Gladys' Bottom of the Harbour Scheme

Single deck rail system (schematic) SMH

The Sydney Morning Herald ran an exclusive last Wednesday, 30th January 2014, on the results of a lengthy Freedom of Information battle with the Minister for Transport. You can read it from this link http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/-31mvw.html
This article drew by far the greatest number of online comments for the day, so transport is an important subject for Sydney-siders. The schematic (left) is from the print edition. Despite getting access to huge volumes of emails, after being opposed on grounds of "commercial confidentiality", there very little information on the single deck train system. No information on where the stations will be located, no information on the path of the tunnels through the CBD. No one has any clue as to what the system would cost.

Politicians from the northern beaches have been pressing for a train tunnel from the northern beaches under Middle Harbour and Port Jackson to the CBD for aeons, but this has, of course, been assessed as ludicrously uncommercial. So they have come up with a new stratagem, to use stealth and systemic deception by the public service to impose the cost on public transport users in the west, and south of the Harbour. It is hardly surprising that professionally-qualified officers in TfNSW are running around like Chicken Little.

The argument for single-deck trains put forward by the O'Farrell government is that they will be able to climb at a steeper gradient, so the depth that passengers will have to descend to the stations will  be less.  The difference in the maximum gradients practicable with single or double deck trains is not significant - both around 7%. Technical Paper 10 in the EIS has this diagram of gradients in the CBD:

Cross section of CBD - Hassell + Arup 2013

We do not know if a rail tunnel would be through the bed rock or in a trench like the Harbour road tunnel, so no one can say how deep a station in, say, the vicinity of Town Hall would be. So many unanswered questions.

We do know that there is no reason to feed trains from Chatswood into the Northern Beaches rail tunnel.  The Minister for Transport has told parliament on many occasions that the Harbour Bridge rail lines have more than enough capacity to handle all the passengers from the privately-operated north-west railway, and she is right.

Erskineville rail line

Eastern Suburbs Railway pops up

The Eastern Suburbs Railway was originally planned to operate as a loop though Randwick and back to Central - there is a second platform directly above the one in use. The railway was terminated at Bondi Junction to reduce the cost and the rail popped up just before Erskineville Station. This was no problem because the railway was compatible with the Bradfield rail system. Erskineville station has four lines and they continue to St Peters station. During the 1980s this was described as a major congestion point in the rail system, culminating in the construction of the Airport Line that took trains off this line.

Apparently the O'Farrell government intends to direct all the trains from the Northern Beaches railway into this Erskineville rail corridor. But there are problems. The single deck trains are not compatable with the Bradfield rail system - the station platforms are not at the same height for one. If the Northern Beaches railway took over two of the lines, the central platform at Erskineville station would be split-level.

And where would this leave the Eastern Suburbs Railway? The possibilities are equally bizarre:

• The Northern Beaches line continues in a tunnel to Wooli Creek Junction - like the Airport line that went into receivership.
• Another pair of rails cuts a swath through Erskineville - a la Surry Hills
• The Eastern Suburbs Railway is privatised and converted to single-deck trains and the money from selling this profitable rail line pays for the ludicrously non-commercial Northern Beaches railway.

So many questions - so many requests for information denied on grounds of commercial confidentiality.

The Green and Black

The Green and Black

I confronted the Project Director, Jeff Goodling, about the contradictions in the various plans in the EIS at the community meeting shortly after the EIS went on exhibition. The Lord Mayor of Sydney and the Member for Sydney were conspicuous by their absence at the meeting, so they may not have been aware of the contradictions and deliberate deceptions in the EIS.

I am not alone in drawing attention to the many contradictions in the EIS, this is an extract from the submission of Kingsford South Precinct, one of the resident groups sponsored by Randwick Council, on page 22 of website submissions here http://majorprojects.planning.nsw.gov.au/?action=view_job&job_id=6042

Note that Randwick Council sponsored community groups to examine the EIS. Clover Moore has embarked on a campaign of letter drops with false information and has maligned community groups with unsubstantiated claims about alternative routes.

Which brings us to the City of Sydney's hysterical response to the the EIS.

Surry Hills ghetto encircled

The Technical Papers state: "To mitigate the impacts to local access the following network changes are proposed: Reinstate the Cooper Street connection to Riley Street to provide access for local residents." This is disingenuous. If Cooper Street reserve in not obliterated the only entry for rag-trade heavy vehicles to the Surry Hills commercial ghetto, from the south, is to circle the entire ghetto - the yellow line on the Google Earth map above. Traffic from Chalmers Street must thread along the single lane of Devonshire Street past the pocket parks closing off Holt and Waterloo Streets and enter from the northern end of Waterloo Street, where it has narrowed. This is simply to avoid the possibility that turning heavy vehicles may "encroach on the light rail alignment" - limiting the speed at which trams can travel through Surry Hills.

