A lurch in the right direction for rattled commuters

The Premier, Kristina Keneally, and her Minister for Transport, David Campbell, deserve credit for abandoning the ill-conceived efforts to reinvent the wheel on public transport.

By dumping the $5.3 billion CBD Metro, they have accepted the central tenet of the independent public inquiry into transport - headed by the state's former rail and roads boss Ron Christie - and decided to build on the essentially sound CityRail system that serves Sydney.

Christie and the Herald were not opposed to long-term plans for metros that serve new growth areas of Sydney. But the ad hoc plan for the CBD Metro was heinously expensive, modelled on rubbery patronage forecasts, and potentially disastrous because it would have blocked the vital expansion of the heavy rail network.

The extension of the light rail from the Lilyfield terminus to Dulwich Hill, intersecting with the inner west and Bankstown lines, was a no-brainer and long overdue, while the planned light rail to Barangaroo and on to Circular Quay will ease bus congestion in the CBD.

The introduction of 1000 new buses is another worthy initiative. As demonstrated by the former mayor of London Ken Livingstone, who made good quality public transport the centrepiece of his administration, flooding the suburbs with new buses builds patronage for future light and heavy rail services.

But with the pat on the shoulder must also come a clip to the back of the head because this plan has severe limits. The failure to build the Parramatta-Epping rail link - another glaringly obvious project - will continue to cut people in western Sydney off from the booming job centres around North Ryde and Macquarie Park.

The $500 million bill for just 10 kilometres of light rail is more than twice the international standard and suggests that, as usual, NSW Treasury, with its historic pro-motorway bias, has inflated the cost of public transport to restrict its growth.

The benefits from extra buses will be limited unless the services conform to the 2004 recommendations of the former premier Barrie Unsworth, and run at minimum intervals of 10-15 minutes in western Sydney. In the densely populated inner suburbs, where patronage already exists, the headways need to be five to seven minutes. The bus plan will be next to useless, unless buses run in exclusive lanes with priority at traffic lights.

And finally, the proposed route for the five-kilometre CityRail relief line from Eveleigh to Wynyard is ill conceived. Without a second harbour crossing, either by tunnel or on the bridge, the relief line will be redundant within a decade.

The relief line on the western side of the CBD - rather than its proper route beneath Pitt Street - will do little to get to commuters from western Sydney to the north shore. It will shift the congestion, especially from people changing trains, to Wynyard station, and is based on questionable proposals to convert the suburban rail system, with its high capacity double-deck trains, to single-deck metro-style services along the north shore, inner west and Bankstown lines.

At the core of these changes are assumptions that, inside RailCorp, are known to be false: that single-deck trains will increase passenger capacity; and that resignalling the network between Chatswood and Strathfield and Sydenham to run like a metro will be viable.

The assumptions used to prove this scenario were biased and designed to negate the benefits of the metropolitan rail expansion plan, which was announced in 2001 after 15 years of careful design.

FAMILIAR WORDS

This is a reasonable, affordable budgetary program which will build the transport system of the future.

The premier Bob Carr, releasing the 1998 Action for Public Transport Plan

Today we start a public transport revolution,

a new beginning, because we break free of the existing CityRail system.

The premier Morris Iemma after announcing the north-west metro in March 2008

What this line does is embed in future planning of public transport in NSW those options for metro links to the north-west, the south-west and the west.

The premier Nathan Rees on the announcement of the CBD metro in October 2008

Source: www.smh.com.au/nsw/a-lurch-in-the-right-direction-for-rattled-commuters-20100221-onz9.html