350 km/h railway with 57 billion dollars: Necessary or not?

In recent days, the media has reported a lot about whether or not to build a high-speed railway, a 350 km/h railway with 57 billion dollars or a 200 km/h railway with 27 billion dollars. Many veteran experts have spoken out in support and opposition to this or that project. In this article, I will mention another perspective on railways and transportation in general.

Usually, railway construction plans will take a long time to build. As many people know, just a short section of urban railway in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City took nearly 10 years to build and is still not completed. So, it will not be surprising if we cannot complete any railway construction in the next 10 years. Therefore, determining the official target for railways in particular and the national transport system in the next many years, such as 2050 or 2100 is very important.

What will Vietnam need by 2050? According to the current development speed of Vietnam, both the demand for passenger transport and freight transport from North to South of Vietnam will increase a lot, so the transportation system will need to meet both. Currently, we have a fairly good airport network and there are 5 airlines, with increasingly competitive prices. Instead of using high-speed railways, aviation will help us transport passengers and the national budget does not need to spend too much money on railways. Vietnam's private aviation companies are doing very well in aviation services, with the current development momentum, by 2050, we will not have to worry about transporting passengers from North to South by high-speed railway, even at 350 km/h or 200 km/h. Therefore, the option of building a 350 km/h railway just to transport passengers with 57 billion dollars should be eliminated. What the State has to do is to regulate the development of aviation services and build a reasonable airport network. The State budget does not need to spend much money to do that. The remaining question is whether to build a 200 km/h railway or not?

So what remains is the North-South freight transport, how should we solve it? Naturally, if we eliminate the 350 km/h railway, we should of course choose the 200 km/h railway. The 200 km/h railway also solves the freight transport problem that the 350 km/h railway cannot solve. So, do we have the optimal solution yet?

Modern railways were invented in Germany in the 16th century. Railways developed rapidly after the industrial revolution and became extremely popular in the 19th and 20th centuries thanks to the use of steam engines. Vietnam's current railways were also built by the French thanks to that popularity. If our thinking is limited to choosing railway technology to develop transportation for the 21st and 22nd centuries, we have limited ourselves to 19th century technology.

We are in the 21st century, many new technologies have been and are being developed. Currently, modern transportation has two prominent technologies: self-driving car technology and billionaire Elon Musk's hyperloop train technology. With the current conditions in Vietnam, hyperloop train technology may not be suitable because it is still in the passenger transport testing phase, but it does not rule out that we can use that technology in the near future to develop inner-city traffic. The remaining technology is self-driving car technology. Let's evaluate whether we can use self-driving car technology to develop the transportation system in Vietnam or not? Self-driving car technology is developing very strongly, and it is estimated that it can be popular around the year 2030. Self-driving car technology can be used to transport both passengers and goods over long distances. Can Vietnam choose to use self-driving car technology to develop the transportation system or not?

Self-driving car technology requires a highway network. We will have to develop a highway system for self-driving trucks to travel. According to McKinsey's forecast, the cost of transporting by self-driving trucks can be reduced by up to 45% in the future. This cost is completely competitive with the cost of transporting by rail. According to the current plan, Vietnam will have a good highway network by the 2030s. The road network has begun to develop rapidly in recent years, instead of building new railways, Vietnam should continue to develop more highways. We also do not need to wait until the 2030s to use railways, with the current road foundation and the near future, we will continue to use trucks to transport goods. The government only needs to continue to improve the road system, design policies to make the application of self-driving car technology in the future easy. We can even use the Ho Chi Minh Highway as a dedicated road for self-driving trucks. Government agencies can approach self-driving technology companies to test the technology on Vietnam’s roads to support the mass adoption of self-driving technology in the near future.

Self-driving car technology will certainly develop explosively in the 21st - 22nd century like railway technology in the 19th - 20th century, we should start investing and preparing from now to take advantage of it. Instead of building a complete railway for the whole country with a huge amount of money, we just need to continue building roads and use railways in places where trucks cannot be used. By using 21st century technology such as self-driving cars to redesign the national transportation system, we will not only save a lot of money for the country but also help us go faster in applying the latest technology to develop the country.