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【澳大利亚《澳大利亚人报》】子弹列车表演者：日本寻求出口超快速列车[已解决]
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Bullet performer: Japan looks to export its very fast trains
子弹列车表演者：日本寻求出口超快速列车
【日期】日
【备注】64条评论& & 无需翻墙& &无敏感词
【译者】bluebit
The Shinkansen bullet train pases Mount Fuji in Japan.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was 10 years old when the country’s first high speed train, the shinkansen, was born in 1964, nine days before the Tokyo Olympics.
It was October 1, crisp autumn, when Japan’s ginkgo and maple trees paint the landscape in a patchwork of red and yellow. “I clearly remember desperately wanting to go on the Dream Super Express as soon as possible,” the Prime Minister told the International High Speed Rail Association last month about his first memory of the country’s famous bullet train.
The rail line was instantly popular — passenger numbers were 11 million in the first year of operation, and had jumped to 118 million within a decade.
More than 50 years on, the shinkansen carries almost 400 million passengers each year along its nationwide network that extends some 3300 kilometres. It has come to symbolise Japan. “It represents not only the pinnacle of rail technologies, but also the Japanese culture that values safety and trust, as well as tireless pursuit for quality and efficiency — the elements that Japan wishes to present to the rest of the world with pride,” Abe says.
His message to the almost 300 industry and government visitors in Kyoto from more than 20 countries is clear. Shinkansen is about transformation, not transportation. And Japan is ready to sell high-speed rail for the 21st century, the ultra-high-speed superconducting Maglev, due to be operating within a decade that can travel at speeds of about 500km/hour.
“Kyoto in autumnal colours looks gorgeous at times and solemn at other times,” Abe tells the crowded room. “This is the perfect setting for distancing ourselves from mundane tasks and problems and letting our minds freely explore the future.”
For Abe, who arrives in Sydney today ahead of a meeting with Malcolm Turnbull, the future that Japan is eyeing is one where the shinkansen is a symbol not only of its technical prowess, but also of its economic and foreign policy success in selling infrastructure to its Asian neighbours.
This year’s sales pitch at the second IHRA forum (the first held in 2014 to mark the shinkansen’s 50th anniversary) comes amid fierce competition between China and Japan for infrastructure development across Asia, including fresh demand for high speed rail that is proliferating across the region and further afield in the US and UK.
Japan is making an aggressive pitch to be the infrastructure partner of choice, promoting its low-interest yen loans through the Japan International Cooperation Agency, a rival to the China-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and a newly established privately-backed finance company, the Japan Infrastructure Initiative.
India, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has already announced it will build a shinkansen line between Mumbai and Ahmedabad, but Tokyo is pushing for its bullet train to be used on another six routes.
Japan is also in contest with China and South Korea to win the contract for a $US16bn high-speed rail project linking Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, which will cut the travel time for the 350km route to just 90 minutes.
Last year, Indonesia caused a diplomatic rumble when it chose the Chinese-state owned rail company CRRC Corp to build its new high-speed rail line in preference to the Japanese, which was contingent on a cheap bilateral loan that required a guarantee from the Indonesian government.
Japan, South Korea and China are also eyeing off the potential for high speed rail to finally become a reality in Australia.
Japan, which has had an office of Central Japan Railway Company in Sydney for the past 20 years, is eager to become involved in overseas infrastructure projects.
Under the so-called Abe-nomics of the current administration, Japan has negative interest rates and is looking to further stimulate its economy with foreign investment. The value of Japan’s highly diverse direct investment in Australia has been growing in recent years and is already worth $86 billion.
Masafumi Shukuri, chairman of the International High Speed Rail Association, says Japan stands ready to help Australia if it decided a high-speed rail project was viable.
“I think we can be of help on various fronts,” Shakuri tells The Australian in Kyoto. “Whether it is the planning of the alignment, or the financing scheme, or how to deliver value capture opportunities, or what type of institutional mechanism you would want, or how to support local development and how to ensure connectivity with other types of transport,” he says.
“But it really depends on what type of economic development Australia will pursue, what the population distribution will be like, what the urban structures of cities like Sydney and Melbourne will be, what policies the Australian people will choose — all of those things affect the impact or contribution that high speed rail can bring to the area.”
