington Crescent, we have to ask questions about how understandable the network is.

Hopefully someone who has been there can tell us about Tokyo, Paris, New York, Moscow, or in fact just about any other city in the world.

Why this sudden burst of philosophy?
The Eddington rail tunnel (or to use its DoT-sponsored name the Metro One Tunnel) is to run from Footscray through several under-served inner suburbs, through the city itself, down St Kilda Road and eventually to Caulfield. This breaks the Octopus. Instead of simply getting on a train to the city and then changing at Flinders Street, passengers will have to think about whether they’re going via Parkville or North Melbourne – and whether they’ll have to change trains by disembarking at South CBD (which we are told will be somewhere near the Town Hall), walking to Flinders Street and catching their train from there.

I realise that over time people will get used to it. After all, the City Loop was a similarly fundamental change in thinking, and passengers today are happy to change at Richmond or simply go right round. But as Yarra Trams pointed out to me in their inaugural briefing, a large and growing proportion of commuters today are not regulars who have been changing trains at Richmond since their school days. Most of these are overseas students – they have a language barrier as well as being in unfamiliar territory. Is our system easy for overseas students to understand? If not, we have failed.

I submit that today’s operation of the City Loop is incorrect. Trains should operate either through the city and out the other side, or via the Loop – and all trains from any given destination should do the same thing. Similarly with the direction – we need some loops clockwise and some anti-clockwise, but changing direction in the middle of the day is wrong.

Similarly with the proposed tunnel – I submit that since it’s not easy to understand (for an international student), it’s not the correct policy for Melbourne.

Viva l’Octopus.

Dubai proposal from globalart.pl

What would become of our horizontal transport systems if vertical cities like this one ever took off.

A city of a couple of a hundred thousand people concentrated on say a sqkm block would obviously overwhelm any road based transport system, and even a heavy rail metro hauling 50,000 people an hour would struggle (and that’s assuming the ENTIRE capacity of the trains is devoted to this station alone, rather than for several stations).

Is some sort of airborne mass transit system required in this case?

Burj Khalifa is fortunate that besides the tourist gimmick, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of people coming and going from the building. And that’s a fraction of the height of this proposal.

Finally having got around to reading Eleven Minutes Late: The Book about British Railways I would have written myself if it was about Australian Railways instead (actually A Train Journey into the Soul of Britain) by Matthew Engel, I’m now in a position to put to paper some more coherent discussion on what the true nature of the problems of Australian rail, its history and its future.

Of a millions gems and true insights Engel gives us, I’ll start on his quoting an interview with John Major after the event, where Major informs Engel that due to the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement, rail would always have to compete with health and education for investment funds from government. “The PBSR is such that the railways would have always limped on for ever…[and should be privatised] so that when there was a crisis in government it would not be in a position of having its budget cut…The railways shouldn’t be subject to the day-to-day whims of government.” To which Engel replied “Are you saying privatisation was necessary because of flaws in government, rather than flaws in the railways?”. Should we say touché at this point?

Maybe Major was scoring an own goal, indicting his own government, and perhaps one hundred or more years of predecessor governments, admitting that perhaps the art of government is not done as well as some politicians might present it.

But I would like to look at the context in which he put it – debt financing.

Many have railed against crude global borrowing limits in Australia over the years, and made them a spectre in the same way as the road lobby has frightened generations of train-loving children when they go to bed – only to see the sun rise in the morning and the road lobby monster has gone.

The private sector has them too. In fact I would go so far as to say that investment funding is one of my favorite paradoxes of corporate management.

The paradox is the finite investment funding paradox.

If you believe in free markets and all that jazz, you’ll know the supply curve of investment funds is infinite at a practical level, perfectly elastic. This means that for a given rate of return above the risk free rate, any project that is going to pay that return has access to a practically infinite supply of investment funds, because that project is small, while the capital market is large. Many sellers.

If the market is practically infinite, then why would a company board ration investment funds to its divisions? Why would BHP, with say a Coal Division and an Iron Division, have to make a choice of which project to give funds it sourced from the market (for example, by withholding dividends) if both Division heads came to the board with projects that would earn above the required rate of return? Why should it make that choice? Can’t it do both a coal project and an iron project at the same time?

This begs an even deeper question: if the board is REQUIRED to maximise profits to shareholders, and both Coal and Iron Divisions had projects ready to go that would do this, why did the Board deliberately NOT do this, actually REDUCE the profitability of the company by choosing between the projects rather than funding both?

Say the required rate of return at BHP was 20%. The Coal project will rate 30% and the Iron project will make 24%. So both projects will boost BHP returns above the hurdle rate. But the BHP board, having sourced funds at 20% from an infinite market, chose the Coal project and effectively rationed capital at 29%, the Iron project failed to clear this hurdle and BHP Board “shrunk the market” for investment capital inside its firm.

I can only suggest two reasons, both plausible. One is the optimism bias of the Division heads. They SAY they will make 30% and 24% respectively, but they are probably overestimating it. Both have risk and one project might fail. Or both. The Division heads are not indifferent to whether the projects go ahead or not. Their own bonuses increase; their empires grow. They have a greater stake in each project than the board does.

Or another reason. It gives the board something to do. If the Division heads were honestly appraising the projects, there is no reason not to fund both. As long as both projects and their risks are disclosed to the market, let the investors decide.

This is classic textbook case for splitting the company. To let the two businesses compete, sell both onto the market and they will compete in an infinite market. Both clear a market cost of capital of 20% and both will go ahead. Everyone is better off, even that grumpy board who no longer get to watch presentations and act as God.

So this is the private sector paradox. Why does the market produce conglomerates to ration capital when the investment market doesn’t need third party rationing (it can do it itself)?

Obviously the word “synergy” has captured too many financiers. The belief that BHP can get economies of scale from different businesses merged together.

In the public sector, the failings of a global borrowing limit have led people to draw the analogy with personal finance. The argument goes, you wouldn’t confuse your credit card (high interest borrowings to fund current consumption) with your mortgage (low interest borrowings to fund long term asset asquisitions) so why does government confuse short term deficit financing in health and other ‘current’ expenditure, with asset investment in infrastructure designed to make a return over many years?

Actually people DO confuse their credit cards with their mortgages; people default on the latter and personal bankruptcies increase. Financial writers from the conservative Paul Clitheroe to the radical Robert Kiyasaki decry how few people know how to manage their money, and how people get themselves into financial distress over indulging their consumption habits.

So maybe the analogy is not a great guide to good government. If a government cannot trust itself (and Major implied this) to distinguish short term gains in social policy over long term gains in infrastructure efficiency, then, like the BHP example, maybe the “Board” needs to divest itself of the latter to the capital markets.

But to return to then analogy, maybe Clitheroe and Kiyazaki have a point. Is it really the practicality of distinguishing two different businesses that is the problem? Or the lack of discipline of those not doing the distinguishing? When I did Corporate Finance at University, they always spoke against conglomerates, the analysts would have trouble coming up with a cost of capital for a diversified business, too complicated they said.

Is it really? Five tabs on the spreadsheet rather than one? Don’t analysts have to EARN their salaries by analysing, not just quoting company ASX releases?

Equally an individual who is spending up on new plasma TVs or a boat and putting it on the mortgage, don’t they know they are not acting in their own best interests?

