This is in order to be comparable to other countries using HSR as a legitimate means of transport. See my post referring to China's HSR.

Picking an extreme example like China is puzzling to me.

Besides your finger in the air calculations about population size are supported by the ABS predictions.
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/featurearticlesbytitle/AC53A071B4B231A6CA257CAE000ECCE5?OpenDocument#PARALINK1

Edited by mcjules: 25/8/2014 09:13:08 PM

Contested East West Link business case tantalisingly close
August 13, 2014
Adam Carey
Transport Reporter for The Age


It was the closest anyone but cabinet and a select few public servants have come to seeing the business case for the East West Link.

The most contested document in Victorian politics was wheeled into court on Wednesday, like a child in a custody battle. A big white box with a bright red lid, wrapped in tape, it sat in plain sight but closely guarded by the government’s legal team.

Inside the box, the court was told, were three ring-bound folders containing the full business case for the multibillion-dollar road project, including two volumes of technical annexures.

Labor’s roads spokesman, Luke Donnellan, launched the legal action, taking the Linking Melbourne Authority to VCAT to try to compel the Napthine government to let the public see what is inside the box, a document that is at the heart of three legal challenges.

The opposition is attempting to exploit a technicality in the state’s freedom-of-information laws that exempt from public release documents prepared for consideration by cabinet.

No cabinet member could reasonably be expected to have read the entire business case, Mr Donnellan’s counsel Siobhan Keating argued, rather they would have read a summary prepared by the department to save time-poor ministers many hours.

The full business case was prepared, Ms Keating argued, for the purpose of gaining funding approval from Infrastructure Australia, the federal advisory body that evaluates major projects.

It is so large and complex it ''could not be sensibly considered by cabinet'', Ms Keating argued. Therefore it should not be exempt from release under freedom-of-information laws.

Evidence was given by Richard Wynne, Labor’s MP for Richmond, and a minister in the Bracks and Brumby governments, that similar processes had occurred under those administrations, with perhaps only one or two key ministers reading full business cases.

Charles Gunst, QC, for the Linking Melbourne Authority, countered: ''Is it possible the desalination plant was approved by some back of the envelope, three-page submission?''

Andrew Herington, a former senior adviser to the Bracks and Brumby governments, intimated that the government’s argument that the business case deserved confidentiality was a cynical ploy to avoid scrutiny of its flagship project.

''Simply taking a large box of documents into the cabinet room doesn’t give it cabinet exemption,'' he said.

Two public servants who helped prepare the business case gave evidence that the document was written with the express purpose of submitting it to cabinet for consideration.

Both appeared nervous while in the witness box, pausing for long periods before answering Ms Keating’s questions.

''This business case was developed for the purpose of securing funding from cabinet,” said Aneetha de Silva, the Linking Melbourne Authority’s executive director, commercial and legal.

Geoff Oulton, director of Transport Investment and Development in the Department of Transport, Planning and Local Infrastructure, said the full business case was prepared over many months and in regular consultation with cabinet members.

''If cabinet had not approved this project, would the business case have had any other purpose?'' Mr Gunst asked.

''No,'' Mr Oulton said.

The hearing continues on Thursday.

So about protecting those Qantas jobs...

Let's discuss the NBN o:)

-PB

Government low-balling us on second-rate NBN

Justifications for the multi-technology mix only add up when you ignore the inconvenient numbers.

This week's NBN review supports the government's decision to scrap the national fibre-to-the-premises rollout and instead take a patchwork multi-technology mix approach – hooking up a quarter of homes to fibre but relegating the rest to HFC cable, fibre-to-the-node or satellite. It's telling that Communications Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, was happy to sign off on this approach before the report was completed, after criticising Labour for favouring fibre-to-the-premises without first crunching the numbers.

