On the face of it, the latest of a long line of studies into fast rail appears to show, yet again, that it is going to be hard to justify the huge up-front capital costs. An estimated cost of $80 billion (give or take $20-odd billion, but who cares about loose change?), which is not going to be recouped in any significant way from fares. So lets not bother, right?
But hang on, aren't we missing something here? Well, only the main cost-recovery avenue -- value (re)capture. The idea is hardly new, but for some reason I can't fathom it is rarely discussed in detail in these fast rail feasibility studies. For those unfamiliar with the idea, it's quite simple. The government is going to shell out huge buckets of money building a high-speed rail line. Anyone owning property near the rail stations will immediately see the value of that property increase. Since these property owners haven't done anything themselves, and are just benefiting from the government's spending, it's fair for the government to recoup the increase. At this point people often start quibbling about difficulties in estimating the benefits, or object to trying to claw back money from old ladies who just happen to own a house near one of the stations. None of that is relevant except in political terms, and for the moment lets stay away from the politics: we can come back to that later.
So how important is value-capture, relative to fare-box revenue? Very. Lets do our own back-of-the envelope calculations and see. First up, lets simplify things just to make the case for value recapture clear. Let's just take the Sydney-Newcastle-Canberra section of the track. The best-guess cost for this in the most recent study is $29.3 billion; let's just call it $30 billion.
Total cost: $30 billion
A further simplification will help bring out my point, and allow us to avoid complicated calculations that just obscure my main point. Let's say that instead of linking Sydney, Canberra and Newcastle, we just build south-west from Sydney out to empty sheep paddocks near Golbourne, and North to some easily developable land near the Central Coast or Newcastle. So, we have two lines, with 4 stops along each line (as in the most recent study), and a train commute of 40 minutes or under for each station.
Now, suppose we develop a small 2km radius 'town' around each station. Since we've built out to sheep paddocks this should be no problem. A 2km radius town with 8 lots per hectare will give us 10000 lots in each town. How much would each lot be worth? With a sub-40minute commute to Sydney, I'd say at least three or four hundred thousand. But lets say after servicing and other costs, the net increase is $200k for each lot. So, 8 stations, 10000 lots per station, $200k per lot, gives us $16 billion dollars:
Land-capture capital recovery: conservatively, $16 billion
So with some pretty conservative assumptions we have recouped half the capital cost. Getting a little more creative should allow even greater cost recovery. Developing a 3km^2 town at each station, or developing at higher densities, are easy adjustments that would increase revenue and get you to near full cost-recovery without any fare-box revenue.
So what about fare-box revenue? In our 8 towns, with 10000 dwellings, lets say there are 10000 workers, 30% of which commute using the rail line, with the other 70% commuting by car or some other mode. So, 3000 workers in each town commuting each way 200 days a year gives us 9.6 million trips. Call it 10 million. Add another 10 million non-work trips. Say each trip costs $10. So, that's $200 million a year, or a 0.6% p.a. gross return on $30 billion invested, before we take into account operating costs. Fiddle with the above numbers any way you like, it wont change the fact that fare-box revenue is almost small enough to forget about altogether, and certainly much less important than value-capture as a funding mechanism.
Net fare-box revenue: approximately nil.
Bottom-line: if you want to fund high-speed rail, heck, in fact rail of any kind, you need to put value recapture front and centre of your approach to cost-recovery. Why isn't it already? Because property owners would prefer to pocket the benefits from the rail-line themselves, and many will fight tooth-and-nail to do so. Building the line to some empty sheep paddock mostly avoids this, because there are only a handful of large land-owners likely to be involved, and that's why I took that approach in the above example, but in reality there would be a lot of opposition to such a move ("It's crazy to build a rail line out to nowhere! We need to strengthen the centres we already have!"). And if you do build to existing centres, it is politically difficult to claw back the increased land values (not that any Australian government have really tried very hard....). In fact, building the line out to empty paddocks is probably not the best plan, economically, anyway, provided that you have a mechanism to recoup the increased value from existing land-holders.
And the reason land-value capture works so well (if you can do it, politically), is because our dysfunctional planning systems have made supply of new dwellings, at low cost, so difficult. So there is a lot of suppressed demand for accessible locations. A rail line is, essentially, a way of 'manufacturing' new accessible locations. Releasing land on the urban fringe is not the same thing -- a point missed by many who claim that the fix to our housing supply problems is just to release more land. This would help a bit, but the real demand is not for land, but for dwellings with good accessibility (to jobs, and other things), and accessibility can only really be supplied by transport infrastructure.
As a final aside, some economists have pointed out that because the benefits of rail systems get capitalized into a relatively small number of land-holders, this makes rail distributively unfair, as costs are shared and benefits and concentrated. The benefits of a motorway, on the other-hand, are much more widely spread. This is a valid point, and can't be addressed without re-thinking value capture. Just to be clear: I'm not arguing for motorways here, just making it clear that making rail work requires us to have a discussion about the fairness of recouping private gains from public infrastructure investment.
