Do unto others as you would do unto yourself

The George Street trams exacerbate congestion in York Street. Inflicting collateral damage on Eastern Suburbs bus services and directing buses at the physical barriers across Grosvenor Street at York Street makes things worse.

The damage inflicted on the rail services south of the Harbour by the overloading of the Wynyard/Central rail lines is much more serious. This is not something that will lessen significantly when the tram lines are operational; this will persist for the rest of the life of the City.

Congestion in bus routes, week one smh

But the damage that the North Shore rump politicians are inflicting on the residents of their own electorates pales to insignificance when compared to that being inflicted on residents of the Inner West and southern Sydney.

Broadway in 1910

George Street west was prone to flooding in the early days of the colony but it was widened in 1906 when Central Station was built at the start of the twentieth century when it was renamed The Broadway. It has provided the people and businesses of western and south-western Sydney untrammelled access to the Center of Sydney, the Eastern Suburbs and the Darling Harbour docks (The Hungry Mile) for more than a century.

The trams were replaced by buses in 1958 and since then buses have travelled from the stop at the start of the Devonshire Street tunnel to a stop at Rawson Place in a minute at all times of the day. Buses would then reach the stop outside the Queen Victoria Building in two more minutes.

What happened after this was of concern only to passengers of bus services that dumped passengers at Wynyard Park without the option of reaching Railway Square. Passengers of the Manly ferries were able to transfer to bus services to all parts of the inner west and all parts of the Eastern Suburbs and the southern suburbs. Circular Quay Station gives them access to the whole of the rail services south of the Harbour.

The birthright of untrammelled access to the center of the Sydney CBD for bus passengers from Parramatta Road and City Road was taken from them by North Shore politicians on 4 October 2015 without explanation. For the rest of the life of Sydney these bus routes will have the most congested entry to the CBD of all the routes into Sydney. The irony is that entry to the CBD for bus routes from the Harbour Bridge is also being degraded. There are no "winners" for any user of Public Transport in Sydney. When the trams are running everything gets worse.

Turning back the Broadway buses

The Hay Street crush

Every bus diverted from George Street must pass through the intersection of Pitt Street and Eddy Avenue. This is the sole gateway for buses from Broadway to cross the "Berlin Wall". Private vehicles can cross the tram rails here or at Bathurst Street.

The buses that cross the tram tracks physically turn around by making a right turn into Campbell Street then another into Castlereagh Street or they make a right turn into Hay Street and proceed to Elizabeth Street then pass through the mother-of-all pinch points in order to make a U-turn into Castlereagh Street at Hunter Street. Every bus from Parramatta Road and City Road must return by passing through the Campbell/Castlereagh Streets intersection and pass along Hay Street and Pitt Street. They are joined in Hay Street by rebadged 378 buses. Hay Street westbound is a two-lane street constrained by a tram line down the middle and with a right turn lane into Pitt Street.

Vehicles and buses turn into Hay Street

Buses as far as the eye can see at stop in Pitt Street

Week 2 at new "Railway Square" stop in Pitt Street

Vehicles turn two at a time from Castlereagh Street into Hay Street then merge into one lane to turn left into Pitt Street; buses join the queue. During the evening peak (5-6 pm) it was very slow going for buses in Pitt Street in week two, as the SMH had observed. The queue of buses stretched almost the whole length of Belmore Park. This was occuring while the Rawson Place arterial road was fully open to traffic and private vehicles had unfettered access to George Street. When Rawson Place and Chalmers Street are closed to traffic, congestion in these bus routes will get much worse.  When the trams are operating the congestion will worsen still more.

The bus services that are forcibly terminated in Pitt Street west of Belmore Park are shown in the on-line and published diagrams of a new CBD bus network as having the terminus "Belmore Park" but the buses have "Railway Square via Parramatta Road" in LED lights on the front and side panels. It is of course physically impossible for Parramatta Road buses to turn around at Railway Square - TfNSW is engaging in deceptive advertising. If I had the money I would report this to the ACCC.

There were far more serious discrepancies between the current actual operation of bus routes and the information on bus routes published in the booklets handed out to passengers in the street and in the online information. On Thursday evening 15 October a large number of the routes that were to be forcibly turned around at Hunter Street (mainly City Road services) were, in fact, not turning into Hay Street but proceeding north along Pitt Street to dog-leg instead along Goulburn Street to Elizabeth Street. The return journey was along Goulburn Street from Castlereagh Street to travel south along Pitt Street. This is the narrowest section of Pitt Street, so there are no stops, and the brilliantly-placed stop alongside the Goulburn Street car park is bypassed. It is a huge distance between the southern-most stop in Castlereagh Street and the "new Railway Square" stop in Pitt Street.

Constance has said that the people of NSW had a right to judge the government harshly if they did not get the bus system right. So what went wrong?

Making Hay Street grid-locked while the sun shone

Thursday was a perfect balmy evening but things were grim for Sydney's bus drivers.

Castlereagh/Hay Streets intersection 6:07 pm

There is no right-hand turn from Goulburn Street into Elizabeth Street. Drivers must turn into Pitt or Castlereagh Streets using the freshly-marked lanes and percolate along Campbell or Hay Street to travel south along the main southern arterials. It had been thus from the earliest days of the colony.

On the Wednesday evening there had been a police officer (you can see him in the photo above) stationed at the critical intersection. He did not appear to know what he was supposed to be doing. On Thursday evening there was another officer on the other side and there were huddles of Transport officers in yellow fluoro jackets at other intersections. They looked as bemused as the bus passengers in Pitt Street.

