New rail lines desperately needed but beware soaring costs

August 22, 2021 â€" 6.00am

The trouble with train lines is they’re so mind-bogglingly expensive.

After a flurry of rail-building across Melbourne in the late 19th century there have been just two significant spends since: electrification in the 1920s (to retire the original steam trains) and the City Loop, completed in 1985, to relieve pressure on Flinders Street Station.

Premier Dan Andrews at the State Library station site.Credit:Jason South

For the most part, successive Victorian governments have been happy to keep the existing network barely ticking over, like an absent landlord, assuming that any major investment will eventually be somebody else’s problem.

Or they’ve hoped that the whole thing would just go away, as seemed the case in the mid-1970s, when they closed the Port Melbourne and St Kilda lines and seriously considered chopping Sandringham, Williamstown and Alamein, too. What a great idea that was.

After decades of neglect, rail is finally back in fashion.

Alongside the level crossing removal project, three massive builds are already under way or about to start: Metro Tunnel, the long-promised airport link and the suburban rail loop, a mostly underground line connecting Cheltenham to Werribee via Monash University and Sunshine.

Now Infrastructure Victoria wants planning to begin on more, including extending existing electric lines to serve the north and west growth corridors, expanding the capacity of the City Loop with 3 kilometres of additional tunnelling, and developing a business case for the Metro Two tunnel, which would run under the city to Fisherman’s Bend and Newport and improve services on the Geelong Line.

Without further investment, it argues, the overall network will be “heavily congested” as soon as 2036 with some lines overcrowded by the end of this decade (no kidding). Moreover, as Melbourne’s population increases to more than 10 million by 2051, many of those in growth areas risk being dependent on cars for transport, effectively repeating the mistakes of the past, when we thought freeways would solve everything.

Our Victorian forebears would be proud. They, too, saw the need for rail to serve newly developed suburbs and no doubt few would have preferred commuting by horse and cart to the relative comforts of steam train. Prising people out of their beloved cars has proved more difficult, but it seemed we reached a tipping point around 2000, when train patronage began to increase well beyond government predictions, with usage nearly doubling between 1998-1999 and 2018-2019.

Few today would argue that cross-city routes and more stations â€" particularly in the outer ring of Melbourne â€" would not be welcomed to make rail the default option for travel of any distance and to encourage more people to cycle or walk at their destination.

But we must not get carried away on a wave of Victorian-era enthusiasm, particularly when COVID has inured us somewhat to what-the-hell levels of government spending.

The 90-kilometre Suburban Rail Loop, originally costed at $50 billion, is now expected reach $100 billion, with the first 26 kilometres alone now pegged at $34.5 billion. The Metro Tunnel, supposed to cost $11 billion, has already blown out by $2.7 billion. At last count, according to the Victorian Auditor-General, the level crossing project will cost a shade under $15 billion. A further $10 billion has been committed for the airport rail link.

Ongoing close scrutiny of these vast projects is obviously paramount, not just around costs but to ensure they deliver what we need for generations to come. Again, the Victorian era â€" when Melbourne was anecdotally the wealthiest city in the world â€" is littered with failed speculative lines that are now growing weeds.

We must look for smaller, smarter wins, too. Infrastructure Victoria suggests, for example, removing the “inequitable” free tram zone and introducing permanent cheaper fares off-peak.

It also says we should prioritise improving our often underused bus services. Unlike trains, it points out, buses “can respond quickly to changes in population, technology, policy and behaviour” and “do not require large, expensive, immovable infrastructure investments”. Now there’s a thought.

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