Community Briefing Note 12 — What happens when UWA gets a railway?
METRONET on Swan Ferry Expansion
Damien Smith | Naval Architect
17 October 2026
Infrastructure Australia has just completed its first-stage evaluation of the WA Government’s long-term planning for additional heavy rail in Perth.
One of the options is a metropolitan orbital railway connecting major activity centres without requiring passengers to travel through the CBD. The route shown runs through Murdoch, Booragoon, UWA-QEII, Shenton Park and Stirling, with possible later extensions making a near-complete orbital route around Perth.
This is still an early-stage proposal. It is not a funded railway.
But it is not new either.
The Stirling-Murdoch Orbital appeared in the WA Government’s Transport @ 3.5 Million plan in 2016. That plan specifically contemplated an orbital rail service connecting UWA-QEII and Murdoch, with Stirling to UWA-QEII also forming part of the longer-term network.[1]
So this is not information that suddenly appeared after the ferry business case was written.
And that raises a fairly obvious question.
What future are we comparing the ferry against?
The ferry business case runs for 30 years, from 2026 to 2055.
PTA says its Strategic Transport Evaluation Model, or STEM, predicts that a 20-minute ferry service will generate 3.1 million additional public-transport trips a year by 2030, rising to 7.2 million by 2055.
Community Briefing Note 02 asked a pretty basic question about those numbers:
Additional compared with what?
The ferry fleet itself plainly cannot carry 7.2 million passengers a year. PTA describes these as additional trips across the wider public-transport network. There may be a perfectly legitimate modelling explanation for that.But to understand it we need to know the counterfactual: what does Perth’s transport system look like in 2055 if the ferry does not exist?
The orbital railway makes that question considerably more interesting. At the simplest level, you would expect the modelling to be able to compare something like this:
| Future network | Ferry | Orbital rail |
|---|---|---|
| Baseline | No | No |
| Ferry only | Yes | No |
| Rail only | No | Yes |
| Rail and ferry | Yes | Yes |
If the orbital railway is part of a credible future transport network, what matters is the difference between the future network with the ferry and the same future network without it.
A railway through UWA could change that comparison in either direction. It might take passengers away from the ferry, it might feed passengers into it, or it might change which ferry terminal makes the most sense.
That is exactly the sort of thing the transport model is supposed to sort out.
There is another model we haven’t seen
There is also a separate PTA document called the Rail Growth Plan.
We know it exists because it has been discussed in Parliament.
In August 2022, the Government confirmed in the Legislative Council that the Rail Growth Plan existed and aligned with rail planning then before Parliament. When asked to table it, the response was that it had never been made public because it was an “internal working document that the agency relies on.”[2]
A later parliamentary debate recorded PTA’s description of the Rail Growth Plan as its response to forecast population and patronage growth and its long-term strategy for the evolution of Perth’s passenger rail network through to 2051.[3]
We have therefore got long-range rail patronage and network planning inside PTA.
We just can’t see it.
Infrastructure Australia has now taken the WA Government’s orbital rail proposal through the first stage of its own evaluation process and placed it in the 5–10 year pipeline for potential future investment.[4]
So how does all this fit together?
Which passengers belong to the ferry?
This goes back to the problem identified in Community Briefing Note 02.
PTA says the ferry produces millions of additional public-transport trips.
But Perth’s public-transport system is going to change substantially over the same 30-year period anyway. Population will grow. Land use will change. Rail capacity will increase. New services may be built. Existing services will become more frequent. People may change from cars to public transport for reasons that have nothing to do with the ferry.
Those passengers cannot simply be counted as benefits caused by the ferry.
The model needs to isolate what changes because the ferry exists at Matilda Bay.
In other words, take the future Perth transport network, including whatever rail investment is reasonably assumed, and run it without the ferry.
These are the passengers underpinning much of the claimed economic benefit.
What about different ferry systems?
There is another layer to this.
Even if we accept that a ferry connection produces additional public-transport demand, that does not tell us that this particular ferry system is the best way to produce it.
The current proposal is only one possible combination of route, terminal locations, vessel type, speed, service frequency and charging infrastructure. A proper comparison should be able to tell us what happens if those inputs change. Would a different terminal produce similar patronage? Would a lower-cost ferry system produce most of the same transport benefit?
Does moving the UWA terminal from Central Matilda Bay to somewhere like JoJo’s materially change patronage once the rest of the future public-transport network is included?
If the claimed benefits depend heavily on one very particular ferry configuration, we should be able to see that.
And what does this do to Matilda Bay?
The published Multi-Criteria Analysis gives Central Matilda Bay an important advantage because it has the “best pedestrian connectivity to UWA campus”. JoJo’s receives the lowest rating on that criterion.
But the State’s own long-term transport planning includes a potential heavy-rail connection directly serving UWA-QEII. That does not prove JoJo’s is the better ferry terminal.
It does mean that a site-selection decision influenced by current UWA accessibility should be tested against a future in which UWA accessibility changes substantially. Again, that is what sensitivity testing is for.
Two questions for PTA
- What future transport network was assumed in the ferry business case’s 2055 STEM modelling? Did it include the Stirling-Murdoch/UWA orbital railway, the Rail Growth Plan and other long-term rail investments? If so, what was assumed and from what date?
- What is the ferry’s actual incremental patronage? Please show forecast public-transport trips for the same future network both with and without the ferry, including actual ferry boardings, mode shift from cars and additional trips elsewhere on the network.
This does not require anyone to predict perfectly what Perth will look like in 2055. Models are uncertain. Projects change. Sensitivity testing exists precisely because of that.
But the orbital railway has been in Government transport planning since at least 2016. PTA’s Rail Growth Plan was already sufficiently developed to be discussed in Parliament in 2022.
This is not new information for Government. Someone should have considered how these systems interact.And someone should be able to show us the numbers.
About the author
Prepared by Damien Smith, Perth naval architect and Director of Damien Smith Design Pty Ltd.
Disclosures: Damien Smith Design was a tenderer for the Swan River ferry project. Damien is also a member of the Management Committee of Mounts Bay Sailing Club and a member of the Australian Labor Party.
The views expressed in this note are Damien Smith’s own and do not represent Mounts Bay Sailing Club, the Australian Labor Party, or any other organisation.
Sources
[1] Western Australian Government, Transport @ 3.5 Million, 2016. Public transport network planning including the Stirling-Murdoch Orbital and UWA-QEII.
[2] Western Australian Parliament, Legislative Council Hansard, 9 August 2022. Discussion of the PTA Rail Growth Plan and confirmation that it was an unpublished internal working document relied upon by the agency.
[3] Western Australian Parliament, Legislative Council Hansard, 22 November 2022. Further discussion of the Rail Growth Plan, including PTA’s description of it as a long-term strategy responding to forecast population and patronage growth through to 2051.
[4] Infrastructure Australia, Stage 1 Evaluation Report: Perth Rail Network Planning, 2026. Evaluation of the WA Government proposal including the Perth metropolitan orbital rail route.
[5] Public Transport Authority, METRONET on Swan Ferry Service Expansion – Business Case Summary 2025, particularly the patronage modelling and 30-year economic appraisal.