Return of the Trams !

A few days ago the Sydney light rail project came to completion with hardly any fuss or publicity.  The section connecting  Circular Quay and Randwick has been up and running for some time, but the branch off Anzac Parade that links the city to Kingsford missed out on the usual completion ceremonies because of the Covid-19 outbreak.

It is ironic that perhaps the most efficient system of moving great numbers of people within a city is now up and running at exactly the same time that those crowds are forced off the streets and prevented from any form of public assembly by a deadly virus.   Those sparkling new trams are running nearly empty.

Light rail was originally estimated to cost $2.9 billion to complete but the final figure came in at double that.  Once we start digging up city streets it becomes a journey into the unknown. What is down there from a past era has long disappeared from public records and has to be replaced with modern engineering.  That is both costly and time consuming.

A lot of businesses fronting onto this light rail network closed their doors because the work isolated them from customers. The courts will be cluttered with compensation cases for years and that mess will certainly give any company considering a bullet train link between Sydney and Melbourne cause to consider the implications.

A bullet train between the cities would need to deliver passengers from Flinders street station in Melbourne to Central in Sydney, and that would involve a new rail line through densely packed suburbs. The problems - and the cost - of establishing that would be unimaginable given the experience with light rail.

That bullet train idea would compete with passenger airlines and that depends on what air air services survive this Covid-19 outbreak. There is the possibility that many airlines may not survive and we may return to the previous regime of state control of both services and prices.  That would certainly make the prospect of a high speed city to city rail link feasible.

Experience overseas with high speed rail makes it clear that rail needs to deliver from city centre to city centre. When the time taken getting to airports is taken into consideration, high speed rail becomes very competitive with the airlines.

Perhaps the time is approaching when an elevated rail crossing of the suburbs to the city centre becomes a possibility.  It would avoid the congestion of digging under city streets and competition with existing road and rail services - and the costs involved !