They got off the pot
Tags: High Speed Rail, Singapore

It appears that the (former) KL-SG HSR will no longer run to Jurong East, instead being a Malaysia-only project. I may be jumping my guns here, but with less than a week to go, there is now an overwhelming body of evidence towards which direction the project will proceed in, so no harm writing about it now.

The shortened HSR now apparently will have its terminal in Johor Bahru, though I guess where exactly remains to be seen. This has various ramifications for both sides of the Causeway, and Malaysians are rightly up in arms at the fact that they get a boondoggle and potentially much worse. But I think Singapore may get out of this in much better shape than expected. Maybe I might be overly optimistic, but why?

The nail in the coffin

Let’s look at the role that Singapore would have played.

There were already many problems with the HSR, its sole saving grace being the promise of getting from Jurong to Bandar Malaysia in 90 minutes and the accompanying economic benefit to both countries overall. But many sacrifices were made to make such a speed possible, and with what is known about the “rebooted” HSR project, you can’t make those sacrifices without actually delivering on the main goal. Given how the thorny issue of land acquisition was what even pushed the HSR route so far out of the various coastal towns and cities in the first place, while there is no more artificial limitation of separating express and local trips, without even an indirect connection to Singapore or the operating subsidies provided by the international service being able to sell tickets in SGD, the intermediate stations are going to be even more questionable than they are now.

An equivalent project in terms of speed, catchment, and travel time goals would have been the Taiwan HSR, but even if the Klang Valley considers itself a Taipei counterpart, Johor Bahru is no Kaohsiung and Melaka is no Taichung. Other intermediate cities fare even worse from a demographic perspective in Malaysia, with most of them hovering around the 200k mark, compared to in Taiwan where you’d have at least 1 million. And even unlike THSR where short TRA branch lines and urban transit sufficed to take passengers from the outer HSR stations in Wuri and Zuoying respectively to the downtowns, there is very little in the way of public transit in Melaka, and existent but poor links in JB.

Given the route that it has largely been committed to, as well as the built-up density along most potential alignments and related land acquisition issues, I think it unlikely that the HSR would ever be able to get as close to JB Sentral, or even Kempas, as the ETS. This means that even with the HSR, a significant amount of time is burnt getting from the HSR terminal to Bukit Chagar RTS terminal on the JB-Iskandar area’s local public transport or even taxis. Thus, it is likely that ETS can still remain a competitive option for JB-KL trips, and is likely to be cheaper too given the overheads of operating a HSR.

Of course, the ETS route is even worse for serving coastal communities, which means pretty much the only thing it’s good at is KL-JB trips. It should thus come at no surprise that back in Mahathir 1.0 when electrification of the KTM was proposed, with JB as the only large viable destination down south, the electrification project first proceeded north to Ipoh and Penang state, then the Thai border at Padang Besar.

Thus, with clear and much more sustainable alternatives for the KL-JB crowd, and long-distance expressway buses already doing a roaring trade in Malaysia, it’s easy to see how the HSR becomes a boondoggle, and Malaysians should be rightly up in arms at the matter.

Honey is delicious to some

I think the biggest losers here might actually be MRCB-Gamuda and YTL, who were originally contracted to begin construction work on the HSR if not for Pakatan winning the election and cancelling everything.

It has to be noted that all along, to maintain a perception of neutrality, Singapore had been insisting on a fair and open tender with various suppliers invited to finance and deliver their high-speed rail systems as a total package. Each country would only then be responsible for providing the built infrastructure for the trains to run on, and would also have to raise the money themselves.

It’s easy to see why this is not acceptable to the folks over at a certain Initiative, who would presumably be more than happy to provide a comprehensive financing, manpower, and delivery package much like what’s happening at the ECRL. Taking Singapore out of the picture, it would then be easy for Muhyiddin and gang to accept a full ride from the CCP.

After all, the signing of the initial contract between MRCB-Gamuda and MyHSR was literally called off at the last minute. There won’t be any contractual obligations to tear up now, especially if the conditions of Pooh picking up the tab says that CCP-controlled companies should be hired for the work.

Of course, some schools of thought say that this could be a negotiating tactic to box us in into future terms more favourable to Malaysia, especially if there is already an operating line on the Malaysia end and Singapore will have to procure its own compatible trains and systems, likely from the same source if intellectual property issues arise. While I still think that colocation of CIQs in both directions should have been done, with reciprocity in the form of the same arrangement at Bukit Chagar and through-running from the RTS to the TEL, we’ll now have to tear up a S$932 million contract for that to happen.

Keep your neighbours close

In the light of the challenging external environment, companies from both sides have been setting up in Singapore. As we well know, Singapore is a congested island with high housing costs and high office space cost too. Much like how several banks have their fintech operations in Changi Business Park, it was envisioned that with the HSR, these companies could put a regional HQ in Singapore but have operations in Malaysia where costs were lower.

While it may be premature to say this, without the HSR it makes it an easier ask to have these companies set up their secondary operations in Jurong or Woodlands instead. And the workers they hire will be spending in Singapore, not in Malaysia, contributing to the Singapore economy instead.

