Barangaroo timelapse - Whole of site 2011 - 2015

Forever blowing thought bubbles

Original CBD metro, Wynyard stop

The original plans for a CBD metro from Rozelle had a stop to the north of Wynyard station. It would have been so far under sea level the only access to the surface would have been by lifts and there was no indication of where the lifts would have been located. Rod Staples is a new breed of public servant with little but contempt for the public. They could at least conjecture that some passengers of buses that are terminated at Wynyard Park might have found their way a couple of blocks north and got on a metro train rather than flood onto the City Circle trains. "That was a bloody stupid idea" commented Kristina Keneally after she had cancelled the project.

Rod Staple's plans for the North Shore rump politicians do not hold out any hope for diverting bus passengers disembarking at Wynyard park away from the CBD loop trains. The metro begins its precipitous decent to pass under the deepest part of the Harbour after crossing over the Cross City under Park Street, if indeed this is possible - it is yet to be confirmed.

Now, on 23 June 2015, Mike Baird and his new Minister for Transport  and Infrastructure Constance announced revised plans for the alignment of the bottom-of-the-Harbour metro.

This metro project is progressing in the same manner as the NorthShoreConnex road tunnels with infantile CGI generated videos released, which contain no plausible information. The diagram left was produced by the SMH trying to make sense of the announcement. The announcement was that the underground station was "expected to be located at Central Barangaroo" and "a working party will be formed" to consider "the optimal scale of Central Barangaroo in the light of the increased transport capability".

The video released with the announcement was a reworking of the original video implausibly showing separate tunnels on top of one another passing under the deepest part of the Harbour. The video continued to refer to stations at Martin Place and Pitt Street prompting the graphic artists at SMH to show violent dog-legs to Castlereagh Street and back to Pitt Street.

Underground? Make that underwater

Millers Point 1907

The waters of Darling Harbour lapped against the cliff to the west of Kent Street. Convict labour built the Argyle cut to link the wharves at Millers Point and Walsh Bay to George Street. There was no road at the foot of the cliffs and Darling Harbour which was deep enough to take the largest ships of the time. Central Barangaroo is a concrete slab constructed over the Harbour in order stack containers before the container wharves were built in Botany Bay. The original plan for a metro station at Barangaroo placed the platforms to the east of the escarpment spanning up to a block north of Wynyard Station. It was never disclosed how deeply underground it would have been or how passengers would have reached the surface.

The Kennelly plan for Barangaroo

When Paul Keating took control of the planning at Barangaroo he insisted on chipping away the concrete slab to roughly resemble the original shape of Millers Point. Christina Kennelly as Planning Minister called for submissions for landscaping the slab and the new government dared not alter the plans. The Barangaroo Authority released a YouTube video of time-lapse images of the transformation of the slab on 27 July 2015. I have downloaded a link in an accompanying post. Hickson Road and a boardwalk are the only part of the slab to remain at the base of the escarpment west of High Street and its heritage listed terraces.

A underground subway station "expected to be located at Central Barangaroo" would have to remain deeply under the floor of the Harbour after passing under the deepest part of the Harbour. So what would this cost?

The underground station at Edinburgh Airport had been costed at half a billion pounds in 2006, because of the necessary provisions for fire emergencies and the need to facilitate evacuations - this was a year after the terrorist bombings in London. The plumetting Au$ makes it difficult to make conversions. No-one has built an underwater subway station anywhere in the world so it is impossible to estimated what it would cost to build one. Baird has set aside $84 million in the State Budget to supposedly find out.

Baird changed the plan at Barangaroo to give Packer absolute waterfront land at the southern end of Central Barangaroo without competative tendering and without disclosure of the terms of the contract. The announcement of a subway station can best be seen as a ploy to do the same to the remaining waterfront land at Central Barangaroo. It is not the developers that will meet cost of building a subway under the Harbour, whatever it would cost.

The coup de gråce for rail services south of the Harbour

One of the first acts of the Liberal Party government was to commission a "pre-feasability study" into Bus Rapid Transport from the Northern Beaches which was published in June 2012. None of the options short-listed came close to being economically viable.

Baird announced before the election that his government would fund a feasability study into a bus rapid transport corridor, which would reach the same conclusions, but would be required in order to declare the scheme a State Significant Major Project. The project required doubling the capacity of the Spit Bridge but it was never specified how this would be done. The pre-feasability study considered terminating the buses at Wynyard Park, as at present, or at the mysterious Victoria Cross, shown as adjacent to North Sydney and accessed via Falcon Street. The dot representing Victoria Cross has now drifted further north in TfNSW videos and crude maps but no-one knows where. So the terminus will be Wynyard Park.

In fact Northern Beaches bus services were stopped from accessing the traditional terminus at Lee Street at the beginning of November 2014. Passengers were forced to catch a George Street bus to reach the new terminus at Wynyard park. North Shore politicians truly believe they can do what they like with voters from the Northern Beaches.

