Horse 3403 - The Stupid Car Pipe Just Makes The Scar Worse

Please explain a thing to me.

If I leave the office at 17:00 and get the first bus to the City, then it is entirely possible that I will arrive at Wynyard at 17:51. to get on a train to Blacktown and arrive at 16:29. It is 38 kilometres from Wynyard to Blacktown and exactly 7 kilometres from the bus stop at Spit Junction to the bus stop at Wynyard. Moving from Wynyard to Blacktown can be done at an average speed of 60km/h. Moving from Spit Junction to Wynyard is usually done at an average speed of less than 9km/h.

Yes, this is nonsense. Yes, this is stupid. But who to blame?

I blame the Lang, Bavin, Stevens, Mair, McKell, McGirr, Cahill, Heffron, Renshaw, Askin, Lewis, Willis, Wran, Unsworth, Greiner, Fahey, Carr, Iemma, Rees, Keneally, O'Farrell, Baird, Berejiklian, Perrottet, and now Minns Governments. I think that that qualifies as an unbiased opinion.

Way way way back in the 1920s when governments had the foresight to consider the possibility that there might possibly be a kosmos after they have left office, the Sydney Harbour Bridge was opened with way too many lanes for cars and provision for four railway tracks. When it was opened, two of those tracks were used by the new bright electric suburban trains and the other two of those tracks were used by trams which ran on proper heavy gauge railway. Wynyard Station which wasn't quite built to full operational intention, started out with six platforms; with 1 & 2 being used for Northern Beaches Trams, 3 & 4 by the North Shore line, and 5 & 6 by the Southern Line. 

The Sydney Harbour Bridge was intended to have those two tram lines eventually converted into full-on proper railway lines but a little thing called The Depression got in the way. Then a little thing called World War II got in the way. After WW2, the McGirr government in an act of utter stupidity, decided to hire Rayethon Corp as consultants, and what should have been a proper legacy was forever stolen from the good and fair people of New South Wales forever. The biggest tram network in the world, was destroyed and would finally disappear in 1961.

It was the McGirr and Cahill Governments, which finally decided to permanently scar the North Shore with the massive act of civic vandalism called the Warringah Expressway. Not only was a golf course, a small cathedral, several cinemas, and thousands upon thousands of residential houses destroyed, by the scar would continue to throb and throb for decades, before the  McGirr, Berejiklian Government decided to double down on the original act of stupidity by throwing many billions of dollars at an underwater Stupid Car Pipe. 

Although the maths are not identical, they are broadly similar for all things that flow. Water, Electricity, and Traffic, can all be described by flow rates, pressure, resistance to that flow, size of the pipes through which they flow, and the potential difference between two points within the system. If we apply the same terminology of electricity to traffic flow, then the story becomes a bit easier to tell.

The Berejiklian Government in a classic Monkey-See Monkey-Do set of politics, after privatising the ferries and the buses and which made them both worse, decided to reward her criminal friends who operate toll-roads like a bunch of licensed bandits, with yet another government built tollroad. What a top idea. After already having mucked up Epping Road with the M2, Parramatta Road with the M4 East, Victoria Road with the M8, Gladys in her peanutted wisdom decided to "upgrade" the  Warringah Expressway.

Now, you can improve the flow of stuff through the system, by increasing the size of the pipes which is what the underwater Stupid Car Pipe is intended to do but that is a very short-term solution and one which spending billions of dollars is almost a sunk-cost fallacy before the project was even started. The Gladys underwater Stupid Car Pipe might act as a Band-Aid over the throbbing scar that is the North Shore's traffic problems but it does nothing to reduce the potential difference between two points within the system.

If Voltage is the potential difference between two points within the system, and that is caused by the number of cars that want to drive on the road, then building more lanes does nothing to address the issue of what caused those cars in the first place. The way that you reduce the number of cars that want to drive on the road is by getting rid of the want.

Had the Northern Beaches had an Elevated Railway, or an Underground, then that would have taken maybe a hundred of thousands of cars off the road, because the people in those cars would have taken the train. As it currently stands, those people have no choice but to get in their cars which causes traffic, or to take the newly privatised and newly degraded bus service which also causes traffic.

And before you tell me that it's not technically possible to build an Underground Railway, let me remind you that the Gladys underwater Stupid Car Pipe is bigger than either the Sydney Metro which also goes underneath the harbour, or in fact the pipes which carry the Eastern Suburbs Railway.

For reasons that make no other sense to me, other than to enrich the pockets of a select few of Gladys' very tory friends, the underwater Stupid Car Pipe will be opened, will be a tollroad upon opening, will immediately fill to capacity because it doesn't solve the problem of what caused the traffic in the first place.

Horse 3385 - A Broken Network Is Better Than A Neverwork (Sydney Metro)

Yesterday morning at Central Station, a crack in a track, warranted sudden urgent critical repairs; this caused Sydney's train network to turn from a network into a notwork, and from a boring boring swift service of silver snakes into a slow moving omnishambles. The repairs had immediate knock-on effects which affected the Northern and Western Lines, the Inner West and Southern Lines, and the East Hills Line. Nominally it did not affect the Olympic Park shuttle service, nor the Cumberland Line, though when I got to Marayong Station, there were no trains running in either direction; so I think the Cumberland Line was temporarily cancelled as well. Who knows? I didn't.

With no trains at Marayong Station, I decided to walk back to Davis Rd; wherein I found that the 752 Bus to Blacktown had already passed through and the 752 Bus to Rouse Hill was already speeding down the street, so there was no chance of me making it to the stop on the other side of the road and catching the bus unless I sprouted wings and became an aeroplane. 

Faced with the horns of a dilemma and the worst case scenario playing out, I could either wait for the next bus to Rouse Hill which would take 30 minutes to arrive (mind you, this is peak service) and then a further 58 minutes to get to Rouse Hill Station. That would be 88 minutes to get to the Metro, or I could schlep to Blacktown and roll the dice to see what I'd get. 

It was actually not too bad. In 78 minutes, I had walked from Marayong Station, taken a Blue Mountains' service from Blacktown to Central, and then the Metro from Central to Victoria Cross. So yes, I did ten minutes better than the 88 minutes to get to the Metro, or rather, I got to the other end of the Metro in less time than public transport at my end would allow.

Here's the issue. In what world does it make any sense to be able to get from Marayong to Victoria Cross in less time than it would take to get from Marayong to Rouse Hill? To those people who like to tell me that the Metro is not for me, even though I happen to live reasonably close to it, perhaps they'd like to explain why it is better for me to be able to get to the other end of the Metro to make the connection than to make what could and should have been an 11 minute connection at this end? 

Victoria Cross is lovely. 

The North West Metro itself is a fine piece of infrastructure. It is just that due to the dendritic nature of how the connecting bus services operate, which also have to go in an and out and everywhere to be useful to the most amount of people, the whole purpose of providing public transport to take cars off of the road is entirely negated if it is more efficient by magnitudes to use a car. 

The first problem here is that major piece of infrastructure cost massive amounts of money. One side of government would rather never ever provide anything that the public wants because they can't spin a profit for their backers; while the other one side of government must constantly cower like a bunch of craven little jackasses because they know that the first side of government can and will sell off infrastructure for peanuts to their criminal friends for peanuts, at every single opportunity. I don't know who runs the matryoshka game of companies which ultimately run MTS (Metro Trains Sydney) but as with any set of matryoshka dolls, they are full of themselves.

The second problem here is that the state of New South Wales is governed by two political parties - the Nutcons and the Wingnuts. Both are corrupted in different ways. Every so often the voting public are asked what kind of poisonous slop in a bucket we would like to put our heads into. In addition to being run by criminal knaves and craven little jackasses is that they hate each other; I mean really really hate each other. The Metro when it was approved by corrupt Barry O'Farrell's  Nutcon party, deliberately stopped mysteriously short of an electorate which votes for the wingnut party. Likewise when equally corrupt Neville Wran's Wingnut party opened the Eastern Suburbs Railway, even though it owned all of the necessary land to be able to build a full heavy rail line all the way to La Perouse and connect to the Botany Goods Line, it sold all of that land to spite the voters and as such, there is no Southern Beaches Line. There was no Airport Line until 2000; so that's two sets of spite fulfilled in one go. Dr Bradfield's plan was submitted in 1915; so that's only 85 years to get the job done. 

