Sydney’s transport and land use blunders

Finally on 27 June'17 Premier Berejiklian's team wandered down their well-worn imaginative path:

The cost of a new metro rail line running mostly through tunnels between Sydney's CBD and Parramatta is set to exceed the $12.5 billion price of the railway soon to be built under Sydney harbour. While insisting it was too early to put a figure on the cost of the proposed CBD-Parramatta line, Transport Minister Andrew Constance said it would be a "much bigger project" than the second stage of the government's current metro rail project.

There are strong indications that the Government's wish-list is unsustainable, under- if not –un-funded, and certainly not legitimised through iA's and Eddington's/Schott's Treasury-based precautions.

Metros cannot carry more passengers than the Bradfield system – the lobbies and iA had forgotten that their patron Nick Greiner's State Infrastructure Strategy measured the existing lines' potential to carry 40,000 people per hour in each direction – this being the "elephant in the room" option.

This author's Eddington Bedrock: from Christie to Greiner to Gibbons has even better options that have been thoroughly peer-reviewed but the governments are ignoring it – especially Baird and Berejiklian. As a start, if Berejiklian's abandonment of the Epping to Parramatta line (without analysis) was reversed, enough paths might be released to allow fast services at higher capacity on the existing system including to the new Airport – much more quickly and cheaply.

It was just about enough when the AFR reported on 30 June '17 that:

NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet has pledged to work closely with the federal government on a planned $12.5 billion (stet, should be "more than") line from Sydney to Parramatta in a sign he is hoping to grab some of the $10 billion of federal funds on offer .... Infrastructure lobby groups have urged the NSW Government to fund the West Metro project urgently .... Property developers argue the line will services (stet) suburbs like Homebush where the state government has encouraged them to build huge housing developments.

There is no scoping, no feasibility of options, no "first plan before transport projects are dreamt up", no benefit/cost analyses, no community engagement – no legitimacy. Once again unelected interests are covering governments' eyes and leading them to the developers' trough. The Federal Minister for Infrastructure at least said iA would be consulted first. Coming generations will face a depleted treasury, an inefficient transport/land use context, and an inability to correct mistakes for at least one generation.

The saddest thing of all is that so little has been learnt from a decade of disarray. The Telegraph had reported in August 2009 that $8 billion would produce travel times savings of 2 minutes per passenger. Then Premier Nathan Rees had said in 2008 that "the CBD Metro has to be pushed through at all costs"; and then, as had his hapless predecessor Morris Iemma done about the West Metro in 2008, he said he'd expect the Federal Government to pay for the same. Nick Greiner's iNSW overturned a few shibboleths but was defeated by Berejiklian's Big Projects – and iNSW has never recovered its mojo.

There is not one independent body which can guide NSW forward. The legendary Milton Morris created one which Wran continued and which Bruce Baird thought in 1995 should be reinstituted. This author was its secretary and knows it was efficient, reliable and clean.

The Greater Sydney Commission should be allowed to shine but it is chained to pre-approved projects (even if not legitimised) and the Commissioners can be dismissed without cause if they offend the meisters. This author's Creative Reconstruction of NSW Local Governance would have set up regional leadership, strong community engagement along a "willingness to pay" path and speedy justice where mischief recrudesces but the Coalition had commissioned it then ignored it.

Perrottet found that same well-worn track and failed his first test – as custodian of Treasury's economics and finance Guidelines, does he know what they mean? Economics might be the Dismal Science but it throws more light on Sydney than does a whole Parliament and State apparatus.