The Hills hoist with their own petard

The end of Hillsbus services

When I was going to Sydney University I would walk from the Engineering Department through Chippendale to Pitt Street to catch a 378 bus to my flat in Paddington. When the Lee Street bus layover was built Railway Square buses no longer circled the Square in order to terminate and the Pitt Street stop fell into disuse - it was difficult for drivers to reach the right turn lanes into Eddy Avenue.

It appears that the stop was handed over to the privately-operated Hillsbus for their express services to the CBD. These services travel along the busway in the M2 motorway then the Lane Cove Tunnel, the North Sydney expressway and the Harbour Bridge to York Street.

Hillsbus express routes to Lee Street

These services as well as bus services to the Northern Beaches use the exclusive bus right turn from York Street into George Street at Druitt street to access the layover at Lee Street. The northbound route from Railway Square uses Market Street to make a right turn into Clarence Street to return back over the Harbour Bridge, avoiding the congestion in making right turns from Druitt Street.

All the bus services from northern Sydney north of the North Shore to Railway Square will be obliterated by trams from Kingsford and Randwick running on empty along George Street after dumping passengers in Chalmers Street.

The Brown Peril

Hillsbus provides services to Parramatta and the CBD from the suburbs to the north of Parramatta - West Pennant Hills, Baulkham Hills to Rouse Hill up the Old Windsor Road - hence the name. Voters in these suburbs and the Northern Beaches put the North Shore bozos into office.

The alternative routes mooted by TfNSW terminate the bus services to the CBD from the whole of Sydney north of the North Shore at the hopelessly congested Wynyard Park, at Druitt Street (requiring a right turn into Clarence Street) or dump buses into Castlereagh Street forcing them to return through the mother of all pinch points in Elizabeth Street northbound. I discussed this in the post The Brown Peril (8 May 2014). The Baird government has now divulged inadvertently the extent of the congestion they will be causing in bus routes in the CBD.

The Pitt Street maul

Every bus from the Inner West and every bus that lays over at the capacious Lee Street terminus must inexorably pass through the intersection of Pitt Street and Eddy Avenue coming and going. Every one of these bus services will be crippled by the trams running on empty to George Street.

 
We can put some figures to this from the brochures issued by TfNSW. The Dec 2012 brochure stated that 175 buses travelled along Broadway into the City in the am peak hour and claimed preposterously that light rail would reduce the number of these buses entering the City by 33. This is of course physically impossible. It is physically impossible for a bus once it has entered Broadway to turn around before it passes through the Pitt Street/Eddy Avenue intersection. The incompetence and contempt for the intelligence of the public shown by public servants put in control of TfNSW is beyond belief. They do know that they will never be required to defend their figures. The only way to reduce the number of buses in Broadway is to reduce the frequency of the services, which are packed during the am peak. Assuming that there is a public servant at TfNSW that can count to 175 then 3 buses from Broadway alone and three returning buses must pass through the Pitt Street/Eddy Avenue intersection every minute during the am peak.

The number of buses accessing the Lee Street terminus from north of the Harbour is obviously constrained by the number of buses that can pass through the mother of all pinch points. This is unknown since the number of Broadway bus services to be sent on to Circular Quay has not been disclosed.

When a tram is passing across Pitt Street no other traffic movement at the intersection can take place other than pedestrians crossing Pitt Street in parallel with the trams. The right-turn lane from Eddy Avenue into Pitt Street northbound is strictly only a rat run for extremely dumb rats as pointed out in previous posts.

Eddy Av/Pitt St intersection, phase two

Westbound traffic in Eddy Avenue has four lanes at the intersection with Pitt Street - two turn into Pitt Street southbound and two cross into Rawson Place. There is an additional lane for regional buses and taxis from the third arches. These vehicles have priority access to the intersection - pedestrian crossings and westbound general traffic movements are delayed. Right turns into Pitt Street northbound are forbidden except for buses and taxis.

Traffic into Rawson Place would be heading for Darling Harbour, Barangaroo and Piermont via Hay Street. The only other route for traffic from the eastern suburbs south of Old South Head Road (Oxford Street) is via Liverpool Street. The Rawson Place route is far less disruptive to George Street bus services than the Liverpool Street would be to Oxford Street bus services. It takes less than a minute for a bus to get from the Broadway stop to the stop south of Rawson Place at any time of the day. They then move into the bus-only second lane avoiding traffic turning left into Hay Street.