I think this is the real issue. The government could borrow what it likes if the public knew the REAL purpose of the borrowings. Arguments about leaving our grandchildren paupers because of the insulation or the school halls are one thing, but its another thing to say they will be paupers because of new roads or rail that they will also use. The problem is how to distinguish between these not just in budget papers, but in public discourse.

There are two immediate culprits for this: opposition parties, and the Treasury. Opposition politicians are an inevitability, but like our infinite supply of investment funds, the ‘market’ for opposition scare campaigns is infinite. With a poorly informed population, who can’t distinguish their credit card from their mortgage, how can the line between government ‘consumption’ spending be distinguished from investment spending?

But Treasuries are supposed to be ‘professional’, why do they deliberately conflate the two forms of debt, and offer the same bond rate regardless of purpose? And do nothing in public discourse (at least until Ken Henry appeared) to clarify this?

I would liken Treasury activity as to the hypothetical board of BHP. Global borrowing limits gives them something to do. The Treasury ’scare campaign’ is not to the public, but to the government. Your voters will remember the debt for the Sydney Harbour Bridge long after they’ve forgotten how grateful they were to you for building it (and discount the benefits it continues to deliver 80 years on).

So what was Major’s real rationale for privatising? By the logic offered above, not to make it more efficient, but to get it away from a Treasury he clearly couldn’t control. We all think Sir Humphrey Appleby was a 1970s confection, they don’t do it this way any more. It’s all spin and 24 hour new cycles now. Maybe the long lunches in gentleman’s clubs and the school ties have gone, but I’m guessing at the heart of it Major was admitting it was still there.

If I can recommend Engel’s book for one thing, it is that he and I are of one mind on the weakness and illegitimacy of modern western governments. He is quite clear that the crimes of Beeching and other notorious figures were not their explicit deeds, eg in Beeching’s case his Reshaping report and branchline closures. Like me, Engel believes this was all window dressing over the real issues.

No, Beeching’s crime was that he had an opinion at all, stick his head above the sandbags, in a political world that has turned into a dull blanc-mange of nothingness. The existential problem of our age. Politics with no purpose.

He argues, as I would, the Labour politics was already just gesture and too late to have any real effect on rail’s destiny, whether in 1948 or 1997. Conservative politics were just as hypocritical.

You can delete the ‘u’ from Labour in this country and get roughly the same answers. In fact for us it was worse; Engel argues railways might have been saved in 1948 in the UK; I doubt they could have been after the 1920s here and certainly the political will was even weaker.

Where does the political will come from in our blanc-mange world? I’ll leave that to my readers to think about. Careerist politicians will always defer to a Treasury that comforts them by absolving them of guilt when their careers are over. A global borrowing limit makes a convenient fig leaf, to help them sleep at nights. No one wants to really face the facts of what an unfunded welfare, health and social system will actually DO to the government.

But what do I recommend? First, that some rail operations actually are profitable, and need to be physically separated out from the rest (while vertically integrated) and given to the capital markets. Forget cross subsidies, they punish the good and reward the bad.

But what about network effects? Then enforce them as “Standards”, like the computer languages and the plugs on electrical appliances. When your railway comes to Sydney, your train will pull up at a platform, your passengers will walk across to the platform of the other rail company. The small marginal cost of this you will absorb. You are entitled to collect the appropriate fare including profit from your passengers, but you will use the same standard ticketing technology, so multi-route passengers don’t need a wallet full of different tickets.

Some operations are profitable, but only with subsidies collected from market failure remedies, such as congestion taxes or pollution taxes. Let the market bid for these, based on outcomes. An excellent example of congestion busting was in Albuquerque, where the state was going to spend hundreds of millions on a freeway upgrade to cope with about one hour of daily congestion, probably 2000-4000 cars.

When they worked out that the funding could be spent on a couple of classic commuter locomotives and bilevel carriages on a daily commuter route along a freight corridor, they saw sense and funded that instead. Not a comprehensive P T solution at any level, but a start. A recognition of the power of rail over road congestion.

Now if some crazy comes up with a different solution say monorail or maglev or hovercraft or whatever, let him go to the market. As long as he meets standards (fares, ticketing, legibility) he should convince the market that the subsidy plus whatever revenue he picks up (fares, real estate, advertising) will pay a return. I suspect the generic US diesel commuter train will beat the maglev for some time to come.

This places the investment risk where it belongs – on the capital markets. Let it not be said I don’t recognise capital market failure. Engel cites as many authors do the railway mania of the 1840s, no different from the dot coms and sub primes of our time. But he acknowledges the real failure was not the overbuilding, but the keeping of this stuff, in poor condition, for a century afterwards. Ditto Australia, amplified.

There is a still a role for public ownership of mass transit systems. I would make this analogous to the BHP example, in this case the iron ore railways. They are ‘profitable’ in that they contribute to the system of mining and selling iron ore. The markets agree selling iron is profitable; they agree you need rail to get it to market; they agree to whatever investment is required to make it happen.

Thus should it be with cities. A city is (I won’t say profitable) worthwhile. It needs mass transit to function. This should be paid for by government, while still attempting to get it back through farebox and real estate.

The investors will flee if there is no efficient mass transit system. I’ve seen this in Dubai, for example, where the Sheik is expending billions on a new metro, to keep his city attractive even after the traffic has become impassable.

But this is no carte-blanche to union rorts or political pork barrelling. The Sheik still has something John Major lacked, returning to the theme I picked up earlier. Legitimacy. Sad to say, a dictator with more legitimacy than a democratically elected pollie. He has made a compact with his people, build Dubai prosperous and diversified away from oil, a guided market, and open for business and trade. What did Major have to offer? A privatisation policy, dressed up as efficiency but, as admitted to Engel, really a way of fixing his government, not the railways.

The Sheik has other advantages. Sure he may have oil revenue, but Australia is not poor. We also have mining revenue. The Sheik has a free flowing labour market, millions of Indians and Filipinos who can come and go to serve his needs. These people, despite being poor, are financially literate. They know the difference between a credit card and a mortgage, in this case between spending on current consumption and on building their families’ futures. Repatriated funds get spent on children’s education, English lessons, eventually on new and better housing. What does Australia have?

Australia not only has a financially illiterate poor, but also a middle class with the same curse. Who can’t distinguish government spending on the balance sheet, a bit like our hypothetical investment analyst who doesn’t want a spreadsheet with multiple tabs. Politicians can play to this, then seek absolution from their Treasury. Al Maktoum doesn’t need to seek absolution from his Treasury.

I see the way back towards legitimacy in western governments through financial literacy. Whether you prefer a measured Clitheroe or an outlandish Kiyazaki, only better financial literacy will help people distinguish between their credit card and their mortgage, between the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the current spending on welfare.

As an aside, I find it amusing that people can say of Dubai, in reference to Australia “Apples and oranges, they have mineral wealth [as if Australia doesn't], they have immigrant labour [while we spend billions on concentration camps and using our navy to fend them off] we have a fragile environment [while His Highness spends up on water recycling, solar power and mass transit] and we are worried about our national identity [while Gulf Arabs actively assert their identify by towering in wealth and position over the immigrants who outnumber them].”

All I see is we have a ‘free’ press which means free scandal and outrage at the normal business of government, we have a welfare-base (the poor who have no incentive to work) and taxation that takes from what is good and encourages what is bad, rather than the other way round.