If you're still not convinced that the NBN-lite is a bargain, Turnbull is happy to spell it out for you on a whiteboard – explaining why fibre-to-the-node is more cost-effective than fibre-to-the-premises. The always articulate Turnbull makes some valid points, but the numbers only stack up if you assume low growth in bandwidth demand, ignore the costs in maintaining legacy infrstructure and don't factor in the possibility of future fibre upgrades.

It's like arguing that it's more cost-effective to a build a single-lane Sydney Harbour Bridge, while conveniently ignoring the fact that it won't meet our future needs. It's a short-sighted approach which looks good in a spreadsheet but is designed to win a political argument rather than meet the future needs of the country.

Comparing the cost of fibre-to-the-node to fibre-to-the-premises overlooks a few key issues which seriously impact on the value proposition;

maintaining the copper network
fixing copper black spots
upgrading and maintaining the HFC network
extending the fibre network later to meet growing demand
The costings on both sides of the NBN debate have been questionable, but you can't take any financial analysis of the multi-technology mix plan seriously if it doesn't allow for all these factors. The big fear is that with a "near enough is good enough" NBN they'll overlook many of the problems with the copper in the ground, as well as skimp on the upgrade required for the HFC network to support triple its current users.

It is technically possible for fibre-to-the-node and HFC cable to deliver fibre-esque speeds of 100 Mbps, but not when you cut corners to save time and money. The first fibre-to-the-node customers are getting 97 Mbps, but you can be sure they were hand-picked in order to show the technology at its best, not its worst. The fact that there's no end user speed guarantee on the NBN doesn't inspire confidence in the multi-technology mix plan. It's like bragging about building a single-lane Sydney Harbour Bridge on the cheap, while ignoring the potholes and horrendous traffic jams.

Turnbull argues that as internet speeds increase we reach a point where "the marginal utility goes to zero" – in other words it's already fast enough to meet your every need so there's no advantage in increasing speeds. If most people won't pay for faster speeds then it's not worth building a better network, according to Turnbull's logic.

This sounds reasonable until you stop to think about what that graph would have looked like five years ago. Where would we have drawn the line and said it was fast enough for most people? Now consider the fact that the NBN needs to meet our needs for decades, not just until the next election. Where we draw the line today is unlikely to cut it in the long-term, especially when the latest NBN review is rather conservative when estimating our future bandwidth requirements.

The aim of the national fibre-to-the-premises network wasn't simply to deliver greater speeds. It was to stop Telstra holding the country to ransom and create a level playing field, to prepare us for the future. Giving everyone the same quality of broadband increases the value of the network, because it creates the economies of scale needed to encourage the public and private sectors to invest in new online services that take advantage of the faster speeds.

Instead the multi-technology mix could put us back where we started – with a hotch-potch broadband mess that condemns some Australians to live as second-class online citizens. When half the country has second-rate broadband there's less incentive to build new services to take advantage of faster speeds, so the "zero marginal utility" argument becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Apparently we're not building a nationwide 100Mbps network because people won't pay for 100Mbps speeds when there aren't 100Mbps services. There aren't 100Mbps services because there aren't enough 100Mbps-capable homes, because we didn't build a nationwide 100Mbps network. If you're going to shout down the "build it and they will come" philosophy, at least acknowledge the true cost of only half building it.

Low-balling us on a second-rate NBN certainly doesn't sound like good value for money, not unless you're a politician

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/gadgets-on-the-go/government-lowballing-us-on-secondrate-nbn-20140829-109vvg.html

Vertigan's NBN endorsement will leave Australia a broadband backwater

As expected, the Vertigan panel’s cost-benefit analysis of the NBN supports the Coalition’s multi-technology mix (MTM), concluding that over the 15 years from 2025 to 2040, each Australian household will be better off by a total of $1,600 compared to Labor’s proposed fibre to the premises (FTTP) system.

On the surface, this looks like a big a nail in the FTTP coffin, but a closer look at the Vertigan report reveals that its analysis and methodology have resulted in a conservative view of future bandwidth demands and internet usage, rather than a forward-looking assessment of what capacity will be needed for the future.