Buses were running up and down Pitt Street to dog-leg along Goulburn Street, making right-hand turns from Pitt Street even more difficult for bus drivers. At around 6:10 pm the queue of buses in Hay Street trying to reach Elizabeth Street started from Castlereagh Street and stretched around the corner into Pitt Street and back to Eddy Avenue. They would have been queued on the other side of Eddy Avenue also. The buses were hardly moving and were blocking south-bound traffic in Castlereagh Street and Pitt Street.

Boy-in-fluoro unable to do anything 

Queue of buses starts at Castlereagh Street, 6:09 pm

Queue of buses in Hay Street, 6:10 pm 

Queuing to go round the corner, 6:12 pm 

Some south-bound buses have moved, 6:12 pm 

Queue of buses stretches to Eddy Avenue, 6:13 pm

I recorded the queue of buses for prosperity, walking round the corner with my iPad, which records the time a shot is taken.

It takes just two buses waiting to turn into Elizabeth Street to block lanes in Castlereagh Street so bus drivers have to bide their time, giving private vehicles the jump on them.

Ve vill tell you where to go

Elizabeth Street was all but grid-locked at this time and this will be the subject of a subsequent post. Suffice it to say now that Elizabeth Street south-bound now has only one lane for general traffic between Park and Bathurst Streets forcing south-bound traffic into Castlereagh Street, where the only route to Elizabeth Street is via Campbell Street or Hay Street. That is, it will do when George Street is pedestrianised. The current chaos is occuring when private vehicles have unfettered access to George Street and Rawson Place and Chalmers Street are fully operational.

Congestion that is intractable

The ploy of using Goulburn Street to dog-leg Broadway bus services to Elizabeth Street and back from Castlereagh Street only works for services that pass through the mother-of-all pinch points and make a U-turn at Hunter Street. That is, if it works at all - the grid lock in Pitt and Hay Streets occured while the ploy was in operation. Services forcibly terminated at "Railway Square" must return through the Castlereagh/Hay Street intersection. So any attempt to reduce congestion in Elizabeth Street north-bound by terminating more services in Pitt Street west of Belmore Park, in order to, say, feed buses from the North Shore into Castlereagh Street, leads inexorably to further grid-lock in Pitt and Hay Streets. The congestion in bus routes caused by the George Street trams in Pitt Street at Eddy Avenue and in Elizabeth Street is intractable. Every sane person, including Greiner and Infrastructure NSW, who has examined the project has been saying this for four years.

Attention: Editor of Sydney Morning Herald

The Sydney Morning Herald has not endorsed a project as enthusiastically or as mindlessly since it tried to con Australians into replacing a constitution that had worked for 100 years with a constitution that was so flawed it was unworkable. Fortunately the Australian people had the opportunity to vote in a referendum in 1999 and rejected it; nowhere more decisively than in NSW.

Now the SMH is describing Luke Foley as opportunistic for opposing a project that has never been properly disclosed, was not properly assessed and can be shown to be as unworkable as the constitution that Turnbull reportedly spent $2 million of his own tax-exempt money trying to promote.

The editorial went on to say: "The joke, of course, is that buses have barely been running on George Street for a long time: they've so often been at a standstill."

The sad reality is that delays in bus routes in George Street north of Hunter Street only affected the very small number of passengers who chose to reach Circular Quay from the inner west by bus. Congestion in the north-bound bus routes had no affect on south-bound services and any delays in south-bound bus movements north Wynyard only affected the arrival times further south; the frequencies remained the same.

With the introduction of the Oyster Card it was ridiculously easy to reduce congestion in bus routes by:

1. Scheduling;
2. Introducing alternative routes along Kent Street;
3. Excluding private vehicles in George Street between Market and Hunter Street.

The final option was mooted by Infrastructure NSW when it was in its sane phase.

Now the Sydney Morning Herald is lauding a project that ensures that no Broadway bus service will ever maintain a timetable and creates intractable congestion in the Broadway bus services diverted inexorably into the Pitt Street / Eddy Avenue intersection.

The challenge for the editorial staff at SMH is to come up with anyone in the whole of Sydney who would be better off because of the project.

The Oyster Card and Victoria Road

As was discussed in the post on 25 February 2014 The world is your Oyster Card Sydney was on the brink of becoming a future-proof world city when the previous state government selected the Pearl Consortium as the preferred tenderer for a smart card public transport ticketing. The Oyster card allowed commuters to change destinations freely at shared bus stops regardless of what destination was on the front of the bus that passed through their pick-up stop. Unlike the Broadway bus services there would be no need to introduce a financial incentive to change destinations for the Victoria Road bus services.

The Oyster Card was not the only thing gifted to the incoming government. When the Rozelle to CBD Metro was abandoned because of the escalating cost Premier Keneally announced a transport plan for Sydney which included relief rail tracks for the western line and a tramway to Barangaroo from tracks past Paddies Market. Barangaroo would also be connected to Wynyard station via the tunnel under Kent Street. Wynyard station was physically located under York Street with the main exits to the bus stops at Wynyard park but there were exits to the west to Clarence Street and under Kent Street.

In December 2010 cabinet agreed to spend $286 million on the pedestrian link from Wynyard station to Barangaroo via an overpass over Sussex Street. Lend Lease was not required to provide funding although its office towers would be the main beneficiaries of the project.

Lend Lease subsequently agreed to build a further overpass at Napoleon Street and the O'Farrell government decided to build a wider tunnel under Kent Street. Lend Lease has completed construction of the overpass and its office towers appear to be ready for letting but, five years on, the Clarence Street portal to Wynyard station is a construction site and the Kent Street pedestrian tunnel is a "deep excavation".