Image: Cairns tilt train could serve as model for new rollingstock.

Thanks to the poster who helped me out with information on this.

Before I start, a confession. I’ve never caught a train to Bunbury. So keep that in mind. I have stayed in Bunbury for several days and enjoyed very much; I’ve seen the Australind up close from the platform; I’ve photographed it out on the line, but never ridden on it.

And the reason I never rode it is the same one that underpins what I’m writing here. The schedule was wrong for me. So I hired a car. If people like me are not to have that same experience again, we would need a true Intercity train on that route. Hence today’s piece.

And you know I like the provocative titles so I’ve gone with this one.

So what’s an Intercity train if I’m not admitting a range of trains that could have been counted, from the Gold Coast line to the XPT to the Newcastle electrification to the Southern Aurora or the Cairns Tilt or even the current Australind?

I’ll settle this issue first before I talk about the proposed new Bunbury line and what rollingstock might run.

I’ll define Intercity as follows. Obviously between 2 cities (and we are not talking Echuca here, I mean decent sized cities). But the run must cater to those who are genuinely travelling for a non-routine journey, in the level of comfort we would expect from a plane or coach on the same route, but also competitive in time and comfort with those modes. And with appeal to the people who would otherwise take the plane or coach, or drive themselves. Finally, I’ll limit it to those routes where you would expect there and back travel framed around business needs, but also suitable for tourism.

That definition rules out the XPT and current Australind as not much better than welfare. The Cairns and Rocky Tilts, while the rollingstock is definitely Intercity (and I’ll talk more about these below) are used on routes that are not competitive with air (though they are competitive with coach). Newcastle electrification and the Gold Coast line are operated as commuter lines with commuter rolling stock. And finally the Southern Aurora, if it ran today, would be in my category of long distance, the same as the Indian Pacific, for while they appealed to the business market at the beginning, no longer competitive with air on that route.

And that’s not to say that some of the above options couldn’t ‘cross the border’ into my definition easily. The Velocities to Ballarat and Bendigo, with some tweaking of timing and interiors, could fit that definition quite well. The Rocky tilt, if put on a dedicated Maryborough timetable with maybe a new line to Hervey Bay, and a few more deviations round the bad bits, might fit the bill. An XPT confined to the Newcastle route, ditto.

And maybe if the X2000 timetable to Canberra had been built up, consolidated and improved upon, that might also have met the criteria.

But I’d like to look at the concept of an Intercity train built from scratch. Project documentation I”ve seen makes explicit that the run will be an Intercity one, not a commuter run.

The current route.

The current Australind follows the suburban legacy line to Armadale, and requires pathing between suburban sets, after departure from a dedicated platform at Perth City. From Armadale, the Australind uses a section of country track dedicated to itself as far as Mundijong, where it joins the freight line from Fremantle. An intermediate station at Byford has been talked about as a destination of suburban trains, and noting the line to this point is the exclusive preserve of passenger trains, should not be disruptive.

From Mundijong the line has been the recepient of an upgrading program spanning some years, but driven by the needs of freight. After passing several small villages that would not merit a rail service in themselves, the line reaches Pinjarra, a country town that is famous among the rail fraternity for its Hotham Valley Tourist Railway. It has also been spoken of as the destination of a new suburban railway from the Mandurah area, at Lakelands. This would serve new suburbs around the lakes, but would presumably also catch Pinjarra in the new suburban ‘net’. This would seem a distant dream.
Beyond Pinjarra some more significant villages appear, again with little merit in receiving a rail service themselves. Once the line hits Brunswick Junction, on the outskirts of Bunbury, again the major needs of freight have passed, and the last small section is dedicated to the passenger train alone. Finally, the line used to run to a station closer to the city, which closed in the mid 1980s. The wisdom of that policy is in question again.

Transit time of 2.5 hours is not competitive with driving, with a new freeway opened. The deficiencies of the route, with respect to running an Intercity rail service, are numerous:

-low line speed (115km/h with some speed restrictions between Armadale and Mundijong)
-indirect route, heading inland before returning to the coast
-line designed and prioritised for freight, with the requirement to pass freights on the single track
-interaction with the suburban network, on the legacy section from Perth to Armadale
-little real en-route demand with most towns too small to justify a service, with troublesome and probably politically dictated stopping pattern. The number of stops has increased since the current service was installed in the late 1980s.
-Bunbury location out of town and in unedifying industrial area
In addition the rollingstock available is a constraint (the only 1067mm non-electric modern railcars in the West) and has the following limitations:

-rolling stock designed as simple coach standard, with little appeal to the business market
-single set, not able to run additional services
-poor timetable for business and tourist travel
-set is satisfactory but will need replacement and/or augmentation

Recent developments – the Mandurah line

While the new railway to Mandurah is not quite even half way from Perth to Bunbury, it is a significant contribution to the revival of rail travel to the south west, and may well point the way to the future for Bunbury.

Some notable aspects of the Mandurah railway bear consideration.

First, the corridor has been developed to a high standard, and suggest considerable faith on the part of the powers that be in the future of rail as a travel choice in the south west not just for close range transit but also for long range commuting, tourism and general travel. Much of the corridor beyond Rockingham is certainly not suburban. The landscape that the new line is plotted through, a mixture of coastal scrub and exurban housing, is typical of what a Bunbury line will also look like.

Second, the line provides a suitable corridor for the Bunbury line for a considerable distance south of Perth. The options, which will be talked about below, all draw on the freeway alignment as far as the end of the current freeway easement at Anketell tunnel. Some of the options follow the Mandurah line further south, others follow the freeway at this point.

The merits will be discussed in more detail below. Suffice to say, having a fast, new and modern corridor already proven for 130km/h travel to the edge of the suburban area will be an advantage over the slower, less reliable and less direct corridor via Armadale. If desirable transit times from Perth to Bunbury are in the 1.5 hour range, then this corridor is well placed to deliver. Even the options that run via the existing route all the way to the Mandurah terminus, and on the assumption that few or no stations are stopped at en route, should deliver a 35 –40 minute transit time on that section. This would leave almost an hour to reach Bunbury from Mandurah.

Third, the new project has demonstrated again, if such a demonstration was needed, of the net benefit of using freeway medians. All the Bunbury options also anticipate freeway and roadside running.

Fourth, sticking close to the coast has flagged the reality of the situation in the south west, namely, that practically all the development and population will be along the coast. The needs of places like Pinjarra are unlikely to be as significant as new communities likely to appear south of Mandurah along the coast. This flies in the face of the past of Australian rail, which was around the needs of agricultural communities.

This is not to say that no development will occur south of Armadale. One would expect the settlements south to Serpentine would be effectively served by suburban trains. I doubt the settlements further south will ever come to much, and the proposal to serve Pinjarra from Mandurah would seem better and more than via a massive upgrade from Armadale.

A shortcoming of using the Mandurah corridor is the lack of a suitable terminal at the Perth end, and it would be likely that an Intercity train would have a short dwell time at the underground platforms and some dead running beyond Perth north or westward. I have seen short dwell times on the new Berlin Hauptbahnhof platforms so I’m sure this can be resolved if the service is reliable.

Regional Planning

The WA Government has flagged an increasing role for Bunbury as a ‘second capital’ for WA. Of course this is hyperbole. But even a limited option for moving some of the WA public service out of Perth, creating new jobs and careers in the south west, would boost the case for better rail.