Hills Buses will also be effectively terminated at Wynyard Park. This has not been formally announced but has been indicated in the "City Centre bus network map" detailing routes that will be implimented when George Street is closed for traffic. Baird will insist that there will be temporary pain before the trams run, but it will become progressively worse for the rest of the life of the City.

The route map shows Hills buses terminating at Druitt Street while buses from Pyrmont are sent north to King Street where they pass through the mother of all pinch points along with every bus from George Street and every bus from Oxford Street and Flinders Street. Will buses be forced to riffle-shuffle with private vehicles through the pinch point? The only buses that will be using the vast layovers at the Lee Street terminus when buses are forcibly terminated at Randwick and Kingsford are minor routes to Elizabeth Bay.

Unmanageable congestion in Elizabeth Street and Druitt Street will immediately force a revision of these bus routes.

Whether Hills buses terminate at Druitt Street or Wynyard park passengers will quickly realise that their best chance to transfer to a train or a Parramatta/City road bus will be to flood onto a City Circle train at Wynyard.

Preventing bus services from the Hills suburbs, the North Shore and the Northern Beaches from reaching Railway Square for the first time in the history of the City, except through the Elizabeth Street pinch point, will create overloading of the City Circle at its most critical point (Town Hall Station). The George Street trams will do nothing to relieve this congestion - the stops are too remote and inconvenient and the service cannot compete with the tube trains.

The localised overloading of the City Circle will cripple all the rail services south of the Harbour.

My trip to Europe

A trip to Europe to see the places from where my grandparents had migrated was part of a bucket list, but it was also an opportunity to observe and ride on tram systems that I had been studying on-line in the course of writing this blog. These are some of my observations, city by city.

Nice

Pantographs down at Place Garibaldi

The tramway in Nice is impeccably designed. The U-shaped route passes under the elevated motorway that was built alongside the elevated railway so trams do not obstruct arterial traffic. Bus services along the other main north-south road, Bd de Chimiez, terminate immediately to the north of the tram line and are unaffected by tram movements. The average speed of the trams over the 8.7 km route is 19 kph - faster than the bus services they replaced. The trams I travelled in were packed to the rafters. Paper tickets are validated on board for each journey. The trams have no signalling, relying on headways and drivers sight-lines for safety. The 100° curve moving into Place Garibaldi (shown left) has unimpeded sight-lines.

Followers of this blog will recall that Nice rejected the "third-rail" technology of Alstom. The trams run on nickle-metal-hydride batteries for a short section along Place Garibaldi. I had a terrifying demonstration of the wisdom of this decision. I had to travel by taxi to Nice airport in torrential rain. The drainage along large sections of the elevated motorway could not cope and vehicles were pumping sheets of water over the edge with their tyres. The driver handled it with aplomb - he had done it before.

Dublin

Rosie Hackett bridge across Liffey

Dublin is constructing a Cross-City luas which will provide connections between the successful tramway to the north of and parallel to the Liffey river and a light rail to the south-east that uses abandoned rail lines. An additional bridge has been constructed across the Liffey exclusively for the south-bound tram rail and buses and taxis. O'Connell Street is one of the widest thoroughfares in Europe but only the north-bound rail will cross the O'Connell bridge and travel up the centre islands - two lines were evidently considered too disruptive during extensive consultations and inquiries that had been conducted since 2005.

Tickets have to be purchased before boarding the trams - there are ticket vending machines at all stops. With the introduction of an intergrated smartcard for all public transport, the touch-on/touch-off Leap Card, this is openly referred to as an honour system. Plain-clothed "Revenue Protection Officers" are being introduced to reduce fair evasion.

Manchester

T-junction at Picadilly Gardens

 Manchester has an extensive tram network to supplement the urban rail network. The tram lines to the north literally pass through the heavy rail terminuses at Victoria and Piccadilly stations. The tram lines to the south enter central Manchester via abandoned elevated rail tracks to the former terminus of the Midland Central Express to London which is now a heritage-listed convention centre. This line comes down to earth to pass through the historic center and link up to the northern system at a T-junction at Picadilly Gardens (left). The noise levels at this junction, the inevitable screaching of metal on metal, have to be heard to be believed. Double-decker bus services from the south pass through the city centre to terminate with a U-turn in the south-east corner of the T-junction.

Manchester bus terminuses

Not all bus services from the south terminate here. Some buses cross the tram lines at the main artery for vehicular traffic, Portland Street, and continue as north-eastern sector bus services. Once buses cross the tram rails they remain separate from the tram lines - buses never share lanes with trams.

Most bus services to the to the north terminate to the north of Piccadilly Gardens or at a purpose-built bus transfer station adjacent to another tram stop north of a vast area of department stores and shopping malls. This transfer station operates like the bus transfer station at Bondi Junction with doors that open automatically when a bus is discharging or taking on passengers.