Japan’s heightened interest in an Australian high speed rail network comes as the project has received fresh scrutiny from a parliamentary inquiry, being chaired by Liberal MP John Alexander. The “issues of concern” that led to the inquiry were ones that worry much of suburban Australia: lack of infrastructure, congestion in our cities, regional decline and a lack of economic opportunity.
The bipartisan committee said the report’s conclusions were unavoidable, particularly the need for decentralisation to relieve cities of the “full burden of growth” while connecting the regions to urban centres with high speed rail. The “essential ingredient” is the increase in land value associated with the rail that will allow the infrastructure to be built — the much vaunted “value capture” model.
“When you view it at as real estate development on steroids,” Alexander says, “then the dollars stack up.”
With the Melbourne to Sydney route being one of the top-five busiest aviation routes in the world, developers believe the numbers make sense.
It would be a profound and dramatic transformation, with evidence to the committee painting a picture of Australia’s biggest cities growing without land constraints, connecting regional areas in a way that effectively brings new people within the city limits without the negative consequences of growth.
Australia’s bureaucracy has remained cool on the project which has been studied sporadically since the 1970s, most recently in 2012 when a Labor-commission report suggested a cost to taxpayers of $114 billion for a network stretching from Brisbane to Melbourne.
When a proposal for fast rail paid for by land development emerged earlier this year, the Greens quipped that the project was the train “that only runs in election years”. One character in Utopia, the popular satire of Australian politics, captured the public scepticism when she said: “We have got designs for the logo, what’s stopping us?!”
In some ways, it has become a national joke.
But the head of the Department of Infrastructure, Mark Mrdak, who spoke at the IHRA forum, offered a glimmer of hope that the bureaucracy was warming to the pitch of the transformational impact of rail, saying he agreed it was essential to address growing problems of city congestion as the country faces unprecedented rates of population growth.
“For much of the last half of the 20th century, Australia invested very heavily in private motor vehicle and our motorways to facilitate our economic growth, but in the decades ahead we are looking much more at rail to underpin our national development, principally because much of our economic growth will take place in our four major cities,” Mrdak told the forum.
“Increasingly the future for us on high speed rail and higher speed rail is going to be how to connect those outer metropolitan and regional cities into our major economic focus around our CBDs and the employment centres of the future.
“Over time, high speed rail will play a larger role in our national transportation task, I have no doubt about that, but our initial focus is going to be around how do we improve that connections between our outer metropolitan and our inner city areas through much higher speed rail.”
In evidence to the committee, director of central Japan Railway Company Torkel Patterson explicitly advised the committee not to build high speed rail for the purpose of transportation.
“But if you want a transformation, if you want to connect and improve the region, connect them and make this economy of Sydney and Melbourne more competitive globally internationally, then high-speed rail is what can let you do that,” he said.
Tellingly, he advised the committee that JR East, one of the seven Japan Railways Group companies, received most of its revenue not from high speed rail operations “but from the shopping centres”.
“JR East owns the station buildings and the property and its revenue came from the businesses associated with the stations,” he said.
While Japan has been viewed as a most likely infrastructure partner for an Australian high speed rail project, China and South Korea are also keen to be a part of the multi-billion dollar project.
The Chinese Centurian group told the committee that a line from Wollongong to Campbelltown could be built by 2023 if it could ink a deal with the NSW government within 18 months in what would be the first section of its proposed fast rail between Canberra, Sydney and Newcastle.
Centurian says the “conservative” value they could recover from property sales of about $3.75bn would cover the cost of the first stage.
But in an indication of the scope of the work associated with the project, Centurion Group chief Patrick Yu told the committee that it would be impractical to build the “whole thing in one go.”
“There are simply not enough engineers,” he said. “There are simply not enough human resources in Australia to do that. If we did that we would increase the cost of construction. We would have a big bump in costs for supply materials. We would murder the construction industry. We would because we would suck up steel, concrete, people and engineers. There would be no one left to do anything else but our project.”
Spacecon, a Korean consortium “with access to Korean technology, experience and finance”, wants to build the first stage from Sydney to Newcastle, a 140km link, followed by Newcastle to Canberra and then Newcastle to Brisbane.
