Sydney: from world city to 'sick man' of Australia

Tony Recsei, president of Save Our Suburbs, a community organisation seeking to limit inappropriate densification, blamed recent power failures on an electricity infrastructure that was not built for high density in an April 7 Daily Telegraph letter, noting that “Cram in more people and overloading must result. That should not be too hard for people to understand.”

Greater traffic congestion

And, of course, insufficient road expansion has been undertaken to accommodate the inevitable intensification of traffic congestion. The planners like to say that higher densities mean less traffic. In fact virtually all of the evidence, throughout the first world, indicates that more intense traffic congestion is associated with higher densities.

Sydney is no exception. The average one-way work trip now takes 34 minutes, which equals that of America’s largest urban area, New York, which has more than five times the population and the land area as well as the longest travel time of any major urban area in the nation.

Sydney’s planners delight in comparisons with Los Angeles, frequently suggesting that their regulations are necessary to ensure that Sydney does not “sprawl” as much as Los Angeles. Actually Sydney sprawls considerably more in relation to its population. The Los Angeles urban area is a full one-third more dense than the Sydney urban area. And despite the fact that nearly half of the planned Los Angeles freeway system was not built, Angelinos spend one hour less each week getting to work each than Sydneysiders.

Even in Atlanta, with a pathetic freeway system little better than Sydney’s and one-third Sydney’s density, people spend an hour less commuting to and from work every two weeks and spend less total time travelling than in Sydney.

The economic cost

There may also be an economic cost. Bernard Salt - perhaps Australia’s leading demographer - has predicted that Melbourne will overtake Sydney in population by 2028. Moreover, there has been substantial domestic migration from New South Wales to Queensland. At current growth rates this could lead the Brisbane-Gold Coast region being larger than Sydney by mid-century. Salt blames Sydney’s declining fortunes on its overly expensive housing.

Sydney: world-class city status threatened?

Research in the United States has associated restrictive land use regulation with lower levels of employment growth (PDF 356KB) in US metropolitan areas. In a more colourful finding, Australia’s Access Economics characterised the economy of New South as “so sick that it is at risk of adoption by Angelina Jolie”. A few decades ago, the English economy was referred to as the “sick man of Europe.” Sydney may well be on its way to becoming the “sick man of Australia”.