Napoleon Street bridge open to the public

Clarence Street portal 

The fourth destination

The relevence of the Kent Street pedestrian tunnel to resolving congestion in bus routes in the CBD is that it opens up a fourth destination for bus services from Parramatta Road, City Road and Victoria Road. Currently (before 4 October 2015), all these bus services have used George Street north-bound to reach Circular Quay where they can physically turn round.

Deep excavation, western side of Kent St.

The Kent Street pedestrian tunnel delivers large volumes of passengers to potential bus stops on the western side of Kent Street at "Napoleon Place". Buses from Victoria Road would enter the CBD from the Western Distributor at the Bathurst Street off-ramp and travel along Kent Street before turning down Napoleon Road to turn into Sussex Street/Hickson Road ending at a terminus at Walsh Bay. The outbound route would be back along Hickson Road/Sussex Street to the on-ramp at Market Street; a fast and efficient route.

Argyle Park bus terminus

Buses from Parramatta Road and City Road would access the Kent Street bus stops from Liverpool Street, avoiding the recently created (against my fervent objections) pinch point at the George Street cinemas and the congested turns from Druitt Street. They would continue along Kent Street to the existing bus layover at Argyle Park.

The out-bound journey would be to George Street via the convict-dug Argyle Cut then south along George Street or Castlereagh Street. Bus services from City Road would mainly use Castlereagh Street, sharing bus stops with the buses that remained on George Street northbound.

When Pitt Street was closed by the Pitt Street Mall George Street north-bound was made to carry buses from City Road and Victoria Road as well as the traditional bus services from Parramatta Road. This predictably enough has led to congestion in bus lanes in George Street north of Market Street.

The only way to releave this congestion is to divert some of the buses to alternative routes. George Street has been the main axis for bus routes to the west of the CBD from the foundation of the colony and must remain so.

The brochure Sydney's light rail future blithely opined that "Elizabeth Street will be the main north-south bus route" and this was chanted by Chris Lock at public meetings before he became a total recluse. In fact the pinch point at the Old Supreme Court Building has benn recognised as the major congestion problem for CBD transport for more than 200 years and the greatest minds of the 19th and 20th centuries have sought to minimise the congestion. The assertion that traffic flow can be increased by painting red lines between traffic lanes and that buses from all the routes that use George Street, as well as routes from the Harbour Bridge, can be diverted into Elizabeth Street northbound is so preposterous it brings into question the sanity of the public servants involved.

Victor is not Victoria

Rozelle Metro station

The CBD Metro was designed to give residents along Victoria Road a rail line to the CBD. There was no rail line to this area of the city. Originally it was conceived to link up with the Northern Line and take pressure of Stratsfield Station and the Western Line. It was then redirected to link directly to Epping station. The project was abandoned when the cost of the first stage escalated out of control but not before the state government had spent almost half a billion dollars on property acquisitions.

When North Shore rump politicians came to power the CBD metro project was revived and the disgraced public servant Rod Staples was brought back from the dead and put back in charge. Ms Berejiklian redirected the line away from Victoria Road to, you guessed it, Chatswood in her electorate. The tunnels would have to pass under the deepest part of Sydney Harbour. Instead of taking a rail line to a part of the city that had never had a rail service, the metro line would replicate almost exactly the existing Chatswood to Central rail line, with subway stations so deep beneath North Sydney and Wynyard Station that there was lift-only access to the surface, a subway station under Pitt Street, directly adjacent to Town Hall station and a subway station deep under the western end of the Central Country Terminal.

Needless to say, no attempt has been made to cost the project. Baird claims he can fund the project by appealing against an independent assessment of power pricing and selling urban electricity distribution assets.

But where does this leave the commuters using Victoria Road to access jobs in the CBD? Baird's ultimate insult to them is to call his proposed station under North Sydney "Victoria Cross". The residents along Victoria Road have been double-crossed.

One-Stop loop

Schematic from Dec 2012 brochure

The original plans announced in Sydney's Light Rail Future showed buses from the Harbour Bridge being given exclusive access to the Druitt Street U-turn. North Shore buses would stop in York Street at Wynyard park and outside the Queen Victoria Building. Passengers wanting to tranfer to a South Eastern Suburbs tram would not have as far to walk to a stop in George Street at Town Hall.

Bus services from Victoria Road would just pass through to William Street. I mentioned in previous posts that this was not credible (Just passing through 11 September 2013).

Currently, bus routes from Victoria Road travel along George Street to Circular Quay ot to the west, after entering the CBD via the exclusive bus lane to Druitt Street from the Western Distributor. The 501 route makes a bee-line to Railway Square along Harris Street and travels north along George Street to a set-down only stop in front of the Town Hall, physically turning round with an east-bound lane in Market Street between Clarence and York Street. This lane is also used by buses that enter from the Western Distributor at King Street, terminating with a stop outside the Queen Victoria Building.

Market Street bus lane eastbound against the flow.

The Metro buses have supplimented the routes to destinations south of Park Street, travelling south along Elizabeth Street. Between these four routes commuters have had it made, despite not having a rail option.

The very expensive alterations to the kerbs in Market Street being undertaken by the Baird government do not in any way change the two-way operation of Market Street west of York Street - there is nothing to show for the expense.