The Network Effect, which is mostly true for transport networks, telephone networks, communications networks, the internet, et cetera et cetera et cetera, basically stipulates that the usefulness of a network increases when there are more nodes added to the network and when those nodes are interconnected with each other. (This is also the reason why the United States has such an efficient method of killing people with guns. The Network Effect is working excellently.) The least efficient parts of a network and by inference the most annoying, are those stub ends which have limited access to the network and/or only connect to it at one point. The idea of waiting for a bus in the elements for extended periods of time, can and does drive people to use their car; which again undoes the point of public transport.

When the Chatswood to Epping rail link was built, it connected to two points at either end and was excellently excellent. Upon conversion to the Metro, that part of the network was still excellent but the western end as a stub, was deliberately not connected to the Richmond Line. At this point, I don't care what you're excuses are for not connecting it, if you want to defend this deliberate act of knavery, then you are a either a criminal knaves or a craven little jackass who hates the public. The whole rail link was build after the people of the north west called out for one since 1931 and what they got was a private tolled motorway initially. The Castle Hill tram line was supposed to be replaced by a train line; which meant that when Castle Hill Station did finally open in 2019, that only took 88 years to get the job done; so at least we are consistent here.

This morning when Sydney's train network was again running like a boring boring swift service of silver snakes, taking the Metro from the western end to Victoria Cross was still not an option because of the connection problem. I took a train from Marayong, then another from Seven Hills, then another from Central, and got out at Crows Nest because I wanted to test the 144 bus. See that? Connection and connection and connection. That's how a network should work; by working across the various nodes of the network. I do fully expect that the North West Metro will connect to the Richmond Line, in 85 years' time from when it opened because that's the going rate in Sydney. That will be in 2104; so I guess the kids of the twenty-second century will be happy.

Horse 3378 - Gadigal Station Is A Good Name

If you want to run a litmus test to find out who your racist friends are, then simply ask them what they think of the name "Gadigal" as a railway station. If they like it, then they might be sympathetic to the cause of first peoples. If they object with open racism, then believe them. If on the other hand, they come up with some half-baked semi-excuse such as "they don't know where Gadigal is", then they might be a quiet racist who fears what other people think and so remain quiet.

The usual objection to the name Gadigal by quietly racist people is that they prefer some other name which is ill-thought out but sounds nice to their ears. Consider the name "Pitt Street". While it is true that the station does have a station front at Pitt Street, unlike Martin Place which is also in the city, it is not short. In fact, Martin Place is so short that you can stand at one end of it and look up or down the hill to see the other end. Pitt Street though, is many kilometres long and that name might be equally valid for a station near Circular Quay, or in the older sandstone government building district, or near King Street, or under the mall where the department stores are near, or where it currently is, or further down towards the Masonic Centre. Calling the station Pitt Street would mean that the name fails at its only function; to tell you where it is. Before I explain why Gadigal is a better name though, I am going to take you on a metaphorical journey.

Yes, it is true that Gadigal is not a suburb. For a thing to be named as a suburb, it must go through the process of being gazetted by the Geographical Names Board. Even then, some places such as Golden Grove, Balmoral Beach, and Spit Junction still aren't suburbs but localities. For instance, Spit Junction is a locality with a Post Office and even postal addresses but even then, those postal addresses extend only as far as the post boxes which are in the Post Office itself. Spit Junction is a final header destination on buses and even has a bus station which is labelled at Spit Junction. Spit Junction is not a suburb. Spit Junction is in Mosman. 

As for Gadigal Station, it is named not after a suburb or a locality but rather, the traditional Eora name for the region. Not that that matters as naming railway stations after things that are not suburbs is not without precedent. There are in fact quite a few stations in Sydney where the name of the station is not named after the suburb but the locality and in some cases, not even the locality. 

Circular Quay Station is named after Circular Quay; which long before there was a railway station, was the name given to the place from where ships and ferries came and went. During the planning stages for the Sydney Electric Underground Railway, the usual name for the station was not Circular Quay but merely Quay as if was on the head boards for tram services. 

Speaking of tram services, Wynyard Station which was conceived as an eight platform underground through terminal, is not named for the area at all. The park on top of the station was originally called Barrack Square, sometimes Quartermaster Square, and only really gained the name of Wynyard when the park was being redeveloped. The statue for John Wynyard at the northern end of the park, kind of cemented the idea of the locality in people's minds after the fact.

Central Station is even weirder. The suburb with Central Station is in is Strawberry Hills. There is no Strawberry Hills Station though.  The grand terminal which faces Eddy Avenue and Railway Square, is Sydney Terminal. I do not think that you will find the official name anywhere on any of the signage but you might hear it occasionally over the tannoy when announcements are being made on long distance services. Sydney Station used to be where the historic mortuary platform is; and was moved in 1916. The extra platforms to the south which are numbered 16-23 (24-25 and 26-27) come much later) were originally called and signposted as Central Electric. The last vestiges that this was ever the case, used to be a lightbox which had the old L7 logo, at street level near the round doric columned enterance across the street from the Dental Hospital. It is long gone.

A more recent entry to this list of stations not being named for suburbs, is Tallawong. In the planning documents as far back ago as 2011, that station was called Cudgewong Road after the proposed site for the railway station. When the station was moved a few hundred metres to the south, the name Tallawong was picked after the next road that the railway line crossed, Tallawong Road. The suburb of Tallawong, which as eventually carved out of both Schofields and Rouse Hill is named after the station which was named after the road. The station itself when it was opened, was actually in the suburb of Rouse Hill. 

So while Barangaroo might be named after the development, and Victoria Cross named after an intersection, St James being named after a church, and Museum after the museum, Gadigal is a bit like Wynyard in that it was named deliberately and the area then took on the name of the station as the local flair. Here's the thing though, you never ever ever hear anyone complaining about where Wynyard is supposed to be, even though it is the suburb of Sydney. People seemingly have no problem with naming a railway station after some guy that they have never even heard of.

In that respect it is identical to Wynyard, or Central and maybe even eventually Tallawong. There is no suburb called Wynyard. There is no suburb called Central. There was no suburb called Tallawong but there is now; after the fact. If you say to people that you will meet them at Wynyard or Central, do they care what the name of the suburb is? No. If you say to people that you will meet them at St James or Museum, are they even aware of the church or the museum? Mostly, no. 

Your quietly racist friend who fears what other people think might quietly seethe inside about the name Gadigal but in the year 2074, they will likely be dead and with them their quietly racist fears about what other people think will have evaporated along with them. The children of tomorrow will know exactly where Gadigal is because it will be where it is. The fun thing about any kind of name is that as soon as it is normalised, it will become boring. The beauty of the word is that in most people's minds, it carries exactly zero expectations about where it is. This means that the name Gadigal serves a different function as a place name. It doesn't describe the destination. It IS the destination.

Horse 3326 - Public Housing Is A Cognitohazard To NIMBYs

In David Langford’s 1988 short story called “BLIT” (Berryman Logical Image Technique), there are a series of images called ‘Basilisks’ which are named after the legendary serpent king who could kill with a single blow. The Basilisks in BLIT are images which exploit programming flaws in the structure of the human mind; which cause people’s brains to crash. A human without a working brain, has a life expectancy of about 30 minutes maximum.

I mention Langford’s Basilisk because the idea of cognitohazards seems to be the main reason why NIMBYs are so risk averse to wanting anything that remotely looks like any kind of housing policy put forward by State and Federal Governments. Housing policy, if you are a NIMBY, appears to be something of an idea hazard; which implemented can harm others if fulfilled, or can cause danger to the person who knows the idea.

In Australia, the provision of public housing is the responsibility of State Governments. Federal Governments have had some degree of say when it came to social and affordable housing but really that only extended as far as the provision of defence housing, of war widows’ housing, and of housing for people on unemployment and sickness benefits. The vast bulk of responsibility for social and affordable housing in Australia, has always been the under the purview of the States.

Here's the fun thing: The States can just build public housing. That’s it. The States in every State (and Territory) in the nation, can just do whatever they want to with regards public housing.

I find arguments that the States can’t build public housing because it is going to somehow upend the so-called ‘heritage’ on an area, complete and utter chiroptera guano. Not only am I unconvinced by arguments of so-called ‘heritage’ on an area but when it comes to actually challenging so-called ‘heritage’, it instantly collapses when a sufficiently large amount of money is waved around.

To wit: I work in the Insanic Republic of Mosman. Near where I work used to be six Federation era houses; all of which were built between 1895 and 1914. A firm called  Helm Properties, found it exceptionally easy to wave around enough money so that all of the former residents left, and now 20 apartments with 35 car park spaces will be built. At a total cost of $26m, the 20 apartments were sold at an average price of $7m a piece from what I can determine. All this means to say is if even in Mosman, where the average resident may as well be a person in God’s Waiting Room (for the First Class Special Flight of course), so-called ‘heritage’ listing when push comes to cheque-book, is a lie.