To estimate the benefit of the NBN to households and small businesses, Vertigan surveyed two groups of internet users on how much they would be willing to pay for higher-speed broadband.

This “willingness to pay” survey approach is a well-established analysis technique but fails to account for the possibility of new broadband applications that have not yet been identified. Responses from the surveyed groups of users are surely biased by their knowledge of what the internet can provide today.

What if a similar study of internet users’ opinions had been carried out 20 years ago, in 1994 when the world-wide web was in its infancy and dial-up modems were high tech? Then, the internet’s uses were very limited: e-mail and small file sharing. Would those users have been able to predict their willingness to pay for future broadband, and would their responses have any relevance out to the year 2020? Of course not. How could they be expected to predict Google, Facebook, YouTube, online gaming, IPTV, Skype, Amazon and the like, or the online applications that have transformed many small businesses.

Since 1994 the Internet has become an essential item for most households and small businesses. It is difficult to imagine how we could survive in a world without the things that our surveyed users back in 1994 could not have foreseen.

The Vertigan Panel backs up its user surveys with a bottom-up calculation of future bandwidth and data usage. Again, there are problems with the methodology. The applications used in this analysis are today’s known applications, like YouTube, web browsing, streaming HDTV and the emerging super high-definition (4k) TV.

Questionable assumptions are made about how many people in a single residence would simultaneously watch different TV programs and run other applications. And it assumes that no new high-bandwidth applications will emerge in the next 10 to 25 years.

What’s more, it appears to ignore broader societal benefits of broadband, including health benefits, educational benefits, and environmental benefits, including reduced traffic congestion and accidents. A more comprehensive analysis would no doubt have found a much larger benefit to the nation.

In short, the Vertigan Report supports the image of Australia as a quiet little broadband backwater, comfortably conservative and not particularly interested in grabbing the opportunities provided by the ongoing digital revolution. It conveniently ignores or understates key international developments in broadband technology and deployment.

FTTP rollouts around the world are gaining momentum. For example, Google now has 1 Gb/s FTTP networks in many cities across the USA, and AT&T is about to start a similar large rollout. Other companies that already have large FTTP networks in place are working to upgrade their FTTP networks to 1 Gb/s and eventually to 10 Gb/s as needed – 200 times faster than the Coalition’s 50 Mb/s MTM solution. Because these companies’ fibre infrastructure is already in place, the cost of the upgrade will be small.

What happens if the Vertigan Panel’s bandwidth assumptions are incorrect, and demand grows faster than they have predicted? They cover themselves by arguing that the day can be saved by upgrading from the MTM, back to Labor’s FTTP. But this will be very expensive. And what motivation will there be for a future network-wide upgrade of the MTM? With a sunk investment and strained finances, NBN Co will have no incentive or appetite to invest for many decades to come. Fibre will be stuck at the node.

The Coalition has indicated that it will eventually sell NBN Co. Privatisation is likely to reinforce this reluctance to upgrade to FTTP, especially in less profitable regions. Australia will be back to square one with a private monopoly network owner, as it was with Telstra in 2008 when the NBN was first mooted. There will be little or no incentive for this owner to invest in network-wide upgrades of their network, and the concept of a universal service will be lost.

It has been very frustrating to see the Labor’s bold vision of an FTTP network comprehensively dismantled and replaced with a backward-looking plan. As telecommunications industry analyst Paul Budde points out in a recent blog post, with the Coalition’s MTM “we can now be certain that Australia will continue to linger on at the bottom [of the OECD ratings for broadband quality] for decades to come”. The Coalition is well and truly locked into a lowest-common-denominator view of Australia’s future needs for advanced digital infrastructure.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/29/vertigans-nbn-endorsement-will-leave-australia-a-broadband-backwater

Time for a reality check on Labor's CBA-less NBN strategy

Force of repetition has turned Labor's failure to produce a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis (CBA) for its fibre-to-the-premises (FttP) National Broadband Network (NBN) strategy into a mantra for proponents of the Coalition's substantially revised plan.

