One of my personal bugbears about living in Sydney is the deliberate stupidity of State Governments in making transport planning decisions; based not on foresight and future needs but on spite and wilful intention to cause harm. Both sides of the political aisle in NSW have been at it for more than a century and will more than likely, continue to do so in the future. In 1932 when Mr Van de Groot slashed the official ribbon to declare the Sydney Harbour Bridge open "in the name of the good and fair people of New South Wales", he did so to the embarrassment of Premier Big Jack Lang; I think that despite de Groot's unseemly rambunctiousness, he may very well have been doing it in the best spirit, precisely because he did it "in the name of the good and fair people of New South Wales".
Successive decisions of spite are the reason why the Castle Hill Railway Line which was supposed to have been built by the end of 1937 was not ever built, why the extension to the Eastern Suburbs Railway Line from Bondi Junction through places like Coogee and on to La Perouse and then to connect to the Botany Goods Line which would have served the airport also was not ever built and also why the subject of my own personal source of annoyance, the North West Metro doesn't connect to the Richmond Line and might not ever be built in my lifetime.
Any network of things always has problems with its weakest connection. The very point of a network is that the efficiency of a system increases beyond what the individual components of that system would be capable of because they are connected.
I live out in the Western Suburb of Sydney; which tend to be ignored by state governments except as a concession that we might have the ability to vote for members of parliament. That shouldn't be relevant but humans are spiteful and when you give them positions of power, they sometimes use that power spitefully. I suspect that the reason why the North West Metro doesn't connect from Tallawong Station to Schofields Station which is a distance of 2222m, is that it stops in a Liberal Party voting seat and to extend it further would mean providing services that would be shared with Labor Party voting seats.
By not connecting the railway line that distance of 2222m when it was originally built, the railway line is deliberately made harder to use; to the point where virtually nobody at all who lives in the west is ever going to. It is a way of enforcing economic apartheid; which also happens to be an engrained policy of government in Australia and appears elsewhere in things like education and healthcare policies.
This is where my experiment comes in. For the purposes of this exercise, I wanted to go from Marayong Station to Rouse Hill Town Centre. It is a sufficiently large enough shopping centre which also contains some restaurants, medium end clothing and retail, and a pretty nice cinema.
From my house in Marayong to Rouse Hill Town Centre, it takes 13 minutes to drive. I realise that taking public transport will always be subject to the vicissitude of fate but had the 2222m of railway line been built in the first place, then it wouldn't have been so bad.
Some notation will be in order:
M = Marayong Station
Sc = Schofields Station
T = Tallawong Station
B = Blacktown Station
RH = Rouse Hill Town Centre
Times that are given will be the time that I arrived at these various places.
Drive: 13 minutes.
I do not need to test this again.
What should have been:
M = 0900
Sc = 0907
T = 0909
RH = 0911
11 minutes.
Theoretically in a best case scenario had the line been built and you could make a connection between a Richmond Line train and the North West Metro at Schofields, the whole trip should take just 11 minutes. The worst case scenario would be if you just saw the Metro train leave Schofields and have to wait the entire 10 minutes for the next one that arrive. That would have been and should have been 21 minutes.
Sadly, that connection does not exist (thanks to the then Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian, who just happens to have the other end of the North West Metro terminate in her electorate at Chatswood) and so I have had to make alternate arrangements to solve a problem which had the thing been built properly, need not be a problem.
So then - the experiment.
Train, Bus, Train.
M = 0945
Sc = 1013
T = 1024
RH = 1032
47 minutes.
This I imagine is going to be the default assumption by people who look at the maps inside the trains both on the Richmond Line and the North West Metro. I looks as though there should be a bus connection in lieu of the rail connection which doesn't exist.
Train, Bus, Train.
RH = 1043
T = 1049
Sc = 1128
M = 1132
49 minutes.