Also to wit: When it came to projects like the M8 or the Second Harbour Tunnel, or the Sydney Metro Project in New South Wales, the NSW State Government had no problem throwing buckets of money at the. So-called ‘heritage’ listing was no problem there either.

While I don’t think that merely opening up development zoning open slather is a good thing, because we all know that will be developers who build shonky buildings cutting corners, and risking lives; with as much density as the regulations will allow to take advantage of people like students and poorer people; which will fall over exactly eleven minutes after the tax advantages are over, the planning system for building places for people to live in, is just awful. The truth is that we will need some kind of private development to provide the housing stock that our cities desperately need, due to four decades of rampant neglect. 

The opening premise of Adam Smith’s 1759 work “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” is that people are rationally selfish. I personally have doubts about the rationality of people but in relation to social and public housing, that selfishness gets turned all the way up to 11. Even if building public housing for the common good is excellent, people are in fact entitled to protect the value of their single biggest asset, which is their home, and they can and will do so; loudly. They can and will let their elected representatives know what they want; including blocking even modest attempts to introduce any kind of gentle density in the form of townhouses and sideways terraces. It seems that the only way that you really get proper housing stock build is either by reclaiming brownfield sites or cutting into greenfield sites.

At the same time part of the housing debate is very much racially motivated by xenophobic people who see that the world has changed in ways that they do not like, has introduced faces that they do not like; and so, there is a secondary argument that housing problems can be solved by cutting immigration.

I might very well be a loonie but it seems to me that the best place for new homes to be built is actually over the top of existing railway lines; which currently are just open air space waiting to be used. It matters not a jot if an electric train passes underneath someone’s house in terms of air quality because the fumes from electric trains are produced far away at the power station. London went electric as early as it could from the 1890s, with both the City and South London Railway and Underground Electric Railways Company of London exploiting the fact that they could build housing near or on top of railway lines.

The reason is obvious. If you put housing near existing transport infrastructure, then this allows people to get to where they work, shop, go to school, et cetera; while also killing urban sprawl, and car dependency. Say what you like about a climate crisis, even you have to concede that addressing a housing but actively improving people’s quality of life is a no brainer. 

But mention any of this on any social media platform and people will try and string you up like you are SARS Cov-19, the plague, a murderer and a common criminal. Maybe it is true that just building more homes on its own is not going to tackle the housing crisis and that the housing crisis needs to be addressed by making homes that are built more affordable. However, NIMBYs are so against wanting anything that remotely looks like any kind of housing policy that the idea of building any more houses at all is a cognitohazard that they fear will break their minds.

Horse 3286 - The Northern Beaches Needs An "L"

Anyone looking at a rail network map for Sydney will realise some very obvious and appreciable gaps. These gaps include are the Inner West gap through Balmain, Five Dock and Drummoyne and Gladesville etc, the Eastern Suburbs gap from Bondi Junction southwards and weirdly, the Northern Beaches void.

In this current wave of 'Metro' building, which is finally an attempt to fill in the gaps, we have had the North West Metro almost but not quite connects Chatswood to Schofields and partly running over existing lines, the continuation of the Metro under the harbour and which will run over the existing Bankstown Line, and the Sydney West Metro which is an entirely new bore to the west ending at Westmead.

Due to the geography of Sydney, the whole entire of the Northen Beaches is really only served through two pinch points; being Spit Bridge and Roseville Bridge. In fact those two roads are really only served by a few arterial roads which converge at those point. To anyone with even a shred of common sense, this is a stupid system; so much so, that it was foreseen by John Bradfield more than 100 years ago but which only the barest of plans was ever made to correct this. Those plans included capacity at Wynyard Station for 8 platforms serving four lines; of which only 6 platforms were built and only two lines completed.

In place of a railway line which never was, there used to be an extensive tram network; which was ripped out by exceptionally myopic governments, and which  is the reason why the Sydney Harbour Bridge since 1959 has has lanes 7 and 8 of road traffic occupy what should the space for two railway tracks. In its place, a bus network was installed. Very recently in the last days of the Berejiklian Government, the operation of these buses was privatised and now Keolis Downer operates what can be best described as a fourth rate service, which was worse than the government-run buses, which was worse than the trams, which was worse then the full scale railway line which was proposed but never was.

In conjunction with massive amounts of opposition to the building of apartments on top of the Woolworths at Cremorne, there have been half-hearted suggestions that the Northern Beaches should also have a Metro. The best proposal that I have seen for this would be to bore directly under Military Rd, then pop out at Parrawi Reserve and continue via viaduct/bridge over the Spit, and then back underground roughly following the route of the B1 bus. As with any of these proposals it sounds bonkers for about ten seconds and then immediately almost criminal that it hasn't already been done.

However, I have recently heard of a proposal which sounds like someone's fantasy got out of hand but which upon a second look, might actually be that mad kind of genius which Sydney needs. That proposal is...

The Northern Beaches L.

What is an L?

This is an L.

An L is short for "Elevated", and by "Elevated" we actually mean "Elevated Railway". In the date 19th century, they were all the rage in the United States, with many Ls being converted from steam to electric in the 1910s. The idea is genius because it's so simple. By putting the trains on an elevated set of tracks high above everyone else, regular road traffic runs underneath and this alleviates the pressure on both.

Of course the obvious downside is that everyone on board an L can see into the windows of people up on the first or second floor of the buildings which line the street and the people who live first or second floor of the buildings which line the street have L trains whizz by them every six minutes. Then again, a road like Military Road is already so unpleasant that people already do not live in those first or second floors of the buildings which line the street. Then again, the unsaid truth is that this already is the case for practically everyone already living next to a train line as it is. The other unsaid truth is that the B1 bus already uses double decker buses; so you can already peer into the first or second floors of the buildings which line the street and nobody complains about that.

The other downside of an L is that as the L creates a quasi-tunnel underneath itself, it will become darker down underneath the L. I note that in places like Chicago and New York which have retained an L, they are built on lattice type sleeper structures; which means that dappled sunlight does come through. It also naturally means that the height of traffic passing underneath the L is limited in height, which affects the accessibility of big trucks. Now this could be solved in the planning stages by making the L already sufficiently high enough so that all trucks of decent height can pass under, or by rerouting those trucks to alternative routes.

Here's the genius though. Double decker buses would not need to exist. About 2000 cars per hour would not need to exist. All of the passengers who currently clog the roads on the many buses that act like a line of millipedes and great hordes of cars, would all disappear upon opening of the L. People individually and traffic in the collective follow similar rules to water and electricity in that they follow the paths of least resistance. If the L provides a less stressful experience than sitting in traffic for 68 minutes (which is the current time from Mona Vale to Wynyard), then people will use the L.

The thing about Sydney's very tory motorways, is that almost to a note, they simply do not make traffic better anywhere in Sydney. Motorways in Sydney are purely toll extraction devices. Railways on the other hand, by virtue of being vehicles limited by tracks, are perfect for cutting underneath the mass hub-bub and chaos of what's happening above; which is why going underground is an excellent option or if you can not go underground then going above is the next best thing.

One of the really really fun things with the idea of an L is that the Northern Beaches void is purely that, a void. It is currently an abyss filled with nothing. This is not even half a hole but a whole hole. We could either fill the hole with 9-car Metro Trains like the North West Metro, or fill it with 5-car trams like the L2 and L3 in the Eastern Suburbs and presumably what will be the L4 from Westmead and what used to be the T7 Carlingford Line. With a void, you can run as many imaginary trains and trams through it as you like.

Admittedly I say this as a deeply frustrated commuter who has worked in Mosman for 20 years. I repeatedly find it idiotic that we can not get from Spit Junction to the City in less than 50 minutes, on an alarmingly regular basis. I could very easily be part of the car traffic but instead I take one of many many buses; from multiple starting points. However in the evening, if I leave the office at 05:00pm, it will often be after 05:30pm before I can even board a a bus. The B1 bus is frequently packed to the eyeballs and displays the message "Sorry Bus Full"; which is partly the result of a wholly inadequate public transport service and partly the result of Keolis Downer wanting to spin a profit and recducing the number of services by 60% in many cases. What used to be a 6 minute service is now a 15 or 20 minute service if you are lucky, and it is still being asked to carry the same number of people.

