Out damned spot!

Gladys Berejiklian

Actress as Lady Macbeth

Shakespeare Hotel,  Devonshire Street

The "artist's impression of light rail on Devonshire Street, Surry Hills" in the December 2012 brochure left me appalled. The brochures were thrust upon everyone attending the Community Forum at Sydney High School and this computer-generated view of the Shakespeare Hotel at Steel Street was used in countless ratepayer-funded letter drops from Clover Moore.

The Minister for Transport and Moore sat alongside the Deputy Director General TfNSW Chris Lock as he explained at great length that trams could not go down slopes greater than 7 metres in 100 metres because they "could not stop". Neither of them showed any signs of twinges of conscience about the situation the innocent pedestrians depicted would be forced to face.

I was surprised that I have not included this figure in a post and since this is a blog of record I will do this now. The white line across the road is the artist's standard way of depicting a pedestrian crossing and is where the current zebra crossing is situated. There can never be barriers to block off this crossing as they would be demolished by trucks turning left from Steel Street into the narrow single lane of Devonshire Street - it will always be a de facto crossing.

The tech guy at the final "information session" was embarrassed by this notorious figure and asked: "How does this differ from the current situation?" I pointed out that there was now very little traffic at the time when people are wending home from the entertainment ghetto to the dormitory ghetto but trams and coupled juggernauts would be passing through every two minutes in either direction - on average one every minute.

AFL games are held to meet television schedules. Friday Night games start at 7:50 pm and end around 10:30 pm which coincides with the peak period for bus services in the cinema/night club strip in George Street and trams have to travel to the Randwich or Kingsford terminuses to turn round. The trams and juggernauts would still be running at their peak until 12:30 am at the least.

The artist erred in not erasing the trees from his figure. Clover Moore told the forum that these would all be retained but the EIS has singled them out for removal.