Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Even the 30,000 flights a year connecting the 190-mile route from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur weren’t enough to sell a high-speed rail project to investors. However, Oxford University Professor Bent Flyvbjerg believes Elon Musk’s Hyperloop could be the answer.
Is the high-speed line on a route to nowhere?
By Tim McDonald
BBC News, Singapore
It was supposed to be shiny, shiny transportation infrastructure that could get passengers from Singapore to the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur in 90 minutes.
Earlier this year, the 350 km high-speed line between the two cities was finally closed for USD 17 billion (GBP 12.5 billion).
Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad took a break on the proposed line for the first time after taking power in 2018 as part of a project to tighten the financial belt.
A subsequent budget crisis triggered by coronavirus made the project virtually unsolvable, and both nations used a joint statement last month to blame “the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the Malaysian economy”.
Malaysia proposed changes to cut costs, but Singapore disagreed and the deal failed.
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The UK’s HS2 program, which will be built from London to Birmingham and then on to Leeds and Manchester, was originally supposed to cost £ 56bn but has since nearly doubled to £ 98bn.
The impact of the pandemic on both UK government coffers and rail passenger numbers has resulted in opponents of the system saying it was no longer justified.
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Another problem with large high-speed rail projects, according to Prof. Flyvbjerg, is that it takes so long to complete that there may be better alternatives available before completion.
For example, the first stage of HS2 should not open until 2028 at the earliest.
He hopes that Elon Musk’s Hyperloop – in which pods with passengers travel through vacuum tubes at high speed – could prove to be a better and more cost-effective alternative to the high-speed route.
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Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55624103
To be fair, BBC employee Tim McDonald mentions elsewhere in his article that there are 21 profitable high-speed routes in China (15 main routes + 6 minor routes). Japan also has profitable routes. But almost no one seems to be able to repeat Japan and China’s trick of building, sometimes profitable, high-speed rail lines.
As for Hyperloop, I’m happy to give Musk a Covid pass for failing to hit his 2020/10km forecast, but a few hundred meters of Hyperloop in the Nevada desert isn’t exactly evidence that the technology is is ready to solve the world’s transportation problems.
Whatever Hyperloop fares, I think we can safely conclude that the Green New Deal vision of high-speed rail is a no-starter anywhere.
I think climate champion John Kerry has to keep his private jet.
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