The north-bound routes along George Street will be obliterated from 4 October but the routes (yellow line) entering the CBD at King Street continue as at present, looping to a stop outside the QVB:

Victoria Road bus routes through the CBD

The fate of commuters that use bus services along Victoria Road that currently travel along George Street to physically turn around at Circular Quay is largely determined by how they voted at the state election and whether the bus route passes a Rail Station. Bus routes (red line) from Parramatta that allow passengers to transfer to a train at West Ryde Station and bus routes from Macquarie University continue to Circular Quay, passing through the mother-of-all pinch points at the Old Supreme Court Building and turning around at the hopelessly-overcrowded Phillip/Young Streets loop - the most congested bus route in New South Wales. Any attempt to force them to use a privately-operated tram service that stops only at train stations would just propel them onto the train system.

Priority access lane to Hyde Park bus stops

The return route to Vicoria Road currently requires a right-hand turn into Druitt Street from George Street but Elizabeth Street carries much heavier north-bound traffic so buses will be diverted east to College Street to make the turn into Park Street, along with buses terminated at the Domain car park forecourt. Buses will have to join the queue of private vehicles from King Street headed to the Eastern Suburbs - no going to the head of the queue after passing through the pinch point.

The bus routes that make it from West Ryde to Circular Quay in competition with the railway are relatively well off, inflicting collateral damage on Eastern Suburbs bus transport. Baird's wrath falls mainly on the inner suburbs.

The Bathurst 500s

Kent Street at Town Hall

Baird defines the "core" CBD as being to the east of Kent Street so buses forcibly terminated on the western side of Kent Street are "removed from the CBD". The green route is for bus services forcibly terminated "outside the CBD". Whenever TfNSW sees a triangle of roads they assert this can be a bus terminus. The green route is deliberately deceptive - TfNSW cannot help itself even at the death knock. Victoria Road bus services are to be terminated by entering the real CBD at Bathurst Street and looping to a bus stop in Kent Street adjacent to the Town Hall office block then exiting via Druitt Street, or is that Market Street? At the going down of the sun, buses will loop round the building in Elizabeth Street, approved when the Manly boys were last in power, that casts shadows over the War Memorial.

Kent Street has been reduced to one lane with one lane for parking and left-hand turns by Sydney City Council, so inner-city dole bludgers can hold naked bike runs through the CBD. The pedestrian crossing to the arcades leading to the concourse under George Street has been obliterated. The one lane in Kent Street must not only handle traffic to the cavenous car parks under the Town Hall office block it will also be the preferred route to the western side of the "Berlin Wall" and Harbour Bridge for vehicular traffic from Broadway. TfNSW has opined that vehicles from City Road would turn into Wattle Street and access the CBD west of George Street by linking onto the Western Distributor at the congested Fig Street entry, but why would drivers do this when they have a path along George Street uninterrupted by bus movements and cross traffic at Rawson Place and Ultimo Road.

Hills districts buses, that currently use the Lee Street layover, will be also be forcibly terminated by looping from the from the Western Distributor south-bound into Bathurst Street and Kent Street, when they are not are turned around at a U-turn from York to Clarence Streets across Druitt Street. It is not surprising that the systemically deceptive public servants placed in control of TfNSW should seek to conceal the plans for these routes until the last moment before 4 October.

TfNSW believe that commuters dumped in Kent Street will be forced onto cattle cars to make connections with bus services terminated at Wynyard park and Pitt Street but this is extremely unlikely when they are dumped directly adjacent to the entry to Town Hall Station. Until the trams are running, transferring to a City Circle train will be their only option for reaching destinations to the north or south of Park Street or transferring to bus services terminated at Wynyard park or Pitt Street, other than to trapse across town to hopelessly congested Elizabeth Street bus services. If the rail system south of the Harbour has not collapsed by the time the George Street trams start operating they are unlikely to alter their habits. Bus services in George Street, however slow, have prevented overloading of the Wynyard/Central rail link from the earliest days of the rail system.

The redundant tram stop

Town Hall/Queen Victoria Building stop

The tram stop outside the Queen Victoria Building is now barely a tram's length away from the Town Hall stop. I discussed this in a post on 28 January 2015, We are not amused. Now TfNSW has confirmed that the stop is redundant. The only buses not from the Harbour Bridge to stop in York Street outside the QVB will be the buses from Balmain:

Balmain bus routes

These are infrequent services. Understandably, since the route requires a right-hand turn across Market Street. The only passengers who would conceivably catch a tram north would come from these buses. The trams only take passengers back to Wynyard park.

Passengers dumped in York Street outside the QVB would walk from York Street to the Town Hall tram stop to reach destinations south of Park Street or to transfer to bus services forcibly terminated in Pitt Street.

So the George Street trams will have a redundant tram stop at QVB and no stop anywhere near Martin Place. This ludicrous flaw has been self evident from the earliest manifestations of the project.

The incompetence of the public servants placed in control of TfNSW is beyond belief.

Ve vill tell you where to go

For 40 years following the demise of the Askin government Public Transport in Sydney has been based on demand. The frequency of services increased according to the patronage of the buses at that time of day.

The system was flexible. On a hot day for instance more buses would be scheduled for the North Bondi service. This was done manually. A transport officer would be stationed at a stop and more drivers would be rostered on if the queues of passengers were too great. It would not have been very efficient but it kept people happy.

If the frequency of a service is not sufficient to cope with the demand bus drivers, after exhorting passengers to move to the back of the bus, resort to skipping stops. Commuters are late for work and can loose their jobs.

