Urban affairs

If there’s one thing that I’ve taken away from my IT stud­ies, it’s this: even if you come up with a new, whiz­bang idea, ask your­self, what prob­lem does it solve?

Many innov­at­ive people are prob­ably hav­ing many innov­at­ive ideas right now, but do any of these ideas solve real prob­lems that people care about?

As an example, my pet peeve are those bar­codes on posters that you’re meant to scan with your mobile phone. Tel­stra seems to think they’re a great idea, but really, what prob­lem does it solve? Is it that I can’t get enough advert­ising in my day that I need to access pro­mo­tional crap even faster? It doesn’t even save me time, and it’s not easier either. I tried it on a bus once: nav­ig­at­ing the menus on my Nokia and try­ing to get the cam­era (which (un)helpfully zoomed in to tele­scopic depths) to focus on a little square on the ceil­ing above my head got me nowhere except for stares all round.

Any­way, back to the main point for today. Firstly, I’d say met­ros are good. I like met­ros. Nathan Rees likes met­ros too.

But what prob­lem does the Central-​​Rozelle metro solve?

Accord­ing to the Her­ald today, the first three stops are Cent­ral, Town Hall and Mar­tin Place. We already have a train line that allows you con­vey your­self between those very three points. Then it con­tin­ues on to Rozelle. What on earth is at Rozelle? The idea is, it would be seem, to make people alight from Vic­toria Road buses and fin­ish the bal­ance of their jour­ney on the metro. Yes, Vic­toria Road is a park­ing lot dur­ing peak hour, but does this metro solve the prob­lem? If people aren’t catch­ing the buses right now, there’s no indic­a­tion that more people will be inclined to catch buses that con­nect onto a metro. Look at the map your­self: Vic­toria Road is a night­mare because it’s the free altern­at­ive to the Lane Cove Tun­nel and the Har­bour Bridge, for people up north-​​western way (Ryde, etc).

Then there’s the Cent­ral end. The idea is to make people get off CityRail trains and force them to change onto the metro… which runs to Town Hall, Mar­tin Place and Wynyard. Apart from the fact that those sta­tions can already be reached by people get­ting off at Cent­ral, what prob­lem is the metro solv­ing? It’s a little crowded at times, but it works reas­on­ably well, and the gov­ern­ment must have been think­ing that they could arti­fi­cially engin­eer a prob­lem by mak­ing every­one get off. It’s not going to work.

Spend­ing $5bn for a pat­ron­age of 5,500 people is pathetic. But people will come if you solve their problems.

So what prob­lems are there that could be solved by a metro? Buses. Sydney Buses suck. Espe­cially the ones that run along George and Cast­lereigh Streets. If you stand along George Street dur­ing peak hour, every second vehicle going past you is a bus. The Wynyard bus ter­minal is also a night­mare; office work­ers queuing up for miles to get on buses destined for the north­ern beaches, along with the Great Wall of China, are the two man-​​made form­a­tions vis­ible from space.

I’ve had this drawn up for a while, but this is a metro line, if it were built, that I think would solve prob­lems:

Enlarge this map

With this metro, you would ter­min­ate Par­ra­matta Road and City Road buses before Broad­way. In this case, for­cing people off won’t irk any­one because the ride into the city is cur­rently tor­ture any­way. Like­wise, on the north­ern approach, ter­min­ate north­ern beaches buses before they hit the bridge. I’ve only paired two sta­tions with CityRail sta­tions – Cent­ral and Wynyard (I think Town Hall is bey­ond hope) – and moved city sta­tions closer together. They’re fur­ther apart than bus stops, but frankly, bus stops on every block as it cur­rently stands is a bit ridicu­lous. Com­bined with some light rail on the sur­face, which Clover seems more than happy to provide, this, I humbly sub­mit, is a metro that solves the CBD’s problems.

It’s not that I think a metro can’t be a good solu­tion, but as it stands, the Central-​​Rozelle metro gets Sydney nowhere.