Indonesia to launch SEA's first high speed rail

[Propfam 2,311]

Indonesia is set to launch Southeast Asia’s first high-speed railway on Monday (Oct 2), a delayed multibillion-dollar project backed by China that will cut travel between capital Jakarta and another major city by hours.

The Chinese-made bullet train named Whoosh is built to take more than 600 people to and from Jakarta and the Javan city of Bandung in 45 minutes, and is part of China’s Belt and Road infrastructure initiative.

President Joko Widodo has lauded the project for the fast ride it will provide between the two cities on Indonesia’s most populous island Java, and he will inaugurate it on Monday, local media reports indicated, citing officials.

“We will launch it on Oct 2 because on Oct 1, the president is busy,” Transport Minister Budi Karya Sumadi told reporters last Friday.

The train can reach speeds up to 350 kmh, and has cost a joint Chinese-Indonesian venture more than US$7 billion to build.

It was built by KCIC, which is made up of four Indonesian state companies and Beijing’s China Railway International Co.

It was set to cost less than US$5 billion and be built by 2019 but delays due to construction issues and the Covid-19 pandemic caused a spike in the outlay.

Authorities have been running public trials of the new high-speed journey of 142 km before its opening.

Chinese Premier Li Qiang rode the train with senior Indonesian minister Luhut Pandjaitan last month on his visit to Jakarta for a series of summits with South-east Asian leaders.

Pandjaitan told reporters last Thursday that Widodo plans to welcome Chinese President Xi Jinping in the future to ride the train, without providing further details.

(Source: The Business Times)

 

Indonesia’s launch of Southeast Asia’s first high-speed railway is set to be an occasion of national pride, but the China-backed project’s outstanding debt also highlight the costs of what is sure to become President Joko Widodo’s legacy.

After years of delays and budget blowouts, the US$7.2 billion Jakarta-Bandung high-speed train – which connects the two cities 142km (88 miles) apart in under an hour at speeds of up to 350km/h – is set to open to the public with great fanfare on Sunday.

Pre-trials conducted by the authorities indicated strong interest from Indonesians, who caused website outages after swarming online to grab 500 free tickets per day from September 17-30.

The government had also invited a who’s who of guests, including celebrities and social media influencers, ahead of the launch to experience the new train line named Whoosh (waktu hemat, operasi optimal, sistem handal), which translates to “saving time, optimal operation, reliable system”.

Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto, a presidential hopeful in the 2024 election, described Whoosh as “extraordinary” after he took a ride with Widodo on September 19.

“Proud to be a child of the nation. We have a high-speed train; it’s sophisticated, modern and clean. Feels like [I’m travelling] abroad, it feels very good,” Prabowo said.

Transport Minister Budi Karya Sumadi went a step further and compared Whoosh with Japan’s vaunted Shinkansen and France’s renowned Train à Grande Vitesse.

 

The project is expected to strengthen ties between Indonesia and China, and open doors to additional Belt and Road Initiative projects for Southeast Asia’s largest economy.

Andry Satrio Nugroho, industry, trade, and investment researcher at Jakarta-based Institute for Development of Economics and Finance (Indef), said the Beijing-funded rail project was part of Widodo’s presidential legacy, albeit a costly one.

“One of the infrastructures that developed countries usually have is high-speed trains. This is where Indonesia is headed. Jokowi wants Indonesia to get out of the middle-income trap by 2045, and be a nation whose per-capita income is equivalent to developed countries,” Andry said, using the Indonesian president’s popular nickname.

“However, this fast train is a burden to carry. The debt repayments still have to be met, as well as loan interest. Every year, we will also inject funds from the state budget to Kereta Api Indonesia (KAI),” he said, referring to the public railway operator. “So, the legacy that Jokowi has built is quite costly for the country.”

Kereta Cepat Indonesia China, the two countries’ joint venture behind the Jakarta-Bandung railway project, said last week that the Indonesian and Chinese governments had agreed to allocate 1 trillion rupiah (US$64.3 million) per year for China Railway Engineering Corporation and KAI to pay for the maintenance and operational costs.

 

‘Difficult for it to be profitable’

Initially estimated at US$6.07 billion, Whoosh’s budget ballooned by US$1.2 billion due to issues related to construction of facilities, land procurement and the Covid-19 pandemic.

To cover the cost overruns, Indonesia sought loans from the China Development Bank and secured a rate of “more than 2 per cent”, Widodo’s trusted cabinet minister Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan said in June.

The loan has been criticised by some for being a sum that could be avoided, if not for Widodo choosing to go with China instead of Japan for the project.

 

When Widodo in 2015 picked China over Japan to build the railway, he had vowed the state coffers would not be touched and that the project would be a business-to-business deal.

The loan’s 2 per cent repayment rate is also higher than the 0.1 per cent rate offered by Japan in its proposal, while the proposed Japanese budget of US$6.2 billion would have been lower than the project’s final price tag.

“This should be a lesson learned for the government. It is quite difficult for the fast train to be profitable. According to our calculations, it won’t be profitable even after the next three presidents,” Indef’s Andry said.

 

Still, Widodo appears to be satisfied with the railway project, which was completed four years later than planned.

He has repeatedly said he would again tap on China to extend the Jakarta-Bandung railway onwards to Surabaya, a business hub in the eastern part of Java Island some 781km from Jakarta, with the aim of making the line more economically sustainable.

Widodo has previously said he wanted Japan to build a separate Jakarta-Surabaya railway via northern Java Island, while it was envisaged that China would build a southern link.

The Japanese embassy in Indonesia told This Week in Asia on September 20 that Tokyo had submitted the results of a “preparatory study” for the northern line. It said Japan would “refrain from commenting on the extension of the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed rail, as the Indonesian government has not yet announced a specific policy on this matter”.