I also hate to say this especially with the effects of climate change becoming more apparent (even if it didn’t matter to the decision makers), but the air hub wins. Where there used to be a risk of the significant amount of southern Malaysia-bound flights, and thus connection options available, vanishing — with their market share being devoured by the HSR, that likely won’t happen anymore. In light of this, investments into expanding airport capacity can be justified, assuming they don’t change their mind in the next 11 years.

Besides, there are still land-based alternatives for the ecologically minded — the EDTP to Johor Bahru will be completed in 2022, after which time ETS trains departing KL are likely going to take only three hours or so to reach JB. Or perhaps the project could eventually be reactivated after some time when things have had the opportunity to progress on various fronts. After all, without Singapore, the entire project may need to be rebooted with some rather different goals this time around; even if Singapore is later invited to rejoin the project, things like the 90min travel time goal may well become impossible.

Stop the clock

Another blessing in disguise is that there will likely no longer be a pressing need to finish the Cross Island Line’s west section before the 1st of January 2031 — with there being a CRL station in the vicinity of the HSR terminal, it would likely have been more convenient than Jurong East. Thus, I believed that it would have been quite necessary to finish the CRL station at the same time in order to provide better connectivity to the HSR terminal than a 700m walk to Jurong East. In any case, still good to do it as soon as possible, and perhaps some of the HSR funding can be redirected to accelerating the CRL works.

The Punggol Coast extension, as far as I know, was the first project where the LTA “outsourced” the building of station structures proper to a non-LTA entity, there being no contract let out by them for the construction of the station. This allowed the developer — JTC, in this case — to better integrate the station into their development, but at the same time tied the station’s timeline to that of the JTC development (which may explain its 1-year delay). It was a risk that would otherwise have made sense, but not in these extraordinary times, and once again it may disrupt CRL plans too.

While this is unlikely given the modular layout of Woodlands North station allowing the station to be done separately from Malaysian flip-flopping, if the CRL station near the HSR terminal was designed as an integrated structure with the HSR terminal, additional design work will now be needed to “tear” it out of the HSR terminal and allow the station to be built separately. This may lead to delays, such as how an additional station along DTL3 resulted in a year’s delay on that project, and that we could well miss the originally promised timeline of having CRL ready by 2030. Of course, it’s good to get things done as quickly as we can, but a delay becomes more acceptable when a key source of ridership is taken out of the picture.

But this can be still dealt with too. Given that the CRL was announced to be built in three stages, with Stage 1 being the 29km east section, we can infer that the ~21km west section has been broken into two parts. Perhaps the boundary between stages 2 and 3 could be adjusted, if necessary, to allow for slack in the timeline for the CRL station at Jurong Gateway, such that people can still benefit from the line.

The pessimist says we already lost

Malaysian media claimed that it was the Singapore side which refused to allow the HSR to stop at KLIA, even with domestic service only. To be fair, I think this is a non issue, since just domestic services to KLIA, everything else unchanged, puts us at sort-of a disadvantage.

The fundamental problem lies with Changi. For reasons I can presumably explain away with the vague definition of “national security”, we in a way gimp our air hub by forcing passengers to undergo immigration clearance if continuing on by land or sea. The most immediate and current consequence is that we lose the opportunity to provide direct connections to the Riau Islands, with a transit-area connection between the airside of the airport, and Tanah Merah Ferry Terminal, as is practiced in Hong Kong. But we can see how this would extend to the HSR, where to take advantage of air-rail connections one would have to enter Singapore and then exit Singapore again, an additional two immigration checks. The same reason can explain why flights still exist from London Heathrow to Paris-CDG.

Furthermore, the design of the HSR terminus at Jurong East appears to be a dead end, and if you ask me does not allow for the HSR to be easily extended to Changi Airport. The easiest way would be to branch off the existing alignment before Jurong Terminal, which means service to Changi Airport will have to stand on its own merits and not be able to serve large parts of Singapore anyway. While you can look at a map and perhaps find ways to be able to thread a 200kph alignment to Marina South, extending it to the airport would be challenging — then finding a way to build a station within the airport. Sure, maybe HSR trains would be able to stop at T5, perhaps with direct access from the airside of the airport, but that doesn’t entirely solve the immigration checks problem, nor does it make anything easier for east-siders to access the HSR.

Much like Bandar Malaysia, the URA actually masterplanned the whole Jurong Lake District to revolve around the HSR terminus (even if some things like the IBP were pressed into service for this vision). Without the HSR terminus, all that’s left is a nice park. This may have other consequences, but we won’t see them for a while yet — JTC has also hedged their bets with other regional centres such as Woodlands North. And with Malaysia out of the picture, the biggest key for accessibility to JLD would actually be the Cross Island Line.

So I think the greatest takeaway here is that Singapore can take the $100–250 million dollars in compensation, along with the pot of money set aside for the implementation of the HSR, and use it to improve our domestic transportation network. If we want to be a whatever hub to encourage companies to set up not just their regional HQs, but also their smart manufacturing plants and whatnot, we will definitely need to implement better ways to connect the various regional centres.