After crunching the numbers, the company said it believed there was “significant profit” if it was allowed to develop the project based on vigorously tested estimates, with before tax revenue after building the project of $41.5 billion.
“We have a great opportunity to shape the funding and participation in infrastructure projects in Australia. Value creation, or value capture, enables all parties — the federal, state a the
and the community — to have agreed and predetermined benefits,” John Moore, a consultant to Spacecon, told the committee.
One of the most high-profile proponents of an Australian high speed rail project is an Australian group called CLARA — Consolidated Land and Rail Australia — which has a plan for eight new “smart” cities along the rail corridor between Sydney and Melbourne to fund the infrastructure.
In a sign of its faith in the project, CLARA has put its money where its mouth is, already securing close to 20,000ha of land through purchase options for new city sites that provide the financial underpinning for the building of the fast rail.
CLARA wants to start with the Melbourne to Shepparton route, and has the enthusiastic support of the local council to push ahead with its plans next year, followed by links from Sydney to Goulburn, and then south to Canberra, before linking up the two capital cities.
It doesn’t want a cent of state or federal government capital to make it happen. It wants something perhaps more difficult — a policy foundation based on a population strategy and streamlined environmental approvals.
CLARA says its project would not just be a game changer, but a “conversation changer” about where people wanted to live that would become more urgent as our cities become less liveable.
The prospect of high-speed rail connecting Australia’s biggest cities, one that comes with the bonus of abundant affordable housing and little cost to taxpayers, sounds too good to be true.
Not all evidence to the committee was positive. The Department of Infrastructure cautioned that there may not be decentralisation, with other factors potentially working against the transport-led revival of the regions.
The Bureau of Infrastructure and Regional Economies said there had been very few examples where government-driven decentralisation had worked, saying it was pushing against global forces that were leading towards urban centralisation. Others doubt the project can be funded without substantial and ongoing government subsidies.
CLARA’s chairman Nick Clearly, one of the most enthusiastic proponents, remains frank about the need for each of his proposed eight smart cities to have an anchor tenant that provides at least 10,000 jobs — or the concept won’t work.
But with Japan, China, Korea and an enthusiastic Australian group all wanting to build Australia’s very fast rail link, the question remains: do we want it? Industry Minister Greg Hunt recently sent ripples through the industry after a visit to Korea and China when he quietly told an ABC local radio station that “now is the moment” for the government to progress plans for high-speed rail on Australia’s east coast.
“One of the things ... as a cabinet and with the Prime Minister we’ll put forward is developing the idea of a Melbourne to Sydney, potentially Melbourne to Brisbane ... very fast train,” Hunt said. “I think now is the moment when this can and should be considered.”
Alexander’s enthusiasm for the project is well known. (He recently told The Australian: “If I was Prime Minister for a day, this is all I would work on.”)
And unsurprisingly, he is upbeat about the prospects of high speed rail on Australia’s east coast, saying it “ticks all the boxes” to meet the Mr Turnbull’s vision for the nation.
“Malcolm Turnbull says this is the most exciting time to be an Australian, well this is exciting — we are going to be agile, we are going to move quickly, we are going to be innovative — if you think about those words and you think about this project, you know what he is thinking about,” Alexander tells The Australian. “There will be jobs and growth, and you can tack on to it affordable housing as well. This is absolutely a literal blueprint of Malcolm’s vision for Australia, and that is what makes me as excited as Malcolm.”
From the Japan experience, CJRC director Torkel Patterson said Australia could see the benefits in action and warned that doing nothing to ease congestion in Sydney and Melbourne was not an option.
“If you do nothing, the cost of supporting that infrastructure is going to be much more expensive than this opportunity you have to spread this population out,” he said. “Yes, it sounds like these cities are small, but as you build them — I hate to sound like the baseball game — they will come. That is the case of Japan’s example.”
Sarah Martin travelled to the IHRA forum as a guest of Central Japan Railway Company.
Irene 58 MINUTES AGO
Japan's very impressive Shinkansen network links 3 of the 4 main islands. It’s fast, frequent, efficient, comfortable, reliable, clean and safe.