This is where the genius of an L truly shines. L services would be the only thing up there. They don't have to contend with the rabble below and instead of being 1-car or virtual 2-car for a double decker bus, a single 9-car L service could replace many buses by itself. If they were driverless robots they could run practically at saturation as well. I think that it would be cheaper than trying to bore a tunnel and I think that the required engineering might be easier as well. All of the electricity carriage could be done in the cavity immediately under the structure; which could also double as carriage for everyone else's electricity and street lighting. Plus it seems like a nice way of ushering a new steam-electro-punk-retro-future. 

If only we could dare to dream. I love the idea of an L. 

Horse 3275 - Adam Smith Would Have Probably Preferred WestConnex Be A Public Road

It should have been obvious to all and sundry that the WestConnex was always going to be one giant colossal horky-borky-whole-sort-of-general-mish-mash. The reason why it wasn't obvious when it was proposed was that we had a tory government, with Transport Ministers, one of whom would rise to become Premier and prove that she was in fact a corrupt tory, before resigning and swanning off to join Optus and never face any real consequences whatsoever. Meanwhile, the good and fair people of New South Wales and the people of Sydney in particular, will once again spend a half century suffering from the effects of the past.

WestConnex, which cost between 2 and 4 crore dollars, has been funded mostly by private capital. Or rather, the New South Wales Government took out a series of loans, and those loans were repaid in two tranches through the mechanism of privatising the bits. In return for being the holding bucket for cheap loans, the New South Wales Government got... er... nothing of any real value until 2060. This means that as I do not have an e-Tag and hate the idea of paying tolls to drive on roads because my petrol taxes and road taxes should already do that, then I will not be allowed to go on these roads in my lifetime. In 2060 I will be 82 years old and given that the healthcare system will almost certainly be degraded due to privatisation, I suspect that I will likely be dead.

As a side note, the NSW State Government selling off the Sydney Motorways Corporation more or less paid for the Sydney Metro; which is further proof that tories can and will sell off our stuff to their tory mates if they can get away with it. This is yet another thing which should have been ours in common, which is now gone forever and is never ever coming back.

The fact that we have private roads, returning private profits, and private rewards, to the benefit of a few private people, who are able to leech off of public good, public credit, and what should be public assets, is absolutely emblematic of the City of Sydney. The land, stolen from the Eora, Gadigal, Dharug peoples et al. was taken away for the benefit of a small few; who then dumped Britain's ne'er-do-wells on the other side of the planet. That same tory class of people has not changed in 235 years and they still view the vast majority of us as either criminals or refuse to be cast aside. 

So when I hear the news of traffic snarls around Balmain, Rozelle and Five Dock of a morning on the news, part of me feels a bit of schadenfreude, that this is the direct result of people wanting to avoid tolls and completely expected from an economic perspective as a toll is a barrier to entry; which is often designed to keep out the poor people. It has done precisely that. Job well done. I mean we could just remove the tolls? No? Aw well. Best of luck until 2060. You've earned it.

- Traffic Snarls? Hooray, you've earned it!

When face with the choice of going onto a toll road, there are some people for whom this is an opportunity cost question (about whether or not the utility of taking the road is worth paying for) but for people faced with this same choice of going onto a toll road, there is no choice at all. The toll is exclusionary. For those who can not afford to pay, private provision of services is exclusionary, and public funding of private provision of services is knavish and tory.

This is not a new argument by any stretch of the imagination. In the second ever proper economics textbook, "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" (1776) by Adam Smith (generally referred to by its shortened title "The Wealth of Nations"), Book V which is titled "On the Revenue of the Sovereign or Commonwealth" deals with issues that seem modern even though, they are themselves ancient arguments. By the way, Adam Smith favoured "public works" like roads, bridges, canals, harbors, the postal system, and hospitals, police and fire brigades because profit-seeking individuals could not and would not efficiently build or operate them.

Much like Smith's previous work "The Theory of Moral Sentiment" (1759), he sees the relationships of various people and actors in the economy as having obligations and duties to each other. Anyone who claims that Smith is just another mercantilist and is in favour of selfishness, is likely to have read maybe one section or one line of text. 

Indeed he starts out Book V, Chapter I, Part III, with a separation of duties and obligations:

Book V: On the Revenue of the Sovereign or Commonwealth

Chapter I: On the Expenses of the Sovereign or Commonwealth

Part III: On the Expense of Public Works and Public Institutions

The third and last duty of the sovereign or commonwealth is that of erecting and maintaining those public institutions and those public works, which, though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, and which it therefore cannot be expected that any individual or small number of individuals should erect or maintain. The performance of this duty requires, too, very different degrees of expense in the different periods of society.

- The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith (1776)

Smith does not have the tools in 1776 to explain how markets work, though in the micro sense it may be possible to ascertain what happens when to parties meet. A market for a good and/or service, is really just myriad-myriad-myriad of these meetings, compiled into the aggregate, then described. However, what Smith has discovered here is that it is nominally beyond the reach of individuals or firms to build great pieces of infrastructure. A market is unable to provide such a good and/or service when this happens and it is properly a market failure. This helpfully explains why Government-owned Telstra would have built the National Fibre Optic Network by the end of 2002 at a cost fo $8bn, and why privately-owned Telstra did not and could not build it. Instead, Telstra spent almost a decade moaning like a bunch of little sooky-babies and the National Broadband Network, was completed a mere 21 years after it had been proposed.

WestConnex could never have been built without government funding for the simple reason that governments as the least risk of all persons in economies, are able to borrow monies at the cheapest rates. What WestConnex did was combine government funding, with tory desires; which is why after having had a piece of infrastructure built, they are now able to extract revenues from the people for probably beyond the scope of my lifetime.

After the public institutions and public works necessary for the defence of the society, and for the administration of justice, both of which have already been mentioned, the other works and institutions of this kind are chiefly those for facilitating the commerce of the society, and those for promoting the instruction of the people. The institutions for instruction are of two kinds: those for the education of youth, and those for the instruction of people of all ages. The consideration of the manner in which the expense of those different sorts of public, works and institutions may be most properly defrayed will divide this third part of the present chapter into three different articles.

- The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith (1776)

In 1776 Adam Smith may as well have being writing science fiction here. The idea that the commonwealth should supply the things that the people ought to have because that has multiplier effects on the net good of everyone in the commonwealth, must have been completely alien to a world where some people were owned as chattel goods and could be bought and sold. This contemplates a world with public schooling and higher education and I have no doubt that Smith would have seen public health care in that same spirit.

Smith's comments here though in relation to public works, after having established that things like roads, justice, policing, defence, administration of justice et cetera, ought to be owned in common by the commonwealth. I suspect that Smith would have raged against WestConnex owning private roads for private advantage.

Article 1: On the Public Works and Institutions for facilitating the Commerce of the Society And, first, of those which are necessary for facilitating Commerce in general

In Great Britain, the abuses which the trustees have committed in the management of those tolls have in many cases been very justly complained of. At many turnpikes, it has been said, the money levied is more than double of what is necessary for executing, in the completest manner, the work which is often executed in very slovenly manner, and sometimes not executed at all. The system of repairing the high roads by tolls of this kind, it must be observed, is not of very long standing. We should not wonder, therefore, if it has not yet been brought to that degree of perfection of which it seems capable. If mean and improper persons are frequently appointed trustees, and if proper courts of inspection and account have not yet been established for controlling their conduct, and for reducing the tolls to what is barely sufficient for executing the work to be done by them, the recency of the institution both accounts and apologizes for those defects, of which, by the wisdom of Parliament, the greater part may in due time be gradually remedied.

- The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith (1776)

Private entities having inherited public infrastructure, tend to be passively negligent in the maintenance of that same infrastructure now in private hands, by virtue of not wanting to pay even a pennycent for its upkeep if they can get away with it. Britain's railways after Ms Thatcher smashed them all to pieces are a classic example of this. The NHS in Britain, having suffered a thousand cuts by the Conservative Party (who actually only wish to conserve private advantage for private persons) is undergoing that same kind of neglect. 

The wear and tear on roads and motorways likely isn't a whole lot but given that concrete can and does crumble when the reo-bar fades and dies, someone at some point will be up for expensive maintenance bills. Again, Smith writes science fiction in that he hopes for "courts of inspection and account" with regards public infrastructure that have not yet been established.

The money levied at the different turnpikes in Great Britain is supposed to exceed so much what is necessary for repairing the roads, that the savings, which, with proper economy, might be made from it, have been considered, even by some ministers, as a very great resource which might at some time or another be applied to the exigencies of the state. Government, it has been said, by taking the management of the turnpikes into its own hands, and by employing the soldiers, who would work for a very small addition to their pay, could keep the roads in good order at a much less expense than it can be done by trustees, who have no other workmen to employ but such as derive their whole subsistence from their wages. A great revenue, half a million perhaps, it has been pretended, might in this manner be gained without laying any new burden upon the people; and the turnpike roads might be made to contribute to the general expense of the state, in the same manner as the post office does at present.

