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Would High-Speed Railways in Indonesia Be a Fast Track to Wasted Money and Disaster?
Yohanes Sulaiman | May 22, 2012
Yohanes Sulaiman | May 22, 2012
On Wednesday, the regional government of West Java announced with much fanfare
that it was planning to work with the government of Japan to build a high-speed
rail network to connect Jakarta and Bandung, and would later expand it to
include Cirebon.
This is welcome news. A high-speed rail network is sorely needed in a traffic-choked Java that lacks a fast and reliable transportation system. Similar to Japan and European countries, Java has a very high population density, making it prone to massive traffic jams. So the creation of an efficient rail network would benefit the island greatly.
Yet, at the same time, this project is fraught with perils and, if improperly managed, could end up as a white elephant that will be just another massive waste of taxpayer money and state resources.
First, there are the problems with construction. The huge Rp 56.1 trillion ($6 billion) rail project will invite corruption. Shoddy construction would undermine public trust in the safety of the system and would spell doom for the project from the start.
The experience of China’s high-speed rail network should be taken into consideration. For years, China has been building a vast high-speed rail network, both as a sign of national pride and as a way to open China’s inner regions for investment and to increase economic growth.
The network was hailed as such a major success that when President Barack Obama arrived in the White House, one of his first decisions was to expand the high-speed rail network in the United States.
In 2011, however, cracks both literally and figuratively began to show in China’s rail network, drawing criticism.
Apparently much of the network was built with such haste and without careful scrutiny that parts of it were shoddily constructed by corrupt contractors. There were reports of corruption within the Railway Ministry, leading to the removal of the minister. The Wenzhou train collision was just the tip of the iceberg as reports poured in of poor management and flaws in the design of the railroad system itself.
All these revelations led to the collapse of public trust in the project, leading to a steep decline in riders and forcing China to halt the construction of 10,000 kilometers of tracks and postpone many construction projects in order to address the defects in the system.
The second problem is Indonesia’s ability to maintain such a system — assuming the project is finished on time and is properly constructed.
One of the terrible habits of Indonesia is devoting huge resources to build expensive projects and then spending very little to maintain them, leading the finished infrastructure to fall into disrepair and eventual collapse.
The Mahakam II Bridge collapse is the poster child of this problem. The bridge, finished in 2001 in East Kalimantan at a cost of Rp 150 billion, collapsed in 2011 due to a lack of maintenance, as no money was allocated from the regional budget for upkeep, except once in 2007.
High-speed trains, running at 300 kilometers per hour, would place massive stress on Indonesia’s rail infrastructure, creating a need for careful inspections and regular maintenance, driving up the annual costs and making the railroad system very expensive.
The potential costs of the system were noted by Inaki Barron de Angoiti, director of high-speed rail at the International Union of Railways in Paris, when he was talking about a Spanish high-speed railroad project.
“High-speed rail is good for society and it’s good for the environment, but it’s not a profitable business,” he said.
The New York Times further noted that “he reckons that only two routes in the world — between Tokyo and Osaka, and between Paris and Lyon, France — have broken even.”
It is doubtful that the relatively low ticket price of Rp 150,000 would cover all the costs of the system, including the use of electricity, which means Indonesia’s high-speed rail network would require a lot of subsidies in its first years of operation. This would make it tempting for the government to skip maintenance altogether, not unlike the Mahakam II Bridge — and that is just looking for serious trouble.
So while the government’s ambition to build a high-speed rail system is admirable and much welcomed, it would have to ensure a higher than usual amount of discipline in constructing, operating and maintaining the system, lest this simply be a white elephant, or worse still, a disaster in the making.
This is welcome news. A high-speed rail network is sorely needed in a traffic-choked Java that lacks a fast and reliable transportation system. Similar to Japan and European countries, Java has a very high population density, making it prone to massive traffic jams. So the creation of an efficient rail network would benefit the island greatly.
Yet, at the same time, this project is fraught with perils and, if improperly managed, could end up as a white elephant that will be just another massive waste of taxpayer money and state resources.
First, there are the problems with construction. The huge Rp 56.1 trillion ($6 billion) rail project will invite corruption. Shoddy construction would undermine public trust in the safety of the system and would spell doom for the project from the start.
The experience of China’s high-speed rail network should be taken into consideration. For years, China has been building a vast high-speed rail network, both as a sign of national pride and as a way to open China’s inner regions for investment and to increase economic growth.
The network was hailed as such a major success that when President Barack Obama arrived in the White House, one of his first decisions was to expand the high-speed rail network in the United States.
In 2011, however, cracks both literally and figuratively began to show in China’s rail network, drawing criticism.
Apparently much of the network was built with such haste and without careful scrutiny that parts of it were shoddily constructed by corrupt contractors. There were reports of corruption within the Railway Ministry, leading to the removal of the minister. The Wenzhou train collision was just the tip of the iceberg as reports poured in of poor management and flaws in the design of the railroad system itself.
All these revelations led to the collapse of public trust in the project, leading to a steep decline in riders and forcing China to halt the construction of 10,000 kilometers of tracks and postpone many construction projects in order to address the defects in the system.
The second problem is Indonesia’s ability to maintain such a system — assuming the project is finished on time and is properly constructed.
One of the terrible habits of Indonesia is devoting huge resources to build expensive projects and then spending very little to maintain them, leading the finished infrastructure to fall into disrepair and eventual collapse.
The Mahakam II Bridge collapse is the poster child of this problem. The bridge, finished in 2001 in East Kalimantan at a cost of Rp 150 billion, collapsed in 2011 due to a lack of maintenance, as no money was allocated from the regional budget for upkeep, except once in 2007.
High-speed trains, running at 300 kilometers per hour, would place massive stress on Indonesia’s rail infrastructure, creating a need for careful inspections and regular maintenance, driving up the annual costs and making the railroad system very expensive.
The potential costs of the system were noted by Inaki Barron de Angoiti, director of high-speed rail at the International Union of Railways in Paris, when he was talking about a Spanish high-speed railroad project.
“High-speed rail is good for society and it’s good for the environment, but it’s not a profitable business,” he said.
The New York Times further noted that “he reckons that only two routes in the world — between Tokyo and Osaka, and between Paris and Lyon, France — have broken even.”
It is doubtful that the relatively low ticket price of Rp 150,000 would cover all the costs of the system, including the use of electricity, which means Indonesia’s high-speed rail network would require a lot of subsidies in its first years of operation. This would make it tempting for the government to skip maintenance altogether, not unlike the Mahakam II Bridge — and that is just looking for serious trouble.
So while the government’s ambition to build a high-speed rail system is admirable and much welcomed, it would have to ensure a higher than usual amount of discipline in constructing, operating and maintaining the system, lest this simply be a white elephant, or worse still, a disaster in the making.
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