Manchester buses queued for U-turn

Public transport in Manchester has been designed to minimise crossings of the bus routes with the tram tracks, with good reason. This is in stark contrast to the deleriously incompetent tramway foist on Sydney by Chris Lock and Ms Berejiklian: all buses from Parramatta and City Roads cross the tram tracks at Eddy Avenue coming and going; buses forcibly terminated at Pitt Street are forced to cross tram rails a mind-numbing eight times in order to turn round.

The other stark contrast is in the location of the tram stops. Tram stops in Manchester are integrated into the railway terminals at Piccadilly and Victoria stations and the tram terminus of the southern tram lines is linked to a railway station at Deansgate by a footbridge over a canal - the famed canal alongside Canal Street. Tram stops are located between these stops, adjacent to the bus terminals. Free bus routes, one one-way (orange line) and one two-way (green line) also link the rail stations.

This is in contrast with the George Street tram stops that mindlessly replicate the train stations. Commuters whose bus services have been terminated at Wynyard park will have the choice of catching a City Circle train coming as frequently as modern signalling can achieve or a tram whose frequency is determined by congestion at Pitt Street. Free bus shuttles in Sydney will be obliterated.

The tram stop in the centre of Manchester is the pinch point that determines the capacity of north-south tram movements. The tram rails through the stop will be doubled with another dual track to the west passing along Corporation Street, a pedestrianised street passing through the area of shopping malls and department stores. One rail has been lain alongside the existing platforms, which will be closed down next month while the remaining lines and island platforms are built. The George Street tram capacity can never be increased.

Edinburgh

Royal Scottish Academy
The statue of young Queen Victoria is clearly not amused by the chaos at her feet

Princes Street tram stop

Buses in Edinburgh have for æons used bus stops strung along Princes Street adjacent to Waverley Rail station, between North Bridge and the Scottish Academy, as an interchange for distributing services throughout Edinburgh. Now the buses are forced to share a single lane with trams at the most critical intersection for the bus distribution network.

The Mound, Edinburgh

The satellite images used by Google Earth were taken before Princes Street was closed to traffic and torn up, so they give a snapshot of what has been given up because of the trams. At the intersection in front the Scottish Academy buses turned right to the northern suburbs, left onto The Mound taking them back to the south-west or carried on towards Haymarket station. Now buses only circulate on to The Mound.

Kings wall (orange line)

The railways that extended north from the Midlands originally terminated at Haymarket to the west of Old Edinburgh town, which had been built on a ridge dominated by the Castle. Pedestrian streets, Closes, so narrow you can touch both sides with outstretched arms, sloped steeply from the central thoroughfare down to Nor' Loch and Cowgate and were easy to defend against Vikings, marauding Highland chieftains and the English. Houses were stacked eight stories high on top of shops and work places and, as in medieval London, sewerage was dumped into the streets. Cromwell was able to capture and hold the Castle but with the Restoration of a Scottish king to the English throne and the Act of Union the city expanded beyond the city walls. The Royal Mile was connected to Princes Street by North Bridge and to Chambers Street by South Bridge, over Cowgate, and Nor' Loch was reclaimed. The wealthy residents north of Princes Street objected to a railway through their parkland until an act of Parliament allowed the rail companies to burrow under The Mound and establish Waverley Station, which spans the entire valley. Railtracks never made it up the slopes and the rail lines continue east of Waverley to link with the lines on the east coast of England. A train line to the north, west of Haymarket, was closed as uneconomic and converted into a cycle path, as were lines to the port from the eastern tracks. Urban transport in Edinburgh has always been provided by buses operating on the roads along the ridges and the overpasses that connect them.

The Scottish Parliament passes an act to establish a rail station under Edinburgh Airport in 2007 and it received Royal accent. The underground station was costed at £500 million and would have been linked to the Forth Bridge line and the Haymarket-Glascow line. The Scottish National Party (SNP) manifesto at the election promised to scrap the station and also a proposal to build a tramway to the airport. The SNP-led minority government after the election commissioned a report from Audit Scotland that confirmed that the projectioned cost from 2003 of £498 for a tramway from the airport to the port was sound.

A draft business case had been accepted by the Scottish Parliament in March 2007 before the election on 3 May 2007. The plan for construction of the shared-road sections was drawn up by a joint design team from the infamous Parsons Brinkerhoff and Halcrow Group and work commenced in July 2007. The SNP-led minority government agreed to continue the scheme after a failed vote in Parliament, stipulating that no further public money would be available. SNP had 47 seats in the devolved Scottish Parliament, Labour 46, Conservatives 17, Liberal Democrats 16, Greens 2 and one independant. Edinburgh Council approved the final business case on 25 October 2007 months after work had commenced and had responsibility for the project through a wholly-owned subsiduary Transport Initiatives Edinburgh.