Other settlements are appearing on the coast between the Bunbury and Mandurah. I’m not going to talk about the merits of this, suffice to say, it is apparently what people want despite the environmental cost.

Bunbury is also mooted for better internal bus services, and possibly light rail. This sounds extravagant, particularly since a couple of bus shuttles is the measure of .existing demand. Most people are picked up/dropped off at Picton. However, better local services would make the longer distance service more appealing against the drive-yourself alternative.

All this demonstrates, as I posted earlier, a good linkage to State, Regional and Local planning. Statewide, there is a link between a strategy of making Bunbury a second capital and providing an intercity rail service to facilitate it. Regionally, through the plans to develop coastal services. And locally through the recognition of the need for better local bus services, or light rail. This contrasts with approaches elsewhere, such as the Sydney Metro or the Mornington Peninsula freeway which have been planned in isolation of their state or regional implications.

The need

If rail is to be a credible alternative to driving yourself for business or tourism and VFR purposes rather than just commuting, it will need to be at an attractive transit time, a good 25% better than driving even in the off-peak.

This would imply a sub-1.5 hour journey time from Perth CBD to Bunbury CBD. The project documentation I’ve seen refers to the need for people to be able to access Bunbury CBD directly from the service, so a Picton style solution is not enough.

CBD travellers might reach the service via taxi, local buses or local trains at the Perth end. If a passenger can leave the train at the Perth end or Bunbury end and be at their destination 10 minutes after the train arrives, the line will still be comfortable against the annoyance of driving and parking. Reliability and frequency will then be the remaining constraints to competing with motor vehicle travel.

If the WA Government moves some of the public service to Bunbury, it would presumably become strict on public servants using the service and not driving from CBD to CBD. This would provide a good floor under demand.

Local tourists would probably find the service inflexible and expensive compared with driving; interstate and international tourists might find the service more useful, especially those from countries that would expect to see a good rail service.

Avoiding Armadale will come at the cost to travellers on this route, as a 45 minute journey into Perth to board the line will make it unviable. However, I expect a replacement bus serving the existing towns will still provide a two hour transit time, which would be no worse than at present. Any attempt to keep the existing set running to the existing towns should be opposed; though I would concede the set might provide a “pre-suburban” service to Byford as a shuttle.

Depending how much of the existing Mandurah route is used, will determine how useful the line will be for travellers from the Peel region. Other Perth corridors to the north, to Ellenbrook, to the east and to Fremantle will probably experience ‘no change’.

The route options
As discussed earlier, using the Mandurah line for departure from Perth is common to all canvassed options. Options vary in two respects – how they leave the Mandurah line, and how they enter Bunbury.

Mandurah and Peel lakes routing.

While 3 general potential routes have been plotted on the map below, the distinguishing features of the routes are how much of the Mandurah line is used; and how the line interacts with Mandurah itself and the lakes further south. All assume stretches significant freeway or highway-side running.

The green option through Mandurah is probably the most superficially appealing but undoubtedly the most controversial and costly. It is likely to arouse objection from Mandurah locals, who have benefited from their own line but are unlikely to want to pass that benefit to people south of their city. Mitigating the effects, such as running underground or by elevated line along Old Coast Road to Dawesville is unlikely to be cost-effective.

Against these risks would be clear benefits in terms of picking up additional local traffic between Mandurah and Bunbury. If the intercity service is to be credible and well used, it needs to serve cities. With Rockingham and Mandurah on the line, a good Intercity service could be provided that would also differentiate from the current commuter service. Ideally Mandurah and Rockingham travellers could pay a premium in the Perth direction.

South of Mandurah towards Bunbury there are no considerations of demand, only of terrain. A proposed station at Lake Clifton at this stage is based on possible future population options, not present ones.

As with any plan that plots multiple routes, the terrain considerations for each route are difficult to summarise. The main problems with the routes (Option 1) following Old Coast Rd are the numerous minor roads and driveways, that need to be grade separated. One such crossing per kilometre or 50 crossings over 50 kilometres it the bleak implication of this. And there are no opportunities to ‘save’ on this by undergrounding or trenching with a high water table and sandy soil.

It is surprising that WA does not yet have a policy of no new level crossings on passenger railways, as the possibility of at grade running is mooted. However, this reduces the possible speed in those areas to suburban limits, for example 80 kilometres per hour. Whereas full grade separation makes 200 kilometres per hour available from the outset. The options that stick to the new Forrest freeway and Peel Deviation, even where there is currently no grade separation, would reduce the number of separations required into single digits.

The document referred to above quite rightly points out how the cost of large numbers of grade separations gravitates against a route that fronts major roads. I note that it would be quite normal in Europe or Asia, when building a high speed rail route, to require this many separations – one per kilometre sounds quite reasonable. This suggests that budget allowed for this project, versus comparable projects overseas, is more modest.

Environmental concerns (other than resident amenity) are lower on this set of routes, as the land is generally developed/degraded already and within designated road corridors.

Another cluster of options suggest using the Mandurah line to its terminus, but heading east to the freeway corridor and sticking to that route for much of the journey (Option 2). Option 2 presents some lower cost options follow the freeway around the other side of Lake Preston and then through country to Bunbury’s eastern approach. The Leschenault peninsula is particularly sought after for a rail route given some unique characteristics. Firstly,having been declared unsuitable for significant urban development it leaves the possibility of a rail corridor that will not be disturbed by adjacent urban land owners, and for obviating the need to ever build a station in this area. Secondly, with much government ownership and a small number of private owners, less land acquisition and fewer grade separations in this area.

On the approach to Bunbury the Australind bypass is one of the possible routes. It is noted that while that route is current not grade separated, it could be by the time of the rail construction. This makes a useful tie-in between the rail and road projects, and might make the rail project more attractive to those who otherwise wouldn’t support it, especially in the Australind area.

Some other routes follow the existing line in from he east. The routes appear less direct but would save considerable cost if built parallel to the freight corridor. It should be noted there has been call for duplication of the existing route for freight demand alone. This could mean the line, by the time it approaches Bunbury, would quadrupled. This is a marked contrast to the single track of today.

Non-Mandurah routing

Running the line directly from the Anketell tunnel and down the freeway/highway combination from there avoids Mandurah and many of the principal environmental considerations and cost barriers. However, it obviously avoids the possibility of serving Mandurah for intermediate Bunbury journeys; providing a premium service from Perth to Mandurah, and duplicates about 40 kilometres of new railway which could be problematic both in cost and political terms.

However the duplicated section would represent 40 more kilometres of ‘conflict’ avoided on the existing line between existing and new services, and would mean 200 kilometre per hour running might be available from Anketell rather than from near Mandurah. And finally, the new route might open up possibilities for other new settlements and stations to be built, though at the risk of not being able to provide the desired high speed Intercity service if this ‘got out of hand’. The new freeway has not been completely grade separated and this may provide the opportunity to do so, especially noting the tie in mentioned anbove.

It would still seem a wasted opportunity to avoid Mandurah though. The options map also suggests a connection to the new line from Mandurah could be built, and potentially if a Mandurah connection to the suburbs eastward toward Pinjarra were built, and intersected the line appropriately, it might be possible to provide some via Mandurah services, or an interchange, or other possibilities. Of course, these possibilities are sitting on top of the already very high cost of a basic new route from Anketell to Bunbury via the freeway.