"Labor should have conducted a CBA before it committed to FttP" is the gist of such comments — which have this week been followed by some sort of indictment of the previous government's haphazard planning, as well as a loud "thank you" to the current government for saving us from economic disaster.

The CBA has in truth done anything but that, as I will explain in greater detail in coming days, once I have had the opportunity to give this long and complex document its due consideration.

For now, however, in the wake of such constant vitriol against Labor's CBA-less NBN, it is worth remembering a simple fact: Were the previous government not so bold as to proceed with the project five years ago, we would still be trying to pretty-please get Telstra to start investing in the fibre-to-the-node (FttN) plans that it quite emphatically shelved back in 2006.

That's right: In today's revisionist mindset, it's easy to lump all the blame with Labor — but the truth is that it was during the previous Coalition government, back in 2006, that the government came to such a loggerheads with Telstra that the then freshly ex-monopolist publicly proclaimed in an ASX filing that negotiations "have reached an impasse. Until Telstra's actual costs are recognised and the ACCC's regulatory practices change, Telstra will not invest in a fibre-to-the-node broadband network."

Eight years later, Telstra still has not invested in such a network; it is happy to continue marketing ADSL2, milking profits and undertaking minimal maintenance on its network with nothing even vaguely resembling a FttN node installed. As you would expect, Telstra remains interested in profits, rather than arbitrary technological progress, believing that anything else is naive folly.

Intervening years have seen a raft of efforts to get the industry to pull itself up by its bootstraps to facilitate such an outcome; just have a look through this 2007 presentation from the multi-telco G9 consortium if you've forgotten about one of the higher-profile efforts.

The government's peace offering, in which Telstra had the chance to lodge a reasonable and fair bid to deliver FttN services under a formal tendering process, descended into farce when the company famously lodged a tender bid that was as non-committal and non-responsive as any of the company's earlier musings.

It was the failure of this process that left Labor with no alternative but to find a different way forward — and that way, as we all know, was to set in motion the plans for the current FttP network.

While few would question the value of a good CBA before a major investment, to say that the Labor government should have run a CBA before embarking on this FttP rollout remains one of the rather inaccurate mantras of the modern telecoms era.

The reality is that Labor had already run its CBA in the form of its FttN tender — in which a panel of experts weighed the various proposed paths forward and found that none would effectively deliver a value-for-money outcome. It is true that the possibility of a fully FttP network was not formally weighed against these objectives, but it is also equally true that then-Communications Minister Stephen Conroy had absolutely no other option.

At that point, it was FttP or nothing, since Telstra had shown with its December 2008 submission that it had absolutely no interest in playing ball according to the government's rules. To suggest that Labor failed to consider alternative architectures is simply incorrect; since any rationally thinking person would at that point have dismissed suggestions of buying Telstra's ageing copper network out of hand, the only other option was to build the network from the ground up.

And that meant fibre, since not even Labor was crazy enough to try to build an alternative copper network to compete with Telstra's. While Labor certainly did miss some opportunities to speed up its rollout — its lax contractor management and rejection of a compromise fibre-to-the-basement (FttB) topography remain soft spots in its telecoms legacy — the fact is that without the framework Labor put in place, we would today have no hope of improving Australia's broadband at all.

Many have forgotten that the Coalition government, the same one that was elected just under a year ago in an emphatic get-stuffed vote against Labor, went to the 2010 election with a farcical broadband policy that was credited with helping the Coalition lose that election.

Five years later, we have the same Coalition government extolling the virtues of its AU$41.7 billion plan, backed by a pair of documents whose preordained outcomes will now be used as justification for renationalising Telstra's copper access network and indulging in a telecommunications U-turn the likes of which the world has never seen.

