Sydney Light Rail Debate: Amusing

Sydney's love affair with arguing about something they clearly need has always been entertaining, but the Sydney Morning Herald's 'City In A Jam' series has been particularly so.

Stupidly, I can't remember all of the names involved and therefore may not be called upon to reliably remember actual facts, but the argument began to get quite heated on January 17 when a pro-bus lobbyist-type person called John Lee jumped on the 'buy more buses' bandwagon. He said buses only take up 1% of CBD traffic (ha!) and that buses can carry more passengers per hour than light rail. Obfuscation of statistics can be fun and he really took that ball and ran with it.

Lee also says that trams aren't any better for the environment compared to buses because they move the emissions back to the generation source. Well, yes, but power stations extract a better burn from their coal than diesel buses (remember those CNG buses? Yeah, me neither.) and it certainly removes the airborne particulate problem that is blighting Sydney. Well, part of it anyway.

Lee also cited problems with ticket integration and most amusingly, cited a 1908 (!) report into trams on city roads.

'A 1908 royal commission into city improvement recommended that Sydney's trams be replaced with buses. It concluded trams were inflexible, expensive, and took up too much room.'

1908? He went on to give some ridiculous costing and failed singularly to miss the point - by giving outlandish costings of pricing trams vs buses, prattled on about Euro III emissions buses (running at about 120db, making Sydney inordinately noisy) and failing to account for all the technologies in place in countries all over the world, some of them technically third world, where people have use one ticket.

Priceless. Who is John Lee, you ask? He's the CEO of Sydney Buses. His background? Communications...as in spin...hmmm.

The very next day, the guy who runs Metro Transport (they run the Monorail and the SLRT), Kevin Warrell responded.

'Travelling on the light rail in the CBD would not cost more. The CBD light rail proposal put to the NSW Government involves no increase in overall fares to passengers who would purchase a joint bus-light rail ticket. When light rail is implemented in the right place, the cost per passenger is lower than bus or heavy rail. Compared with, say, a bus transitway, light rail is exceptional value.'

'As for passengers changing modes, it works in Singapore, Paris, London and virtually every other major city in the world. Many Sydney commuters interchange every day, and CityRail is introducing more interchanges as part of its clearways proposal. The key is designing the interchange to work efficiently for passengers.'

Naturally, he would err on the side of light rail considering he's going to be front and centre if a tender ever gets handed out. Note, however, he mentioned having light rail 'in the right place.' Lee reckons light rail is no good at all. You ask a Melbourne-ite who lives in the inner city about trams and most will say they are terrific.

In an article published in the Herald on January 10, Garry Glazebrook, a transport consultant, predicted that there will be another 2000 buses on Sydney's roads by 2021. The same story said that the Opposition Leader, Peter Debnam, promised to put light rail down straight after he wins the next NSW election.

Fat chance.

Sorry, that wasn't fair. Good on him, but only if he actually does it. He's a big L Liberal, not small, so I can't see him going all gooey and environmental that quickly. I smell a rat when I read on and he talks about positively Communist ideas by extending light rail out to Parramatta and the Northern Beaches. And, bizarrely, Wollongong. He did prevent a riot by not mentioning Bondi. The residents would have gone ballistic.

Government Transport Minister John Watkins immediately went on the attack, saying, 'I'm not convinced that whacking light rail tracks down one or two of our major city streets is the answer to congestion in Sydney because it means you would have to ban motor vehicles from those streets.'

Ahem. John. Next time you're in your chauffeur-driven limo reading the paper, say, 'I say, James, take me to Melbourne this instant. They have trams, you know, and damn it all, I want to see a city with no motor vehicles on the streets.'

Good grief, man, are you an idiot? Nobody says you have to ban cars from the city (it would help, though) and why not put a congestion charge on to do just that? Oops...sorry...can't do that, can you? That would decrease the toll take for those public-private partnerships.

And therein lies the problem. The NSW government, current and past, has got so deep into these ridiculous public-private partnerships that they're stuck. In a response to a blog post on the same SMH website, a reader asked why NSW politicians can't open their mouths without sounding like they're applying for a job at Macquarie Bank. Sydney desperately needs light rail to reduce its dependence on buses and to improve the efficiency of not just the existing bus and heavy rail networks but the entire city. The CBD is coming under increasing pressure as more trips to the city by people (up 32% by 2020) for business and pleasure place the already staggering network under more pressure.

Watkins again: 'We haven't closed the door to light rail … but my priority as Minister for Transport has to be getting the heavy rail system running correctly because that is how you move the majority of people in and out of the CBD.'

Rubbish. His priority is to build and maintain an integrated transport network to avoid the staggering annual losses calculated to be $18bn as a result of an entire city that is virtually gridlocked. Heavy rail is not the only answer and he is indeed part of a government that abandons heavy rail projects that will do just as he wants - get people in and out of the CBD. The Parramatta-Chatswood line would have kept thousands of daily commuters out of the CBD and therefore out of that part of the network, but they bailed at Epping, of all places. So more people having to drag their sore feet through the CBD.

Sydney's problem is that the Government keeps building roads and the people of Sydney fill them while the rail network is awash with angry, often stranded, passengers. The buses are caught in the traffic and light rail is just a dream. Running a light rail line down George and looped back up Castlereagh would be of immense use to Sydney. It will get hundreds of buses off George St, be an opportunity to build spangly new ticketing and interchange systems and reduce both air and noise pollution (why do those buses have to be so loud?).

What is the Government priority? Who knows. But it's not getting Sydney moving.