It would be wonderful to have this in Australia, but would it be feasible, given our greater distances and smaller population? And I haven't forgotten the Shortone's grasping little union mates.
holy quail 1 HOUR AGO
everyone sing now !
♫♪ monorail !&&monorail !&&monoraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaail !
James 2 HOURS AGO+1
Cost-effective bulk freight transport between cities is less visible and glamorous than passenger transport, but probably a more urgent problem, and it doesn't need new railways to fix it. All it needs is to break the union stranglehold on shipping crews and then the coastal shipping industry could restart itself.
Raymond 4 HOURS AGO
Australia would do well to postpone all major projects like this until a later year (perhaps 2030) by which time the perpetual motion dreamers will have been thoroughly discredited and common sense will once again be seen in Australia.
Peter 5 HOURS AGO
I'm for overnight luxury (vehicle-carrying) ferries Brisbane/Sydney/Melbourne. The technology exists, no land purchases or special rails would be necessary, just terminals at each port. Such ships ply the Baltic every day. Fantastic.
Douglas 4 HOURS AGO
&&I'd prefer the faster models.
Douglas 5 HOURS AGO+1
John Anderson should be charged with aggravated stupidity promoting this rubbish.
Its high speed if it doesn't stop to pick up passengers, so it only good for the users at either end and a couple along the way. Imagine the fights as to which towns are chosen!
How many of us would welcome a high speed train and all the associated&&infrastructure roaring by our houses and farms knowing it's of absolutely no benefit to us. He incredibly thinks that a train line next to your house improves the&&value of it and he can then snavel that extra value to pay for the whole piece of idiocy. Let him build a train line (or a wind turbine) next to his house and then he can tell us how much it's gone up in value.
Jason S 5 HOURS AGO+1
@Douglas Ignorance is bliss eh Doug? How many stops do you think the Japanese Bullet trains have? Did you read the article?
Douglas 5 HOURS AGO
S @Douglas&&Yes I did Jason and I repeat if it stops everywhere half a dozen people want to get on or off it won't be fast . How many Japanese commuters are there for how many kilometres of track?&&Compare that to Australia and inform me and everyone else how ours will somehow make economic sense.
By the way, can I sell you a slightly used Multi Function Polis or even a&&brand new NBN that we just had to have.
Jason S 3 HOURS AGO
@Douglas @Jason S Doug, nobody is suggesting we build a VFT across the Simpson Desert or Nullarbor. The Brisbane to Melbourne route can be viable. Yes the up front costs are high but this gets paid back many time over through economic returns. Please do tell how this country is going to stay competitive via reliance on road transport?
Roger 3 HOURS AGO
@Douglas Alexander not Anderson!
Douglas 2 HOURS AGO
@Douglas&&You're right,sorry bout that.
Douglas 2 HOURS AGO
@Jason S @Douglas&&So it's high speed freight as well. If it's an economic winner Jason lets just keep the taxpayer out of it and let some entrepreneur make a killing on it.
They will be lining up to get started if they are a confident as you are. That would also be an big advantage if the Government was not involved as I've never heard of a government owned rail network breaking even . ( Coal & iron ore lines excepted).
In reply to your question as to how we are going to stay competitive without a high speed rail network I simply ask you to nominate which products need to be moved from Melbourne to Brisbane in 9 hours rather than a day or so.&&If you're thinking fresh vegetables then consider whether consumers will be willing to pay a premium for that service.
Just because it's brilliant technology and it's nice to zip along at very high speed it doesn't&&make it necessary or economic , think NBN.
Jeffrey 8 HOURS AGO+3
We should let the priva but can you imagine the bureaucrats and politicians getting out of the way.& &No, neither can I, it’s just not in the nature of the political beast to be satisfied with the role of broker and facilitator of progress.& &
They must always be in total charge of every detail, they must be the change agent that gets the brownie points and are conceited enough to think they are best placed to select th plus they will always want to control the money side of nation building projects.& &&&You’d think they would have learned
but the signs from energy policy, the antics over the new submarines and the results from the NBN are showing our politicians and their bureaucrats still haven’t got it yet.
Paul 9 HOURS AGO+3
Trains need passengers and Australia doesn't have any.&&Forget it.
