Redfern. The name probably evokes memory of the 2004 Redfern riots and the Aboriginal enclave in the Block. As with other uni students who use Redfern station, I’m fairly familiar with the part to the west of the station. But what lies to the east? With a camera, I set out to investigate.
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Tags: blake dawson, enclave, pro bono, redfern
A while back, CityRail started having these Empty Trains. I can’t for the life of me work out why anyone would choose such a stupid name. Does it mean that there’s no one inside? Does it mean it doesn’t go anywhere afterwards, as in, it’s terminating? (If so, what’s wrong with the word terminating?) I suppose it’s better than a (null) train.
The real WTF in the picture, though, is how a platform 23 service ended up on the Illawarra Line screen.
Weekly train tickets to go the way of the Tcard: here we go again.
I think running the new and old systems side by side would ensure a smooth transition, but I don’t think sliding discounts should be implemented. There’s no good reason why less frequent travellers should subsidise more frequent travellers. Part of the reason why TravelTens and friends are sold at a discount to the standard fare is, I would presume, to encourage efficiency, by amortising the cost of transactions over a number of trips. (Suppose buying a $2 ticket takes 30 seconds, and we hire someone to sit there at $30/hr. You can do the maths.) With a top-up smartcard, this rationale no longer exists. In Hong Kong and Singapore, for example, individual trips are substantially cheaper than an equivalent trip in Sydney - so much cheaper that there’s no need for sliding discounts for regular users. The other problem with sliding discounts is that it reflects a narrow mentality that people should use public transport for getting from home to work and back again (thereby taking a regular route and attracting a discount), whereas public transport should be far more pervasive than that.
Tags: hong kong, public transport, singapore, smartcard, tcard
Rees’s red-hot razor: I was right. Mr Premier says that he’s “pulling back” from the metro, and he’s unwilling to commit to the project. But should NSW go ahead anyway? Are the long-term benefits worth the large debts that the state will rack up?
So we have a new Premier. But Joe I’m-very-popular Tripodi and Eric Let’s-build-some-more-roads Roozendaal are still there. And I’m very confident the new Premier is just going to pull $10 billion out of his rear end to build the metro now that the power sell-off has fizzled. Sigh. Update: Miraculously, they’re now Finance Minister and Treasurer respectively. According to Wikipedia, our esteemed Treasurer started his Commerce degree but never managed to finish it. And now he’s in charge of a $47.6bn budget?
Sydney and Parramatta - the London and Paris of the Great Southern Land? A laughable proposition by any measure.
As part of the Sydney Design festival (the existence of which I was not aware of before this event - it’s rather telling that I know more about the festivals currently on in Melbourne than in my home city), the Lord Mayors of Sydney and Parramatta (Clover Moore and David Borger respectively), together with three panelists, presented their visions of their respective cities before a minuscule audience. I went with Daniel, and he has already made some comments.
Firstly, the concept of Parramatta as a city distinct from Sydney, as a city with a distinct role, culture and vision, was foreign to me. I had known that Parramatta was growing in importance as a centre of government and business, and I had viewed it as a regional centre, but I had always perceived Parramatta (along with Liverpool), as being merely regional centres of the larger entity known as Sydney. Borger’s vision of Parramatta being the complement of Sydney, as being the hub of western Sydney - perhaps inspired by self-interest as he is the Mayor of Parramatta - made little sense, for economies of scale and the innate attraction of the larger city centre (Sydney), will deprive Parramatta of the fuel required to make it truly great. Perhaps the problem is in the definition of “city”. As Daniel noted, the two mayors’ speeches focused almost exclusively on inner-city living - on the development of the City of Sydney and the City of Parramatta - but hey, Sydney is more than that. What Sydney (as a metropolitan area) doesn’t need is for such a limited vision restricted to two central business districts and their immediate surroundings. That is Sydney’s problem - a fragmented, localised approach that lacks coherent oversight. Fortunately, at least in Borger’s case, he recognised the need that the existing governance structure of local governments in Sydney is problematic. Sydney is a whole, living, breathing organism - and it deserves an authority with the jurisdiction of the entire greater metropolitan area.
My other criticism relates to the Mayors’ visions themselves. Putting aside the fact that clearly neither of the two Mayors could be bothered coming up with decent speeches, the visions (presented as a Utopian vision of Sydney in 2030) lacked generality. We heard plans for a theatre here, the demolition of a carpark there, and the specifics of the environmentally friendly solutions in a building somewhere else, but there was no underlying context in which to place these ideas. You walked out of the talks feeling as if Sydney’s going to be going on with the business of just getting things done by 2030, but I left the Town Hall without the excitement that I’m living in a city that has a goal: a united goal that all Sydneysiders will be proud to take part in, a goal that will cause Sydney, as a whole, to shine brightly. The motto was that Sydney was to become a city of villages (ignoring the fact that that is simply copying Melbourne’s reputation) but there wasn’t any sense of that either. It’s true that large visions can often be a panacea for having real concrete plans, but if done correctly, it will motivate the people of Sydney to take ownership of their city’s destiny.
Update: An extract from David Borger’s speech can be found on the SMH site: here
Tags: city of sydney, clover moore, david borger, local government areas, parramatta, sydney, vision
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