Australia
Is Sydney’s long wait for rail expansion over?
Australia’s largest city, Sydney, has struggled for decades to get its public transport mix right, and as a result its suburban rail network continues to suffer from under-funding and a lack of bipartisan political support. However, with a change of government and the release of two major reports, a new vision is starting to emerge, but as Mark Carter asks will it be enough ease Sydney’s rail transport woes?
EW South Wales and Sydney in particular have long been the nation’s enfant terrible when it comes to transport planning, and the rail network has often been a major casualty. This can be partially attributed to the high level of politicisation associated with transport planning across Australia. Services on Sydney’s CityRail network are regarded as slow and unreliable and urban rail patronage growth has been sluggish over the last 20 years barely averaging more than 1% a year. Melbourne, by comparison, has averaged annual growth of 5% over the same period.
N IRJ November 2012
The previous New South Wales government attempted to solve some of these problems with ambitious plans for metro-style systems for the Western suburbs and the long-vaunted North West Rail Link. However, both schemes eventually contracted to a much smaller system around the Central Business District (CBD), only for this to be abandoned, leaving the state government to pick up a reported $A 500m ($US 524m) compensation bill. A change of government in 2011 has seen a renewed focus on public transport and a commitment to finally build the North West Rail Link (NWRL) to serve the city’s rapidly growing suburbs. This
though has come at the expense of the $A 2.6bn Parramatta - Epping heavy rail link proposed by the previous administration, for which the federal government was providing most of the funding which is now sitting in limbo. A state-wide Transport Master Plan developed by Transport for New South Wales was released in September outlining the government’s 20-year vision to deliver what it says will be a world-class network.
For the Sydney suburban network the plan is based around Sydney’s Rail Future plan, released previously, which includes investment to increase capacity, construct the North West and
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