That a considerable revenue might be gained in this manner I have no doubt, though probably not near so much as the projectors of this plan have supposed. The plan itself, however, seems liable to several very important objections.

- The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith (1776)

Smith proposes that the revenues gained from toll-roads, if they exceed the maintenance costs, be ploughed back into the consolidated revenues of the commonwealth to contribute to the general expense of the state. In my lifetime, very tory governments from both political football teams, robbed the Commonwealth forever by selling off highly profitable quangos such as the Commonwealth Bank, Telstra, various State Banks, GIO, et cetera. To that end, my back of an envelope calculation would suggest that in my lifetime, there has been in excess of two trillion dollars of profits that could have defrayed the need for public taxation.

Private corporations care only about returning private profits to their shareholders. Whatever tolls could have been generated by WestConnex have been foregone for probably beyond my lifetime. On top of this, the permanent scarring of the road-infrastructure above, has meant that while the tolls exist, there will be permanent tailbacks on surface roads, also for probably beyond my lifetime. That means that we have private profits, built with public monies on the cheap, with permanent public nuisance. 

WestConnex in their loveliness have been allowed to punch the people of Sydney in the face and keep on doing so until 2060. A permanent public nuisance and a denial of service of a road which should have been ours (and will be only given back to us in 37 years' time), has been perpetrated upon the people of Sydney. At the moment we have the Leader of the Opposition pointing fingers at the Government for allowing this, when it was in fact a previous leader of his own political football team, who still has not been thrown in prison for corruption, who allowed and caused this.

What promoted this was and article in the Australian which claimed that WestConnex is something that Adam Smith would have agreed with. I shall not link to that article because I do not wish to send that private firm which is repeatedly hostile to the idea of commonwealth, any pennycents at all. 

When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776 this was set against a world of mercantilists, where people some people were owned as chattel goods and could be bought and sold and which was released when a war was being fought to retain and keep that right to own as chattel goods, after punitive taxation measures did not bring that to an end. This is before the age of mass public education and mass literacy. This is before the age of public hospitals. This is before the age of public fire brigades. This is before the age of a professional dedicated police force. Nevertheless, Smith's two books, which are now seen as being economic texts, were more in the art of political economy. Yet again we come back to the most basic questions of economics and politics.

What shall we produce?

How do we produce it?

For whom shall we produce it?

Who shall own it?

Who shall control it?

Smith's answers, as denied by the Australian, frequently advocate for the common good and common happiness of the people in commonwealth. Smith would likely have been annoyed at WestConnex, as this is just more mercantilists doing mercantilist things, for private advantage. The people of New South Wales and the people of Sydney are not allowed to have nice things because of very tory policy. That's the permanent legacy of WestConnex here. We are repeatedly not allowed to have nice things in Sydney because private people want private things at public expense, and they get away with it by yelling about the spectre of "socialism". Yes, I like some socialism; especially when it contributes to the common good and common happiness of the people in commonwealth.

I like the words of another Scotsman; who also understood the idea of commonwealth and common good.

The socialism I believe in isn’t really politics. It is a way of living. It is humanity. I believe the only way to live and to be truly successful is by collective effort, with everyone working for each other, everyone helping each other, and everyone having a share of the rewards at the end of the day. That might be asking a lot, but it’s the way I see football and the way I see life.

- Bill Shankly, manager of Liverpool Football Club (1959-74)

Horse 3272 - I Saw The Sign And It Opened Up My Eyes, I Saw The Sign. Tolls Are Demanding, Without Understanding.

The Rozelle Interchange has taken exactly two days to cause horridness and nastiness to roads in Sydney. The Rozelle interchange which is as far as I can tell the biggest and most complicated underground road junction in the southern hemisphere, contains more than 16 kilometres of tunnels, and its opening day on Sunday went went relatively smoothly. However, a proper regular traffic day like yesterday, caused motorists to behave perfectly rationally and Transport for New South Wales could only blame motorists for being "confused at the new signage". 

What was the signage that motorists were supposedly "confused" at? The single sign, just the one, facing east-bound motorists on Victoria Road after they cross the Iron Cove Bridge, looks like this:

Now I put it to any sane person of reasonable faculties and intelligence, that this sign indicates that there are two options here. The one to the left, is for Balmain via Victoria Rd and does not have a toll. The option on the right, is for the City and Port Botany and does have a toll. I would like to think that I am a pretty good analogue for Billy Brown from Sydney Town, or the Man On the Bondi Tram, or the Man on the Parramatta Omnibus - that is, some reasonable person of average intelligence, who can be expected to act in reasonable, average, and expected ways. I would hope that my reading of this sign, is adequate.

But no.

According to the management at Transport for New South Wales, I am "confused". I do not think that I am "confused". I think that as a some reasonable person of average intelligence, who can read a street sign, that if I do not want to pay the toll (which I don't) then I should move into the left lane.

Apparently, many motorists who have encountered this for the first time, have been making last-minute lane changes and one poor soul who probably got scared of ending up in West Woop-Woop, East Banana, or Umpakumbunka North, reversed their car while in peak hour traffic. I would not have done that but I would have been quietly cursing black and blue, gnashing my teeth, and biting my thumb at Transport for New South Wales.

Transport for New South Wales told the radio yesterday that the reason for "confusion" and tailbacks was that many motorists didn’t realise that the tunnel between the Iron Cove Bridge and the Anzac Bridge is toll-free; which means that the queue of cars wanting to stay on Victoria Road could have actually bypassed the traffic by using the Iron Cove Link underground.

Excuse me?

Firstly, as a sane person of reasonable faculties and intelligence, I do not know how you could draw that conclusion just from looking at that sign.

Secondly, we the decent and fair people of New South Wales, who already live in a city with tolls on the Harbour Bridge, Harbour Tunnel, on-ramps for the Warringah Expressway, the Eastern Distributor, M4, M5, M7, M2, M2 link, and now M8, that is more tollways than exist in the entire of Europe except for Italy, have been punched from pillar to post by knavish tory toll companies for so long, that when we see the word "Toll" on a sign, we believe you.

The thing about a toll on a private road, or private school fees, or private health insurance, is that the existence of a toll is a barrier to entry. Putting a toll on what should be a public service, is almost by definition going to act as a barrier to people using that service. Making people pay money for the use of a thing, has not only the effect of increasing the list price of the thing itself but also will put a psychological stop on people wanting to use the thing. A toll on a thing not only adjusts the price at which the thing is being offered but also adjusts the non-monetary impetus that people might have for using the thing. A toll is very much a market device as it very much adjusts the amount of the service or good that is being used at that particular end user price.

Economics generally is about the questions of what to produce and at what price a thing should be produced at. Markets are concerned about the price of a thing and the volume of that thing which changes hands at any given price. One layer which sits on top of that is the amount of happiness and utility which is derived from the quiet enjoyment of the thing in question. Happiness is related to but not congruous to the amount of utility derived. However economics is not politics and trying to force the two together as though they were, is dishonest. This is why I find it so horrid, that when Transport for New South Wales tries to blame the public for being "confused" when they are the ones who made lots of policies and took actions to force upon the general public to make a decision based upon the opportunity cost of spending or not spending their money and time, they do so without seeming to acknowledge that market mechanisms are playing out in the aggregate, as cooly and coldly as should be expected.

The other thing of note about a toll on a private road, is that being a barrier to entry, it can and will have flow effects through the system. Even looking at the most basic of flow equations (traffic, water, and electricity all broadly follow the same rules), produces what you should expect to be slower speeds.

V = I.R

or 

I = V/R

If R is suddenly massive because you have created a pinch point where traffic wants to go from three lanes back into one because you have placed a toll in the way that traffic wants to avoid, then you have increased Resistance (R). If Voltage (V - that is the amount of traffic that wants to get through the system) remains broadly unchanged from one day to another, then Current (I) should decrease because that's how basic arithmetic works. Increase the denominator and the number should get smaller. Guess what? Less cars per hour moved through; which proves that the maths was right. For the same voltage of cars, an increase in resistance by mushing all of that traffic back into a single lane, must lead to and has led to a decrease in the amount of current, which is traffic flow.