Had the Coalition gone to the polls promising to spend more than AU$40 billion to implement a piecemeal and extremely expensive network whose replacement is already being discussed — had this been the Coalition's honest policy at the 2013 election, it would have been laughed out of the spotlight and sent back to the drawing board yet again. But Labor lost the election for reasons entirely unrelated to the NBN, and the project has been one of the biggest casualties of the change of government.

The true costs of the Coalition's policy have only become clear since it secured power, riding a wave of anti-Labor sentiment that has been extraordinarily successful in polarising normally objective observers who have failed to remember the entire context in which Labor's NBN was hatched. Once spruiked as a cut-price alternative to Labor's CBA-free policy, the Coalition's NBN has exploded in size, scope, complexity, and cost.

As expected, the CBA has justified the government's policy on paper — and loosed the chain on Turnbull's wrecking-ball NBN politics. However, once the dust has cleared, Australia's broadband future may yet look much different than anybody would have expected.

http://www.zdnet.com/time-for-a-reality-check-on-labors-cba-less-nbn-strategy-7000033117/

China isn't an extreme example.

Italy's HSR runs from Turin (2.2m) through Milan (7m), Rome (4.2m) and Naples (4.2m). That's the entire population of Australia living on the major stops of the Italian HSR.

The Japanese Shinkasen had 353 million passengers in 2007. Their main line runs from Tokyo (38m), Yokohama (3.7m), Nagoya (8.9m) and Osaka (18m) and carried 143m of those passengers.

Japanese construction giant Obayashi announces plans to have a space elevator up and running by 2050

Once the realm of science fiction, a Japanese company has announced they will have a space elevator up and running by the year 2050.

If successful it would revolutionise space travel and potentially transform the global economy.

The Japanese construction giant Obayashi says they will build a space elevator that will reach 96,000 kilometres into space.

Robotic cars powered by magnetic linear motors will carry people and cargo to a newly-built space station, at a fraction of the cost of rockets. It will take seven days to get there.

The company said the fantasy can now become a reality because of the development of carbon nanotechnology.

"The tensile strength is almost a hundred times stronger than steel cable so it's possible," Mr Yoji Ishikawa, a research and development manager at Obayashi, said.

"Right now we can't make the cable long enough. We can only make 3 centimetre long nanotubes but we need much more... we think by 2030 we'll be able to do it."

Universities all over Japan have been working on the problems and every year they hold competitions to share and learn from each other.

A team at Kanagawa University has been working on robotic cars or climbers.

Professor Tadashi Egami said tension on the cable will vary depending on height and gravity.

"We're studying what mechanisms are needed in order to ascend at differing altitudes and the best brake system," Mr Egami says.

A major international study in 2012 concluded the space elevator was feasible but best achieved with international co-operation and Mr Ishikawa from Obayashi agreed.

"I don't think one company can make it, we'll need an international organisation to make this big project," he said.

Experts said the space elevator could signal the end of Earth-based rockets which are hugely expensive and dangerous.

Using a space shuttle costs about $22,000 per kilogram to take cargo into space. For the space elevator, the estimate is about $200.

Constructing the space elevator would allow small rockets to be housed and launched from stations in space without the need for massive amounts of fuel required to break the Earth's gravitational pull.

It is also hoped the space elevator could help in solving the world's power problems, by delivering huge amounts of cheap solar power or storing nuclear waste.

It would also be a boon for space tourism.

Obayashi is working on cars that will carry 30 people up the elevator, so it may not be too long before the Moon is the next must-see tourist destination.