There was a moment of sanity on 25 August 2011 when Council voted to terminate the line at Haymarket. This actually made sense. The line from Haymarket to the airport is segregated from the road network with bridges over the rail lines and and a tunnel under the interchange at the start of the Edinburgh City Bypass, a free motorway around the coastal city. The frequency of services is limited only by demand and safety standards - there are many level crossings. Extending the line to St Andrews Square merely replicates the rail line to Waverley and ensures that congestion at the pinch point in front of the Scottish Academy will always determine the frequency of services. It is physically impossible for the two extra island stops to the west along Princes Street to ever transfer passengers to buses - they have a long walk to their destinations.

A week later Council reversed its decision and agreed to extend the tram line to St Andrew Square, after the Scottish Parliament threatened to withdraw funding. The tramline, shortened to half its length, cost over £1 billion when interest charges are factored in. It is universally described as a fiasco - half the length at twice the cost.

I wanted to get a photo of a tram queueing to go through the pinch point but they were so infrequent I gave up. This was a Saturday evening but airports don't close at weekends.

A statutory inquiry into the fiasco was set up by the Scottish Parliament on 7 November 2014 so public servants could be compelled to give evidence. It is expected to examine more than 2 million digital files and 200 boxes of documents.

Edinburgh compared with Sydney

New Town, Edinburgh 1819

It turns out that Edinburgh will get off relatively lightly compared to what is being inflicted on Sydney by the George Street trams. The George Street trams mindlessly replicate half the City Circle loop but they also obliterate all the places in the CBD where it is physically possible for buses to turn around.

New Town to the north of Nor' Loch was laid out in accordance with Georgian planning principles with orthogonal major roads alternated with minor roads and lanes. Melbourne and Adelaide have similar road structures. In Edinburgh this was achieved the same way as on Manhattan island - hillocks and outcrops were flattened and the rubble used to form The Mound. Planners were not encumbered by medieval land titles. Bus services can be rerouted to roads further north to avoid the chaos in Princes Street. Commuters will just have to walk further to catch a bus.

Diverting bus routes and other traffic away from the pinch point at The Mound could potentially allow the frequencies of the tram services in Edinburgh to be increased. This is not possible in Sydney where every bus from Broadway will be forced to pass through the intersection of Pitt Street and Eddy Avenue entering and leaving the CBD regardless of where they are terminated. The frequency of trams in George Street must inevitably decrease over the future life of the City of Sydney. The volume of general traffic through the intersections at either end of Eddy Avenue can never be diverted since Wentworth Avenue/Elizabeth Street is the major arterial road between the Eastern Suburbs and the rest of Sydney to the south and west, and the other routes, Cleveland Street and Gardener Road, are also stuffed by the tram rails. In Edinburgh traffic passing round the city centre using the City Bypass to the south or a route through the port, to the north, is unaffected by tram movements.

Trams in Edinburgh share a lane with buses only on the outbound route for a short distance in front of the Scottish Academy. In Sydney trams will share lanes with buses in both directions for an unspecified distance from the Kingsford terminus across Gardeners road. Every bus that transfers passengers at the terminus will be forced into these lanes regardless of where they are eventually forced to turn round. It is not known whether buses will turn right into Bunnerong Road from this lane or a separate right-turn lane. Parsons Brinkerhoff showed buses entering the shared lane at random - no attempt to maintain safe headways. This cannot be. It will not be possible to increase tram frequencies while this system persists. There are shared lanes in Centenial Park on the Randwick leg which creat the same problems.

The trams in Edinburgh do not pass through pedestrianised areas.

One can keep on producing odious comparisons of the George Street trams with all the other tram systems in the civilised word. There has never been a tramway as incompetently designed.

My observations have comfirmed the obvious: the George Street trams are the greatest mistake made by a city since the fall of Troy.

Push recruiting

A couple of weeks before Mike Baird became Premier ads appeared in newspapers asking for applications from qualified persons to apply for positions in the NSW Public Service. The ads defined the role of a public servant to give the minister for planning and infrastructure unbiased advice and said the recruitment drive was to deal with the large number of coal mining applications needing to be assessed. The ads were never proceeded with.

The ads for Project Director Light Rail make it clear the applicants will not have leave to give any independent advice. The light rail is described as high capacity, reliable and sustainable but it is not clear what is being sustained. The position "is accountable for the delivery of a world class light rail that is safe and reliable". Public Servants can not be sued for fatalities and injuries that are the result of incompetence so the successful applicant has nothing to fear.

I was told by the tech guy at the Surry Hills information session that the successful consortium bidding for the contract would be required to present an audit of the safety provisions before construction commenced. Clearly this has not occurred. ALSTOM is the only member of the ALTRAC consortium with assets sufficient for them to be sued, so ultimately they will be held accountable.