The advent of smartcard ticketing makes data on the ultimate destination of passengers available virtually in real time. Never before has it been as possible to plan services to take Public Transport passengers efficiently to where they are heading. But Transport for NSW has no intention doing this. Commuters are being sent to destinations they have no desire to go to solely to increase the likelyhood that they will transfer to a privately-operated tram service. TfNSW will not announce service schedules or ticketing until in September just before the new routes come into operation. TfNSW are using the frequency of services to satisfy themselves, in their own minds, that they are fulfilling infantile boasts about "removing buses from the CBD". Boasts made when the plans were indeterminate and very different to what has eventuated.

No estimates of the congestion being generated in the bus routes to and through the CBD can be made until the frequencies, arbitarily based on previous loadings, are revealed. But it can be said with certainty that passenger demand will be very different with the new services.

Eeny, meany, miny, moe

Bus routes between Parramatta Road and River

Bus routes north of Parramatta Road leave Parramatta Road at Norton Street in Leichhart and travel to Marion Street roughly parallel to Parramatta Road before plunging north to terminate just south of the Parramatta river at four different places Rozelle, Chiswich, Abbotsford and Mortlake. They currently travel along George Street to physically turn round at Circular Quay. From 4 October the Rozelle route will be terminated at Bronte beach, the Chiswick service (orange line) will be forcibly terminated in Pitt Street west of Belmore Park and the other two will be forcibly terminated at Hunter Street.

Needless to say, commuters will avoid buses with "Belmore Park" up in LED lights on the front like the plague. Buses with Martin Place in LED lights on the front will be in such demand they will be skipping stops before they reach Parramatta Road. Current figures for demand on these services are based on the number of passengers along the exclusive lengths of the routes - once they start sharing bus stops it does not matter where the bus route originated. You catch the first bus with Circular Quay on the front.

It will not take long for commuters to work out which bus services to catch, and only then will it be possible to calculate the congestion in Elizabeth Street northbound.

Odd man out

The question remains: Will the poor buggers in Rodd Point and Chiswich be condemned to be dumped in Pitt Street simply because they had no choice but to catch a bus with Belmore Park on the front?

It looks ominous. Since the introduction of the Opal card passengers have not been able to switch from the 378 service to a  380 Circular Quay service without paying for an additional trip despite the services sharing stops for almost the entire length of Oxford Street. Little did Bronte commuters know that their route was secretly being lined up to be diverted from the efficient Lee Street layover to Rozelle. Their elected parliamentary representative Notley-Smith presumably knew - he was a member of the Round Table - but his tongue was embedded too far up the North Shore rump for him to raise a squeak of protest.

Will the residents of Dykehart roll over and meekly accept what is being thrust upon them? Will they accept the loss of an express morning peak service to the "core CBD". Roll on 4 October 2015.

If they are allowed to switch destinations without incurring an additional trip there will be a mass exodus at the first available stop in Haberfield. The longer they delay making the switch the more likely it will be that Martin Place buses are skipping stops.

Whatever is going through the mind of  Baird is largly irrelevent. Voters will have an opportunity to decide what is fair at an election before or shortly after the trams start running.

The outer inner west

Not all buses turn north at Norton Street. The bus routes that continue west along Parramatta Road either turn south along the Hume Highway before heading north to a terminus at Strathfield Station (480, 483) or they continue along Parramatta Road before turning south to a terminus at Burwood Station (461).

However these routes have the same route through the CBD. The buses currently use a bus-only right-hand turn in front of the Town Hall to access a terminus at the Domain car park forecourt from William Street. The traffic signals at the George/Park Streets intersection use loops in the road - if there are no buses waiting to turn the phase is omitted. The intersection works impeccably at all times of the day.

These bus routes do not contribute to congestion in the CBD north of Market Street. The routes are collateral damage. The 461 route will be forced to join the cue of vehicles dog legging from Bathurst Street to William Street; the 480/483 routes will be forcibly terminated in Pitt Street.

So, why are the Hume Highway bus routes being singled out for the full brunt of Baird's wrath? The only apparent reason seems to be that the Hume Highway passes through the electorates of Grayndler and Watson and Parramatta Road passes through Reid, which returned a Liberal member to the House of Representatives.

The Member for Grayndler the Honourable Anthony Albanese is the Shadow Minister for Infrastructure and Transport and Shadow Minister for Cities. He is unlikely to remain docile in the face of these insults to his electors.

The same question arises: will the lower-class commuters from along the Hume Highway be able transfer to an upper-class bus at any of the many stops they share along Parramatta Road without incurring an extra trip?

Will this be an issue at the next Federal election?

Terminator 3 - The end of civilisation as we know it

Screen shot from WestConnex the video, June 2014

Baird never intended the six extra lanes of the M5 motorway to terminate at Euston Road and Campbell Road in St Peters. The plan was always to dump six lanes of freeway traffic into Parramatta road somewhere to the west of the junction to Pyrmont Bridge Road. Here the traffic would merge somehow with six lanes of freeway traffic from Parramatta road (the surface road) and six lanes of freeway traffic from the tunnel replication of Parramatta road. At the end of June 2014 he abruptly announced that a further four lanes of freeway tunnels from the Glebe Island bridge would be added to the mix. Taxpayer assets would be privatised to pay for this - North Shore motorist would not be paying anything for their trips south via the Anzac bridge. The carriageways would appear to cut a swathe through Whites Creek Valley Park.

The computer-graphics generated videos released by Baird in June showed a change of plan. Traffic from the six extra lanes of the M5 would be dumped into Enmore Road to the southwest of King Street Newtown (as far as can be made out from the vague maps) instead of or as well as Parramatta Road.

