Daily Times

The Crossrail project in the United Kingdom is essentially designed to reduce the travelling time from the point of entry in the UK at Heathrow airport to the major commercial centers like Liverpool Street and Canary Wharf.

The Crossrail is a remarkable infrastructure project undertaken in the UK with a labyrinth of 42 km of new tunnels at an estimated cost of UK Sterling 14.8 billion, shaving off the journey time from 55 to 34 minutes.

In terms of specialised and value-addition employment, over 700 apprenticeships have been created by Crossrail. It is pertinent to note that nearly all contracts have been awarded to UK-based companies.

The construction machinery in the Crossrail project was fitted with pollutant reducing emission controls- which is something we don’t see in road construction in Pakistan.

Artificial intelligence has been utilised by the designers in deploying a centralised grid of linked databases to mesh about 1.7 million files into a consolidated information model.

On the other hand, the outlay of the Orange Line project in Lahore is USD 1.478 million sponsored through the mechanism of the government of Punjab acquiring a soft loan from the Exim Bank of China through the instrument of tendering. Civil works for the project were assigned to Pakistan despite the majority of China – Pakistan related investments taking place on a Built Own Transfer basis.

The length of the rail track is 27.1 km and is designed to cater to 245,000 passengers daily. As far as could be gleaned from information available in the public domain, the investor retains revenues from the project for a certain period of time as the project returns the principal amount at a pre-negotiated rate of interest.

Most underground transit systems, unlike the Orange Line, are noiseless, invisible, and do not obstruct light, air or traffic, and operations continue unhindered despite weather conditions with considerably higher expenditure than elevated transit systems.

The construction cost of Sao Paulo’s 11 km subway track was USD 1.6 billion. Singapore’s Circle Line extends 22 miles with 28 stations and cost USD 4.8 billion working out to USD 130 million per km. Madrid’s recently opened Metrosur line is 41 km long and costs around USD 58 million per km.

The New York line tops the list as the most expensive subway line at USD 1.7 billion per km and expenditure of London’s 16-km-long Jubilee line and Amsterdam’s 10 km North South line pale at USD 350 million and USD 400 million per km respectively.

Variables in pricing include real estate values, stations, labor, and bedrock tunnel boring.

In many US cities, light rail is the preferred mode of transportation instead of subways.

Internationally, there is a marked variation in high speed rail (HSR) line costs such as the Haikou to Sanya line in China and Madrid to Albacete line in Spain billed at USD 15 million a mile. Installing expensive magnetic levitation technology to lift train carriages is exemplified by the 19 mile “maglev” line in Shanghai at a cost of USD 63 million per mile and was a test project for the future of China’s rail infrastructure, yet it was not a viable market solution for mass passenger transport.

Initially, when China built its first high-speed train corridor in 2008 it averaged at USD 31 million per km and at the same time it averaged at USD 54 million per km in the US. The HSR safety record in China is alleged to be compromised by Japanese and Western detractors. Subsidies remain a sore point and developing countries groan under their financial ramifications. Examples include Japan’s Shinkansen,which runs between Tokyo and Osaka,and is capable of carrying 150 million passengers annually, and South Korea’s Seoul to Busan HSR, which is also not considered financially viable.  France’s Paris to Lyon HSR service regularly seeks substantial subsides. Turkey’s Ankara to Istanbul HSR line is apparently financially viable for a middle income country.

In the US, trains remain oriented for freight and not for passenger traffic, and in Pakistan it is the opposite leading to the financial ruin of the Pakistani railway

China being the emerging economic giant is involved in construction of rail tracks inside and outside China.However, authentic data about its extensive HSR of 20,000 km is not available in the public domain and it is suspected that the HSR has racked up an internal debt of over USD 300 billion.

Prior to 2003, China still did not have a single kilometer of HSR. A Japanese company Kawasaki Heavy Industries entered into licensing agreements with a Chinese company permitting it to avail its expertise and blueprints to develop HSR in China albeit, restricted to domestic usage in China and is now apprehensive that China is exporting Japanese HSR technology abroad in violation of the intellectual protection regime.

However, moves to sue the Chinese company faltered after Japan felt it had to compete with others to retain its access to the huge Chinese market in other sectors and could not afford to engage in an intellectual piracy skirmish with China.

China has inherent advantages over the US to bolster its HSR commitment including population density (“suburban sprawl”), property rights (land largely controlled by state) and commercial freight network (U.S rail system is efficient and economical for long-haul shipping of bulk goods).

In the US, trains remain oriented for freight and not for passenger traffic and in Pakistan it is the opposite leading to the financial ruin of the Pakistani railway.

In Pakistan, the National Highway and GT Road are the economic arteries of the country yet the affluent travel on the Motorways is a showcase of opulence and a capital intensive infrastructure. Even for the sake of discussion, highways cannot extend all the way to the seaports as the steep gradient of Balochistan makes rail the only viable option.

The avowed objective of the Crossrail project was to reduce the travel time by almost 21 minutes and the ostensible purpose of the diversion and substantial investment of public funds towards the Orange line is to symbolise the city of Lahore as a developed city with its accompanying political connotations and its contribution to the economic wellbeing of the common man is debatable at this point of time.

Nadir Mumtaz has contributed to the article

The writer is presently doing Masters in Sustainable Development from SOAS. He is involved in research in the areas of finance, energy and environment related to sustainable development

Published in Daily Times, June 9^th 2018.