Traffic in the reverse direction would be from Bathurst Street turning into George Street. The right turn into George Street could be banned but, once again, the traffic is less disruptive in the three southbound lanes of George Street than it would be to Elizabeth Street bus services. To access the Cross City Tunnel traffic to the eastern, southeastern suburbs must drive past Bathurst Street and loop into, you guessed it, Liverpool Street, as discussed in a previous post Last Exit from Barangaroo (17 October 2013). The traffic to and from Barangaroo will be boosted massively when the car parks in Crown Casino come on stream.

The traffic light phases are controlled by SCATS mainly using the loops in the road to sense when queues of vehicles have emptied. Phase 2 does not vary throughout the day however. Vehicles queue and pass through the intersection five at a time. The queues are exhausted well before pedestrians have crossed the intersection. I do not have access to SCATS data but have measured the phases with a stop watch app. The walk sign remains on for close to 6 seconds then the don't walk sign flashes for around 20 seconds. This would be the absolute minimum time required - pedestrians become frantic if don't-walk signs flash immediately after the walk sign comes on.

Eddy Av/Pitt St intersection, phase 1

The other two traffic light phases vary throughout the day according to demand. The main phase 1, the arterial vehicle flows between the Eastern Suburbs and the rest of Sydney south of the Harbour, generally takes between 40 and 55 seconds including the orange phase. The effects on these vehicle flows from the dumping of traffic from the WestConnex tunnels into Parramatta Road and Enmore Road have never been factored in. The east bound lanes of Eddy Avenue become gridlocked around 5:20 pm. Vehicles queued in the right-turn lanes in Pitt Street do not clear the intersection and SCATS takes over and co-ordinates the traffic lights at both ends of Eddy Avenue.

The third phase for north-south traffic movements in Pitt Street generally take around than half a minute. The traffic for this phase will be increased by the vehicles displaced from George Street by the trams.

The frequency of trams

Five-segment tram

The five-segment Bombardier trams being assembled in a factory in the Dandenongs for the Melbourne tram system are 33 metres long and will carry 210 passengers. They are the longest trams in Victoria. There are no trams longer than this in Britain.

The seven-segment Bombardier trams being imported from Germany for the Gold Coast are claimed to carry 229 standing passengers as well as the 80 seated, which tallies with the claims of TfNSW of 220 standing passengers and 80 seated for the George Street trams which would be 45 metres long.

Segments must be added two at a time as you can see from the diagram above so a nine-segment tram would be 57 metres long, 3.5 metres longer than the longest road trains permitted on the Stuart Highway - the longest in the world. A Google search for nine-segment trams or light rail carriages mainly throws up references to this blog - they don't exist anywhere in the world. It is Connecting Sydney consortium that will choose from where to import the trams but we can deduce that each segment pair carries about 90 passengers so a nine segment tram would be assumed to carry 390 passengers.

Ms Berejiklian announced that the light rail would have capacity of more than 13,500 passengers per hour in each direction in response to demands by the preferred bidder for nine-segment trams, that is 225 passengers per minute. Nine-segment trams carrying 390 passengers packed like sardines would have to pass through every intersection in the route every 1 minute and 44 seconds in either direction. If the trams have priority signalling, necessary to achieve this capacity, a tram from either direction would be passing through the Pitt Street/Eddy Avenue intersection on average every 52 seconds. The pedestrian crossing requires a minimum of 26 seconds so that leaves 26 seconds for every other traffic movement at the intersection. In the words of Joe Biden: "Not physically possible". Bear in mind that an additional phase will be necessary for at least 3 buses per minute to turn right into Rawson Place so they can pass through the pincer movement of death at George Street, and an additional phase for right turns into Pitt Street northbound.

Ms Berejiklian went on to say: "The proposal offers services that from day one carry up to 15% more light rail passengers in peak hours, and 33% more seats (sic) across the day. The 33% figure would appears to mean that TfNSW is asserting that 100 extra passengers can be crammed onto a nine-segment tram. The 15% figure, 45 passengers, indicates that the frequency of peak hour tram services would be reduced by more than 18%. That means that the frequency of trams arriving at the Kingsford and High Cross park terminals will be reduced by twice this amount.