Enmore Road Newtown
Six lanes of freeway traffic dumped into the two eastbound lanes.
Traffic for six lanes must enter from the west-bound lanes.
Will the Enmore Theatre (left corner) survive?

Now four months later Baird and Abbott have come together with the Roads and Maritime Services Minister Duncan Gay to stand in front of a poster that revises the plans yet again. Not minor revisions but revisions that destroy the arguments advanced for the WestConnex project from the very beginning. The public relations spin for the project was no different from those advanced for the Cross City tunnel and the Lane Cove tunnel. The number of traffic lights avoided by replicating the surface roads with tunnels were counted and claims were made as to the time savings that would ensue for motorists using the tunnels. I won't insult your intelligence by repeating them. Now Baird and Abbott have proclaimed that the road tunnels will remain deep under the Princes Highway to the west of the Cooks River rail terminal. The only places where traffic can enter and exit for the six lanes of the "New M5" will be Enmore Road and Euston Road - a binary choice. This is forever.

Duncan Gay boasted that they were not making the mistakes of the old M5, which had steep gradients as it kept returning to the surface to provide connections to the surface road system. The "New M5" would have slight gradients for 9 kilometres from its start in Kingsgrove until it reaches St Peters. Not surprising as, in plane English, WestConnex does not connect with anything.

Mr Gay denied flatly that dumping traffic in St Peters would overload roads in St Peters and Newtown. He did not mention plans to also dump traffic into Enmore Road. He insisted that traffic would make a right-hand turn from Euston Road into Campbell Street, cross Alexandra Canal by a new bridge and percolate through chronically congested roads north of the airport to the terminals rather than use the existing M5 tunnels which provide direct uncongested connections to the terminals. This is "absurd" as the former Minister for Infrastructure Anthony Albanese has pointed out. The existing M5 also gives direct access to the container berths at Port Botany.

Access routes to the airport terminals from the M5 (yellow arrows).
The interchange at the bottom right corner gives access to Port Botany.

Euston Road feeds traffic from the "New M5" into Botany Road, Elizabeth Street and Crown Street only. Traffic heading for destinations east of Crown Street would use the existing M5. Yet Baird is crippling traffic flows in these traditional arterial distributors between the Eastern Suburbs and the rest of Sydney south of the Harbour with the George Street trams.

The Melbourne Cup day trifecta

You would have noted the common denominator in all the roads targeted by Baird on Melbourne Cup Day 2014: they carry all the bus services from the western, south-western and southern suburbs of Sydney into the CBD. 

The never-exhibited amended EIS for the CSELR project conceded that the pedestrianisation of Chalmers Street would result in congestion at the intersection of Elizabeth Street, Eddy Avenue and Foveaux Street that was off the scale: a level of service rating of D, as bad as it can get. I discussed this in a post on June 6 Level of Public Service: D. The underlying assumptions used to predict the traffic flows in 2021 were never revealed and cannot be disputed as the RTA stopped publishing traffic-flow data in 2006. However some of the assumptions were clearly preposterous. They were claiming that traffic to the CBD would be reduced because people would find the transfers from buses to trams so attractive they would stop parking in the CBD.

The predictions of traffic flows in 2021 could not have factored in the effects that dumping traffic from the tunnels of the "New M5" into King Street, Botany Road, Elizabeth Street and Crown Street would have on bus services south of the Harbour and congestion at both ends of Eddy Avenue. There was no warning that Baird would do this until his announcement on Melbourne Cup day 2014. There must be an independent and public assessment of the congestion caused by the trams before any contracts are signed for the project. The inquiry could also consider the effects of trapping buses in a bus bay at the Foveaux Street intersection.

The WestSouthwestNorthshoreDumpz project

The grey cliffs of Parramatta Road

Motorists intending to use the Cross City Tunnel or the Harbour Bridge or with destinations in the the northern CBD use the City -West link road and will continue to do so. Traffic dumped from the tunnels into Parramatta Road has nowhere to go except Pitt Street. There is literally no parking east of Pyrmont Bridge Road and no possibility that there ever will be except for a small amount of parking on the ground floor under Broadway Shopping Centre, accessible only from a tortuous route from Bay Street. The strip of Parramatta Road to the west of Pyrmont Bridge road will be devastated by the property resumptions required to bring the traffic to and from the surface.

The intersection of Pitt Street and Eddy Avenue was also given a level of service rating of D but this would not have factored in the effects of the revised plans for the "New M5" and the increased length and frequency of trams demanded by Connecting Sydney consortium.

Road train on Stuart Highway, 53.5 metres long

Ms Berejiklian refuses to reveal the length of the trams that Connecting Sydney consortium insists on running. The trams will be longer than the maximum length of the road trains that are allowed on the Stuart Highway and outback highways in WA and Queensland. The coupled Juggernauts will be twice as long.

The trams will be travelling slowly through the intersection of Pitt Street and Eddy Avenue as they come into or out of the stops at Rawson Place even if they are given priority at the lights. They will be crossing on average every minute at peak periods we are told. Pedestrians will be blindsided at every crossing to and from Central Station making it even more unlikely that they will reach the speeds of sixty kph between stops used by TfNSW to calculate vehicle flows through intersections and for calculating the capacities of the tram services. Buses terminated at Pitt Street will require a separate phase to make a right-hand turn into Rawson Place in order the pass through the pincer movement of death at the George Street pedestrian crossing which also has a level of service D. It is worth pointing out that the trams passing through Eddy Avenue will be largely running on empty after dumping passengers in Chalmers Street. They will be all but empty when they reach the terminus at Circular Quay.