Jason S 5 HOURS AGO
Wow, lots of negative nancies today. No wonder we have a crippling infrastructure deficit in this country with these kinds of attitudes. Meanwhile road freight and traffic snarls are only going to get worse. Much , much worse.
Victoria 9 HOURS AGO+3
Long overdue - should have been done in the 80s when France showed the way despite economic recession at the time.or 90s, but at least the planets are finally aligning.
Our versions of Sir Humphrey Appleby, no doubt in the thrall of the airlines, have been killing it for decades. Time to ignore them and get on with it.& &
Don't care how it's done, but we should also be looking at European models, as France and Spain have a similar terrain of urban centres separated by large tracts of agriculture and forest.
Messing about with real estate plays is undesirable - too many chances for scams and distortions.
Fund it progressively, with the help of an infrastructure bond, and we can easily afford it. France recovered the cost very quickly.
kev of Tas 5 HOURS AGO
@Victoria We should have done it in the 80's when we had six times the population of France and therefore the same population density.
wayne 9 HOURS AGO+3
The first question to be asked is where is the electricity going to come from? Will there be wind turbines located all the way along the track to take advantage of the airflow from the trains. With Labor States all trying to be a stupid as South Australia there won't be enough energy to satisfy then needs of any existing State needs.
John 5 HOURS AGO
@wayne The savings in jet fuel would be more than sufficient to provide fossil fuel for VFT electricity.&&Any surplus could then go to SA to keep their diesel generators running.
wayne 9 HOURS AGO+3
Which is the most desired? The NBN or the very fast train?
If you believe some they will cost about the same. Then of course they have no experience trying to build something in Australia so we can as a minimum double the true cost and still expect to be under the true cost.
I for one don't mind a very fast train so long as it requires no taxpayer funds, no Government guarantees, no special taxation conditions etc. if it's commercial they will build, if it requires anything from Government then it has to be a no.
One mess like the NBN is enough for each generation.
Jason S 5 HOURS AGO+1
@wayne Build both. The VFT can't be rolled out to Tamworth ahead of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne all for Tony Windsor's vote. That is why the NBN was screwed up.
John 5 HOURS AGO
@wayne Most of the expenditure would be in land acquisitions and civil engineering /power construction.&&That's all bread and butter stuff in Oz.&&The train sets would be a fraction of the cost.
Alan 10 HOURS AGO+1
Given we could have 50% renewables at the same time, passengers should hope the wind keeps blowing during the day, there's no storms or cloud and it doesn't need to run at night, otherwise they might get a long walk.
Wojciech 11 HOURS AGO+4
Lets see how much green protesters shows up to support bullet train .
Chris 11 HOURS AGO+1
Let's finish the current NBN white elephant before we start a whole herd of them. Romantic yes - economically viable? Just ask Steve Bracks how is $80 million for regional rail in Victoria went.
Stephen 12 HOURS AGO+2
The notion is nice, but it depends on real estate for income and secondary partners to give people jobs in the places the train goes. Seems too much of a long shot to me. The sad thing is the glamour of a Bullet Train has taken our eyes away from the much cheaper upgrade to our heavy rail network. This network is in many places between our capitals just a single track and uses very old mechanical switching technology. Get a dual track, and most importantly allow transport companies to operate their own trains on it. Doing enough work to get a freight train to run at 80km/h would be a huge upgrade and solve a lot of problems. Trucks after all are mostly privately owned but run on publicly owned roads.
The Bullet Train model collapses with improvements to the various commuter train systems in Sydney and Melbourne. Far too risky to invest in for me. Let them build one to Newcastle and see how well that works. They might have a chance with that one. The rest, well they would know a lot more after operating a line to Newcastle for a few years.
Roly 8 HOURS AGO
@Stephen A high speed train to New. For what & NRL game access?
Bruce 7 HOURS AGO
@Stephen Transport companies already can and do operate there own trains. In-fact most freight trains on the main line system in Australia are operated by freight companies.
Jason S 5 HOURS AGO
@Roly @Stephen High speed train goes through Newcastle on its way to Brisbane it doesn't end at Newcastle. Sheesh!
kev of Tas 12 HOURS AGO+9
Fifty minutes from Sydney to Melbourne by ultrafast maglev supertrain.
