Unless
you’ve been on holidays in some remote place over Christmas you’d have noticed
that trains have been making the news a lot lately in south east Queensland. Mainly
it’s because of the lack of them running, which it seems in turn is because
there are not enough people to drive them. Much of which was triggered by the
opening on one extra line of just 12 kilometres in length, which has been
talked about for close to 130 years and which has been in detailed planning or
under construction for the past decade. Kind of snuck up on them all I guess.
Having so many scheduled services pulled at no notice has
given the hapless Queensland Rail every appearance of being utterly unable to
organise a round of drinks at a brewery. Steeped in olde worlde tradition, it’s
not hard to imagine the departmental mandarins enjoying a regular cup of tea at
work delivered by a tea lady, her trolley complete with lace doilies as it rattles
along the corridors of rail power.
It’s not just management which gives the
sense of something scripted around Reg Varney in “On the buses” (a British sitcom
of the early 1970s) but the Rail Tram and Bus Union too seems rooted in a
bygone era. According to the Union’s website “The
RTBU was formed 1 March 1993 through the historic amalgamation of three railway
unions and one tram and bus union... These unions have a strong tradition
dating back to the nineteenth century.” It seems that’s a tradition they are
intent on keeping alive and well in the 21st century.
There are always more accurate back stories
than sensationalist headlines, and no doubt there have been many contributing
factors behind the latest embarrassments. Some of these date back many years,
some date back only a few years, and others just a few months. Not all have
been due to decisions of QR Management either. However, as generous as we
taxpayers can be, it is hard to have confidence given the opening of the new
$1.2 billion Redcliffe line seems to have been quite predictable, while there
was no heads up that services could be impacted in the slightest way.
The Redcliffe line came in at $100 million per kilometre, which is hardly small change for the taxpayer. We are entitled to question how well our taxes are being spent.
With this in mind, it’s very hard to have
much confidence in the proposed $5.4 billion cost proposed for the 10.2
kilometre cross river rail link. This one’s $530 million per kilometre – five
times as costly as the new Redcliffe link (going underground a large
part of the reason). But here’s the rub: we are being asked to trust the same
crowd who seemingly can’t staff the trains we already have, and who insist that
without this extra $5.4 billion of our money (that’s us, the taxpayers) that
the whole network will choke and congestion costs will escalate.
The cross river rail is not a new proposal
and dates back many years. Successive governments have been told the same
story: that without an additional crossing, the network will reach capacity. The
date for that capacity breaking point keeps getting extended and the project
delayed. The fact that Brisbane has only one river crossing is a real issue. But
what’s at stake here is a question of trust and given the latest series of
debacles, can we trust that an extra $5.4 billion is going to be well spent and
well managed?
If you look for details on the business
case you can find a five page PR document which calls itself a ‘cost benefit
analysis summary’ but which is preciously short on evidence and long on
promise. Have
a look for yourself. It’s not much given the sums of money we are being
asked to part with. There’s an older
business case by Deloitte in 2011 which assumed a 50% increase in public
transport mode share from 2009 to 2031 (from 8% to 12%); a 23% increase in rail
patronage by 2031 with cross river rail, and which attributed 39% of the
project financial benefit to “perceived” public transport benefits. Would you
call these heroic or conservative assumptions?
All of which prompted me to check on the
actual numbers of people across Greater Brisbane – an area with a population of
around 1.8 million – that actually use rail. Based on the last Census, the
number of people who used rail – either in whole or in conjunction with some
other form of transport – was 65,212. Not a big number. That’s 65,212 out of
the 925,385 employed persons in the region of 1.8 million people. The number
correlates with QR’s ‘Passenger
Load Survey’ (the most recent one of which was in 2009). It showed that the
network carried 65,752 people in the morning peak and 57,286 people in the
afternoon peak. Which however you cut it
is a small number and less than 5% of the population.
What’s more, the rail network is mainly
designed around servicing inner city employment. There are around 180,000 jobs
in total in the inner city – one in ten jobs of the broader metro region. Nine
out of ten of us work in suburban areas which are largely not serviced by
train. The same QR survey shows that, of 65,231 total boardings and alightings
in the AM peak, 33,738 (52% of the network total) were at Central Station. Roma
Street came next with 9,319 followed by Fortitude Valley (4,757), Bowen Hills
(2,116), South Bank (2,790) and South Brisbane (1,751). Put these together and
you have 84% of passenger movements across the network being at these six inner
city stations.
But we are told by the rail experts that
unless we spend another $5.4 billion on a transit service that moves less than
5% of the population - almost all of whom are travelling to six inner city
stations to access the 10% of metro jobs that are in the inner city – then we
are facing a transport meltdown.
I know it’s not fair to divide the proposed
$5.4 billion for the Cross River Rail by the 65,000 users (but if you did, the
answer would be $83,000 per user) or to add the $1.2 billion cost of the
Redcliffe Line (which would bring the answer to over $100,000 per user) because
these investments have network wide implications that benefit both public and
private transport, as well as freight. It would be equally unfair to divide the
project cost by just the additional number of people projected to be carried as
a result of the extra investment, because that’s the sort of number crunching
business people do; it’s not meant for transport businesses. It would also be
wrong to point out that these are just the capital costs and that each trip –
per person per direction on a CityRail train – is
subsidised by the taxpayer to the tune of $10, or $20 for a round trip.
I am not suggesting an
additional river crossing is not a good idea. But based on recent performance,
and given the very large sums involved – all of which is taxpayer money not
privately funded – then you’d hope for a bit more detail than what’s in a five
page PR document for a project promoted by a government agency which seems incapable of managing the existing network.
Maybe management of the project and the
network should be given to someone else? How about the aviation sector? Our
airports were privatised in the late 1990s, as was our airline Qantas. Both the
airline and the airports are now vastly more modern and efficient, and serve
the travelling public far better than when they were basically government
organisations. Plus they aren’t going cap in hand to the taxpayer on a regular
basis to keep them afloat. (The privatisation of airports and Qantas, by the
way, were originally decisions of the Keating Labor Government). Aviation
is a type of public transport and freight business, as is rail. So why not drag
some aviation experience into the rail sector?
Queensland Fail (aka QR) and the
government’s insistence that we need to spend a further $5.4 billion on a
network managed by the same people behind the recent debacles is just not
confidence inspiring. It leaves you with the sinking feeling that they’ve based
their business case and management model on an episode of the ABC’s satirical ‘Utopia’ – a “multi award-winning
satirical comedy about a group of people charged with building this nation –
one white elephant at a time.”
