Plans to rebuild Darling Harbour, return trams to the CBD and build more motorways have divided the city, writes Jacob Saulwick.
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Transformation … Barry O’Farrell announcing plans to give Darling Harbour a billion-dollar facelift. Photo: Louise Kennerley
Barry O’Farrell and Gladys Berejiklian are nothing if not cautious. So before the Premier and his Transport Minister faced the media at the north-west rail link’s Castle Hill information office on Thursday morning to release the state’s transport plan – the plan they say will guide what happens in Sydney and NSW in the next 20 years – their staff prepared a list of questions likely to be asked and some potential responses.
The document, displayed on the screen of the office’s reception computer to the side of where the press conference would be held, ran through information that would soon be repeated almost verbatim.
Why had they rejected the advice of Infrastructure NSW? Why had they dismissed the idea of an underground bus tunnel? And with all the focus on the CBD, what was being done for the bulk of greater Sydney and the rest of NSW?
Illustration: michaelmucci.com
But first, it is worth running over what happened this week.
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Six hundred and thirty days after he won an overwhelming mandate to govern, O’Farrell has started to expand on what he will do with that mandate, the big things he will strive to achieve and, perhaps, what the man who gave himself the job of Minister for Western Sydney might be remembered by.
On Tuesday, he announced plans to tear down most of the major buildings in Darling Harbour and undertake a massive works program building larger ones.
And on Thursday, he committed his government to ripping up the CBD’s main street for a tram line running to Randwick and Kingsford, potentially the biggest change in the way the centre of the city’s transport will operate since the installation of the Eastern Suburbs railway line in the 1970s.
Thursday’s plan included other initiatives. There is the WestConnex motorway to run from Auburn, under the inner west, to the airport and the M5. There is the north-west rail link from Rouse Hill to Epping. And, some time in about a decade, the government says it will begin building another heavy rail link though the centre of the city to allow more trains to run into town from the outer suburbs.
But an important question hanging over Thursday’s plan was if the government would have the gumption to fulfil its election pledge to return trams to the city and the eastern suburbs.
On the estimate of the lord mayor, Clover Moore, who has long championed the revival of CBD light rail, returning trams to the city has been parsed through as many as 50 studies in the past 20-odd years.
”George Street is the civic spine of the city,” said Elizabeth Farrelly in endorsing a tram and pedestrian boulevard through the heart of the city. Farrelly, now an opinion columnist for the Herald, said those words in 1993 when she was a councillor with the City of Sydney.
”It sounds like a good idea but it would be wrong to make a premature statement before … feasibility studies are completed.” This was said in 1995 by the then transport minister Brian Langton, Bob Carr’s first man in the job, when commissioning studies into a tram line from Central Station to Circular Quay.
O’Farrell recalled the history of Sydney’s aborted tram dream at his announcement on Thursday. ”I was there at the opening by Bob Carr of the existing light rail into the inner west,” he said, referring to the start of Sydney’s sole light rail line from Central to Lilyfield in 1997.
”At that opening, Bob Carr said that project would be the renaissance of light rail across the city. And nothing was done by Labor.”
One main reason nothing was done was the risk involved. Putting trams in the CBD necessitates disrupting one of the most densely used and economically important corridors of the city, state and country.
And one of the benefits of light rail, removing buses from the street, will also require some passengers to hop off buses to change to trams.
”Public transport users would be discriminated against by the plan,” Allan Miles, from the advocacy group Action for Public Transport, said in 1993, responding to Farrelly and the City of Sydney’s proposal.
”Whereas car owners would just drive their cars into a car park station, public transport users would be forced to change.”
Miles said this week he still had those concerns.
However, O’Farrell and Berejiklian say the light rail plan makes sense because it is set against an unsustainable status quo.
”Simply adding more cars and buses to existing routes would only make Sydney’s roads more congested – particularly in the CBD, where the Harbour Bridge, York Street, George Street and Elizabeth Street are often clogged in the peak,” Berejiklian says.
The congestion means buses rarely run on time.
Transport for NSW says between 19 per cent and 34 per cent of buses run within two to three minutes of their scheduled arrival time in the CBD and along Anzac Parade, where the line will extend to. The department expects 97 per cent of trams to arrive on time when the line opens in either 2019 or 2020.
There is a reasonable amount of detail about how the trams will work. Between Circular Quay and Central, trams will run every two to three minutes during peak hours. But it is unclear how often they will run outside these hours, though the government says they will be frequent enough to allow users to ”turn up and go”.