What I find even more stupid about this 16.6 kilometre underground spaghetti junction is that a policy decision was taken to build this and not some other thing. The $16.8bn price tag, means that this cost $1.0121bn/km. Yet again we run into our old friend in economics of Opportunity Cost. At $10m/km, we could have had 168 kilometers of underground railway line. Now admittedly that would not have addressed the problem of traffic flow immediately but placed properly, commuters would have not put their cars on the road and left them at home and taken the train instead. One train service clears about 10,000 people per hour/ which is better than 3000 cars per hour. That has a different effect on current flow. Fewer cars does lower the Voltage which does lower the traffic flow but it also lowers the need to accommodate that traffic flow in the first place. There is a kind of happiness and utility to be derived in not having to sit in traffic; which comes from being on a train.

However that choice was never on the table for the motorists who use Victoria Road. They came across one lonely solitary sign and made their decisions completely rationally based upon the information that they had. The tailback which stretched back along for many kilometres was not because motorists were "confused" but rather, that the road is badly signposted, that motorists are consistently treated like mugs, and that an opportunity cost decision was made so that they were forced to make that last second decision. The tailbacks and traffic are not the fault of "confused" motorists who are acting rationally but Transport for New South Wales who made the decision to spend $16.8bn to build this silly thing in the first place.

Horse 3261 - Sydney Trains Encourages Fare Evasion? I Guess?

Sydney Trains in their wisdom, as part of the roll-out of the next wave of automatic ticketing machines have decided in many cases that accepting cash is no longer something that they want to do, and that EFTPOS is also something that that they are no longer interested in. The only acceptable payment that the Opal ticket machines take, is AMEX, MasterCard, and VISA. These three forms of credit card can also be used on the Opal Card readers.

What a top idea. Denying people the ability to pay, can and does lead to people not paying. 

When I arrive at Marayong station, as I do not have a credit card, there is literally no ability for me to pay my fare for the week. This quite frankly is an excellent idea, especially in the west because it means that people with no ability to pay for a fare, will simply ride on the trains for free. Why bother tapping on or off, if you literally can not buy a ticket to ride. At stations on the Richmond Line, as there are no such things as barriers which impede entry, then this can and does lead to people simply walking on and off trains.

The cabinet which houses the ticket machine, has remnants of the place where once there was a PIN-pad and where there used to be coin and note acceptors; so it is like the machine is actively taunting people. There is a place in the centre of the machine to place your Opal Card so that you can top it up but given that the Opal Card readers standing on the station also use the only forms of acceptable payment that the Opal ticket machines do, what's the point?

I would expect that at a major station like Blacktown, which is both a junction for the Richmond and Western Lines, as well as being one of the few stops that Blue Mountains trains stop at, that it would have a machine that accepts either cash of EFTPOS. Nope. Blacktown Station has ONE solitary ticket machine that accepts credit cards only. Granted, there is a newsagent and what appears to be a fancy energy drinks shop which both have the ability to charge up an Opal Card but both of those are closed when I pass through the station of an evening. Yet again,  as I do not have a credit card, there is literally no ability for me to pay my fare for the week.

The ticket machines themselves use an Ingenico Near-Field Communication (NFC) reader. In principle, an NFC reader does not care a jot or an iota about the kind of data passing through it. The means that the reason why Sydney Trains ticket machines refusing to accept EFTPOS is not a technical one, but rather that a policy decision.

Here's where we get down to tin tacks. I do not know who Sydney Trains does their banking with but the Ingenico machine in our office at work costs us $24.75/month for EFTPOS transactions.

There are 170 stations within the Sydney Trains network and a further 199 stations within the greater NSW TrainLink network. In total, the 369 railway stations in New South Wales, at $24.75/month for EFTPOS transactions would cost a mere $109,593 to run all the machines in the state. When you consider that many stations in New South Wales are unmanned, then paying for the equivalent of two staff members for an area of 809,952 km² doesn't sound too unreasonable.

WRONG!

Sydney Trains would rather make commuters pay 1.4% for the privilege of paying for fares. If there was ever a way to corporately punch your own customers in the face and to discourage them, this is it.

Sydney Trains are now helpfully being punished by the rag-tag ruffians, hooligans, bogans, and ne'er-do'wells at Blacktown Station, with them leapfrogging the ticket barriers on a very regular basis. If you are a person for whom morality is optional, then stealing from a faceless corporation which in this instance refuses to interact with you, seems like a rational option.

The threat of fining people by NSW Transport Officers seems like a bit of applied game theory. 

If NSW Transport Officers or the Police detect that you have committed the offence of travelling on trains and buses without a valid ticket, they they will issue a fine of $200. In my case, as NSW Transport Officers and Police are likely to check Opal Cards at least twice per week, then this fine is not worth the effort. However, if you can reliably ride the trains without a valid fare, for more than a month, then a fine of $200 is less than the $50/week multiplied by four for a month. Remember a fine is little more than a punitive price. A fine is still ultimately only a tax that can be paid for; which when applied rationally might actually be more cost effective. It should not be. That is stupid.

Of course I also realise that this might very well be one of those things like the North West Metro which doesn't connect Tallawong to Schofields because the other end went to the then Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian's electorate and she didn't want to have her electorate infected with poors, or the fact that it took almost 30 years of petitioning to get Doonside Railway Station lift access, but it seems to me that my complaint is view as being silly.

All top up machines have card readers that take eftpos/Visa/MasterCard, and your debit card will be one of these networks. Even if it doesn't have a chip, you can swipe. If it *still* doesn't work, it sounds like there's an issue with your card of some kind.

- Name Withheld, Twitter, 30th Oct 2023

Take note of the use of the word "all" in this reply to me on Twitter. The word "All" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Obviously I have a different definition of "all" to this person, as I would have used the words "practically none". When I begin my journey on a Monday morning, there are zero places that I can pay for my weekly fare at either Marayong or Blacktown. I actually have to have already completed a journey to Town Hall to be able to pay.

Town Hall Station which suffers under the traffic loads that it must carry in the evenings, should be a place where there are lots of ticket machines. As it currently stands, there are but four ticket machines at the station. Two of these machines are Card Only and as before "Card Only" is a misnomer as "Card Only" actually only means AMEX, MasterCard and VISA, only one accepts coins (which doesn't accept EFTPOS), and only one machine accepts EFTPOS as a form of payment.

The curious thing about the machine on the right hand side in the photograph above, is that although it says that it accepts EFTPOS as a form of payment, it does not. The label is actually a leftover from when this machine used to accept EFTPOS and coins.

The one machine which accepts EFTPOS as a form of payment, is on the western side of the ticket hall; which is on the other side of the ticket hall which is the one machine which accepts cash. Even then, this appears to be a legacy machine which will likely be replaced with the current machine, once it has ceased to be in service. As Sydney Trains very much lack the technical staff to be able to service these machines any more, the rollout program is one of replacement and not repair.

Here's the punchline to this whole sad joke. When Sydney Trains says that it wants feedback, including if you openly tell them that due to their own policies of making it so hard to pay for fares that people will actively steal from them, their response was thus:

Hello, 

Thank you for your enquiry to Transport for NSW.

There are now multiple options to top up so that you are always ready to travel.

You can top up: 

• on this site

• via the Opal website

• via the Opal Travel app

• over the counter at Opal retailers. Find a location on the Opal retailers map

• using one of the Opal top up machines available at selected stations, stops and wharves

• at Sydney Airport stations, however a $35 minimum top up applies

• at Transport Customer Service Centres

• at selected Service NSW Centres

When you top up online or via the Opal Travel app, you can access your new balance in as little as 15 minutes for metro, train, ferry and light rail services. Please allow up to 60 minutes for buses.

More information on how to top up your Opal card can be found online.

Yours sincerely,

Transport for NSW

- Transport for NSW, 19th Oct 2023

See the problem here? Their site, the Opal website, and the Opal Travel app, all require AMEX, MasterCard, and VISA. Most "of the Opal top up machines available at selected stations, stops and wharves" all require AMEX, MasterCard, and VISA. Sydney Airport stations, Transport Customer Service Centres, and selected Service NSW Centres, are not my local railway station at 7 am in the morning, are they?! And "Over the counter at Opal retailers" is also impossible at 7 am in the morning at m,y local railway station. 

Transport for NSW either didn't read my email, or didn't think about it, or else the person at the other end was by demonstration too stupid to understand what it means.

Herein lies the problem. I like an absolute fool, think that public transport should be free as a public service, in which case there is no need for ticket barriers at all. However, if there are to be fares for travel (which is still reasonable and rational) then there should at least be a reasonable ability for people to pay their fares. Having a credit card is not something which is either available to all, nor something which is even desirable. Imposing the use of credit cards as the only acceptable method of payment either seems myopic or discriminatory to me. 

