The CARR that ate Sydney

Many of us can remember the way we held our breath during the Olympics in late 2000, hoping that the city rail system - which a few weeks earlier had been hiccuping away as usual - would hold out and impress all our overseas visitors. And it did. But what has happened to it since then? We are certainly finding out the bad news the hard way.

Since Bob Carr led the ALP back to power a decade ago, he has managed to re-direct spending away from a publicly-consumable good - i.e., cheap, safe, reliable public transport - to a form of privatised transport that is unequally distributed in our society: to cars and their infrastructure - tollways, expressways, motorways and under-city tunnels.

This switch is despite his government’s nominal espousal of social justice principles and commitment to cutting pollution levels. One could expect that, on both these grounds, he might set about improving public transport, to both facilitate getting people to and from work and their various other activities, as well as cutting down on the CO² pollution generated by motor vehicles. But clearly this is not so.

In Sydney, while population has grown from 3.6 million in 1991 to 4.1 million in 2001, spending on public transport has fallen behind. Certainly the growth of CityRail fleet has failed to keep pace with the growth in patronage demand.

Yet spending on roads has escalated. According to the Bureau of Transport and Regional Economics, in 2000-1, out of a total Australian spending on state roads of $4.0 billion, NSW spent nearly $1.5 billion.

We can already see the gridlocks that are crippling Sydney’s roads. And it can only get worse if we don’t confront the situation as a matter of urgency. Critical long-term decisions about replacing and upgrading our aged public transport infrastructure have to be made. Yet after ten years of “Builder Bob”, what have we got?

Think of city rail. A rail system without enough reliable drivers - it took a rail disaster that claimed seven lives two years ago to draw the government’s attention to this, something it should have been aware of any time in the previous eight years. The betting is that the government hasn’t been spending all that much on rail maintenance since the Olympics.

And what about those promised lines that are still to materialise? Whatever happened to the Carlingford to Chatswood via Epping extension, a connector that would have provided a time-saving link between the west and north of our city, cutting out the necessity for workers to travel into the city and then out again?

And then there are line closures. The previous transport minister, Michael Costa - the one that shoots from the mouth - has justified the closing of several critical lines as a money-saving measure. One of these was the CountryLink daily Murwillumbah XPT service, which would now terminate at Casino. But as a PriceWaterhouseCoopers report into the closure noted, this decision “was primarily based on avoiding a large future track investment requirement …”

If the “unfortunate” necessity for spending on maintenance and upgrading were the main criteria for closing lines with low current patronage, where would that leave our rail network? Should we all rush out and buy cars? This was actually suggested by Michael Costa’s spokesperson late in August 2004. He is quoted as saying, “the rail network cannot be all things to all people … It’s designed to move a large number of people in small amounts of time when demand is greatest … People do have other options. If they want to use their car, it does not make sense (to run trains)”.

Isn’t that putting the cart before the horse? Mightn’t it be that the train services are so bad, in terms of service, reliability and safety, that people have no other option than to have a car?

As Costa’s spokesperson went on to say, “The minister said you can buy a car very cheaply … even allowing for depreciation, it makes it very competitive”.

Traffic experts argue that, to avoid “automobile dependence”, public transport must be faster than cars in all main corridors. Given that Cityrail has its own dedicated track, this should be easy to ensure.

Yet on the lines that are still in operation, services are so bad there is little point in commuters using a timetable to do any travel planning. So many trains were late that, in an effort to sidestep required performance indicators, the minister announced that the definition of a “late” train will be altered from “after the due or usual time” to anywhere up to five minutes after the scheduled arrival time. Isn’t that an ingenious way to “improve efficiency”!

Even the proposed new timetable, due for implementation in September, relies on a reduction of services in the off-peak periods to improve service connections. So you can forget about staggered working hours as a way of relieving congestion levels for a long time yet.

And don’t forget the debacle of the Millennium train. Remember it? It was launched with much fanfare on June 30, 2002, only to have ongoing problems emerge. Luckily it held out until after the elections in late March 2003, only to be withdrawn from service early in April 2003. But it was “re-launched”, again with much fanfare, on June 2, 2003. Claims in state parliament that its cost had blown out from about $250 million to nearly $658 million were followed soon after by an announcement that no more Millennium trains would be brought into service.

