city of sydney

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Sydney’s metro: a solution looking for a problem

04 May 2009 in Urban affairs by Enoch Lau | 10 comments

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.

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A Tale of Two Cities

11 Aug 2007 in Current affairs, Urban affairs by Enoch Lau | 5 comments

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

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