The idea of a high-speed train in South Africa has again raised its ugly head. It is a beast that just won’t die.
Transport minister Barbara Creecy said last week that the government was “testing the water for a new 300km/h” rail link between Joburg and Durban. This has been proposed before, but it is at least as dangerous economically as it seems to be alluring for politicians.
There is a reason why the present railway between the two cities is laid to a gauge (the distance between the tracks) of 1,067mm (3’ 6”). It runs from sea level to an altitude of 1,753 metres — and about half of that elevation is reached at Pietermaritzburg, just 90km from Durban. The mountainous terrain made unfeasible a broader gauge (like the 1,422mm or 4’ 8½” established at the foundation of railways in Britain, and used for the Gautrain), both financially and in engineering terms. And a broader gauge would be necessary for a high-speed train.
There are rapid-transit lines in the world operating at high altitude, but none that reach such elevations over such a short distance.
Such a project would cost in the hundreds of billions of rand, even by conservative estimates. An earlier cost study (2009) for a 640km high-speed double line between Gauteng and Durban estimated an R80bn infrastructure cost, using difficult terrain assumptions including 100km of tunnels and 50km of viaducts and bridges. That sounds like small change.
And it is a well-known engineering phenomenon that major projects overrun their budgets, often by staggering amounts.
The UK Treasury’s “Green Book”, a document to guide assessment of policies, projects and programmes, mandates “optimism bias uplifts” (extra cost added to estimates) because experience shows that humans systematically underestimate costs.
In the US, the California High-Speed Rail project, which has not even got to the tracklaying stage, was initially expected in 2008 to cost $33bn. The latest estimate is $128bn.
Prof Bent Flyvbjerg of Oxford University, an expert on megaprojects, has said that “underestimating costs and overestimating benefits is best understood as lying — strategic misrepresentation”. His global study of 258 transport projects found that nine out of 10 ran far over budget.
You’d think that engineers and project managers would allow for this — but that might mean their proposals would be rejected as prohibitively expensive (which they end up being anyway).
There is no shortage of enthusiasts for such a project.
Government planners look forward to happily spending the rest of their careers on it, with hundreds of meetings and thousands of PowerPoint slides, instead of dealing with all the intractable problems in trying to fix the present degraded railway line from Gauteng through KwaZulu-Natal. In the late 1950s this carried more than 100 trains a day. Now it is regarded as busy if there are a dozen.
And it is hard to find anyone in what seems to be the freemasonry of civil engineers to speak out against such a patently extravagant and unnecessary project. If they are employed by an engineering company, they want the work and will say nothing to jeopardise it. If they are academics, they look forward to abundant research material and consulting fees. Politicians will point to the potential for job creation.
Yet a Durban-Joburg high-speed link would probably cost into the trillions — and let’s face it, we don’t really need it.
Let us hope the minister quickly removes her toes from the water.
