not necessary.
What’s not necessary? HSR? DIsagree. It would be very useful and would make travelling by train viable to a lot more people
Only destination it may work is Sydney-to-Melbourne line. But I do not think we have enough traffic there to be viable. Look at Japan, bullet trains there is more expensive than planes if you travel between major cities. Only thing trains have over planes is convenience and reach for small destinations.
Only destination it may work is Sydney-to-Melbourne line
Melbourne to Brisbane (via Canberra and Sydney) is the only place anyone talking about high speed rail in Australia is concerned with. Nobody is saying we should build high speed rail to Broome.
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Agree. We don’t need hsr, we need more services on the existing normal-speed tracks. Adelaide-Melbourne is currently only 2x per week on a tourist train. Sydney-Melbourne 2x day. All you’d need to do is build more trains. You wouldn’t need to build hundreds of km’s of expensive high-speed track. We could run some trains Melbourne through Albury all the way to Canberra while we’re at it.
We need both. Air transport produces a ridiculous amount of greenhouse gas emissions, and nobody is ever going to replace a plane with a train at low speed train speeds. With high speed rail and properly-priced externalities, almost all Melbourne-Sydney trips (pre-COVID, one of the busiest flight routes in the world) as well as stop-offs in Canberra could easily be done by train. You probably wouldn’t replace as many Brisbane-Sydney trips—if externalities were appropriately priced-in, you’d most likely see leisure and family trips done via train but business trips continue to be flights.
You’re right that we also need more frequency, but that almost automatically comes with the high speed upgrade. High speed rail replaces flights in the sub-1000 km range. Low speed rail is its own category that simply doesn’t compete in the same space as flights, which is why the low frequency unfortunately makes some sense and increasing it wouldn’t help. But when you’re competing with flights, the volume of travel, and therefore the frequency of trips, goes way up.