The trams will be large, capable of carrying about 300 people. That has become the international standard for light rail vehicles that bear more of a resemblance to futuristic metro trains than the old tram to Bondi Beach with its rails for hopping on and swinging off.
There will be nine stops in the city, bookended by those at Circular Quay and on the Chalmers Street side of Central Station. There will be a 1-kilometre pedestrian zone on George Street between Bathurst and Hunter Street, but emergency vehicles, property owners and small delivery trucks will still be able to use this stretch.
At Chalmers Street and Central, east-bound trams will be able to pick up students for the University of NSW, Sydney Boys and Sydney Girls High schools, and day-trippers to the Sydney Cricket Ground, Sydney Football Stadium and Randwick Racecourse.
From Chalmers Street, the line will turn left into Devonshire Street, past the Gaelic Theatre and the Shakespeare Hotel with a stop placed near the corner of Riley Street.
Devonshire Street, however, finishes at Bourke Street. This means the government will have to buy out the properties of some homeowners before the line can nudge its way across the Eastern Distributor, Moore Park and into a separate bus lane on Anzac Parade.
On Anzac Parade, the stops will become further apart to try to increase the speed on the route. Even so, the journey times do not appear very short. It will take 20 minutes to get from Randwick to Central, and another 15 minutes to get to Circular Quay.
Berejiklian believes journey times are just one thing to consider – light rail will be more comfortable than the existing buses, and it will offer greater reliability.
Potentially the greatest risk, however, in the government’s determination to revamp the CBD and introduce light rail in the eastern suburbs, lies in highlighting what it will not do.
After he released Infrastructure NSW’s state infrastructure strategy in October, its chairman, Nick Greiner, told a briefing of senior officials the most glaring weakness in the strategy was what it did for the broad arc of Sydney’s west.
WestConnex, the proposal to carve a motorway under Parramatta Road and then a tunnel to the airport, will make it easier for people in Parramatta to drive to south-east Sydney.
But it will offer little to anyone getting from Liverpool to Campbelltown, from Bankstown to Penrith, from Parramatta to Blacktown.
The O’Farrell government is building the massive north-west rail link to Rouse Hill. And the south-west rail link, started under Labor, should be finished by 2016. It is also talking about bus improvements in the west.
But there will be plenty of criticism that its transport priorities do little for much of greater Sydney. The Opposition Leader, John Robertson, is already questioning whether western Sydney train commuters will be asked to subsidise eastern suburbs tram users.
”The plan shows the continued neglect of western Sydney, which is incomprehensible, both from a political point of view and from a planning point of view,” Professor Phillip O’Neill, the foundation director of the Urban Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney, says.
”The plan seems blind to the City of Cities planning philosophy for Sydney over the last decade,” he says, referring to the logic of developing Newcastle, Wollongong, Parramatta, Penrith and Liverpool as powerful centres in their own right.
”The transport plan … offers nothing to support the growth of these regional cities. We must remember that the number one problem for transport in Sydney is the car dependency in greater western Sydney.”
O’Neill cites recent figures from the Bureau of Transport Statistics showing that greater western Sydney will need 383,000 additional jobs in the next 20 years. ”The transport plan takes no account of this regional jobs growth. In other words it says to people in western Sydney and the regions that your lives of daily car dependence and congestion are to remain as they are at present.”
David Borger, a former Labor roads minister and mayor of Parramatta, concedes failures of his own side of politics on this score. ”I think that our government lacked vision for employment in western Sydney in its later years,” Borger, now the western Sydney director of the Sydney Business Chamber, says.
But he is also concerned the 20-year plan offers little to redress this. ”It is an excellent vision for central Sydney, but we will have a very unbalanced society if we don’t create jobs in western Sydney,” he says.
”I think WestConnex will certainly provide some assistance for the Parramatta area. It will mean it is a lot closer to drive there. But it probably won’t have a huge impact on the Penrith or Liverpool town centres in terms of employment.
”We do need more vision for how we can grow places like Parramatta.”
The Parramatta council, for instance, has proposed its own light rail line that will connect Castle Hill, Parramatta and Bankstown. In Thursday’s plan, the government said it would work with the council to refine this proposal and complete a study into it.
If one goes by the history of George Street’s light rail proposals, Parramatta’s light rail is only 49 studies away from getting someone to say they will build it.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/the-vision-thing-20121214-2bf42.html#ixzz2F4KeucFk