I’ve had a brief glance at the business case and it does look more rigorous than the previous ones.
They use multi-criteria analysis (MCA) methods and also do an assessment on counterfactual investment options, which is a very good change from what we’ve usually seen.
Working Dog Productions is circulating this file clip on their Facebook page given the Newcastle HSR Business case release earlier in the week.
Also in the rest of the world their outskirts aren’t so sprawled out
Interesting calculation on carbon emissions from existing travel options
I can’t help but think that was nothing but a peformative action on the part of Sheeran. His personal travel would pale into insignifgance compared to the carbon emissions for lugging all his gear for the shows around the planet.
If we can’t build inland rail then we might as well give up all hope of every having high speed rail
Personally I think HSR should not be built until local, regional and metropolitan transport links are upgraded and built first. Because it’s great if you can get a train from Brisbane to Sydney in under two hours but not so great if your out at Toowoomba, the Sunshine Coast or even the Redlands and it takes you another hour just to get to the high speed rail station. I would redirect the money from the Sydney to Newcastle HSR to finishing the Inland Rail project instead. Then once we do get to developing HSR, I think we should build it as a maglev system, as that travels faster. Last thing we want is to spend decades building HSR just for maglevs and even more superior forms of High Speed Rail have been developed and we are a really big country so we need as much speed as possible to connect different areas.
But even just straightening and upgrading existing regional railways would be a win, we can’t even do that, let alone build an entire high speed rail network.
California High Speed Rail
Far over budget and far over project time scales.
Infamous. I’m surprised the Trump Regime haven’t tried cancelling it yet.
Politics aside (or included) there are a lot of lessons to be learned here if we want to ever pursue building one of our own.
The Trump admin has rescinded the $4B federal grant for CAHSR.
I believe they’ve also passed a law making the project ineligible for future federal funding.
UK HSR to cost more than a trip to the moon and back.
My understanding is that CAHSR is funded heavily by the state (wiki says ~76% state funded as of 2023), so even if the current regime tries to cut funding that won’t necessarily stop it. US states have significantly more ability to levy taxes than Australian ones and California is quite wealthy so this is much more feasible than it would be here.
Out of interest I looked it up, and it seems like the main 2 funding sources for CAHSR were the sale of almost $10B in bonds (a pretty typical US state funding measure that is almost unheard of here) and a flat 25% revenue from a carbon tax. That second one is very interesting to me and I think would be a great way to source more PT funding while reducing emissions, but unfortunately carbon tax has been thoroughly poisoned in Australian political discourse so ah well!
