Success Factors of the Asia and Europe High Speed Rail: Lesson Learned for Indonesia as the Massive Strategy Services

Abstract

Southeast Asia might have its first high-speed rail (HSR) project in the next few years. Located in Indonesia, this project is expected to connect Indonesia’s capital Jakarta with the neighboring city Bandung in around 150 kilometers of distance. Proponents and critics have been addressed to this plan but only small amount of research has been conducted to examine HSR’s operating system in Asia and Europe and the rate of success of HSR implementation in Indonesia. The objective of this paper is to provide an estimate of the total cost of building, operating and maintaining a HSR with technical characteristics and the supply and demand conditions based on Asia and Europe experiences. Although the calculation formula provides a lower bound to the actual cost, this expression summarizes the critical factors that must be taken into account when analyzing the costs of HSR lines. These include the line length, the number of trains needed to respond to the demand, train capacity, average distance and the corresponding unit costs. This understanding is very important and meaningful for Indonesia’s future projects as it will lead to a better analysis of the expected construction and operating costs. Moreover, the number of passengers to be transported that are differentiated by economic and geographic conditions, and becomes the urgently service delivery to the nation people. This paper also provides suggestions and recommendations toward the government in considering the total service community.

Keywords: Asia and Europe, critical factor, high-speed rail, Indonesia, total costs