Two hours from Melbourne Central Station to Melbourne City Centre by Dan Andrews organic green candle lit ox wagon.
Dermot 13 HOURS AGO+4
It takes a man of vision and guts to kickstart such a programme. Not a job for the wafflers and weak kneed.
Frankly I cannot see MT as the man to see this important project through. As a proclaimed IT guru he has seriousley cocked up the NBN and has left Australia way behind other countries with far less resources. LNP no longer have my support until such time as they show some vision,action and grow some cohones. I cannot envisage any change under the current leadership.
evan 13 HOURS AGO+5
We dont need fast rail because we have (wait for it) NBN!
Jason S 5 HOURS AGO
@evan Build both and get on with it. By the time we stop talking about such things the Chinese have built them.
AKA Peter 13 HOURS AGO+14
Japan has about 124 million people, around 336 per square kilometre.
Australia has about 24.5 million people, around 8.5 per square kilometre.
Don't those figures tell you something about the potential passengers?
kev of Tas 12 HOURS AGO+3
@AKA Peter Exactly. That is all we need to know but i have no doubt we will soon start squandering money on this mad pipe dream.
Charles 10 HOURS AGO+3
@AKA Peter No they don't. Sydney Melbourne is the 4th busiest air route in the world with circa 8million passengers per annum. Sydney Brisbane is the 10th. Then look at the road trips taken by cars. We can easily support a fast train.We should also have an upgraded freight track too.
Victoria 9 HOURS AGO
@AKA PeterThis is a tired misconception. We are not talking about the Simpson Desert here, but&&Melbourne to Sydney, at least the 5th highest density passenger corridor in the world. Overall population density is irrelevant.
France has been running it since 1984 with great success, as all travellers apart from bureaucrats and pollies know (they of course are too delicate for mass transport).I .
Roly 8 HOURS AGO
@AKA Peter Japan fits in to Oz around 30 times. Doesn't that tell you something about distance ??
Or would you rather go back to the four door EH holden with wind down windows to go on long road trip.? lol
Jason S 5 HOURS AGO
@AKA Peter AKA, where does the article suggest we should have the same number of bullet train lines as japan? We just need a line linking Brisbane to Melbourne. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Your attitude is why Unions have control of our roads via the TWU.
John 5 HOURS AGO
@AKA Peter You've selected a very pessimistic method of comparison between Japan and a likely Australian VFT route.
For Sydney to Melbourne, a rough calculation would be say 11 million people in an area of say 100,000 sq.km. or 110 people per sq.km- say only a third of Japan's density to build less than a third of their rail length.&&And a whole lot less mountains to tunnel through.
Douglas 2 HOURS AGO
@John @AKA Peter&&Wouldn't there be a heck of a lots of threatened species and sacred sites along that route John. Whichever route you're thinking of actually.
They're everywhere where I live, and big mobs of NIMBY too. Could add years and millions to the cost.
Geoffrey 13 HOURS AGO+3
Energy, concrete and steel production - all should be made cheaper by scrapping climate change imposts, RET and all that rubbish. This is essential infrastructure and regional development will not achieve potential without it. Easy to criticise, but doing nothing can also be quite wrong-headed. There are two rail projects that should be done, this and the inland freight line.
kev of Tas 12 HOURS AGO+1
@Geoffrey Inland freight yes but this one is mad.
Chris 11 HOURS AGO+1
Exactly so. Infrastructure could be built massively cheaply in this country if you actually tackled the root cause of high prices - the explosion in cost of labour and energy.
Dallas 13 HOURS AGO+1
'Value capture' relies on land use constraints to drive prices up and housing size down.
Cheryl 13 HOURS AGO+1
Australia has not being able to build a fast reliable freight network, not much hope for a fast passenger train.
gerard 14 HOURS AGO+11
well it would be good if it did get up and running.
however, I have travelled many times on the shinkansen in Japan. It goes straight thru mountains, towns, cities often elevated. It is hi-teck and the staff etc have the culture to support it. This just cant happen here. Every endangered green frog in existence will get in its way! Our customer service is woeful. Our planners hate anything elevated. The cost of a ticket from Osaka to Tokyo is nearly $200. The cost of airfar from sydney to melbourne can be a little as $80!
