Comments on: Sydney Metro Project Wavers as Light Rail Expansion Gains Supporters

By: urbantransit

urbantransit — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 12:00:55 +0000

Sydney should convert some of it’s CityRail lines to Metro-style lines, in addition to the planned lines.

However I agree that the CBD Metro is stupid by itself, if combined with the West and Northwest Metros, then it would work well.

There is a good proposal/plan here:

http://www.railpage.com.au/f-t11355472.htm

By: Urbane

Urbane — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 03:52:22 +0000

The new light rail extension is along a goods line that connects nowhere to nowhere. It is an easy way for a very lazy government to announce a project that has supposed green credentials, but does nothing to connect people where they want to go or need to go. There has been no analysis to support the route, or any proper examination of alternative routes that actual connect places together. Supposedly, they will build “new” places along the route, but why do that when you have perfectly good centres servicing the region already, that need to be better connected? Maybe it gives developers (read Labor Party Donors/Funders) more opportunity to build new developments that are poorly designed and planned, not sustainable in any way, nor do they help build a great city that people would enjoy living in.

Sydney has incredibly bad, even non-existent transport planning that does not understand where or why people want to move about the city. Thus most schemes fail because there is none of this analysis.

By: Nathanael

Nathanael — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:16:23 +0000

Cityrail is a treasure, and I hope they go with the new Cityrail tunnal across Sydney Harbor — it is by far the most sensible option.

By: BruceMcF

BruceMcF — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:23:23 +0000

Indeed, a new Cityrail tunnel could be used to help fix previous blunders, like connecting the Airport line to the Southern Line at the same time as building a massively expensive underground expressway in the south giving much easier access to the airport by road from the area served by the southern line.

If the new tunnel allowed trains from over the Sydney Harbor bridge to run into the Airport line, that could given directly no-transfer access to the North Shore, where 70% of high frequency airport users live, and to Hornsby, the Central Coast and Newcastle and the Lower Hunter, who face the most substantial obstacle course in accessing the airport by road from the Pacific Highway.

By: Brandi

Brandi — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 03:29:02 +0000

I guess this seems kind of similar to High Speed Rail allocations in America. Do you put money towards smaller things that can make a difference or do you start something new that won’t be very beneficial with just a small segment but will probably be when it is built out? Not sure what the right answer is to be honest.

By: Thad

Thad — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:11:56 +0000

I think they were talking about the light rail and monorail, not CityRail, which serves mainly the suburbs with rapid-like service in the CBD. Seeing how most of the ridership would be from the suburbs to the CBD, it does make more sense to expand suburban options.

By: Jeffrey Bridgman

Jeffrey Bridgman — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:51:02 +0000

“There’s something to be said for working as much as possible with the system one already has rather than investing in an alternative that has no network connections and no ability to reinforce the existing offerings.”

Makes me think of Toronto’s Scarborough RT….

By: Alon Levy

Alon Levy — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:06:32 +0000

It’s not true that nobody uses Sydney’s rail system. Sydney actually has a pretty high transit mode share by Anglophone standards – 24% for the metro area, up from 19% in the late 1990s. This isn’t much lower than the corresponding figure in New York, which is either 27% or 30%, depending on how you define the metro area.

I don’t think it’s stupid to build urban lines before suburban extensions. Urban lines are where most ridership is. Excessively suburban systems can only attract peak hour commuters to downtown; this is BART’s main problem.

By: Nathaniel

Nathaniel — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:28:27 +0000

Also, the monorail is very much, just like in the Simpsons, ‘the crappiest train ever built’. It goes nowhere and pretty much only tourists ride it. (I remember visiting Sydney as an 8 year old and getting really excited by it, then having my excitement completely demolished by how underwhelming the whole thing was.)

By: Nathaniel

Nathaniel — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:26:33 +0000

Sydney has a bad track record of building stuff that no-one uses – see the airport rail link, the cross city tunnel and the Lane Cove tunnel. This does seem a bit extravagant too, considering that outer suburban extensions of the CityRail network were axed in order to fund this new corridor, meaning that a good 300000 people in an area with no rail service for kilometres get nothing, while people within a 10km bike ride from the city get yet another transport option.
There is also an opportunity to extend the light rail along a disused freight corridor – something I think the light rail operators have been pushing for now for a while – which runs south from the end of the existing alignment and crosses the main west line and the Bankstown line (I think). Again, the NSW Government denied the light rail operator approval to undertake this project.