Chris Lock was stood down abruptly from his position as Deputy Director General of the Transport Projects division of TfNSW in April after a 10 year career. He appeared with Ms Berejiklian at the Sydney High "community forum" where he was howled down. He got a better reception later that week at a Randwick Businessman's breakfast but became a total recluse when people including myself pointed out the obvious flaws in his arguments. He continued to "work" full time on the project using complete lack of disclosure and deliberately contradictory information from the consultants to the EIS to avoid scrutiny.

"Pizza boy" Jeff Goodling has also been stood down. He explained a great length that he could not answer any technical questions about the light rail: his role was to "deliver the Project". I confronted him about the deliberate contradictions in the consultants descriptions in the EIS. He said these should be pointed out in submissions so they could be dealt with. In fact the consultants continued to produce contradictions up to the signing of the contract by Altrac.

The new Minister for Transport, facing the annihilation of his political ambitions, does not care what qualifications the naxt head of the department has on his CV. He is looking for a Public Servant with political skills to deal with "stake-holders" and hopefully con the general public. There will be no shortage of applicants seeking a position that has taxpayer-funded superannuation for life.

Australian innovation: Nobody Pays

Jonathan Burrows

Jonathan Burrows exploited a loophole in the Oyster Card system over a five year period. He commuted from a station without barriers in East Sussex to a tube station in the City of London, a journey that should have cost £21.50 each way. By not using a ticket when he entered the rural station and when he transferred to the tube line he was only charged the maximum for the shorter distance of the tube line when he exited through the ticket barriers at Cannon Street station in the City, £7.20. British rail estimated the fares he had evaded amounted to £42,550 which he paid within a couple of days hoping to avoid publicity. To no avail. He was taken to court and his name was released to the British tabloids. He was sacked from his job at the UK branch of Blackrock and the Financial Conduct Authority banned him from working in financial services for life.

These were astonishing consequences, particularly when you compare the FCA with APRA.

A commuter is in fact highly unlikely to be picked up for fare evasion when travelling between train stations that do not have ticket barriers, in peak hours. If a commuter exits at a station that has barriers it will be picked up that he did not tap on and most commuters have destinations with ticket barriers.

It is unclear if he tapped on/off when he transferred to the tube train. He could have made the transfer at a station that allows transfers to be made by switching platforms without going near a ticket barrier, such as Strathfield or Central in the Sydney network. When he did not tap on or use a paper ticket at the station in east Sussex the Oyster system had no idea where the journey had commenced and would have charged him the maximum fare for the tube route. The fault was with Oyster system - Burrows merely took advantage of the flaw. If he had not admitted everything by paying the estimate for the evaded fares he could have only been fined for evading the one fare when he was picked up on the platform of the station in east Sussex following a tip off - a small fine that increases after three offences. They knew where he lived and where he worked but Scotty could have been beaming him up to London.

The Opal system has the same flaw. A passenger who has not tapped on can transfer from a Newcastle train or a Blue Mountains train to, say, an inner-west City Circle line at Strathfield or Central and tap off anywhere in the City Circle and be charged only the maximum for that route. Ms Berejiklian challenged commuters to try to take advantage of the system! Illawarra line passengers can transfer to inner-west trains at Redfern station.

The Western Line has relief rail lines that make it physically possible to trap fare evaders. Trains from outer Sydney skip long swathes of stations in inner Sydney. Ticket inspectors (are they still called that) have time to go through the carriages asking passengers to show a validated paper ticket or tap a card on on a hand-held reader. Any passenger bailing out prematurely can be asked to do the same by backup inspectors on the platforms.

This is not possible with the trams. The doors open at every stop and once a passenger with an untapped card steps off the tram he is home free. Passengers in the other carriage will have a view of an inspector working through a carriage through the face to face unoccupied drivers cabins.

Ticket inspector on Melbourne tram

This is not a problem with the Myki Card:

• The onboard readers are disabled when the doors are closed.
• The inspectors can observe any one exiting without tapping off.
• A passenger who taps off without having tapped on will eventually be detected.
• An inspector downloads a list of all the cards that have tapped on and not yet tapped off on entering the carriage - anyone who taps his reader with a card or a smart device that has not been tapped on is immediately pinged and can pay an on-the-spot fine if he is not a recidivist.
• Melbourne trams are never coupled.

The North Shore Death Cult

The impossible situation that Opal Card inspectors will have to confront has been laid out in a secret risk assessment report from Arup who were consultants on Visual and Landscape assessment in the original EIS. The risk assessment focused on the number of intersections to be encountered by vehicles crossing the tram lines and the speeds at which the coupled trams will be presumed to be travelling. This unreleased report is the first time information on the presumed speeds of trams through intersections has been provided to consultants. SAMSA, the "independent" consultants for the Peer Review of Traffic & Transport Assessment commissioned by Planning and Infrastructure, were fobbed off with the assertion that the presumptions of which intersections would be given priority for trams were "conservative". Now Arup, hardly independent consultants, have been told that trams will pass through 23 intersections at "high speed" (up to 70 km/h), 17 intersections at "medium speed" (up to 40 km/h) and six intersections at low speed (less than 25 km/h). The intersections are not identified in the report. The assertions of high speeds through intersections are preposterous as tram stops are perforce situated adjacent to intersections and trams must slow down to stop without throwing passengers around.