The Bunbury Terminus

Australia has been through a long term trend of moving long distance passenger rail stations out of city centres. Examples are numerous, from Adelaide to Townsville via Canberra and Gympie. Wodonga is the current and most recent example. Not many places have defied the trend – Cairns would be one of few where the opportunity was not taken.

The trend would appear to be driven by both the expedient of selling high priced real estate; but also by the reality that passenger needs have changed, and may not be so easily accommodated in small central city sites. I recall in my younger days the anguish of trying to get the Motorail wagon off the Aurora shunted at Sydney Terminal in the face of peak traffic. Picking up passengers from trains to destinations in the suburbs.

And with freight being driven even further from city centres, the remaining trackage in some of these places is then only kept for passengers, and the opportunity then arises to remove both.

In Bunbury, the removal of the passenger station in the 1980s definitely followed this pattern. Freight had been gone for a while, and twice daily diesel hauled Australind was the only train the few kilometres.

The documents seem to suggest that a new Bunbury city station, essentially returning to the status quo ante, is essential to the proposal. This is refreshing to say the least. That said, the proposed station will be on a very tight site in the centre of a road median and will face some critical constraints that need to be resolved favourably to the whole project. The consequences of the tight site include insufficient length and lack of platform frontage that impact on service frequency and train length. This latter may impact on rollingstock choice, as I will explore further below.

That said, it is clear from the documents that the authorities see it as crucial to position the station for important walk-up traffic, easy access by bus and potentially light rail, and as a ‘gateway’ to the city, part of the streetscape and the feeling of place. This is a clear reversal of the trend of the 1970s to today.

And given the constraints of a tight inner city site, the document acknowledges the possibility of keeping a second outer station for Bunbury, presumably the current station if it is on the adopted route. This station would serve park-n-ride and long distance connecting buses.

A terminus in the centre of Bunbury gravitates against extension further south. Reports have been prepared, suggesting a long term interest in extension towards Busselton and maybe Margaret River. It would be a shame to limit these options unnecessarily, as at Coolangatta.

Light Rail

This is worth a separate post, so I won’t spend too much on this. Suffice to say, it is quite fascinating to see Light Rail seriously mooted in unrelated documents, in a city as small as Bunbury. We are still waiting for the Rockingham system, so I won’t hold my breath. Much of the discussion regarding a station site hinges on its suitability for Light Rail. While laudable, I’m surprised it is taken seriously. A train arriving once per hour is not going to generate much tram traffic, unless the site has other merits.

As in Rockingham, Light Rail is seen as a viable way of linking the rail system that is – to the place where the passengers want to be, given the difficulty of bringing the heavy rail service closer to the CBDs. But this begs the question of why so much effort would be put into getting heavy rail into the city centre, and build light rail as well. Presumably Light Rail could serve the current station at Picton, at less cost than a difficult heavy rail alignment

Other implications, even further off in dream land, are whether the Bunbury Light Rail would be more a street tramway, or a serious suburban transit system. This relates to the options presented in the documents for high speed rail routesinto Bunbury from the east or north. With an eastern option, it might leave the northern suburbs better served by Light Rail. If, on the other hand, the line went via the north, a commuter rail service might be a better option, using spare capacity on the high speed line. And a Karlsruhe-style Strassenbahn might also suit, using some existing rail corridors as well as new ones.

Rolling stock

As noted above, high speed for this service has been identified as 200 kilometres per hour. On one hand, this would be slower than the same definition overseas. On the other, it would be the fastest service in Australia when opened, and the practical speed limit of the 1067 mm Cape gauge. 1435 mm gauge offer higher speeds, but at little return. It would imply either complete dual gauging and station modification on the existing freeway easement and underground; or a new approach to Perth via Fremantle or Armadale (and therefore slower), and unless able to access the existing East Perth standard gauge platforms, would need a new Perth terminal.

200 kilometres per hour was supposed to be offered on a regular basis on the Prospector route to Kalgoorlie and the set in use on that route is apparently capable of it. However that route has numerous limitations such as running with freight, level crossings, livestock risks and little real demand for that speed, as it doesn’t change the modal competition advantage (flying is still quicker, and rail remains slightly faster than driving without it).

The next consideration is the choice of technology. This could boil down to three I can identify: diesel, gas turbine and electric fed by conventional overhead wiring.

Diesel would seem to be appropriate for a simple Intercity frequency of 1 per hour. This however runs into the constraint of not being able to sit for long in the underground platforms (although this would also be dictated by the limited time available at the platform between local services in any event). Versus the considerable cost of electrifying the route this would seem to be a clear winner, even if oil prices grew.

I know little about gas turbine trains except for the burst of interest in the 1970s. They appear able to run at consistently high speeds better than diesel, though 200 kilometres per hour is not unusual world wide for diesel power, the UK having introduced it on their main lines in the 1970s.

Electrification, as noted above, would be a cleaner option for underground and suburban running. It could also make for a more comfortable journey if the decision is taken to operate the service using multiple unit cars with motorised passenger bodies rather than separate power cars. Having the diesel plant on board produces noise and vibration which is never as comfortable as an electric alternative. Given the identified limitations of a Bunbury terminus, it seems more likely than not that separate power cars will not be provided. And the Velocity precedent suggests that as power required increases, it is less likely that non-motorised trailers can be inserted into the consist, such as happened with the Budds in NSW.

Electrification also opens options for suburban services to be provided on parts of the route that merit it. This could include, as noted above, from Anketell to some distance along the freeway as attracts settlement; or from Mandurah into its surrounding suburbs; or even plausibly from the Bunbury end, if that urbanises further.

This suburbanisation also raises the risk that an Intercity service is eventually dropped and the government goes for the ‘lowest common denominator’ option of using commuter stock on the route with no provision for premium custom.

Those familiar with the Newcastle and Illawarra story will recognise this. The original Newcastle Express (Flyer) and the South Coast Daylight were not discontinued upon electrification but ran for some years along side the commuter stock. In the Kiama case, the fact that it was not considered worth changing trains at Wollongong for those services suggested it was worth continuing loco hauled trains through. Eventual electrification to Dapto and beyond has all but ruled out the possibility of the loco-hauled trains returning.

In Newcastle’s case, it would simply be that as loco-hauled stock and electric locomotives have been retired, they have not been replaced like for like. I have often made the case for how the XPT might be a better performer for an identified business market, with a stop only at Gosford and aiming again for the 2 hour transit time mark, so that the route competes with road.

Victorians have seen the demise of general N-class hauls out of Ballarat. At least in this case, the replacement is faster and little difference in comfort on this quick run.

Returning to Bunbury, even if the B-set body was seen as a viable template for a 200 kilometre per hour service, it would be unfortunate if the politicians saw that as an acceptable reason to run the ’lowest common denominator’ service.

My preference would be to see the Rocky Tilt design updated for this route. It would be over 20 years old by the time a Bunbury line was finished; but has served Australian rail reliably. I have been on one when it said it was doing 173km per hour, and has been proven above 210km/h so would seem to be the closest existing technology to what is required.