This provoked an hysterical response from the City of Sydney. Their submission refers to a table in volume 1A which is a cut and paste of the passage in the Technical Papers. They shriek: "The Proponent should consider that opening Cooper Street will help local circulation but will provide a by-pass from Elizabeth Street to Crown Street."

The recommendation is: "That the reopening of Cooper Street only proceed if the Proponent demonstrates that it is essential to traffic flow and local access."

Neither TfNSW or City of Sydney show any concern for the Child Care centre adjacent to the reserve, that was the subject of a previous post. City of Sydney's only concern is to stop evil motorists from avoiding blocking the only exit to the north from the other Surry Hills ghetto.

A year ago, when it had become a "stakeholder", the Council amended the Local Environmental Plan 2012 to change the zoning of land adjacent to the reserve, resumed for road widening, from General Residential to Public Recreation. O'Farrell could have a fight on his hands.

The obvious solution to all these problems is to leave Holt Street and Waterloo Street open at their southern ends and to slow down the trams in Devonshire Street so they can cope with the odd turning truck. Even better, to not run trams along a road that is too narrow to accommodate them.

Clover Moore's only concern is the maximise the profits of the the privately-operated tram company by letting it ride roughshod over Surry Hills. She is backed up by her acolyte Alex Greenwich (get it), the Member for Sydney, who opines in the submission posted on his web site: "Pocket parks at road closures - These closures must provide high quality plazas and pocket parks at intersections to help green and pedestrianise the area and add to the village atmosphere".

The EIS shows no concern for the employers in this major commercial area of Sydney; only for local residents, who vote at elections. O'Farrell is apparently prepared to do to the rag trade and News Ltd and all the other smaller businesses in the area, what his Federal colleagues are doing to the car industry and the Goulburn Valley.

The community independents have a long history in this area. When they controlled South Sydney Council the area had one of the highest unemployment rates in Australia. When South Sydney was merged with Sydney they took control of the goose that laid the golden eggs. Now, sure enough, they are killing the goose.

The Public Service prat

At a community meeting in Surry Hills after the EIS had been released, residents were lectured at length by officers from TfNSW on how their objections should be framed. They should be short and not deal with matters like the proposed Parramatta Light Rail! The officer pictured suggested: "For example, you may wish to object to the right-hand turn from Devonshire Street into Crown Street."

Why would anybody object to this right-hand turn - the only one apart from Devonshire into Elizabeth Street? Since this intersection had been cropped from the figures shown in the EIS, there was no information on which one could base a comment. Now Sydney City Council has inadvertently released alignment diagrams that explain this little mystery.

There is only one lane of traffic in Devonshire Street all the way to the intersection with Crown Street. One vehicle waiting to turn right will block all traffic movements in parallel to tram movements which we are told will be occurring on average every sixty to ninety seconds. There will be vehicles wanting to turn right during most phases when the trams are running - 5am to 1am, supposedly. The only traffic movements in parallel to the trams will be to fill the lane to the intersection. It will take only eight or nine vehicles to block the only exit to the south from the public-housing ghetto - to exit, traffic from Marlborough Street must turn left into Crown or Bourke Streets. This happens often during the weekday evenings, without any trams.

Marlborough Street exit from ghetto blocked, 5:30pm

Not that O'Farrell gives a shit. The alignment diagrams confirm that half the area of Ward Park will be used as a construction site, but holds out the tantalising prospect that this area could be reduced, by a sliver, by blocking off Marlborough Street. This would mean, of course, that there was literally no exit to the north from the Surry Hills ghetto.

The green patch encompasses the church hall of the Roman Catholic St. Peters Church. This building, built in 1880 had its slate roof repaired after the super cell. The tag says Property Adjustment TBA - that is presumably, To Be Announced. Not to be discussed or negotiated with the Church authorities, who first learned they would not be able to conduct funerals when the EIS was released.

 

O'Farrell has as much respect for his Church as he has for the intelligence of residents south of the Harbour.

Global Sydney

I am a Liberal lady from the North Shore,

If you have to ask what it will cost you can't afford me

The Sunday Telegraph 09 September, 2012 commented: The O'Farrell Government has spent 18 months and more than a million dollars developing a transport masterplan only to present a grand design that is almost identical to the one prepared for the former premier Nathan Rees.

When this was pointed out by Labor MP Ryan Park, Ms Berejiklian said the new initiatives introduced in the masterplan included a second Harbour crossing, 46 corridors and a "strategic network heirarchy". "Another difference between Labor's transport plans and this one is we will deliver."

