Bringing the regions closer

Photo / Supplied

The new trains on the High Speed 2 network in England will carry up to 1100 passengers at a time.

Building a high-speed rail route is the easy part, what is harder to understand is that faster connections will spur regional economic growth, a visiting British professor says.

Around the world, governments have neglected the ability of these connections to move people quickly, says Southampton University's Professor Andrew McNaughton.

Instead the regional centres fail to develop, and young people drift off to the big city for university and work. This leaves older people who are less skilled in the regional city, which doesn't contribute fully to a growing economy.

The answer, McNaughton says, is to get cities sharing the economy — "you do the manufacturing and I'll do the research. Do you want Auckland to keep spreading out like a rash where the choice in 40-50 years is living in a condominium in the middle of the city?

"Also, a big city (like Auckland) only works as a single city if you can get across it in 30 minutes, whether it's buses or light rail."

He calculates that Auckland's proposed light rail line from the city centre to the airport in Mangere with 20 stops along the way would take 30 minutes if the trains travelled at 160km/h.

He says the regional cities are not big enough to have financial, legal, manufacturing and other key industries. But they can develop and concentrate on a specialty such as the knowledge economy — advanced manufacturing, IT, research and international students — if they were a one-hour commute from the big city.

One-hour commute

McNaughton thinks Hamilton can be a one-hour commute from Auckland with faster rail — not the present two-hour rail excursion he experienced while on holiday here earlier this year. He says putting in overhead electric lines, upgrading the track and running trains at 180km/h would get Auckland to Hamilton down to an hour.

"If governments want to activate the economy of a regional city where industry wants to grow, and people want to move there, then they need to realise the difference connections make."

McNaughton has been the technical director of the £55 billion High Speed 2 (HS2), Britain's largest infrastructure project, is also advisor to the New South Wales government on its Fastrail strategy, and chairman of the World High Speed Rail committee.

HS2 is connecting England's six biggest cities: London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester, with Birmingham — the second-largest — being 50 minutes from London with trains travelling at 180km/h.

HSBC Bank is now moving from the City of London to Birmingham because of the shorter commute, better quality of life, and cheaper office space and housing. "The managing director is moving there, and he doesn't feel disconnected from London," says McNaughton.

New South Wales network

McNaughton, who also advises the government of the Czech Republic, is halfway through collecting evidence to devise a faster rail network in New South Wales between Sydney and the regional centres such as Wollongong in the south towards Canberra, Newcastle in the north and across to the Blue Mountains going west.

"It's about moving people faster between the cities. Young people in Wollongong have left for university because they couldn't face the 1hr 40m trip to Sydney.

"It will take some serious tunnelling to reduce the commuter time and that's a 20-year project.

"But if we do it right, we can give the government a basket of projects such as upgrading tracks and straining out some of the curves and they can get started within the next two or three years," McNaughton says.

He is realistic. High-speed rail projects take 20 to 30 years to complete at billions of dollars. He says politicians need to move away from today and think about the benefit of the next generation. There has to be a bipartisan approach.

"If a piece of land is taken for a new rail deviation, they need to see it is building a city for the long term and it will benefit our children. Politicians need to think over a period of two generations and invest in different modes of transport wisely."

After all that, McNaughton's faster rail is speeds between 160 and 250km/h, not the bullet trains in China reaching 350km/h commercially and testing at 440km/h.

"That's stuff of boys' dreams. It's not appropriate — you go as fast as you need, not what the techies want," he says.