The patronage guarantee

Passengers per hour inbound

Ms Berejiklian claimed all along that the seven-segment trams would carry 9,000 passengers per hour, that is 150 passengers each minute, to and from Circular Quay at peak periods. Elementary maths showed that this was impossible but Berejiklian has refused to respond to any questions. That would require trams carrying 300 passengers packed like sardines to pass through every intersection in each direction every 2 minutes - a 45 metre tram passing through the Pitt Street/Eddy Avenue intersection every minute. This leaves 34 seconds for every other phase at each intersection. Not quite as ludicrous as her present claims but still so utterly ludicrous it brings the sanity of the public servants she put in control of TfNSW into question.

TfNSW published one diagram of the passenger loadings they expected at different stages of the journey in the EIS. These figures assume that bus services along Anzac Parade would be terminated at Todman Avenue although they refused to respond to objections asking how the buses would physically turn around without traumatising students at Kensington Primary for life. The figures for percentage of capacity used at day one of operation of the trams assumed that the maximum capacity was indeed 9,000 passengers per hour.

The social devastation of the need for speed

So did the EIS assume that trams would have priority at the signals at the pedestrian crossings in Chalmers Street, Eddy Avenue and Pitt Street? Obviously the public servants at TfNSW did assume this.

Run times?

The table of run times in the EIS asserted that it would take 2 minutes for a tram to discharge and load passengers in Chalmers Street and travel to the next stop at Rawson Place, and the same time for the reverse direction.

We can get a some idea of the time it takes for a tram to load and unload passengers from the five-segment trams to Dulwich Hill at the Central station stop.

Dulwich Hill line Central stop

The 8:40 am tram from Dulwich Hill cruised into the Central stop after turning from Hay Street at about walking speed despite complete segregation from pedestrians. There is a solar-powered sign that tells drivers how fast they are leaving the stop and to slow down, but it is about walking speed. At the stop it took 24.8 seconds for passengers to disembark and a further 57.4 seconds for the last passenger to board the tram. It took a further 6.9 seconds for the doors to close and the tram to set off at about walking speed a total of 1 minute 29 seconds. Trams currently have conductors on board to collect the fares. With the Opal card it will take longer for people to tap on and tap off.

Transport for NSW refuse to reveal the distances between stops saying it is Cabinet in Confidence. We don't know exactly where the lengthened stops will be in Chalmers Street and Rawson Place but we can get a good idea of the distance between the stops with Google Earth - a tad less than half a kilometre. So the public servants employed at TfNSW are calculating that the trams will travel half a kilometre in half a minute - an average speed of 60 kph, the speed limit.

The Dulwich Hill trams do not have priority at traffic signals - it took only 87 seconds for a few passengers to board behind the Capitol theatre but the tram was held up at the lights for more than half a minute - no-one complained. The public servants at TfNSW and Planning and Environment are requiring priority signalling for trams at intersections at Elizabeth Street, Chalmers Street, Eddy Avenue and Pitt Street.

So the EIS was completely fraudulent:

• The capacity of the system was far less than the 9,000 passengers per hour in each direction claimed in the EIS and the Assessment Report by the public servants at Planning and Infrastructure;
• The frequency of services will be less than that claimed, from day one;
• The accumulated run times are a ludicrous fabrication;
• The trams will be more murderous with pedestrian crossings of Eddy Avenue and Chalmers Street not being co-ordinated with and overridden by tram movements.

Huge failure
The Deputy Director General of TfNSW Projects Division told the Randwick business breakfast in April last year: "Here it is fast" - no doubt pointing at Moore Park. Trams run on rails and cannot leapfrog trams. If they are fast "here" and really slow "there and there" they will run into the back of the tram ahead. Spacing of the trams is the only mechanism for avoiding such a catastrophe - they cannot stop. Eddy Avenue is not the only place in the system that reduces the frequency that trams can reach. There are the shared bus/tram lanes at the Nineways intersection and the branch in the tracks where trams can arrive simultaneously - one has to be delayed to establish sufficient spacing.

Connecting Sydney consortium has determined that the only way it can reach the capacity demanded for the patronage predicted by TfNSW is to introduce nine-segment trams to narrow streets that have never carried trams. Nine-segment trams are not seen anywhere in the World. They are demanding that the taxpayer take all the risk for patronage not reaching the outrageous projections of TfNSW.

The project is a dud.