Flagstaff station to open on weekends
September 21, 2014
Richard Willingham



Flagstaff station will be opened on weekends regardless of who wins the November state election, with both major parties making a Sunday pitch for votes on the issue of public transport.
The City Loop station is currently closed on weekends but Labor on Sunday pledged to open the station if it wins the November 29 poll.
Just last week Greens leader Greg Barber tabled a petition in State Parliament calling for the station to be opened on weekends, saying it would provide vital access to the area and help local traders' business.
Opposition Leader Daniel Andrews said the western part of the CBD was no longer the "dead end" of the city, with a surge in new apartments as well as easy access to Queen Victoria Market and the northern end of Etihad Stadium.
"There are something like 8000 apartments being built in this precinct right now. This western end of the city is thriving, it is growing, it is very popular," Mr Andrews said.
Opening the station was part of Labor's Homesafe policy to have 24-hour train and tram services on Friday and Saturday nights, and would cost $1 million, he said.
Transport Minister Terry Mulder said the government planned to open Flagstaff station on weekends from April, when the train timetables will be changed.
Greens candidate for Melbourne Ellen Sandell said the Greens had long supported the proposal.
"It's a quick, low-cost way to stimulate local economy and ensure residents can make the most of their local area," she said.
Metro chief executive Andrew Lezala said opening the station was worthy and the costs were manageable.
Premier Denis Napthine joined Mr Mulder to unveil a new information campaign about the Free Tram Zone in the city, which was announced in March and begins on January 1.

Fuck all reason for flagstaff to open on weekends.

Amazing that this was science fiction thirty years ago... and still is now.

Sweet.

[size=7]Storm havoc: commuters endure three hour V/Line service to Melbourne[/size]
By DAVID JEANS Oct. 27, 2014, 11:30 a.m.

STORMS have wreaked havoc on morning Ballarat V/Line services, sending social media into meltdown with annoyed commuters.

Ballarat commuter Melanie Schoo said a three-hour trip on her 7.35am service to Southern Cross Station made for a rough Monday morning.

"It took me three hours to get from Ballarat to Southern Cross," Ms Schoo said.

She said she was frustrated no delay announcements had been made at the Ballarat Railway Station.



Ms Schoo said the service ran into trouble at Rockbank where the train was stationary for an hour before arriving at Southern Cross Station just after 10.30am.

"Then for extra fun, because we touched on two hours earlier, we had to go back through the gates and touch on and touch off again," she said.

"You would have thought they would turn the gates off for the morning."

She said free coffee coupons offered at Southern Cross Station did not sweeten her three-hour commute.

"The system is clearly a mess, the slightest thing throws it out," she said.



"I don't think lightning is a particularly new phenomenon and storms or hot weather aren't too unpredictable - it shouldn't affect all services."

V/Line spokesperson Ebony Jordan said a signal failure between Rockbank and Deer Park caused by the storm was resulting in delays of up to 90 minutes.

She said crews were still at the site working to fix the signal failure.

"An electrical storm in the early hours of this morning is to blame for the disruptions," Ms Jordan said.

"The delays on this morning's services were roughly 30 minutes, but the 7.28am service from Wendouree to Southern Cross was among the worst hit, with customers experiencing delays of around an hour-and-a-half."

Some services are being replaced with coaches.

Customers who experienced delays of more than an hour are eligible for compensation and encouraged to contact V/Line on 1800 800 007.

[size=7]Melbourne Airport Rail Link: do we need it - and when?[/size]
November 9, 2014

Sydney has an airport rail line. So does Brisbane. Perth is building one. Should Melbourne? Jason Dowling peers down the track at what Victoria's major parties are really proposing.

Everywhere I go it seems easier to access the city from the airport. But how common really is airport rail around the world?

Many of the world's famous cities that Australians love to visit invested in airport rail connections long ago. London's Heathrow, New York's JFK and Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris have airport rail links. There are some exceptions, think mega-car-city Los Angeles and its busy LAX.

What about in cities that are similar in geography and population to Melbourne?

Melbourne often competes with Vienna and Vancouver for the most liveable city title – they both have airport rail links. Vienna's City Airport Train takes 16 minutes from city to airport, Vancouver's airport rail link to the city takes 26 minutes. Across the ditch, Auckland Airport does not have a rail link.

Have they been a success – economically and in attracting passengers?

Both airport rail links in Sydney and Brisbane initially struggled to attract commuters and turn a profit. Early patronage was well below expectation. In Sydney prices were made more attractive with government assistance and demand has grown. Patronage on Brisbane's Airtrain has also grown with millions of commuters now using the airport rail links annually in both cites. Both rail links now turn modest profits.