The yellow blob

The second Harbour crossing (a tunnel for trains) has not been designed, let alone subjected to a "pre-feasibility study" or costed. The route for the tunnel under the CBD shown in the 9/11 2013 brochure is a yellow blob covering the whole of the CBD.

The cost would be many billions of dollars and there does not seem to be any reason why this could succeed where the more modest Balmain to Sydney University Metro was abandoned without explanation after half a billion dollars had been spent on property acquisitions and compensation.

The three American-based global consultancy firms commissioned by TfNSW to sign off on the EIS would have cost the tax payers a fortune, particularly if they were being paid by the word. We don't know at what stage they were commissioned or what actual work they were contracted to do apart from signing off on the EIS. It may require a Royal Commission to find out what was taking place at TfNSW the past year.

AECOM seems to have produced some of the figures for parking restrictions in the "light rail corridor". Parsons Brinckerhoff may have some responsiblity for cropping the deliberately-misleading figures for the tram stops in Chapter 5 of the EIS and co-authored chapters 1 to 5 with TfNSW. Booz & Company who co-authored the "Technical Papers" with AECOM is a "management  consulting" firm with no engineering background. The technical papers are meticulous in ascribing the figures and tables reproduced for the EIS to TfNSW. It appears that all three consultants were given access to all the draft plans and alternative plans supposedly considered by TfNSW  and were allowed to come up with wildly contradictory plans for the Project.

You can Google the three consultancy firms to find out their backgrounds. Parsons Brinckerhoff was taken over by a British company in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. It was announced on October 30, 20013 that Booz & Company would be taken over by the global accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and it was not a hostile take-over - it was accepted two days before Christmas. It is difficult to see what synergies there could be for the merger, but whatever difficulties Booz & company may have been in when it signed a contract with TfNSW there can be excusing the mindless acquiesce exhibited in the EIS. I will cite one example.

In the EIS Technical Paper 1 - Part B page 205 there is a segment:

Traffic flow changes
"These traffic pattern changes can be summarised as follows:

• Traffic accessing the CBD from Parramatta Road/Broadway is likely to divert to Wattle Street/Harris Street to access the city via the Western Distributor/King Street, William Henry Street/Pier Street and Ultimo Road to avoid George Street/Pitt Street where capacity has been reduced due to light rail."

This is gibberish. There will be two lanes of traffic along George Street to Hay Street which leads to Darling Harbour and Barrangaroo, as at present, but there will be no bus priority lane and Rawson Place will be closed, cutting off access to Hay Street for traffic from the south and south east. Traffic will be less likely to divert into Wattle Street, much less.

• Kent Street, Sussex Street and Clarence Street (for buses) will take on a higher order role for access to the northern CBD as well as access to the Harbour Bridge.
• Kent Street will take on a more important access role for the Rocks, Dawes Point, and Barrangaroo.
• Castlereagh Street and Elizabeth Street will be subject to significant increased usage by general traffic and buses ...
• A (sic) east-west diversion to Cleveland Street is forecast which will call for a management plan to further improve the operation of this already congested corridor.

And so on. Booz & Company, or is that AECOM, have confirmed that no modeling has been done on traffic flow in and around the CBD. This should have been done before O'Farrell made his whimsical decision to run trams along George Street. This is what determines if the Project is viable, not estimates of how many passengers can be forced to transfer from public buses to privately-operated trams.

In fact, it can easily be shown that congestion in bus lanes in Elizabeth Street northbound becomes intractable with pedestrianisation of George Street, and this will get progressively worse for the rest of the life of the City. Ditto congestion in Cleveland Street.

Booz & Company conclude, speaking for TfNSW:
"To address the effects of these potential changed traffic patterns, TfNSW and RMS (thats Roads and Maritime Services - O'Farrell's other monster bureaucracy) are working together to identify appropriate upgrade measures. This work is on-going and includes additional modelling assessment at the strategic and operation levels to refine the optimal solution."

In other words, TfNSW and RMS have not got a clue what to do. They are asking Planning and Infrastructure to give approval to a project that has not been established as a viable proposition - it is not viable.

I did not comment on this in my submission to the EIS. What can one say in the face of a mea culpa as comprehensive as this.

Booz & Company conclude: "This work will be completed prior to construction of the CSELR commencing."

Pig's arse it will. The Minister and her Pizza Boy, Jeff Goodling were openly negotiating with PPPs before the exhibition period for the EIS ended. If Planning and Infrastructure give approval to the EIS none of the unanswered questions will be dealt with before contracts are written. All that will be established in the assessment process is whether O'Farrell has subverted the Planning and Infrastructure ministry as comprehensively as he has subverted TfNSW and RMS.