A proper independent assessment of the impacts of the revised-since-the-EIS trams on congestion in bus routes from south of the Harbour into the CBD must be made before any contracts are signed. This can of course only take place when it is known whether traffic from the "New M5" will be dumped into Parramatta Road as well as Enmore Road and what will happen to traffic from the Glebe Island U-bend if this ever goes ahead.

Return of the living dead

Attack from the north

They must eat the brains of Southsiders to survive

Sydney Region Outline Plan 1968

Old Freeway Reserves

This is not the first time the North Shore rump of the Liberal Party has tried to ride roughshod over the Inner West and Surry Hills. Forty five years ago the government of Robin Askin, the Member for Manly, set up a committee of "experts" to draw up plans for linear radial freeways that would over-ride the Cumberland Planning Scheme. The black lines ending in arrows on the "Outline Plan 1968" were the proposed motorways.

The main roads of Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth and most North American cities had been laid out in orthogonal patterns and the mathematical implausibilities of the radial motorways superimposed on the grids of North American cities were impossible to deny by the late 1960s. However, Sydney had always had a radial highway structure because of the limited routes out of the Sydney Basin.

The Pacific Highway was the only route to northern NSW and had been directly linked to the Harbour Bridge with the first Sydney motorway, the Warringah Freeway, and hence to the Cahill Expressway and the Eastern Distributor. The proposed Newcastle motorway, which replicated this route, circled through Darling Harbour and dumped traffic on the western side of the CBD into east/west roads that had never been widened because they lay between the Darlinghurst escarpment and the deep-blue Darling Harbour. The proposed Western motorway, which replicated the Parramatta Road/ Great Western Highway route through the Blue Mountains, did the same thing.

The Eastern Distributor passed between Crown and Bourke Streets before running east along Moore Park Road alignment, cutting a swathe through Darlinghurst and Surry Hills. The designs of the Eastern Distributor and the Western Distributor went through many iterations from the time the Harbour Bridge was built but the CBD and Surry Hills were always the meat in the sandwich. I read through the various designs for the Distributors, which were archived in the Engineering Library at Sydney University, when mounting a case against the design Brereton had "pulled out of a draw and said build it" - they would still be archived in the Fisher Library.

The Sydney Region Outline Plan 1968 was never Gazetted or discussed in Parliament and never had any legal status. It gave carte blanche to developers and Sydney is still dealing with the consequences. The motorway designs were utterly insane, they were never costed, they would have had a devastating impact on public transport in the CBD and they were unworkable; but they were published and fully described.

1973 Road Map

The Liberal party government was forging ahead with the first stage of the Newcastle motorway, the carriage-ways across Darling Harbour, in the belief that the rest would have to proceed, when Neville Wran won a narrow victory in the 1976 state election and terminated the contracts. The carriage-ways were redirected to Glebe Island, the Cumberland highway was cobbled together to give a direct link between the Newcastle motorway and the Hume Highway and the Eastern Distributor provided a link to the Princes Highway under the runways of Mascot Airport. Sanity had been restored and Wran went on to record Wranslide victories. Sydney has ended up with a vaguely orthogonal motorway system.

Westconnex, O'Farrell's tunnel vision

Now the North Shore rump is back in power and we are once again facing uncertainty and confusion. The diagrams released by the government for the multi-billion dollar Westconnex project have stylistic similarities with the diagrams produced by the Askin government - lines with arrows superimposed on indeterminate maps - but there is now a complete lack of detail.

Plan released to ABC News

There is however a startling difference between Askin's plans for the Inner West and O'Farrell's: there is no longer any connection between the Western Distributor and the southbound tunnel. The eastbound tunnel runs under Parramatta road, as proposed by Infrastructure NSW when it wanted to use cut-and-cover construction, then pops up into Parramatta Road east of Pyrmont Bridge Road and west of Sydney University. At this point traffic has nowhere to go except to dogleg into Cleveland Street at City Road or plow on through Pitt Street which will be crossed by trams running on empty to Circular Quay for the first time in history.

The only connection between the Western Distributor and the southbound tunnel will be via Harris Street and Broadway/Parramatta Road, assuming there is an on ramp to the southbound tunnel. The northbound route is along Wattle Street and through the Fig Street bottleneck.

Needless to say, these traffic movements will not auger well for Parramatta Road and City Road bus services. This is the main focus of this blog. There are blogs and websites that deal with the Westconnex project: http://westconnex.info/

On Tuesday 4th March 2014 the Shooters Party and the Labor Party supported a Greens' motion in the upper house giving the O'Farrell government 21 days to release all draft and final versions for the project. The Roads Minister Duncan Gay said: "This puts at risk the biggest road project in the country... It destroys our economic position in getting the best deal for the state."

This kind of motion was discussed at meetings of PUSH but Surry Hills residents did not have the political clout to get it through parliament. The release of the documents will finally give an insight to the workings of the O'Farrell Government.

Managing congestion with the Oyster (aka Opal) Card

Bus routes from Victoria Road

Previous posts have dealt with how, for more than one hundred years, tram and bus services from the Eastern Suburbs and, in particular, the South Eastern Suburbs have been designed to minimize the number of buses that travel through the "pinch points" in Elizabeth Street northbound. Similar measures have been utilised to minimize congestion in George Street north of Market Street for buses from Victoria Street and the City West Link roads.