 

Analyst Christine Tjhin said the opening of the Jakarta-Bandung railway was an indication of Indonesia’s “responsiveness” to technology and innovation.

The transfer of technology from China to Indonesia, through both countries’ joint research initiatives, driver training and interactions between engineers, could one day translate into further advancement of Indonesia’s transport system, not just on the island of Java but also the rest of the archipelago, she said.

“We’re quite lucky because the one that we got now is already among the latest products from China,” said Tjhin, who is the director of strategic research at the Jakarta-based Gentala Institute, a consultancy focused on boosting ties between Indonesian and Chinese investors. “Who knows, maybe we can have a cross-island high-speed train … In China, they have the ones that can go above the water.”

According to Tjhin, the high-speed rail project had also boosted Indonesia’s image in the eyes of the Chinese public, as it was frequently featured in meetings between both countries’ officials at high-level forums, such as last year’s G20 summitin Bali and the recently concluded Asean summit.

“It captures the attention of the Chinese government and also the Chinese population. This is good because a lot of the perception in China about investing in Indonesia has been pretty much shadowed by our historical past,” she said, referring to crackdowns on ethnic Chinese people decades ago. “They have increased confidence that Indonesia is no longer anti-Chinese."

(Source: SCMP)

[Propfam 2,311]

My take:

1. Whoosh is a great name, despite not a local one. It feels like California HSR should be named, "Yikes!" lol.
2. The best deal ever, despite being unprofitable. Why? Because transit shouldn't be profitable. Transit is useful for many things. Sure, you can make transit profitable. But that would come with tons of disadvantages, like high ticket cost. Not to mention that it'll limit the usefulness of the HSR since only few people can afford. (Mind you, the HSR costs like $20 for the lowest tier and under $35 for the highest. There is even a rumor that the ticket could be as low as $10 but I think it's just for the first couple of days)
3. One of the best HSR you can hop into. CR400 family, which includes the AF model which used here, is one of the fastest HSR you can ride. With the operational speed of 350 km/h, it surely beats out things like ICE, TGV, and even Shinkansen.

[matias93 7,535]

I would say that the biggest thing that will determine if this ends being a successful project or not is how the price of the ticket and the actual travel times compare to flying, in the long term.

Even a cheap ticket won't do much if the travel times, counting arriving and departing from the stations, aren't competitive, and conversely, no increase in speed would make a dent on air travelling if the tickets are too expensive for normal people, which makes that detail of having low cost options only at the beginning.

Now, the main factor that could resolve a bad mixture of the former is to which places this train can move people. I don't know Java enough to say, but from the satellite images, it seems that the design of the railway might have some issues, like putting the terminal stations in Jakarta and Bandung too far away from the city centre, thereby eliminating the main advantage it has over air travel, which is being able to take the train from the city centre (I mean, they literally put the Jakarta terminal just beside the airport? really?), and not including intermediate stations that could add extra passengers to the main route travellers (though admittedly this project looks a lot like the first phase for a trans-Javan high speed railway, which would make much more sense).

Cost overruns, which are usually the main complain in this kind of projects, are not that important in the long term (you have a relevant point there), but the project has to prove itself successful to make people retroactively justify them, and crucially, they need to be solved in the operation stage, because otherwise the HSR will become a money sink and an easy target of criticism for any government, making all to easy to defund or scrape it for petty political gains.

All in all, I hope this project succeeds, but from afar, it looks like it hasn't jumped all its hurdles yet.

[Propfam 2,311]

It's official. Yesterday, the line was announced by the president. Yes, it's indeed called Whoosh. Unfortunately, I can't include the animation due to my time. It's quite sick, tbh.

Answering Matias:

1. The stations are indeed in the outskirts. Very typical of Chinese designs. This is intended to spark development around the stations (and yes, there are intermediate stations). Of course, for the Halim one, it's already developed. So the rationales are land availability (huge deal in Jakarta) and being on the LRT line.
2. Yes, it's indeed the first phase. There are 2nd and 3rd phase while will be done. The first would be the southern line, crossing Yogyakarta, since it's more attractive (ever heard of Pantai Selatan? That mythical icon has strong appeal to people in Java and Javanese in particular). It'll be done by China, again, for obvious reason. And it would be a HSR since it's just so cheap if you build it that far. The 3rd phase is basically a Japanese apology. It'll cross the northern part of the island, which used to be very famous but also quite poor. I guess it'll be semi high-speed, probably either on the level of ECRL/Boten-Vientiane, or likes of Athens since Japan has experiences with both. Both end in Surabaya, 2nd largest city in Indonesia that's also almost as wealthy as Jakarta. So, there will be insane amount of passenger once one of both phases are completed.
3. There are intermediate stations. I have an official album by the company itself and it shows 4 stations (note Walini is canceled at the last minute due to time constraints). Details are in Chinese and Indonesian.
4. The HSR is pretty much outcompeting with airlines. Flights from Halim to Bandung costs like $50-70 depending on the situation (ofc, on mudik aka homecoming seasons, the price is higher). What more interesting is the highway. It's around the same price as the HSR, except it'll cost more due to fuel and accummulated maintenance of the car (since bikes can't enter highways). Carbon emission, while it's a bit murky thanks to reliance on coal while also building hydros and geothermals, I bet the HSR would win.
5. I know hypes often won't last very long. But I think this would be the same as Trans-Java highway. It'd be very popular, despite a lil unaffordable for most people in Java, except ofc Jakartans. It's just the fastest travel possible under $40. I don't know about the security, since Chinese built railways are famously known for that.