Welcome aboard. There is no stopping light rail for Canberra now. The feasibility study by Booz-Allen and Hamilton issued during the week predictably enough said light rail is a goer for Canberra and we should move on to engineering, environmental and detailed costing study.
It fits a pattern of feasibility studies. Yes it is feasible. Let’s have some more studies.
The Government that runs a bus service propped up by a huge subsidy will move headlong into a $400 million light-rail and commit rate-payers’ money for 20 years. It will be the lowest population city in the world to have such a system.
Flawed study after flawed study has given light rail a momentum of its own.
The latest one is based at every turn on most favourable conditions for light rail. It assumes no improvement in bus technology for 20 years. It assumes a population growth of 52 per cent up to 2016 yet miraculously jobs will grow at 65 per cent. It assumes, therefore, that the growing participation rates caused by more women coming into the workforce will continue for the next 20 years when common-sense suggests the saturation point for women in the workforce must almost with us.
It does not state what its annual population growth assumption is, but it appears not to have revised population projections with the post-recession drop off.
It concludes that Canberra can begin a light-rail system with a population of 310,000 when the smallest North American or Australian city with one has 670,000 and most have one million.
It urges an early start to save money.
It urges higher taxes on cars and parking. It wants a light-rail tax on parking fees, fines and traffic infringement notices. It says that light-rail’s capital cost will be lower because Canberra has wide, open, high-quality and mainly flat roads on which it can build (another freebie for light rail from existing infra-structure).
It acknowledges that it has to steal customers from ACTION to be viable.
“”These patrons form the initial backbone to the light-rail patronage estimates,” it says.
We take riders off one white elephant and put them on another.
Its preferred construction order is to take ACTION’s best routes first and to put light rail where ACTION does not service well (Queanbeyan and the airport) last.
Another assumption is that the developers of greenfields sites in Gungahlin will contribute $76.7 million. This amounts to a tax on new-home buyers to support a rail system.
If the Gungahlin greenfields developers are in on the light-rail deal they will encourage more employment in Civic and less employment in Gungahlin to boost demand. They will discourage mixed development in Gungahlin so the train make more money.
It assumes part of the financing will be done through federal tax concessions.
The new feasibility study says of previous studies, “”While we have made some minor modifications to the initial plans, the results of the previous work appear fundamentally sound.”
In fact, previous studies have been attacked as fundamentally flawed. And this study continues the trend. It tweaks all of the data and estimates in light rail’s favour.
It has the classic elements of the “”big project”: take money from the value added to land; pervert the tax system in its favour; take without paying valuable things from other infrastructure (roads and buses); pluck the choicest and most profitable part of the market (the 333 routes) ignoring the rest.
With all of those assumptions and givens, as the study says, light rail is feasible. But is it sensible or a wise use of resources.
This has all the hallmarks of a mill-stone around rate-payers necks while all the hangers on, consultants, construction companies and unions hop on the gravy train. And this one has the added bonus of obtaining public respectability through the approval of parts of the environment movement which has convinced itself that light rail is a Good Thing no matter what the cost, irrespective of the possibility that the misuse of resources in its construction could be far more damaging than any foregone reduction in greenhouse gases.
The ACT Government should commission a consultant (who signs an undertaking not to tender for any subsequent light-rail work) with a brief to specifically argue the case against light rail. All previous ones have had the onus the other way.
The debt run up by public transport in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia was almost as bad as the debt caused by idiotic grandiose financial dealings, perhaps worse in some cases.
But don’t expect the ACT to learn from those errors and don’t expect a little caution in the best interests of ACT taxpayers. Rather expect the gravy train to continue rolling.