With regard to the use of expensive tilting technology, it should be kept in mind that the new line would be engineeered not to need it, and those options that maximise the amount of new line would also therefore minimise the amount of tilting that would otherwise be required. And the existing freeway trackage should be able to support 130-140km/h without tilting. The Bunbury line is planned for 4 kilometre radius curves; however occasional slowing around curves of half that radius would not impact journey times significantly. A route via Old Coast Road may have many more tighter curves, and this might dictate a tilting set.

It was interesting to note the QR engineers’ evidence to the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into Tilt Trains, where they stated that the tilt function had been included for faster operation on existing trackage; the many new deviations were built for 160km/h operation without tilting and they would not have included it if the entire Brisbane to Rockhampton narrow gauge railway could have its tight curves removed. It seems to be a level of complication best avoided if not absolutely required.

If the diesel option is selected, then the slightly newer Cairns Tilt train technology would also seem to be a suitable platform to upgrade from. This set has also achieved Australian rail speed records.

Any political imperative to use local Australian manufacture, namely the Maryborough plant, would be reasonable given the experience of that plant in putting together the Cairns and Rocky tilt trains, or alternatively the current Transperth and QRPax suburban trains.

Services

I have suggested a 1/hour service. Obviously demand would be higher at peak times but it remains to be seen whether buying additional sets, and adding additional track capacity is justified given the limited time of day it would be required.

I would rather see the aviation industry approach to yield management, namely peak/off peak pricing. Especially as the actual ‘gradient’ of cross-elasticity with road demand is the opposite direction, namely that rail would be more attractive at peak times given road network congestion. With business travel a viable option on the route, it is likely business travellers would be price-insenstive to the time of travel, while tourists would benefit from cheaper times.

If the route was electrified and if intermediate stations appeared, it might give the option of extending some of the B-set services in peak times to boost capacity. For example, if the intermediate Lake Clifton station was electrified, then a B set only running to there, would relieve the Bunbury set of the need to stop. Diesel options limit this flexibility.

While the project documentation is against the idea of the line being a commuter line, the reality is there may be demand for such a service. A sub 90 minute service is not unusual on the East Coast, with many commuters travelling from Gosford or the Blue Mountains or Varsity Lakes. This would suggest a higher capacity set, with say 8 cars, could be separated into a premium/first section and an economy/commuter section. If the Bunbury platform is too short, however, lengthening the train to accommodate commuters might not be possible.

Pricing and Marketing

As a new (or new in 50 years) concept in Australia, this service could provide a new opportunity to pitch rail at the premium market. It would therefore be reasonable to price it appropriately.

Versus road competition, businesses are usually sharp enough to see the true costs of motoring. At 70 cents a kilometre, the 180 km journey should be priced at around $120 for a car. The Victorian comparator, Shepparton, priced at $40 per journey for first class, should be a reasonable minimum for this service. I would see scope to raise it to $80 in peak times, and even with taxis both ends should be competitive with driving.

On board catering would not really be necessary; I would like to see some options for platform-side coffee service and maybe on-board coffee sales.

So how will a new genuine Intercity service be received in the market? The public service could force the issue – if the government mandated all travel between Perth and Bunbury CBDs by rail, this would also place a demand floor under the service.

It would be lovely to see some genuine private sector decentralisation from Perth. Wesfarmers, for example, is a national firm, and has its roots in the South West. Would it not be fitting if parts of Wesfarmers could be headquartered in Bunbury, especially its Bunnings Division?

The market needs to accept the route in the same way it accepts air travel. Most other significant centres in WA are only accessible by air, so the attachment to driving should be easier to break. Bunbury rail needs to be seen as the air service to Bunbury. I would suggest using aviation accounts, offering points and lounges could also be key to the deal for business.

Maintaining the service as ‘non-welfare’ also needs to be achieved, this includes not flooding the service with pensioner vouchers, providing properly trained on-board staff rather than the usual ‘railway’ supply, keeping facilities clean, not modifying timetables because the CWA says the old dears can’t make it onto the 5:50am departure, and so on.

The Intercity Railway in Australian Rail ‘ecology’

The reason I was motivated to write this was to look at how Australian rail can emerge a ‘success’ from over a century of defeats. I see an ecology of Australian rail not a lot different from overseas, with some crucial additions.

I see the successful models as follows:

-the mass transit underground railway through densely packed city centres, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne
-the medium distance commuter rail service
-the long distance ‘cruise’ style tourist rail service, lasting a day or more
-heavy intermodal freights and bulk mineral or grain freights
-specialist passenger services like Skitube
-tourist rail services like Puffing Billy or Zig Zag
-light rail in the smaller cities or less populated parts of large cities but where buses are no longer adequate.

[Just so I’m clear what I do NOT see as having an ongoing role in a successful rail system, these are the general purpose commuter rail services, the day country trains and the legacy overnight trains such as Countrylink or the Westlander.]

To this ecology I am confident to suggest the reemergence of Intercity rail. What air travel and road travel picked off 50 years, ago can reemerge at the expense of both.

Just as rail has slowed due to an accretion of ‘barnacles’ such as the welfare imperative, underinvestment and priority for freight, other ‘barnacles’ have afflicted road and air. Security concerns, congestion, environmental concerns, NIMBYs are tending to retard rail’s competitors and may open up a niche. Bunbury would seem to be an ideal candidate to test this.

Like most degenerative diseases, the malaises that have affected Australian rail over our lifetimes, were present long before they become evident, and long before they ended up nearly killing the host.

I’ve been down this track before so I was going to look at specific trends in rail, and open discussion on these topics.

In previous posts here and elsewhere I’ve suggested that the legacy rail network, particularly in SE Australia, had its last serious bout of investment in the 1920s.

However we would be foolish to regard even this round as a proactive investment in Australia’s development. On the contrary, I would suggest it was reactive, in other words, the “body” of Australian rail politics had already had the ‘disease’ at the point when the first radical cures were being tested.

Economic advantage over the competition

Even the lightest laid, most insubstantial railways in Australia, be they the cane tramways or the pioneer branchlines of the larger gauges, had a capacity and transit time advantage over the nearest competition, namely horse-drawn wagons.

Along the coast, however, the advantage was less clear, as shipping could at least manage to hold its own in terms of carrying capacity, and was not far behind on transit times (an analogy for the situation today vis a vis road and rail?).

Hence the coastal rail networks were the last to be developed, with 3 conspicuous examples: A connection from the eastern states to Perth, contiguous rail to Cairns, and the coastal line from Melbourne to Sydney (never finished) and Sydney to Brisbane (only completed in 1930).

I should also mention the Murray River riverboat network, if only to mention it played a valuable role in establishing the idea of rural development and the development of agricultural commodities as opposed to merely agriculture for home consumption. However, the network was not extensive, was indirect and not very reliable.

For all the talk of nation building and the importance of a national rail network, I suspect economics drove this.

Back to the horse-drawn vehicles: A manifold improvement in productivity from rail haulage was evident from the first railway being built, and for established or viable settlements it made sense to pay for rail haulage or passage, no matter how high the fixed costs of the rail system. Rail systems were incredibly capital intensive and somewhat labour intensive as well, however, to run the same system, even if it were possible, using horses would have been much more intensive in both (if you regard horses as capital).

In this first phase, rail as a development option was really against the opportunity cost of not developing country at all. While a grazier might be able to graze extensively, or a quite specific mining project, say gold or copper, might be able to smelt on site and lift small amounts of finished product out by horse, the options for development and settlement of distant inland settlements were few without rail.