I note that the rate of fare evasion rate on the London Underground is 2%. In Sydney, the rate of fare evasion rate is closer to 8%. Public transport fare evaders cost New South Wales about $120 million a year, and an increase in  disrespect for government combined with what appears to be a deliberate a lack of human interaction, makes fare evasion more of a victimless offence to the public. I suspect that we have almost reached the point where Sydney Trains are passively encouraging civil disobedience.

Good luck to them?

Horse 3257 - Gadigal Station Offends The Easily Offended

Whilst it might be true that not everyone who voted "No" in The Voice Referendum is racist, it is certainly true that every racist voted "No". It is also true that any reputation that Australia might have had as being an easy going nation has been burned like a kerosine fuelled magnesium fire, in that in the last few weeks especially, Australia is now visibly more nasty and racist. 

Yet another example to add as evidnence that the racists have all been emboldened, was the naming of one of the new stations on the Sydney Metro extension. Even though just two stations up the line there will be a station called Barangaroo, it is the name Gadigal Station which will be located in Sydney's CBD beneath Pitt and Castlereagh Streets that has really brough out the hate filled racists, like mother to that kerosine fuelled magnesium flame.

The fact that this extension will take commuters under the harbour to Chatswood in just 13 minutes, is neither here nor there. It is purely the fact that this this station has been given an indigenous name, which has brought people out to spit bile and acid.

One of the usual methods of naming stations would be to name it after the suburb that it is in. When this station is opened, there will be eight stations within the suburb of Sydney; those being: Barangaroo, Martin Place, Gadigal, Town Hall, Wynyard, Circular Quay, St James, and Museum. You will note that Central/Sydney Terminal is not one of those, as this is actually in the suburb of Strawberry Hills. 

Thus, this demonstrates the first problem of naming a station. When there is only one in a suburb/city, then the name is obvious but when there is more than one (or eight), it becomes more difficult to let people know where they are.

The next available option would be to name the station after the street that it is on. The obvious choice would be to call the station Pitt St Station, expect that Pitt St as one of the long streets of central Sydney, is 2.5km long. Also, it does not help that there already are three stations on Pitt St; those being Circular Quay, Town Hall and Central (which isn't even in Sydney). Naming the station after the vague and long location of Pitt St is equally daft.

Most people with some quanta of common sense would prefer a station to be name after the specific location it is in but when that isn't possible, then the naming of railway stations becomes really difficult really quickly. 

Melbourne has this problem everywhere; mostly this is because Melbourne towards the centre of the city has good overlay of both trains and trams. Melburnians who live closer to the city are much more spoiled for choice than Sydney Siders are. Melbourne has railway stations called Southern Cross which isn't a place; Melbourne Central which is named after a shopping centre and has been renamed twice since it opened from Museum to Daimaru to Melbourne Central; then there are stations in Melbourne called Jewel Station and Batman Station which also aren't places.

If we look overseas, Grand Central Terminal in New York isn't named after a place, the nearest Underground station to Trafalgar Square is Charing Cross which also isn't named a place, and Paris has such station names as Roosevelt, De Gaulle, Reunion et cetera, which are also not named after places.

The same kinds of people who will hide behind sock puppet Name 8 Digit accounts (John88483756) are likely to have an Australian Flag, or a picture of someone like Benito Mussolini, or perhaps most laughably of all, the crest of their favourite rugby league team such as the Parramatta Eels or the Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles. 

In the part of the world where I live, from Marayong to Parramatta, the places are named after a Dharug word, an internment camp, the Seven Hills of Rome, another Dharug word, a place in Lancashire where witch trials were held, an explorer, a brewery, and then another Dharug word. 

Maybe its just a rich people thing in places like Bondi or Coogee, where they have the luxury to complan about indigenous names. It must be really frightening to live in a city which has places named Waitara, Waroongah, Warringah, Cabramatta, Parramatta, Bondi, Coogee, Cronulla, Warrawee, Toongabbie, et cetera et cetera et cetera, without going complete apoplectic. 

It could also be that I am just too dog ignorant to see why this should cause such offence. Naming an Australian place after the Australian Australian word for that place, seems like kind of a no brainer to me. More generally when it comes to the naming of things, people get used to it really quickly. As much as it annoys the racists, of whom I will take as a confession that they are actively too ignorant and stupid to work out where they are, the name Gadigal Station will in time not be named after the location, it will be the location. "Near Gadigal Station" will appear on stationery and directions within weeks of it opening. 

Quite frankly the name Gadigal, which is named after the traditional Eora name that the station is actually located in, seems about as good as any. However, as this is the new emboldened racist cry-baby twenty-first century, then an aboriginal name for a place just seems to be really infuriating to some people.

Horse 3217 - To Conquer Traffic You Must Become More Traffic

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/the-race-to-stop-a-sydney-traffic-sewer-becoming-the-next-parramatta-road-20230628-p5dk62.html

The Inner West Council and Balmain Greens MP Kobi Shetty are pushing the government to develop detailed plans to transform Victoria Road at Rozelle by removing traffic lanes to allow for more public and active transport and wider footpaths, before the motorway tunnels open later this year.

...

The state government previously forecast a drop in traffic of up to 50 per cent on part of Victoria Road in Rozelle once a 1.1-kilometre tunnel bypass opens as part of the $3.9 billion final stage of the project. The tunnel will link the Iron Cove Bridge to a massive underground spaghetti junction at Rozelle.

- Megan Gorrey, Sydney Morning Herald, 3rd Jul 2023.

Speaking as a member of the great Sydney public who lives west of the Red Rooster line and therefore whose opinion matters not a jot to the people who lives east of the Red Rooster line, I have serious questions as to why anyone would think that opening a tolled motorway is going to cause "a drop in traffic of up to 50 per cent on part of Victoria Road in Rozelle". Are they mad? Do they like lying? Have they decided to throw all that they know about the world upon the bonfire of ignorance and dance around as though they were making a logic sacrifice to nonsensery and toomfoolery? I can completely understand that the Inner West Council and the Member of Parliament for Balmain object most vociferously to the fact that Victoria Road passes through their electorates but expecting that there will be benefits from narrowing the roads and making people drive more slowly, is dafter than a kangaroo playing tennis in the middle of the Gladesville Bridge.

Traffic as a moving festival of slowness, is similar to other things that flow and move. Broadly speaking, things that flow obey the same sets of rules. Flow of traffic, flow of electrons, and flow of water, can be described with mostly the same sets of mathematical equations and herein lies the problem. Things that flow tend to follow the path of least resistance. In theory adding a brand new pipe should alleviate pressure on an already existing pipe but when that pipe is itself subject to valves and baffles and switches which discourage things from flowing into it, the expected advantage of installing that new pipe is immediately flushed away.

One of the interesting things about the imposition of a toll, is that it is a barrier to entry. Fees generally are a barrier to entry into a marketplace but in this case, the metaphor crystallises as people who do not pay, are not allowed to use the motorway. Of course there will be some people who can not afford to pay. Those people will continue to use Victoria Road at reduced utility. There will also be some people who do not want to pay, if they think that they price is too high. In response to the motorway being opened, the  plan from Inner West Council by removing traffic lanes, is actually to discourage people from using Victoria Road by physically reducing the utility of the road even further. 

In the case of Epping Road which has been reduced to a one lane road in each direction, beyond Mowbray Road and towards the Pacific Highway, the reduction of utility of the road forced some traffic to run up Mowbray Road via Artarmon and other traffic to head southwards and back towards Five Dock. Part of the reason why Victoria Road's traffic is so bad, is precisely because of another toll-road. As for Victoria Road, another part of the reason why of why traffic is so bad on it is that the opening of the M4 and the subsequent loss of utility of Parramatta Road, has force even more traffic onto Victoria Road. Another part of the reason why Victoria Road's traffic is so bad, is precisely because of another another toll-road.

Inner West Council's solution it seems, is not to improve the road but to choke traffic even harder. This will naturally lead to consequences. We can see what kind of consequences that this will lead to, by looking at the M4 west of Church St in Parramatta. As the M4 is tolled, but only beyond Church St eastbound, then this creates an incentive for people to leave the M4 at Church St. Consequently, what happens is a very long, very ugly, and very slow queue of cars which builds up at about 5am in the morning and remains there until about 8pm at night. On a motorway, where the closing speed between a lane which is crawling along and motorway speeds of 90km/h, this has the potential to be disasterous. The tailback of cars queueing, is typically between about 4km and in the morning peak as much as 10km long. Inner West Council's solution is not going to cause a speed differential between different lanes of traffic but it is absolutely going to cause a tailback; which given that Victoria Road is a main aterial road, looks little more than pure churlishness on the part of Inner West Council.

