High Speed Rail CEO Tim Parker says everyone has an M1 story and he hasn’t heard a positive one yet.
Parker was one of three men addressing the August meeting of the Gosford Erina Business Chamber (GEBC), updating the audience on the status of three transport projects.
He started by admitting he had no big announcement to make but the business case for the fast rail between Sydney and Newcastle had been submitted to Infrastructure Australia eight months ago.
“We’re ready to go, the development phase is next, firming up pricing, programs,” Parker said.
He is hoping for some sort of decision by the end of the year.
Parker debunked some common criticisms of high speed rail such as Australia not having enough people to support one.
He said population would be 28.5 million by 2051 and 60 per cent of the population live on two per cent of the land mass with the area between Sydney and Newcastle the most densely populated.
That was why the Newcastle to Sydney section of the line was first to be assessed, with the current rail network struggling and roads busy.
He said the new rail line would see journey times of half an hour from the Central Coast to Sydney with fares “competitive”.
People can visit the National High Speed Rail Hub located at 175 Scott Street, Newcastle to learn more about the project.
Next speaker was Transport NSW senior manager for Transport Planning Nick Buchanan, who gave an overview of the draft Central Coast Strategic Regional Integrated Transport Plan (CCSRITP) which was recently on public exhibition.
He said the plan should be finalised later this year or early next year.
The draft includes four new bus corridors: Umina–Woy Woy–Gosford–Erina–Terrigal; Gosford–Erina–Bateau Bay–The Entrance; Tuggerah–Bateau Bay; and Tuggerah–Wyong–Lake Haven.
Cycle corridors and major upgrades of roads are part of the draft as are improvements to level crossings at Rawson Rd, Woy Woy and Warnervale Rd, Warnervale.
The third speaker was Sasha Kanthan from Brisbane Water WaterBUS, a proposed zero-emission fast ferry service for Brisbane Water.
WaterBUS had responded to Transport for NSW’s request for feedback on the Draft SRITP, saying it identified several persistent transport issues, including: over reliance on private vehicles to access essential services and employment; growing congestion on arterial roads; insufficient and inconvenient first and last-mile connectivity to areas and the vulnerability of established road and rail networks to storms, flooding, bushfires, and challenging topography.
Kanthan spoke about how the waterbus could address many of the issues.
The first route would be an affordable high-speed, low-wash, waterborne passenger transport route between Woy Woy and the Gosford waterfront.
It would link an estimated 40,000 residents on the Woy Woy Peninsula to everything Gosford, the regional capital seeks to offer, without adding to the expense of road traffic congestion or the need for high-rise car parks.
Read more about the WaterBUS vision here: https://www.waterbus.au/
As much as I’d love a High Speed Train to the Central Coast, I’ll always question them picking this section first. If they choose Sydney to Canberra instead, you could incrementally upgrade the existing line, with the only megaproject-sized investment being a new approach into Sydney (the least important part, as the existing South Line is very fast already). And, importantly for keeping costs down, almost all of this could be done at grade, with tunnels being a rarity.
Meanwhile, half of Sydney-Newcastle has to be in a tunnel, and it’s difficult to split this into more than 2 stages if they don’t want mainline trains to be able to use the tracks too.
I hope it gets built. But oh boy, they picked a hard one to start with.