The other thing i'd like to say is that in Syndey we cant even get a commitment to build a train to the new airport or even build a tram 3 km down George Street, (two years and 50 metres of track so far) for less than $1.5 billion let alone a VFT to Melbourne for $150 billion as estimated.On our current efforts we would get abou 30 lm of track - possibly in 50 years.
Get real and tell us the true cost!
John 15 HOURS AGO+3
The solution to congestion in the cities is reduced immigration.
evan 13 HOURS AGO
@John And more emigration!
Peter 15 HOURS AGO+2
I had a ride on a maglev train in China recently. It is very impressive however even the Chinese decided that at $500m per kilometre the cost was just a tad unrealistic to develop further!
terry 15 HOURS AGO+3
Having this would be like giving a 3 course meal to a monkey, wouldn't know what to do with it.
The cost to Australia would outstrip any benefit, put it to bed and get on with lowering our deficit.
Rick 15 HOURS AGO+6
Why do you keep promoting this white elephant? Australian politicians and con artists can come up with massive tax dollar sinkholes without being constantly bombarded y this one.
Just stop it.
Brad 16 HOURS AGO+8
A Maglev train in Australia would not work outside NSW because in Victoria and South Australia, where the electricity supply cannot be counted on, you would have a 2-300 tonne train drop down on its magnets every time the wind blew harder than 80km/h or every time Loy Yang staff threatened strike action.
The other thing is the massive capital cost - Australia has the sixth-largest landmass of any country yet a population of only 24m. The customer base would at best only be between Sydney and Melbourne and fares would not be competitive with what is ultimately the world's fourth busiest air corridor.
The whole discussion of VFT in Australia should be put to bed permanently.
Michael 10 HOURS AGO
Nearly right Brad, but add in 6 million tourist a year to the 24 million and its closer to 30 million. Two thirds of the population live in the Melbourne Sydney Brisbane corridor.
Maglev trains generate a big slice of their own electricity through regenerative braking and use Siemens supercapcitors to get going like trams do.
Brad 2 HOURS AGO
@Michael The percentage of regenerative braking generated by a train would be almost useless for the approx. 800km journey because it is not going to be a stop-start scenario like it is with trams or suburban heavy rail. From Sydney to Melbourne you would have what... three, four, maybe five stops where the train could feed electricity back into the system. It's not a lot of juice over that distance.
philip 16 HOURS AGO+1
The key question is: Can we afford not to have fast train services in the big capital cities?
Lincoln 16 HOURS AGO+3
So what capital cities are going to be serviced, oh the east coast why should the biggest mining revenue states WA, SA subsidise a pointless, expensive, money burning venture that won't benefit either, better airports not luxury trains is what's needed.
Be aware Australia this is Albos baby and we can't afford another NBN the ALP are pushing this madness.
Rick 15 HOURS AGO+5
@philip Can we really afford to waste more taxpayer dollars on this white elephant.
We have enough politicians' infrastructure waste, we don't need anymore.
D 7 HOURS AGO
@Lincoln Speaking of SA, maybe their uranium could provide the power....talk about laugh.
Michael 19 HOURS AGO+6
The best indicator of viability is the price of a ticket at full cost recovery. The best estimate for a Sydney/Melbourne ticket is about the same as a business class airfare - not a viable prospect.
Gerhard 18 HOURS AGO
@Michael It could be viable if we had reliable and cheap electricity.
Rick 15 HOURS AGO+6
@Gerhard @Michael Not even then.
Sanchia 20 HOURS AGO+11
Running high speed trains on electricity generated by wind turbines? It cant happen because of the laws of physics. So that takes care of either the train or the RET. Then we have issues such as population and density and freight and last but not least the Unions for whom this will provide a massive trough. Having ridden on fast trains in France (nuclear power) China (nuclear power and the three Gorges Dam worlds largest Hydro generator and Japan (Hydro and Nuclear Power) this could become our biggest white elephant and a vanity project we cannot afford. When you are squeezing pensioners it does not make a lot of sense politically and economically to commit to the enormous cost of a fast train. But then stranger things than this have happened since 2007!
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