There are two basic routes for buses from Victoria as you can see above. One uses Druitt and George Streets to terminate at Alfred Street or north of Grosvenor Street; the other travels along Harris Street and gives direct access to the Parramatta and City Road bus services and Central Station as well as the southern half of the CBD. Buses terminate on this route by discharging the last of their passengers in front of the Town Hall, with hazard lights flashing, and doing a loop-the-loop round Druitt, Clarence, Market and York Streets. This requires an against-the-flow bus lane in Market Street:

This is not ideal, as the buses are competing for space to turn right in Druitt Street with North Shore buses terminating at the QVB, and there is no space to lay over. In the evenings the two routes are combined. I waited in vain at the stop in Druitt Street for a bus to Lilyfield in 1987, so these routes have been in operation for some time.

It has been the bus services from Parramatta Road and City Road that cause congestion in the bus lanes in George Street north of Market Street. Passengers transferring to trains at Central Station leave the bus at the last stop on Broadway and traipse through the Devonshire Street Tunnel to the platforms. Passengers disembark here also to catch the 378 service along Oxford Street. The buses discharge further passengers at Town Hall to transfer to New South Head Road services and are running on empty by the time they reach the terminus at Bridge Street - the only place in the CBD where they can physically turn around. The congestion in George Street is obviously not caused by hordes of passengers trying to get to Circular Quay by bus.

In the past it has not been possible to dissuade passengers from catching a bus to Circular Quay and getting off at Railway Square, so all bus routes along Broadway have gone on to the terminuses at Circular Quay. I pointed out in my letter to the Minister in April, and reiterated this in my submission to the EIS, that all this changed with the development of the Oyster (aka Opal) Card.

George Street at Town Hall

Here's how it works: there are services from City Road and Parramatta Road that terminate at Circular Quay as at present; services that turn right into Park Street from the Bus-Only lane in front of the Town Hall and terminate at the forecourt at the Domain car park; and services that pass along Pitt Street and Eddy Avenue to terminate at Randle Street. All these terminuses allow lay overs so buses can maintain schedules. Randle Street was successfully used as a terminus for the Olympics in 2000 and is used for events at the SCG.

Passengers can use the Opal Card to switch destinations at any stop in Parramatta Road or City Road regardless of the destination on the front of the bus when they boarded it on their local roads, and then continue their trip. Eastern Suburbs commuters have been doing this for generations. If passengers are still on a bus service beyond a certain point, say the bus stop on Broadway just to the east of the City Road, they pay to go to the terminus on the front of the bus regardless of where they get off. Only buses with passengers needing to go to destinations in the northern half of the CBD pass through the "pinch points" in George Street north of Market Street - problem solved. City Road services would not have a terminus at Randle Street as transfers to rail can be made at Newtown Station.

The tech guy at the "information session" commented about the system I have described: "The power of pricing". There is more going for it than that though. Services terminated at the Domain car park would give round-the-corner transfers to Eastern Suburbs bus services from a stop in Park Street at Hyde Park and services terminated at Randle Street would give access to Elizabeth Street bus services.

Running seven-segment trams along George Street obliterates not only all the places in the northern CBD where buses can physically turn around - terminuses north of Grosvenor Street and at Argyle Street as well as Alfred Street - but also at Randle Street. George Street bus services are simply displaced to Elizabeth Street. It will never ever be possible to resolve bus congestion in the CBD.

The reclusive Chris Lock

At the Randwick breakfast in April the Deputy Director General TfNSW, Chris Lock, bemoaned the queue of buses in York Street, trying to reach the Wynyard Park bus terminus, that he claimed could stretch to the other side of the Bridge at the morning peak. His only solution was to divert some buses across the Cahill Expressway. The Opal Card can minimise bus congestion here as well.

There would be three, at least, terminuses: Wynyard, York Street at the Queen Victoria Building, and Lee Street. You know the rest. The point at which a transfer to a bus with the proper destination would have had to have been made would presumably be the last stop in Military Road or Falcon Street. George Street in front of the Town Hall can never be "pedestrianised", but then, George Street has been the main traffic artery to western Sydney from the time of the first fleet.

Melbourne bus console

So how much would it cost to resolve bus congestion in the CBD? A hell of a lot less than spending, we are told, $1.6 billion on a tramway and making bus congestion intractable. In fact it would not cost a brass razoo more than has already been committed by the state government to roll out the Opal Card - more than a billion dollars.

In the old days, buses had rollers with destinations at the front and the drivers manually set the destination at a terminus. Now buses have LED signs that are set from the drivers console. The bus' route is clearly fed into the software for the Opal Card so dastardly commuters who switch from a different route can be differentiated from commuters who get back on a bus of the same route after stopping for coffee.

Passengers who fail to tap off with their Opal Card are charged for the whole route to the terminus, so charging passengers for trips based on the sections as published on route maps, as with the existing Mybus paper tickets, is already built into the software. It will be ridiculously easy for a future, competent state government to restore sanity to public transport.

The Oyster (aka Opal) Card system described above is the antithesis of the bizarre pricing system being rolled out by the O'Farrell government. It does not penalise commuters who change routes when making a journey in one direction.

Incredibly, the Opal Card being rolled out will penalise commuters who transfer from buses to the, we are told, $1.6 billion dollar South Eastern Suburbs light rail. This is a mode change and is regarded as a separate trip. The state government refuses to say what the pricing structure on the trams will be. This will evidently be decided by the PPP.

The extra costs for commuters who are forced or volunteer to transfer at the Randwick or Kingsford terminuses will pale to insignificance compared to those for commuters terminated at Rawson Place. No matter how bad off you are there is always someone worse off.