Given the opportunity cost of rail was undeveloped country, this could easily skew arguments towards rail development. And away from developing the rail well, given that even a poor quality line would make a significant difference to the economic prospects of fertile country.

However, by the 1920s, even a rudimentary motor vehicle-based alternative would be a real threat. Here, the economic advantage came not from capacity or transit time (roads were still poor), but from the blind-spots of rail: inflexibility of rail, and high fixed costs.

If anything, arguably, motor vehicles profited from the opposite characteristics of those that made rail great. Rail could carry a few hundred tonnes at a time, even on the lowest quality routes; rarely was that capacity needed in Australia except during harvests, and even then. Yet customers and later taxpayers were paying for that fixed, very high capacity the routes had. Transit time might be better, but gate-to-gate or gate-to-ship times might be better, simply for the lack of waiting and handling.

If you stand in the souvenir shop at Puffing Billy’s Belgrave Station, you will see something that gives much of the game away. A comment on a photograph from the heydey of narrow gauge shows the old goods shed at Belgrave. It notes that little freight was in fact shipped through Belgrave, even at the start. It just wasn’t worth unloading it from horse or truck onto a narrow gauge train for a few km, then transhipping to the broad gauge. Much easier to get the horse or truck down the hill to Fern Tree Gully, even if this had a longer transit time.

This would be the tale of much of Australian rail even by the 1920s.

I recall reading in the passenger market it was similar. The Newcastle Express was introduced in the 1920s to combat the same problem, with some effort put into reducing the journey time which had not been a priority before. The road journey was still 4 hours versus 2.5 on the train. However was this the real journey time? The train might be reliable and fast but how frequent compared with a car you drive yourself, and could leave anytime; or a bus that might need only 20 passengers to be a viable run?

It follows as well that as the road journey time decreased, you would expect efforts made to improve the rail time as well. This did not occur, and the time is approximately the same today, despite vast sums spent on electrification, concrete sleepering and heavier rail.

Despite Australia having a somewhat impressive growth rate since the start of Australian rail, in practice it was nowhere near enough to soak up all the excess capacity of the rail system where it ran. And the question of spending recurrent resources maintaining this capacity, rather than a simultaneous rationalising and improvement, has dogged Australian rail since that time.

Technology

This flowed through into the technological choices. Assuming abundant capital and a viable market, one would assume Australia would at least be in the middle of the pack of technological innovation. And where the returns from innovation were high, in cases where Australia’s situation was special, you would expect to see Australia at the front. Situations like remoteness, like high temperatures, or low water availability, long distances to depots, and so on.

So it is a surprise to see it took an American to come in to shake up the South Australian Railways out of their Britishness, and that the neighbouring systems paid scant attention to what he was doing, though the lessons were much the same for them.

Physical token-based safeworking would be the first bizarre import from the UK that should not have persisted past the development of an alternative. Of course there were doubts about telegraphic and virtual systems such as train orders; why these weren’t traded off against the clear savings from significantly less staff and capital, and more flexibility, is not clear. Too many ‘purists’ with a UK history of safeworking I suspect.

Electrification on the DC system was also a technology just starting to come into its own when two Australian cities grasped it. It wasn’t actually a brand new technology, given trams and interurbans had been using a lighter version of the technology for some time. In fact, when Doncaster had Australia’s first electric tramway, it preceded Melbourne heavy rail efforts by decades.

This was a truly expensive technology, though it also realised significant benefits in crewing and servicing costs of locomotives. Especially in the busier or steeper parts of the system where steam costs were high. It is puzzling why, given these advantages, it wasn’t more widely used, especially before the advent of heavier haul diesel locomotives. I would guess the recurrent costs of the less profitable and more sparsely used parts of the system were diverting capital from what could have been a good system on the major routes.

Referring to the Newcastle Express above, one could imagine a lighter, faster and more sprightly electric service that could have been built in the 1920s, using similar car bodies as the suburban system but fitted out to a higher standard. Such cars could have put on the power on the grades the locomotives found tough, such as Cowan Bank, Hawkmount, and the Hornsby climb, and might have been cleared for faster running around curves. That alone would have cut some time from the timetable of the day, before any consideration was given to rerouting the corridor.

While internal combustion locomotion was still in its early days, railmotors had started appearing around the country on passenger traffic, most conspicuously through the Brills, CPH and PERM (later DERM).

Again, this should have been seen as a canary dozing off in the coalmine, as steam-hauled passenger trains were obviously quite unviable by the 1920s on all but the major routes. If a complete train of passenger cars could be replaced by a single self-propelled carriage, this was clearly pointing to the unviability of passenger traffic in rural areas on the whole. Now I don’t mean could they fill a train, as there will still large numbers of well patronised mail and day express trains on the major routes. I mean could they fill a train at an adequate rate of return, and to every nook and cranny of the system.

Oddly enough, some of these railmotors also started appearing on outer suburban routes, such was their lower cost, their convenience, and the actual traffic on offer. It is a wonder such vehicles weren’t considered for the marginal outer suburban lines of the day, like Lilydale, Hurstbridge, or the North Shore. As I understand it, they did actually see service to East Hills, Carlingford and the Sefton route.

If the 1850s revealled the promise of opening up the country with conveying heavy loads in reasonable times, the 1920s heralded the need for economy, the productivity curve tapering off massively.

Industrial Relations

The Australian Settlement, taken from the point of the Harvester Judgement, was a bit over a decade old at this point. In return for paying a fair wage, businesses exposed to import competition would be protected by tariffs. As this would hurt the domestic and export sectors, agriculture would be supported through marketing boards and export facilitation. Large numbers of monopolies were under government control, from water and electricity to the railways.

In the Anglosphere this was not yet the norm. The heydey of the private railway groups in the UK was coming upon them, while major railroad groups were forming in the US. Those nations too, apart from some cherry picking in specific industries like ship building, tended to less government intervention.

Given the explicit development objectives of Australian governments, it is not surprising that Australian rail operations had fallen so completely under government by this point. While the objective of maintaining the rail enterprise as a whole as a profitable or at least cost-neutral endeavour remained, differentials of profitability within the enterprise remained.

Fare and freight rates books tended to be fairly even by distance, even when the costs of delivery changed markedly according to what was actually involved. Hence a distant branchline that was costly to serve might not cost much more to the customer than a more easily served mainline destination closer to capital or port. And certain traffics might be advantaged to customer; never to the railway.

Little pressure was brought to bear on the enterprise therefore to actually become more efficient. And with road transport bearing upon them, orders of magnitude of efficiency would be required. Technology, as explained above, could help. But at the end of the day, leadership and management were lacking when they were needed most.

A railway of steam locomotive-hauled passenger trains using staff and tickets, substantial staffed stations and could have been quickly transformed into a system of EMUs and railmotors, using simplified signalling and unstaffed halts with onboard or agency ticketing. The 1920s would have been the right time to have done it.

Conclusion
I’ve long been a believer the rot started long ago, and so long ago that we can scarcely recognise the cause; few around today would have seen the world where it was not the case.

Whether your fond memories were 1960s steam, 1970s branchlines, 1980s mainline express trains or even 1990s vestigal suburban trains that have now passed from use, what you were seeing was the dregs, the tail end of a system that started dying before most of us were born.

