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.
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