What work has been done on developing a rail passage to Tullamarine. How would it work? How long would it take?

Melburnians talk about a rail link to the airport like they do the weather. It has been a constant topic of conversation for decades. The Napthine government has settled on an Albion East alignment that follows the Sunbury line out of the city and takes the Albion-Jacana freight line path. Closer to the airport the rail line will go up the centre of the new Airport Drive freeway extension. The airport is considering three locations for the new train station and hopes to have a final design in 18 months. An underground station has been ruled out because of cost. The airport said there was no "secret Harry Potter platform" already built at the airport, which has been a long-held Melbourne myth.

The airport said a future train terminal would not be in current long-term car park areas.

The journey time to the airport is forecast to be an ambitious 25 minutes.

What's the government's position?

The Coalition said the $8.5 billion to $11 billion Melbourne Rail Link, which includes the airport rail link, would "transform the rail network, reduce delays, improve reliability and boost capacity by up to 30 per cent".

It said "early works" were expected in 2016, with construction from 2017 and the full project, including Melbourne Airport Rail Link, to be complete in 2026. The government could not say which section of the Melbourne Rail Link would be built first, the link to the airport or the rail tunnel from Southern Cross to Fishermans Bend and South Yarra. It said exact timing for the opening of both sections of the project would be determined once further design and construction planning had occurred. The budget papers said the project will be completed "from 2026" and contain only 2 per cent of funding in the next three years.

And Labor?

Labor said while an airport rail link is a worthy project, it was focused on "the services that people use every single day". It is prioritising building the Melbourne Metro project to increase capacity in the city loop and its plan to remove 50 level crossings.

What about the Greens?

The Greens support an airport rail link.

Where do the key business groups and unions line up – and why?

The Victorian Employers' Chamber of Commerce and Industry supports the airport rail link as critical to tourism growth.

Trades Hall said while it supported more infrastructure jobs in Victoria it was not convinced the airport rail project would get off the ground. Trades Hall wants an infrastructure pipeline that focuses on people getting to work and prioritises local jobs.

What's the case against – and who makes it?

Why duplicate? The Skybus service already runs a direct, frequent and affordable link from the CBD to the airport. Other transport projects will be delayed or cancelled to build a rail line to the airport. As recently as 2011, then Transport Department secretary Jim Betts said about a rail link to the airport "unlike the CBD of Melbourne, which has repeat concentrated flows ... you don't have that base load of commuter demand that justifies railways in other circumstances". Some consider an airport rail link a white elephant that would not suit the travel habits of many airport visitors. The new airport rail link plan from the Coalition would also mean the Metro Rail plan to expand capacity in the city loop with a tunnel from South Kensington to South Yarra and with five new stations at Arden, Parkville, CBD North, CBD South and Domain would be scrapped. Metro Rail was years in the planning and was supported by Infrastructure Australia.

Can projects like this ever be considered an economic success – and should they be considered in economic terms alone?

Brisbane and Sydney rail lines are profitable. The economic benefits of a rail link would grow as congestion worsens on the Tullamarine Freeway. Visitors to Melbourne Airport are expected to double in the next three decades and hit 60 million a year by 2030. The airport says the rail link is desperately needed to cope with anticipated demand.

If not, what else should we be looking at? If not airport rail, what's the alternative?

Some have suggested an elevated light rail system running above CityLink as a less expensive, faster and more convenient rail alternative. At the minimum, the SkyBus service to the airport should have a dedicated CityLink lane to avoid getting stuck in congestion.

Yeah, I'm surprised Melbourne doesn't have a rail link to it's airport. At the very least a tram.

At least the SkyBus shuttle seems to run every 10 or so minutes.

Sure, but it relies on the over capacity Citylink toll road and is at the mercy of other traffic snarls.

$30 return for a bus ride is pretty steep, too.