Arup does not question the assertions of Transport for NSW and concludes "The risk profile for CSELR equates to 1.14 fatalities per year". Arup did not consider any of the matters brought up by myself and others in Submissions to the EISs. They did not consider the blindsiding of pedestrians at every crossing to and from Central Station, the attempted diversion of pedestrian routes at Riley Street, the impossibility for buses to make turns without encroaching on the tram alignments, the proximity to pedestrian areas and the other matters. Arup are plucking figures from thin air in line with the other consultants for the project. There is no tram system anywhere in the world remotely comparable to the George Street trams. The fatalities expected from collisions at intersections alone are many times higher that those experienced by the current public transport system.

The proclaimed speeds between stops leave very little time for ticket inspectors to operate. Once an inspector has been identified passengers who have not tapped on can exit at the next stop when all the doors open. If smart devices are ever permitted to be used to tap on/off in NSW, passengers will be able to take mug shots of ticket inspectors and upload them to apps that track inspectors and issue warnings to fare evaders in following carriages.

This will be of little concern to ALTRAC since the "availability PPP" guarantees the consortium profitability regardless of how much it collects in fares.

Maxing the Opal Card

Commuters filmed by SMH maxing Opal cards

When the Opal Card was introduced by Ms Berejiklian it was not clear whether a trip in the opposite direction on a bus or tram route with the same number on the front within one hour of tapping off would be regarded as another journey. I speculated that, say, James Packer could travel by bus from Palm Beach, complete his business in the Sydney CBD within an hour and travel back to whence he came, so the distance travelled according to the GPS calculators was zero, and then pay the fare for the minimum distance travelled. Now intrepid commuters have put the system to the test and apparently he could.

Journalists from the SMH filmed commuters walking or running or bike riding between stops at the Pyrmont Bay and Star casino. The word on the street was that it would take 28 trips between the stops to accrue the 8 short journeys needed to travel anywhere in the metropolitan area using the Opal card for free for the rest of the week. Four trips within an hour of first tapping off counts as a journey. If travel in the reverse direction was a separate journey only 8 movements back and forth between the stops would be necessary.

This is possible because Opal card scanners are not on the trams but on the pavement beside the stops - you do not have to catch a tram to make a trip. Any two stops can be used for this ploy. The stops at Capitol Square and Paddy's Market would work just as well but involve multiple crossings of George Street.

By George I think she's got it

Town Hall stop to QVB stop

The George Street trams will open up a new set of possiblities for people to minimise their cost of weekly travel. The Citadis X05 has double exit doors at the front and rear and these woutd be the prefered exits so one of the multiple Opal card scanners will be placed in front of the Town Hall steps and another beside the mid-block entry to the QVB - literally a stones throw apart - less than 200 metres apart.

But the big advantage from the George Street trams is the ability to break trips into separate journeys without making four trips for each journey. This can be accomplished by switching between linear routes.

On arriving at Central by train bus or tram (one trip) on a Monday morning it only remains necessary to generate seven extra journeys to travel by train or bus anywhere in greater Sydney for the rest of the week. This can be done quickly and cheaply without ever actually catching a tram - you can use a tram for some of the journeys if one happens to turn up in time. You can generate an extra journey by spilting the train trip to Central into two shorter journeys by, say, leaving the train at Erskineville station on the Illawarra line or Newtown station on the Western lines and walking to Macdonaldtown station to reach Central.

If you arrive by train at Central Electric tap on at Chalmers Street then tap off at Rawson Place (one trip for the cheapest distance). Then backtrack across Pitt Street and up the escalators to tap onto the Dulwich Hill line, then down the escalators to tap off at the Capitol Square stop in Hay Street.

It is not clear if a journey on another route cancels the hour period in which trips on the previous route count as the same journey but it probably does. Ms Berejiklian made the point that James Packer, for instance, could have up to three stops for coffee or shopping and continue his journey so long as he caught a bus on the same route - the hour countdown restarts at each tap off at the end of each trip. One of the intrepid commuters interviewed by SMH talked of "rinsing" the card at the end of a trip.

If this is indeed the case one could complete the necessary seven trips by switching between tram routes. This could be accomplished by a short walk to Campbell Street to tap on at Chinatown stop then tap off at Rawson Place.Then up the escalators to tap on again at Central stop and tap off at Capitol Square. Walk to the Haymarket stop to tap on and tap off at Capitol Square  Finally catch an Elizabeth Street bus to your destination in the CBD. Another bus to Central in the evening outside the hour period and the journey home and every journey anywhere in the greater metropolitan area for the rest of the week is free.