It would be hard to make meaningful second guessing of decisions taken in the 1850s or 1880s, the world was still a very different place then. By the 1920s, however, enough of the modern world was visible for informed descendents to judge how effective contemporary decision making was.

With the advent of road transport, rail would no longer be unchallenged on most passenger and freight tasks. Technology was moving to improve rail incrementally; but the capital was not able to be raised; and the will not summoned to divert funds from those parts of the network that could not be saved, to those that could.

What had confronted the 1850s and 1880s decision maker as a clear advantage to rail; the same day journey or the same week goods haul, would soon not be enough. Days would turn to hours and rail would lose massively.

What survives from the 1920s? Suburban electrification in Melbourne and Sydney provided an asset that could be drawn down for the next several decades; only now are realising its limitations. Train order working and a big locomotive and rolling stock policy did not really leave South Australia until the 1950s and 60s, so I’m not sure it was a success. Branchline railmotors did at least point the way to the least cost way of carrying country and interurban passengers, with Vline’s Velocities the descendents of generations of rail motors, arguably the way it should always have been.

As an aside, I feel, and I suspect Carr does too, fluking it was not in NSW long term best interests. He has intimated that the NSWALP was still undergoing ‘regeneration’ from Wran era cronyism into Bracks era ‘listening’ and was caught on the hop, with Carr himself really a transition manager rather than Premier materials, in the way Brumby was. So as a context to why government policy has been so awful, especially transport policy, this may provide some explanation. Certainly a ‘listening’ government might have heard the problems earlier than that one did, whether they acted is another matter.

Returning from the digression, I’m not a supporter of government centrally planning an economy; it doesn’t work. However, a modicum of city or metropolitan planning is essential, even in a free enterprise system. Most of the counter examples are from developing countries, and while many of them ‘bustle’ with economic activity, few are efficient while urban development is unplanned.

And many of them, such as Bangkok, were late comers to the need for heavy fixed rail transport. Fortunately, an underlying template of growth means that as rail facilities appear, urban fabric can be quickly remodelled around them. However, it can still leave useful development orphaned from a system for years.

In mature capitalist democracies, the change will always be slower, and hence important to get right.

Planning is always fraught with the question ‘top down versus bottom up’ – should objectives be framed at the top and intepreted down, or should realities at the bottom be synthesised into themes and then handed down as the plan. The answer is, of course, it should be a two way street, but that is unsatisfying as that will always cause conflicts and it is the resolution of conflicts, rather than utopian rational policy development that is the planners’ real job.

However, I can say for sure that in advance of a metropolitan transport plan should be a metropolitan plan (ie land use, settlement and economic activity). This should state for certain, based on current uses and efficient future uses, what will happen where.

And while I prefer a measure of ‘horizontal’ separation between planning, regulation and executive functions, so that the people writing the plan aren’t influenced or corrupted by the wrong influence, there should be a vertical alignment in the system between those doing the planning and those holding the funds. For example, I don’t favour a Department of Planning doing such a plan, but rather a Premiers Department, holding hands with the Treasury who will have to pay for it. Keeping the objectives Achievable within the SMART acronym requires that sort of Premier level blessing.

In terms of transport, it is important for such an urban plan to acknowledge existing transport networks and how to get best value from them by appropriate settlement and economic activity policies – but that is where it should stop. The final step at this level is simply a capacity analysis, how much more each of the existing transport corridors can take, as this informs decisions about either new settlement patterns, or new investment in transport. But don’t jump to that decision just yet.

It is at the next level, where a comprehensive transport needs analysis is undertaken, based on the flows of people that the urban plan predicts are likely to generate.

This is the key weakness with the Dulwich Hill LR. I can see no evidence of analysis revealing what key flow of people it is supposed to be supporting. And even if such a flow of people exists, what priority it takes over hundreds of other flows.

It is far too early in the planning cycle to be talking technology.

Once the needs analysis is complete, it is then important, in light of the metropolitan urban plan, to then priorities these flows according to their impact on economic activity and urban amenity, and also how well served these flows are by current networks.

If, for example, a policy suggests the ‘international financial centre’ arc crosses Sydney Harbour and heads up to Chatswood and Macquarie, as they currently do, then what is the transport potential or deficit currently, in terms of volume and time.

And then rank this issues as a priority against hundreds (and I mean hundreds) of others, for example, policies of investing in Western Sydney business, or relieving housing shortages by expanding the sprawl, or making the Central Coast a more attractive place to live, or densifying Southern Sydney inner urban areas. A long list. They need to be prioritised.

Then, and only then, do you then develop options for solving these problems. There is no point considering options for improving Leichhardt to Dulwich Hill transport if it is a low ranked priority. Now it might be a high ranked priority if , for example, the urban plan had said that high density settlemenet would occur along the corridor, but it was clear such settlement would overwhelm road-based transport.

The options will probably be framed around different technologies, but even here, the focus should be on volumes and times. For example, a metro and a LR line might be similar transit time options, one is clearly a different volume response. A clear ‘curve’ should be plotted of the volume based response and the cost attributabl to it. Publishing the curve will help outside stakeholders see that cost-effectiveness is being sought.

Then second order effects should be shown. The consequences to the urban plan of the preferred option versus do nothing. This would include the economic costs, such as the opportunity cost of the capital used, but also of business chocked off by poor transport.

These plans should not be specific about location of transport networks. While it should be assumed existing fixed rail corridors remain, it should be enoguh to say, for example, that a Parramatta to North Shore link is required -not a Parramatta to Epping one. That may be the result,but it rules out other options, such as a Victoria Road-West Ryde-St-Leonards option as was also floated.

Implementaiton plans separate from the metro transport plan should consider this level of detail.

With Dulwich Hill, even worthwhile isues such as should the line go to Ashfield, or Five Dock, or Campsie, or Wolli Creek, are hard to consider while we have no higher plan which actually identifies the flow we are trying to solve. Dulwich Hill itself is low in the urban planning hierachy but the proposed line misses some much higher order development. If we knew, for example, that Wolli Creek was a high priority urban settlement, and needed high quality transport links around Sydney, then we might have some sense of whether the line should go there. Or Ashfield, or Five Dock, or whatever.

The line will be a policy orphan, as well as an operational one.

Sydney’s metro proposal suffered the same problem, not just that it didn’t feature on proper plans, by no metropolitan planning and needs analysis informed it. No priority for Rozelle in urban planning, for example. No publications on exactly where the congestion points in the CBD rail network were, and how simply upgrading Cityrail was not enough. No prioritised list of demand management, bus, light rail or Cityrail alternatives and how they ranked on benefit or cost.

This comes back to Wran-era cronyism I mentioned above. No scope for ‘listening’ and no stomach for major plans, lest the caravan of development lobby funders took fright.

In NSW, a decision to favour TOD and town centres favours Frank Lowy and his Westfield empire, and the major resi builders like Meriton, while road-based developments favour other developers such as DFO and the big suburban house developers. This is an undercurrent of improper influence that even other states seem to be able to avoid at the metropolitan planning level, though I’m sure it impacts at lower levels like local government.

None have clean hands on transport planning though. From the ‘demand’ end, we have the toll road companies wanting to profit from transport deficits, at the other end, we have the unions wanting control and influence over public transport delivery.

Even Dulwich Hill is partly orphaned by the fact that you would in no way want to hand the operation over to Cityrail or their cronies with the public sector administrative and operational unions.