Responding at the discussion "High-speed railway - Opportunities and challenges" organized by the Government Electronic Information Portal on October 29, Deputy Minister of Transport Nguyen Danh Huy said the reason why the high-speed railway project has been studied for nearly 20 years, and is only now preparing to be implemented in practice.
Deputy Minister of Transport said: "It can be said that any investment project must come from practical needs. For the North-South high-speed railway, research has taken 18 years.
In fact, in 2011, we submitted it to the competent authority, but at that time there were some concerns.
The first is the need for large investment capital while the scale of the economy is still very modest. The second problem is that our public debt at that time was also very high. The third is the problem of interpretation of speed and functionality.
Up to now, in the process of researching and establishing 5 specialized plans, we have forecasted that on the North-South corridor, the demand for transporting both goods and passengers is the largest.
It can be said that we have the geographical economic characteristics of distributing large urban areas, large industrial zones, and large economic zones all concentrated in coastal areas.
With that geo-economic characteristic, we have an advantage in transporting goods by sea, because according to research in the world as well as in the country, sea transport costs are still the cheapest cost in transporting goods.
We have also forecasted transportation demand and found that this is the right time and necessary to build the North-South high-speed railway to restructure the transportation market share appropriately.
Through research, in terms of advantages, distances over 1,000 km are suitable and advantageous for aviation, while distances under 1,000 km must be by rail.
The second problem is that at this point, our economy has reached 430 billion USD, and public debt is also at a very reasonable level of about 37% (in 2023). Our resource conditions are basically not a big challenge.
The third issue is technical concerns, we have also explained, for example why the speed of 350 km/h was chosen, or why the function of use is passenger transport.
Basically, it has been explained through 10 years of research with the participation of many experts from countries around the world as well as interdisciplinary delegations visiting and studying in 6 countries with developed high-speed railways. These issues have now been clearly explained.
This is truly the premise and motivation for us to enter the era of self-development."