In both of these cases, the bus in question is the 751 bus from Blacktown to Rouse Hill. As far as I have been able to tell, it is the only bus that runs between Schofields and Tallawong and even then doesn't act as a shuttle. There apparently is an on demand service but if you don't have a credit card and/or don't have the app (which I don't) then it doesn't exist.
Train, Bus.
M = 1140
B = 1145
RH = 1251
71 minutes.
This was also the 751 bus from Blacktown to Rouse Hill Town Centre; and needed me to take a train from Marayong to Blacktown.
Bus, Train.
RH = 1350
B = 1432
M = 1446
56 minutes.
This was the 735 bus from Rouse Hill Town Centre to Blacktown; then a train to Marayong.
Train, Walk, Train.
M = 1446
Sc = 1453
T = 1515
RH = 1521
35 minutes.
It is a strange state of affairs when walking appears to be the fastest way to get somewhere; that is because I don't have to wait for the connection. If you had any sizeable amount of shopping or if you are old, then this opinion also doesn't exist for you.
Train, Walk, Train.
RH = 1530
T = 1533
Sc = 1555
M = 1621
51 minutes.
Again, I had to wait for a train at Schofields; which had there been a connection with the Metro, I would have made easily.
Had there not been a pandemic going on, then the obvious problem with the Metro would have been on display. Bus connections exist but are bad. There have been reports in various newspapers that the commuter car parks fill to capacity in the morning and that some stations along the line don't have any parking spaces at all. If the point is to get people onto public transport, then it fails as a project.
My experiment shows that there is practically no point to using the Metro if using a car is an option for the people of the west. Connections to Tallawong are hopeless; connections to Rouse Hill prove beyond impractical, and connections to other stations are also mostly pointless.
If you have to take an hour in some cases for a journey with proper infrastructure connections could have taken 11 minutes, then the impracticality of the system is sufficiently large enough a barrier that people aren't going to use it.
I really want to like the North West Metro but it can never be anything other than a fun thing to ride, for me, in its current state.
I have been officially told by Transport For NSW that no plans currently exist to make that final connection unless approval is given for both the Badgerys Creek airport at the Metro extension and it increasingly looks likely that from this end, that connection will never be made. Yet again this looks like the deliberate stupidity of State Governments in making transport planning decisions; based not on foresight and future needs but on spite and wilful intention to cause harm.
1 comment:
I don't think it is incompetence or malevolence, I think it is strategic.
Why doesn't Sydney Metro go to Schofields instead of Tallawong?
Why didn't light rail go just 2km further from Kingsford Juniors to Maroubra Rd?
Why isn't Metro West pressing on with tunneling and going to Central and Zetland?
Plenty of other examples like this.
A theory could be people within the bureaucracy have realised that leaving these types of gaps force the Government's hand somewhat to keep going with additional projects which go even further than just biting off as much as you could chew would have done in the first place. Because they aren't as cheap to just fill in the gaps if you have to do a new EIS and restart the project - if you are going to fix the Schofields-Tallawong gap you might as well do it properly and go all the way to St Marys, opening up new development and connecting many new communities. If you are going to extend LR to Maroubra you might as well go all the way down Anzac Parade where there is an open reservation or to Maroubra beach where there are enormous development opportunities. If you are going to come back to restart tunneling Metro West from Hunter St to Central then Zetland you might as well continue all the way to the SE and get the full returns of the project. Better than the half-assed jobs alot of projects have been over the decades like the Sydney Airport line or Brisbane Cross River Rail.
We can’t assume that governments want the overall cheaper option rather than the option that's cheaper per year. Schofields instead of Tallawong would require a new EIS and the cost of that and the delays may not make it cheaper. The CSELR had to end somewhere, and again, it's also about annual budgets, not just total sticker price. Metro West was obviously a decision about getting what seemed necessary up front and was already an expensive project. While $ per KM usually drops for every added km, it's not the only element of the decision for scoping.
Post a Comment