Rail transport

In the UK David Cameron is copping a flogging for pouring billions into a high-speed rail solution that only rich pricks are going to be able to use. Anyone who suggests rail is the solution of the future transport issues should be taken out the back of the bike sheds and given a sound thrashing. Driverless cars are the way of the future.

Anybody who still believes high-speed rail is the answer to our transport problems, rather than an unaffordably grandiose throwback to a bygone era, needs to take a trip to Silicon Valley.

Some of the world’s cleverest scientists and engineers, including those at Google, are pioneering a new generation of driverless cars that will change our lives as much as the internet has already done.

David Cameron likes to think that he is making Britain more like California but his embrace of the £35bn taxpayer-financed HS2 project linking London to the Midlands and the North is, in fact, shockingly outdated, making him sound more like a French bureaucrat desperate to build monuments to himself than an enabler of US-style disruptive entrepreneurship.  Read more »

A reader emails about road transport in relation to the Labour/Green commitment to introduce state control of power.

After huge success with power control models it must be time the Greens looked at nationalising the road freight and passenger transport industries.

This was done in the UK in 1947 with some success according to some old died in the wool (now dead)  poms consulted 60 years ago.

This will allow us to make sure that all in inefficiencies of the rail system are equally shared by the road freight system. It will ensure that all trucks are reduced to 5 tonnes capacity and that any deliveries over 50 miles will be done by rail.

This will mean that people travelling from town to town (cities will also be reduced in size) will be able to happily travel in buses without trucks blocking their view.

As a result supermarkets will reduce their stock items, and only one approved brand of any product will be sold.  Read more »

It looks like the Unions and Labour are happy to take on a $3,000,000 annual loss for the sake of 30 tourists a day.

That is a subsidy of more than $250 per person per trip at those loadings.

And what happens to those tourists?

Do they disappear in a puff of smoke because the train has gone, or do they catch the bus like the others?

I hardly think many people are going to change their plans to visit New Zealand because a train ride from Picton to Christchurch is denied them in winter.

It looks like KiwiRail have made a pretty realistic attempt to increase passenger numbers.  Read more »

I see the Auckland public transport people are slashing their wrists because the use of the rail system is DROPPING. Their solution is to
subsidise it some more…

Auckland Transport have provided a multitude of excuses for the patronage dip over the past few months – some more plausible than others (they blamed the World Cup for some of the declines in August and November, even though the World Cup was only in September & October 2011).   Read more »

Why is nineteenth century technology so bloody expensive:

The first train line in Sydney to be paid for and built under the Rudd and Gillard governments opened on Monday, $700 million over budget and three years after it was promised to be finished.

The 36km Southern Sydney Freight Line will allow extra freight trains to run between Macarthur and Chullora in the city’s south west and will increase rail freight capacity along the entire Australian east coast.

But the project ended up being vastly more expensive to build than when it was first promised by the federal Transport Minister, Anthony Albanese, in 2009.  Read more »

Labour has said they have spoken to Len Brown about their vision for more affordable homes.

Len Brown wants more people living in shoe box apartments near rail corridors…so people can “live, work and play in the world’s most liveable city”.

Wr know this works elsewhere…and thanks tot he wonders of Youtube we can see Len Brown’s vision in action…where communities, relaxed urban planning rules and having commuters and businesses near rail corridors works well:

Len Brown is currently troughing it up on a jaunt to Sydney…is he trying to buy the monorail

Meanwhile Lyin’ Len continues to want to spend vast ratepayer wealth on 19th century technology?

Google is developing self-driving cars that will be able to move faster and more efficiently than current cars because their 21st century technology, like the 19th century technology of fixed rails, effectively prevents cars from colliding.

Nineteenth century fixed rails take you where the railroad, or its government subsidizer, wants you to go. Self-driving cars will take you where you want to go, with as many stops as you like along the way.

That’s in line with the way Millennials lead their lives. The iPod/Facebook generation fashions its own playlists and friends lists, rather than let central decisionmakers choose for them.

ᔥ Xinhuanet

The world is littered with corpses of failed rail projects but it doesn’t seem to stop mad Len Brown from trying to foist a dead certainty loss making venture upon the ratepayers of Auckland. He will be long dead by the time everyone finds out his rail loop idea was a costly white elephant.

If cities as large as Beijing and Shanghai can’t make rail work then there is no way Auckland will.

Cities may struggle to fund and maintain ever-expanding underground systems, report Xin Dingding and Wang Xiaodong in Beijing and Shi Yingying in Shanghai.

China has spent 39 billion yuan ($6.1 billion) in the past 20 years on its manned space program, which has sent 10 craft into orbit and achieved several notable breakthroughs.

