10 Mar 2012: SEQ: Cross River Rail Gold Plated? Saying so is short sighted!

[ozbob]

Media release 10 March 2012

SEQ: Cross River Rail Gold Plated? Saying so is short sighted!

RAIL Back On Track (http://backontrack.org) a web based community support group for rail and public transport and an advocate for public transport passengers has refuted the LNPs claims that the $6.4 Billion cost for Cross River Rail is gold plated.

Robert Dow, Spokesman for RAIL Back On Track said:

"Public transport planning in Australia has had a long history of cutting corners in crucial areas.

"Inevitably problems then develop that are disruptive to fix, and often cost more than the original project!

"For instance, the cost of duplicating the Gold Coast rail line from its original single track has cost more than when it was originally constructed, and the job still isn't done at Coomera!

"The same can be said for the proposed $2 billion cost of fixing the CBD busway bottleneck that was 'designed in' at the start, the Busway was built for $425 million in 2001.

"It's a double whammy for Queenslanders, because money is stretched spending on new infrastructure to keep up with growth, but also having to go back and fix up problems on existing infrastructure caused by bad design and penny pinching in the past.

"Cross River Rail represents one of the few examples where the design has thought of everything.

"The junctions are well designed, stations accommodate longer trains and are well located, track capacity looks not just at the immediate crunch from Gold and Sunshine Coast trains, but to long term expansions to cities like Flagstone, not yet built.

"6.4 billion dollars may seem like a lot of money, but it is exceptionally good value for an 18km rail project that solves several problems at once, has all future provisions from day one, and will be operating for the next 100 years plus.

"It seems incredibly biased that the $4.8 Billion spent on  6.5km of motorway tunnel plus 3km of Busway for Airport Link receives no complaint but an 18km rail project costing 25% more than this is accused of being wasteful and unaffordable by the LNP.

"The core of the network is the most crucial part, Cross River Rail is south east Queensland's most crucial infrastructure project. The last thing we need is 'cheaping out' on a non-solution that compounds the looming transport failure in south-east Queensland.  It is time the LNP got behind Cross River Rail and demonstrated that they actually understand what is required for the future (1)."

Reference:

1.  22 Jan 2012: SEQ: Cross River Rail bipartisan support is the way forward http://railbotforum.org/mbs/index.php?topic=7523.0


Contact:

Robert Dow
Administration
admin@backontrack.org
RAIL Back On Track http://backontrack.org

[ozbob]

Discussion thread Cross River Rail --> http://railbotforum.org/mbs/index.php?topic=2034.msg90090#msg90090