• Bus routes into the city (jpg)

Thousands of bus commuters to Sydney’s CBD would need to hop off at major interchanges on the outskirts of the city before arriving at their desks in the morning, under proposals outlined in yesterday’s draft transport master plan.

The interchanges might be an inconvenience. But they might also be necessary, with the city already groaning under an unsustainable volume of bus traffic.

Yesterday’s plan puts the creation of new bus routes and interchanges some years away. Yet it also outlines the philosophy that would be adopted if a government was ever brave enough to redesign the city’s bus network.

In short, the philosophy recognises a simple trade-off: to have more frequent bus services, bus commuters would also need to get out and change more often.

Fewer bus routes would take people all the way from their home to their final destination.

This is how the master plan puts it: “The current radial one-seat bus service network, which attempts to provide single-service bus transport from many origins to many destinations, has little capacity for growth and is not adequate to the task of meeting complex 21st century travel patterns.”

The frequency of buses on major cross-city routes will increase.

But “this will be enabled in part by consolidating some existing low frequency bus routes onto major corridors, and by reallocating resources to provide higher frequency on trunk corridors and their rearranged intersecting feeder routes”, the plan says.

“The need for interchange may be increased, but the inconvenience of interchange is reduced due to higher service frequencies.”

All this is years away. The draft transport master plan puts “moving from a radial to a networked bus system” into the 10 years and more bracket.

But the sheer weight of numbers might force the government into overhauling the manner in which buses move through Sydney’s CBD much earlier than that.

During the busiest two hours of the morning, 1500 buses converge on a few narrow and congested corridors in the middle of Sydney.

And around York Street and Wynyard Station, the roads are already demonstrably at choking point.

To cope, the transport plan proposes turning more buses around before they hit the city. And it proposes running some buses on different roads into and out of the city.

“The reconfigured bus network will be planned around the principles of ‘near-side’ termination and some through-routing, rather than ‘far-side’ termination,” the plan says.

“Instead of the current arrangement under which many bus routes enter the CBD, travel through and terminate at the opposite side of the CBD, creating congestion and layover challenges, the future network will see additional cross-city Metrobus-style routes that traverse the CBD, terminating at destinations beyond,” it says.

“Local routes will terminate just inside the CBD [the ‘near side’], allowing passengers to connect to other high-capacity modes such as rail or light rail, or to walk a short distance to their final destination.”

This is the sort of policy that has been championed by the lord mayor, Clover Moore.

But Cr Moore, like many others, is frustrated it will take so long to implement, with the draft transport plan putting it off for at least five years.

She is also frustrated that there is as yet no policy on fares – no policy that would not penalise people who get out of one bus and transfer to another.

“While it’s great the government is looking at the way buses operate in our CBD, the plan is light on detail and commitment,” Cr Moore said.

“The City [of Sydney] strongly supports integrated fares but there is no commitment in the plan to ensure that people do not have to pay more if they require two different transport modes to complete their journey,” she said.

“And there’s no commitment to matching the frequency of different modes of transport. This is important because research shows that people will only change modes if there is a tangible benefit in travel time to their final destination.”

The Greens transport spokeswoman, Cate Faehrmann, is another calling for faster action.

“New bus interchanges in the city should be fast tracked in order to ensure our city doesn’t come to a complete standstill when these new buses come on line,” Ms Faehrmann said.

“I doubt frustrated commuters would mind having to alight a few stops earlier at an interchange because right now they are spending an inordinate amount of time at a standstill and this will only get worse.”