If this is not the case, one must switch between routes. For instance: catch a Railway Square bus from Eddy Avenue, then a bus forcibly terminating in Pitt Street, tapping on south of Rawson Place and tapping off at the next stop to the north. Then an alternative route from Pitt Street to Railway Square, City Road or Parramatta Road, tapping off at the setdown only stop at Rawson Place. Then tap on a bus heading for Elizabeth Street at Pitt Street south stop and tap off at Eddy Avenue. And so on.

Oyster v Myki

Myki terminal on Melbourne bus

This ridiculous scenario does not occur on the Myki system introduced in Melbourne. I recall that when Melbourne metropolitan transport had paper tickets a commuter had 4 hours from the first use of of the ticket in which to transfer to any other route, within a zone system. With the Myki card this has been modified to 2 hours from the first tap off.

With the Myki card a commuter from Bronte could transfer from a bus headed to Railway Square to a bus headed to Circular Quay without paying for two journeys, and visa versa for Bondi commuters. Melbourne was laid out with a classic Victorian orthogonal road network and public transport allows commuters to reach any destination it the CBD with only one journey. It is the attempts by the deleriously-incompetent public servants put in control of Transport for NSW to impose a public transport system based on linear routes that creates impossible situations. The system must inexorably fail because of the pinch point in Elizabeth Street which has been the fundimental determinant in tranport planning in Sydney for 200 years.

Commbank can't

The contract to roll out the Opal card was negotiated by the previous, competent State Government. The lead partners in the Pearl consortium were the Commonwealth Bank and Cubic Transportation Services, the corporation deeply embedded in the military/industrial complex that had implimented the Oyster card system in London.

Docklands Light Rail in 1987

The Oyster card was rolled out on the Docklands Light Rail which is a genuine light rail system opened in the 1987 utilising the elevated goods rail lines of the London Docks around Canary Wharf. Additional concrete viaducts took the line to the south over Canary Wharf. The Canadian company Olympia & York developing the Canary Wharf filed for the biggest bankrupcy in history but the rail project was sound and has been extended.

The carriages are now twice as long and more frequent. The high-floor carriages draw power from the underside of a third rail under the overhang of the platforms and are fully automated, without drivers - the standards of system safety are claimed to be higher than for heavy rail. Routes that would have required trams to run through streets were rejected in the 1980s. No "World City" has built trams through city streets.

The main difference with heavy rail is the length of the carriage sets and the lack of ticket barriers at the entrances to the platforms. When I descended from the platform at Canary Wharf station there was a looped public address announcement reminding passengers to go back if they had not tapped off.

 Tragically, the Oyster card system of placing card readers on the platforms developed for the Docklands metro lines have been mindlessly adopted for the Sydney trams.

In Melbourne the Myki card readers for the trams are placed at the entrances to the carriages. This has far-reaching advantages with the development of the latest technologies, as it turns out. The contract for the rollout of contactless cards signed by the previous state government required the system to be upgradable to more recent technologies.

Oyster card reader at ticket barrier

The systems already in use round the world were the use of credit/dedit cards with printed circuits (used in tap and go terminals) in place of the Opal cards. However Apple and Google (Android) were already marketing smart phones. In September last year Oyster card readers in London were upgraded to recognise mobile phones. Banks issue apps that allow mobile phones to charge Oyster payments to an account set up by the commuter.

Needless to say the Apple Pay app has been "synced" to the newly released Apple Watch. The big advantage of a smart phone or smart wearable over a printed circuit on a plastic card is that they have a rechargeable battery. They can operate over greater distances - it is not necessary for the device to be lain flat on a pad in order to initiate a transaction. This will be the main selling point for the Apple Watch.

At an "assisted checkout" at a supermarket, for instance, a transaction could take place as soon as you touch the "pay now" field on the touch screen. The Apple Watch currently requires you to click the side button twice: Apple needs to get the support of banks in making it accepted at "touch and go" credit card terminals.

As far as can be gathered the big four Australian banks have not signed up to recognise Apple-Pay-enabled mobile devices or the equivalent Android devices. These would potentially operate in competition with the lucrative credit cards they issue.

The smart devices operating over greater distances can eliminate the distinction between gated and no-barrier stations. A commuter would trigger a transaction by walking through the entrance to a platform or entering and leaving a bus or tram. Passengers not carrying a mobile device would still have to tap a card on the pads. With these systems the dwell times at stops for buses and trams would be reduced, achieving faster jouney times. In fact we would expect the systems in use for the Oyster card readers in London to be introduced in Melbourne for the Myki card readers any time now.