There is some grain of truth that reducing Victoria Road to a single lane of travel will reduce "traffic" but this smacks of weaponised NIMBYism that has not been properly thought through, if in fact any thought was put into this at all.

Perhaps the most useful equation here is the general equation for Voltage, Current, and Resistance. V = IR. Voltage can be thought of as the speed of traffic. Current is the number of cars per hour. Resistance takes into account the number of useful lanes and the number and operation of the traffic lights et cetera.

This can helpfully be rearranged to form V/R = I.

Since the speed (Voltage) will drop, and the resistance will be greater; that is that V gets smaller and R gets bigger, then I gets smaller as an output.

60/1000 = 0.06

40/2000 = 0.02

Hooray, the traffic flow will be smaller. However, one of the neat things about maths is that it does not care about your stories and is always waiting to make fools of us all. The things driving the drivers, which makes them want to go somewhere (which include going to work, school, university, shopping, et cetera) are still driving the drivers. Just because Inner West Council wants to choke down traffic does not mean that that traffic has any less reason not to go somewhere. There will be some traffic, where the drivers who are prepared to pay the toll will be taken off of Victoria Road but as for everyone else, they will not. For them, all that happens is that there is a slower section, yet another set of resistances that makes their life harder and as proven by the imposition of tolls on the M4, a transposition of tailbacks and worse and longer tailbacks at that, further back up the road.

The really really dimwitted person here is the MP for Balmain and member of The Greens, Kobi Shetty. Her policy of NIMBYism, will actively cause traffic to idle longer, use more petrol, and add to CO2 and NOx emissions. Cars that idle for longer and going nowhere, don't just magically disappear because you moved them 5km up the road.

So who actually wins here? Tollway operators. We should probably drop the pretense at this point and just admit that Inner West Council has likely been persuaded by developers and by the tollway operators themselves. We should absolutely be convinced that the NSW State Government, given the very lone history of MPs being given golden parachutes by private enterprise, actively love finding new and impressive ways of tightening the screws on the good and fair people of NSW. If this actually was about improving traffic, then there wouldn't be tolls on the roads and traffic would move freely; however asking for that is like asking your neighbourhood bully not to beat you up and to give you lollies.

Inner West Council wins (?) because they get reduced "traffic" but they'll now get a far longer and possibly permanent bottleneck. To the immediate west, Ryde Council must surely be spitting chips, losing their bananas, and going nineteen to the dozen with rage. Congratulations, they will now be the new recipient of a brand new traffic snarl as eastbound traffic fights to go from three lanes, back to two and then back to one. 

It is pieces like this in the Sydney Morning Herald that actually make we wistful and wish for the days of yore when local newspapers like the Ryde Leader and the Balmain Herald would have po-faced people and angry people pointing at things on the front pages of the newspaper. It is very likely that Inner West Council without as much public scrutiny just decided to jam this through some council meetings with no kickback whatsoever. Meanwhile, the people who live west of the Red Rooster line who have no say but who are immediately affected by this, will just have to treat this like yet another bitter and sour lolly and suck it up.

I do not drive down Victoria Road enough to be troubled by this plan in particular, which means that I am not going to be pained by it, but it still seems to me that between NIMBYism and the greed of private tollway operators who see the public as nothing more than a machine to extract more money from, that the road network of Sydney is actually less useful than it was when I was a kid. Sure, there are more motorways but they don't relieve traffic woes when the roads are then made worse to entice people to use the motorways.

Horse 3153 - The 2023 NSW State Election - Eh? Who Knows?

With the parliament dissolved and the election only a few weeks away, the 2023 New South Wales Festival Of The Vote: The Bout To Knock The Other Out has begun in earnest. Current incumbent Dom Perrotet has kicked off his campaign with a proposal to bribe parents to the tune of $400 per year every year, if parents put aside money into a savings fun for their kids. This sounds like a great plan until you consider that very poor families who live from payday to payday will likely never get any of it, and that Mr Perrotet's own family stands to gain $50,400 by my calculation. Charity begins at home - his home. To those who have, more shall be given but to those who have not, they will be given nothing. This is the Matthew Principle in full swing. Meanwhile Chris Minns and the Labor Party have decided to adopt the policy of not saying anything at all and not being the Liberal Party. Given that two of the four Premiers who have served since Labor last held office in NSW have been referred to the ICAC, then this might be a policy of pure genius.

However is simply existing, enough to swing the electorate? To be honest, I have no idea. Given that the pandemic is still in pretty recent memory, and former Premier Gladys Berejiklian's referral to the ICAC will likely not be reported in full until after the election, I do not know how either of those will affect the intentions of the good an decent people of New South Wales. My sense of not knowing is amplified by a complete lack of silence from rural print media which no longer exists. It used to be that you could gauge the intent of people in that great expanse that we call "not Sydney" by reading through the local newspapers. That is now impossible.

The cold, hard, mechanical facts of the election are as follows. There are 93 seats in the NSW Legislative Assembly; which means that 47 are needed to form government. The Liberal and National Parties have since the 2019 Election held 48 seats; which has meant that in order to pass legislation, they needed everyone on the floor of the chamber. Fortunately, that's really easy considering that the NSW Parliament Building is so incredibly cramped and small that apart from running up stairs from their respective offices, nowhere in the premises is any more than 3 minutes from anywhere else. 

To get to 47 seats though, the Labor Party will have to take an additional 11 seats, to the 36 that it already holds, if it wants to win government. It could in theory take them from any of the 9 independents but given that all of them are likely to hold, then flipping them from the Liberal/National government is the only realistic way that Labor will take the keys to the kingdom for the next four years.

The 11 seats most likely to flip, are in order of most marginal to safest are:

East Hills

Upper Hunter

Penrith

Goulburn

Willoughby

Tweed

Winston Hills

Holsworthy

Riverstone

Parramatta

Oatley

Oatley was won at a margin of 6.8% on the 2PP basis at the 2019 Election; which means that realistically, there needs to be a 7% swing towards Labour if they are to take government in their own right. 7% in Australian politics at any level is not impossible but it is unlikely. Of those 11 seats, 6 of them are in Western Sydney; which means that for the first time in possibly a long time, the Liberal Party and the media companies will have to cencede the fact that Western Sydney actually exists. 

The demographics of Sydney which is distinct from the rest of NSW is such that there are a collection of very rich and very staunchly Liberal voting electorates along the coast. What we've seen over the last few Federal election cycles is that when the people get so fantastically rich that they have all possible needs met and more, that they may be pushed towards uncontrolled Independents. There is a big collection of electorates which always will vote Labor. Then there is a ring of seats which blink with either colour, depending on which way the wind blows.

I also have no idea how much immediate recency bias plays into this. If there is some catastrophic train failure in the week before the election, then the people of Sydney who by themselves have the power to make and unmake state governments, may decide to do that. It hasn't explicitly been brought up but the threat of privatisation of the railways, is always lurking in the background. I find it interesting that even with the privatisation of the buses, this has made zero difference to voting intentions in staunchly blue seats. 

What I do not know is if the 11 seats listed above, which sit inside that 7% swing threshold, have stable voting patterns. Willoughby would likely revert to being a Liberal seat under most circumstances but given that it was their MP who was Premier and referred to the Independent Commission Against Corruption, there might be pent up anger there. Upper Hunter is confusing as the electorate might either reflect wishes of a decidedly working class mining demographic or a semi-agrarian bloc who might vote National. Tweed is unknowable. Tweed is quickly becoming a place where old and rich people retire to because they want to be on the Gold Coast but it also has poorer people who have been priced out of living in Brisbane; then you add in the further complication that it is a border electorate and I've got not idea.

My suspicion is that the Liberal/National Coalition will not hold government. What I have no idea about is if sufficiently enough of the electorate across the state is going to run across the aeroplane and make it lurch in the other direction. Queensland with its single chamber, does this a lot. It is also highly likely that the Labor Party will flip some seats and we'd be left with a blue and red bloc with about 44 seats each. This whole election might then rest on the decisions of a few kingmakers who then get to decide who to hand the keys of government to. If that happens, then get prepared for the Daily Telegraph and the Sydney Morning Herald to get as close to slander as they possibly can, to pressure them into choosing the Coalition. As it is, the right-wing trashmedia already hates "the Teals".

47 - seats for government

11 - seats need to be flipped

7% - swing

Those are the key numbers. That's what this election hinges on.