Abstract
High-Speed Rail is often advertised as a sustainable alternative to air travel, and accordingly numerous initiatives for the construction of new HSR infrastructure are currently being pursued across Southeast Asia and the globe. However, beneath promises of “zero-emissions travel” frequently lie numerous hidden factors—how much steel is needed to build the railway? What energy sources are being used to generate the electricity which drives the train? Moreover, how many passengers are required for the train to be efficient relative to other forms of transport? This paper seeks to examine these questions to uncover what “hidden factors” may be present in HSR, using Vietnam’s proposed North–South Express Railway (NSER) as an example. This study calculates the CO2 emissions likely to be produced by the NSER from the construction steel and the power consumed in operation using publicly available data on the technical standards of the railway and existing data on emissions per energy source, combining this data with market size analyses of the central provinces of the proposed line based on official population and income statistics across a range of scenarios to estimate what level of ridership will be required to outperform an equivalent-length air journey. The research finds that under current projections, the HSR may emit more CO2 per end-to-end journey than a plane, that even in per-capita terms the emissions may be worse depending on the seat fill rate, and that the market size of Vietnam’s central provinces will present significant challenges in ensuring that the railway is efficient enough to outperform the plane in ridership terms. This demonstrates both the outstanding impacts of coal and other fossil fuel use in the energy mix and the potential link between environmental performance and regional inequality which constitute the hidden costs in HSR projects, and the exacerbated risks to the environment posed by inequality.
Highlights
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.From Britain’s HS2 line to Japan’s Chuo Shinkansen maglev project, high-speed rail infrastructure is currently a hot topic among policymakers around the world, withSoutheast Asian leaders among the forefront of this push
The first part concerns the CO2 involved in the production of the steel, the second part discusses the CO2 emissions of each end-to-end journey along the North–South Express Railway (NSER) in relation to the energy mix, and the third part discusses per-capita CO2 emissions under a range of scenarios
Vietnam Airlines alone operates some 40 flights per day on this route [24], which means that in effect, the steel is equivalent to around 905 days of operations by only Vietnam Airlines—in practice, considering the presence of other airlines and larger plane types in operation, the steel CO2 would be the equivalent of far fewer “operational days” of equivalent flights
Summary
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.From Britain’s HS2 line to Japan’s Chuo Shinkansen maglev project, high-speed rail infrastructure is currently a hot topic among policymakers around the world, withSoutheast Asian leaders among the forefront of this push. Express Railway (NSER), initially proposed in the early 2000s and recently revived by the Vietnamese government [1], is no exception. High-speed rail projects are often pitched as sustainable and environmentally friendly modes of long-distance transport, but the realities can be much more complex (and often inconvenient) than the promises. This project was initially based on three central hypotheses—each of these forms one section of this article. These were: This article is an open access article
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