However, even that vast sum would only fund construction of 78 kilometers of subway given the current average cost of 500 million yuan for each kilometer. And for most big cities with a subway, or planning a subway, 78 km is a mere fraction of a network.

So far, 28 cities have had their plans approved by the National Development and Reform Commission. According to those plans, 2,500 km of subway will be built between 2010 and 2015.

“Construction will cost at least 1 trillion yuan in total,” said Chen Xunru, a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, who conducted research into subway construction and delivered a speech on his findings to the CPPCC’s annual meeting in March.

Experts are concerned that the construction could strain the resources of some city governments and plunge them heavily into debt.

They are also worried that the cities may not have taken account of the possible long-term costs of operating and maintaining the network. Moreover, there are concerns that the large-scale move toward construction has resulted in a shortage of trained professionals, which in turn could lead to reduced safety levels.

ᔥ Liberty Scott

The Labour party and other train spotters would have you believe a whole load of nonsense about rail in New Zealand that is frankly all motherhood and apple pie fantasies.

Liberty Scott bursts those bubbles:

Here’s a good summary I wrote before...

1. Rail network shrinked due to privatisation. Wrong. Almost all line closures were under state ownership when rail had a statutory monopoly on long haul freight!  The track network length has barely changed in 20 years.

2. Rail stopped being viable after free market reforms. Wrong, it stopped being consistently financially viable by 1945. It had short pockets of profitability since then. The early 1970s saw it drift from profitability to losses, which weren’t recovered until 1983 after debts had been written off and it started being paid by government to run commuter rail services in Auckland and Wellington under contract (and a host of unprofitable freight lines, such as the Otago Central Railway).

3. Track Maintenance was run down after privatisation. Wrong, it was already being run down in public ownership, track was run down more, but sleeper replacement under private ownership increased.

4. Rail is worth a lot as an asset. Wrong. The NZ$12 billion book value of rail that was on the Treasury accounts was a nonsense, equating it to all other SOEs combined (e.g. 3 power companies, Transpower, NZ Post) which all make profits. Most of the value is based on a replacement cost if it was built today, which of course would never be done. I’d argue it is probably worth 4% of that at best.   It’s worth noting that this has only been partly fixed as of late.

5. Rail only needed rescuing after privatisation. Wrong. It has been rescued several times before. It has long had serious economic viability issues.   In recent history it was bailed out in 1982 (all debts cancelled, and the operation commercialised), 1990 (had the debt of the North Island Main Trunk line electrification written off as a “Think Big” debt, then NZ$350 million, and another $1 billion wiped off to pay for the restructuring to make it viable).

6. Rail is good to reduce accidents, congestion and environmental problems Wrong. “the optimal level of externalities is not zero – at some point it becomes more expensive to lower them than the welfare created by their further abatement” Rail related deaths are only slightly lower than truck related. No evidence that rail reduces congestion. Sea freight is twice as fuel efficient than rail, but little interest in that mode.  Indeed Greens actively oppose international ships carrying domestic freight along the coast to placate their unionist mates.

Like I said before, the presentation basically says that rail is not as fuel efficient as is quoted, and that only 30% of the current network handles 70% of the freight. It suggests concentrating on the main trunk, and lines to the Bay of Plenty and the West Coast

ᔥ The Telegraph

The Poms have just discovered the business case for HS2, their high speed rail is piss poor and some ratbag bureaucrats have hidden it for three years:

The Sunday Telegraph has learned that even as they promoted the supposed benefits of the controversial high-speed line, civil servants were sitting on a secret 170-page report which revealed those benefits to be grossly exaggerated.

One senior official at the DfT explicitly told colleagues that the research “could not be used” because it would spoil the case for HS2, according to Colin Allen, a local resident who has sought the document’s release under the Freedom of Information Act.

“I was absolutely horrified that they were covering this up,” he said.

The cornerstone of the new line’s business case is a claim that the first phase, from London to Birmingham, will generate benefits worth £23 billion, more than the £17 billion cost of building it.

The vast majority of the supposed benefits – £20.1 billion – come from claimed increases in productivity on the basis that quicker journeys will leave people with more time to work.

The Prime Minister, David Cameron, claimed that the line would have a “transformative” effect on the economy.

The then transport secretary, Philip Hammond, said it would “reshape Britain’s economic geography” and “transform Britain’s competitiveness as profoundly as the coming of the railways in the 19th century.”

But the internal DfT report, “Productive use of travel time and the valuation of travel time savings for business travellers,” says that most of these supposed gains are illusory.

Makes you wonder about Len’s inner city loop and the business case for that.