But not in NSW. Anyone walking passed a Opal card reader with an activated mobile device would trigger a phantom journey. Whether this was to Central or Dulwhich Hill or to Circular Quay or Kingsford would presumably depend on which side of the tracks they were walking. Someone walking across the tracks could trigger journeys in both directions. If they missed the buzz in their pocket they would not learn of these phantom journeys until they examined the periodic accounts issued by their bank.

The Commonwealth Bank clearly has no intention of upgrading the Opal card readers despite the Sydney rollout having taken place after the upgrading of Oyster card readers in London, and despite the requirements of the contract with the former State Government.

It appears that the advice Ms Berejiklian has been receiving has been as shonky as the financial advice given to Joe Hockey's mother in law. It is despicable for a bank that has a privileged position as one of the four pillars to take advantage of the defiant obtuseness and mathmatical incompetence of North Shore Liberal ladies.

The lone wolf

Airbus A320

The Airbus A320 that was crashed into the French Alps was 37.6 metres in length, well short of the length of the 67 metre trams that will ply their way along George Street. The maximum weight when fully laden with fuel, cargo and passengers for take off is 78 tonne, less than the 80 tonne mass of the coupled Citadis X05 trams when empty of passengers and drivers. The brochures from Alstom do not give the specifications so the mass is estimated from the specifications for the C2-class trams in Melbourne. The Germanwing A320 was carrying close to its full loading of 150 passengers and crew whereas the George Street trams will have a claimed capacity of 450 passengers.

Following the crash of the Germanwings aircraft the Australian Government has changed the regulations to require two people to be in the cabin at any time and EU airlines will have similar requirements to those for American aircraft. Tram drivers on the other hand are alone in control of the tram, controlling when the doors open, and are not subjected to any psychological screening. However tram drivers will not be the main concern.

Murdoch newspapers have been used to attack individuals such as James Callaghan, Peter Slipper and Kevin Rudd, but they can readily be turned into weapons of mass destruction.

CG image of Citadis X05 concealing the length

An American company, Vapor Bus International developed edge-sensitive exit doors for buses in 1974, the same year that Intel introduced the 8080 processor. Pressure waves in the hollow rubber sealing tubes detected objects obstructing the closure of the doors and they reopened. Edge-sensitive doors have become mandatory in public transport for buses and trains throughout the world. With the development of microprocessors more sophisticated systems for gap detection have been developed and with vehicles using electric motors for propulsion, such as trains and trams, on-board computers generally prevent the vehicle moving when a door has not closed. Alstom does not disclose the systems to be used in Citadis X05 which has not been delivered anywhere in the world.

A modern tram can be immobilised, with the brakes automatically applied, by superglueing, say, a small block of wood to the frame of one of the exit doors. All a "lone wolf" has to do is effect delays at stops between Circular Quay and Rawson Place with a Murdoch newspaper, a walking stick, umbrella or crutch or a body part, causing the tram to miss traffic lights. Then the coup de grâce is delivered at the Rawson Place stop. On exiting from one of the doors of the rear carriage a small object is superglued to the frame of the door or the floor. By the time the driver has gotten out to investigate why the door will not close the fate of the up to 450 passengers in the tram and the 450 passengers in the following tram is sealed.

Sight lines at Rawson Place stop

By the time it is physically possible for the driver of the following tram to see the stationary tram it is 2.5 seconds from impact. So what would the driver do in his final few seconds of life? Would he sacrifice his life and stomp on the emergency brakes to activate the ATS braking in a futile attempt to mitigate the severity of the injuries inflicted on the passengers? Or would he abandon the controls and try to exit the glass-bubble drivers compartment? The driver's compartment of the Citadis X05 was clearly not designed to protect a driver when coupled carriages collide with coupled carriages of a tram with the brakes applied - the Sydney North Shore is the only place in the world that produces politicians contemptuous enough of human life to run trams of such mass through heavily pedestrianised precincts.

It should be noted that this is not a suicide mission. All the lone wolf has to do is set up a web cam to broadcast the resulting carnage onto the world wide web. Then he can disappear into the crowd. The only purchase he needs to make is a tube of superglue which can not be traced and would not trigger any alerts when purchased. If he wishes to have the publicity he can remain behind and exhort passers by to record the carnage on their mobile phones.

The "lone wolf" attack can take place at any time of the day between 7 am and 7 pm any day of the week - he can choose the time when there are the most passengers on the trams for maximum impact. When the George Street trams are in operation any individual can institute an attack at any time in the future life of the City of Sydney - New South Wales will remain on maximum level security alert for the rest of its history.

A deluded individual who purchased an illegally sawn-off shotgun was able to stage a siege in Martin Place that effectively shut down the CBD for a day. The election of a Baird state government will ensure that any individual will be able to shut down the Sydney CBD for an indefinite period at any time - the knowledge is out there.

Baird's scripted response to the election result was that voters had decided between fear and hope, but the situation is hopeless - there will never be any respite from the fear of attack from extremists.