Sydney is Australia’s premier tourist destination, attracting more tourists than any other place in the country. One might therefore expect that, as in London, Amsterdam or Paris, there would be a fast, efficient rail link from the airport to the city. But as an employee at Sydney International Airport recently went public to note, CityRail cannot even keep to its timetable on this route, which is “not only an inconvenience but provides a very poor view of our transport system to overseas and domestic visitors and is detrimental to overall tourism”.

And think of the poor workers in Sydney who have to use the rail. According to one source, since June 2004, so many morning and afternoon peak hour trains have run late that 26 million people have, over that period, been late for work.

So bad have things become that even the state’s own Sustainability Commissioner, Peter Newman, has become a critic. Noting that $10 billion has been spent over the past decade on tollways and tunnels, he points out that a road lane can carry only about 2,500 persons per hour; light rail can carry between 7,000 and 10,000 per hour, while trains can carry 50,000 people per hour - 20 times the capacity of a roadway.

And some 200,000 people come into the city by train every day.

He goes on to highlight Builder Bob’s failure to adequately maintain the city’s rail system. After a decade of Carr and cars, we now “need a decade of rail building in Sydney … if we are to make a liveable and sustainable city”.

It was only in mid-March that he suggested a fast train link between the city’s west and the CBD was critical to the ailing transport network. And a consortium of private investors was willing to build - at no cost to the government - a 26km tunnel between Parramatta and Wynyard, extra lines further west to St Mary’s and Penrith, and a new city station, MetroWest.

And how’s this for an example of what passes for transport planning in Sydney. Late in March this year, Costa, in his new role as Minister for Roads, announced that he was reversing a pledge - given in the lead-up to the last election - to hand back to the community land that had once been set aside for a southern freeway from Sutherland to the city.

Costa’s predecessor, Carl Scully, had decided almost three years ago to dump the $700 million F6 motorway, stating that he would prefer public transport, such as light rail, to use the land corridor. But Costa has stated that a dual-carriageway road is now back as a possibility.

Even the government’s urban consolidation program is being undermined. Having encouraged people to live closer together in townhouses and apartments, with the expectation that they could catch a train or bus to their workplace, public transport is so abysmal that people are still having to use their cars. A report for the Business Council of Australia noted of Sydney’s ailing, failing rail system, “until major investment occurs, poor reliability will continue to encourage people to prefer using cars”.

And does Bob ever remember what he has claimed earlier? At the opening of the western extension of the Light Rail network, on August 13, 2000, he stated, “I think the revival of light rail is going to be one of the great themes of living in Sydney over the next few decades”.

Is it any wonder that people don’t understand what is going on.

We now have 2.1 million cars on the road in Sydney, a growth of just under 10 per cent in the last five years. And as all transport experts will tell you, putting in more roads and freeways merely adds to congestion and pollution. Overall, on any day at peak hour, there are 350,000 cars on the roads of greater Sydney.

There are wider economic costs to this. Australia-wide, urban road congestion costs $16 billion a year, or 2 per cent of gross domestic product. Sydney generates between 25 and 30 per cent of Australia’s total economic activity, with the CBD accounting for about 8 per cent. Think how far ahead we would be without this road congestion.

We clearly face the necessity of doing something about our ageing public transport system. Otherwise Sydney will slowly grind to a halt, as Cityrail fails to deliver and our roads are increasingly choked with cars.

It is time to give serious consideration to how a new way forward can be achieved. Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) have delivered on toll roads and tunnels; perhaps they should be given the opportunity to deliver on public transport. Funds are available - only the political will is lacking.

A new mass transit system would do much to decrease our dependence on cars, would do wonders towards cutting pollution levels, and greatly improve the economic efficiency of our city.

A recent TV news program highlighted a statistic that says it all about the result of Bob’s decade in power, “almost a third of Sydney’s landscape is [now] dedicated to roads and car-parks - and more are being built”. So while Bob Carr might like to be remembered as “Builder Bob”, and a friend of the environment, it may turn out that he will enter the history books as “The CARR that ate Sydney”.