|
Melbourne Transport |
Common Urban Myths About TransportMyth:
Freeways are cheap, and public transport is expensive by comparison
Fact:
A two-track railway costs around one-third as much as a six-lane freeway,
but can carry more than three times as many passengers. Public transport
is one of the most cost-effective ways yet known to move the large numbers
of people wanting to travel in an urban area.
The fact that large road proposals in Melbourne almost always get funded, while large public transport proposals never do, can lead people to think that roads are funded because they're cheaper. The bureaucracy encourages this view by emphasising the costs of public transport proposals and the benefits of freeway proposals. The Victorian transport bureaucracy's fast-and-loose approach to spending money on roads is deservingly satirised in Wayne Macauley's novel Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe. The novel's premise is a fictional planning proposal by which an estimated 990 people are to be lured to a new housing estate by the promise of a 50-kilometre, six-lane dedicated freeway. Were such a road to be built today, its cost would amount to over $1 million per resident! (Alas, in the novel the road lobby loses its nerve and the freeway doesn't go ahead.) In reality, the capital cost of freeways is vastly greater than that of the rail infrastructure required to move the same number of people. A case in point is the Mitcham-Frankston Freeway (or Eastlink), now slated to cost $2.5 billion for some 45km of road, or a massive $55 million per kilometre. More mundane freeway projects have costs in the vicinity of $30-40 million per kilometre for a six-lane road. We cannot rely on Melbourne experience for accurate costings of rail lines, since the last major urban rail extension completed in Melbourne was the Glen Waverley line in 1930. However, Perth is currently undergoing a renaissance in urban rail, and we can use their costings as a benchmark. The Northern Suburbs line, built in Perth in 1991, cost $230 million all up for 33km of track, or $7 million per kilometre - including earthworks, track, overhead lines, stations, associated roadworks, and rolling stock. Perth's new southern railway to Mandurah was built for $12 million per kilometre, including the cost of freeway realignment and tunnels under Perth CBD. Excluding the latter, the cost of earthworks, track, overhead, stations and road overpasses for the 70km surface railway was $422 million, or just $6 million per kilometre. But how does the capacity of a freeway and a railway compare? The carrying capacity of a freeway lane is roughly 1800 vehicles per hour, or 2000 people per hour given average vehicle occupancy of 1.11 passengers. A typical six-lane freeway therefore carries up to 12,000 people per hour in both directions. (Another page explains why car pooling can't be relied on to boost this figure by much.) A double-track suburban railway, meanwhile, can easily support one train movement every three minutes in each direction without straining its capacity. A six-car train can carry around 1000 passengers before reaching crush conditions. Thus the rail line can carry at least 40,000 people per hour in both directions, and perhaps more depending on the signalling system and vehicle design. (A similar calculation can be made for freight capacity, with much the same result.) We conclude that by comparison with a six-lane freeway, a two-track railway costs around one-third as much but has more than three times the carrying capacity. Of course, the railway also takes up far less space (typically requiring only a 10-metre reservation compared with 50 metres for the freeway), inflicts far less noise on nearby residents, and generates virtually no pollution. (Even the greenhouse emissions can be minimised by buying the electricity from renewable sources.) However, as we explain on another page, it is in the interests of the powerful Melbourne road lobby to make public transport projects appear more expensive than they are. Privatised operators and suppliers also find it in their interest to inflate project costs, as it boosts their prestige to preside over a big-ticket project, and perhaps because of the old rule that the more money there is floating around, the more likely it is to wind up in one's own pocket! © 2007 Public Transport Users Association Inc. (PTUA), Victoria, Australia. ABN 83 801 487 611. Last modified: 18 February 2008
|
