Suggest anything you want, as long it fits with Transport for NSW’s vision of single-deck metro-style trains that travel from Rouse Hill to the CBD via a second harbour tunnel crossing, bypass urban renewal sites in Erskineville and St Peters, and then go on to cannibalise the Bankstown line from Sydenham to Bankstown. Oh, and you can choose between a station at Sydney University or one at Waterloo, but beware of stoking UrbanGrowth’s greedy appetite for a bigger public housing sell-off to fuel more senseless density.
It may never sit well to argue against spending money on trains, but when the government is about to tip the biggest bucket of public cash over Sydney’s rail network in a generation, it is imperative that the money put out as many fires as possible and not just slosh into the pockets of private rail operators.
That’s why, no matter how you look at Transport for NSW’s Sydney Metro plan, there will be far too many opportunities lost and far too many wrong steps to stay quiet and hope for the best.
In South Sydney, the proposed Metro will ignore the doubling of the population in Erskineville and St Peters and take all Bankstown line trains away from those stations. Keep in mind Erko and St Peters have some of the highest overcrowding in the network, reaching 167 per cent capacity in the morning peak.
Transport for NSW has pointedly said that, once those services are gone, there is no guarantee they will all be reinstated. With that kind of attitude, it seems like it was no mistake that the glossy brochures Sydney Metro handed out like candy at recent community information sessions excluded any mention of Erskineville and St Peters. Apparently, this area just doesn’t figure in the state government’s calculations for public transport into the future.
There will be other big losers from Sydney Metro. The thousands of commuters accessing the stations west of Sydenham to Bankstown will face a year of chaos when their otherwise perfectly serviceable stations will be put out of action so they can be “upgraded” to accommodate the new metro trains. Never mind the millions already spent in recent years on stations at Marrickville, Campsie and others to improve accessibility. And what’s more, after all this money is spent, these stations will be handed over to a private operator, funded by taxpayers, to run this new not-so-public transport system.
Passenger comfort also takes a hit. Metros will have around 600 less seats than the dual-deck trains, and standing passengers will be required to fit four to the square metre. To give you an idea of the squash to come, lay the South Sydney Herald on the ground and that’s the space you will get to stand in and no more. And remember, that will be expected for the entirety of the 60kms of line from Bankstown to the CBD to Rouse Hill.
The government says everyone should get on board with the changes because of the improvements to rail capacity across the network. But as public transport advocates like EcoTransit, Action for Public Transport NSW and Sandy Thomas have shown, even greater improvements could have been made for a fraction of the costs through a series of smart stepwise solutions envisaged by the visionary John Bradfield one hundred years ago. This month, a public meeting at a full Erskineville Town Hall rejected Sydney Metro in its current form and called on the government to go back to the drawing board. But the government shows little sign of listening.
Instead, the blind ideology that created the turkey of the privatised metro-style North West Rail Link is coming to gobble up the rest of the public rail system. This extreme view within Transport for NSW, which insisted that new train tunnels be built too steep and too small for the existing dual-deck trains, holds sway in government and is now coming, if it can, for each and every one of us. Not for any other compelling reason than you can have any kind of rail future you want, as long as it’s black.