Duh Clover, Moore confusion

Chalmers Street alignment diagram

The City of Sydney submission to the EIS makes the stipulation (recommendation 47) that the work site shall be defined as per the attached plans (appendix B) produced by TfNSW.

These plans were never disclosed until now, after the close of submissions, and they explain things that TfNSW officers refused to discuss.

The text of the report by consultants Parsons Brinkerhoff (Chapter 5 -Part B page 34) states: "At the corner of Chalmers and Randle Street, the existing footpath would also be extended, as Randle Street would change to two-way traffic movements and the turn from Randle Street into Chalmers Street would be removed." This does not make sense and it was not possible to work out what was meant, as the figure 5.22 in the report was cropped so as to not show the intersection. The figure was displaced to show two platforms of Central Station but only a glimpse of Elizabeth Street, but enough to confirm only one north-bound lane in Elizabeth Street. The "single general traffic lane provide on Chalmers Street" is just a rat-run for very stupid rats, as pointed out in a previous post.

Now City of Sydney has inadvertently released documents that show what the consultants were describing. There is indeed one lane of traffic turning into Randle Street from Chalmers Street, across the tram lines with priority signalling, where trams are slowing to come to the stop.

During construction it will be impossible for pedestrians from the Eddy Avenue station entrance to access the eastern side of Chalmers Street as the pavement comes to a point at the crossing. What happens after construction cannot be determined as the crossing has been cropped.

TfNSW's other consultants, Booz & Company came up with a radically different design which is also included in the EIS, in its Technical Papers (5.4.1.4), without explanation. Booz & Company assert baldly, without any data on building alignments and kerb alignments and lane and footpath widths: "provision of two northbound lanes could be provided with the loss of only one southbound lane through kerb and lane adjustments". Note that the consultants say could not would. The yellow lines in the diagram are presumably the kerb and centre-line alignments and the width of the footpaths on the western side of Elizabeth Street appear to be close to zero. Elizabeth Street south of Foveaux Street is the main pick-up bus stop for buses to southern Sydney whether they travel to Circular Quay or terminate at Central and congestion on this section of footpath would be among the highest in the CBD.

I commented in my submission on the EIS that TfNSW has a history of making convenient assertions and asked for this latter-day assertion to be properly assessed. The EIS is asking for approval of multiple choices. This makes it impossible for anyone to make constructive criticism of the plans, particularly since there are no details or data to work with.

Not that the nutters at City Hall are capable of making constructive criticisms. They seem to be oblivious to the discrepancies in the designs of the different consultants. Perhaps their officers were intimidated by the word technical and failed to read the documents prepared by Booz & Company. The City of Sydney has been working all along with the assumption that the vehicle flows in Chalmers Street would be forced into one lane.

More disturbingly, despite having access to detailed alignment diagrams, the officers and politicians at City of Sydney have failed to pick up the obvious flaws in the plans of both the consultants for the Central (nee Chalmers Street) tram stop. Passengers from the Surry Hills side of Elizabeth Street have to cross to the western side of Chalmers Street then walk south, in order cross the tram lies again to catch an outward bound tram. Extra crossings are provided - like anyone is going to use them. The TfNSW tech guy kept asking how is the situation with this system different from Melbourne. The island tram stop in Flinders Street and the outside tram stops in St Kilda Road at Flinders Street Station are indeed accessed from the pedestrian crossings.

Flinders Street Station, Melbourne

Currently Elizabeth Street bus services conveniently deposit passengers directly at the Devonshire Street Tunnel entrance to Central, and pick up passengers at the Foveaux Street stop. In the modelling of passengers expected to use the tram stops, Booz & Company assumed that people would find catching an outbound tram at the Central stop so difficult they would walk to the Surry Hills stop, except of course for events at the SCG.

Fortunately, if O'Farrell does not return for a second term, the trams will actually have to compete with bus services. Passengers will be able to choose whether standing on a tram with priority signalling and walking long distances to stops, is an advantage over the convenience of the bus services. Voters will be voting for their feet.

It's been done

Infantile paralysis

The brochure Sydney's Bus Future contains hypothetical diagrams designed to impress readers with the intellectual brilliance of the public servants involved. Like in the two previous brochures in less than a year, the argumentation is remarkably infantile.

Priority signalling at intersections is expensive and useless if buses are behind vehicles turning left or heading straight ahead at intersections (figure A), and pointless if the bus is heading to a bus only lane across the intersection (figure B). Figures C and D are the existing situation in countless six lane arterial roads.

Taylor Square bus priority lane (from previous post)

Fortunately, previous, competent State Governments have installed successful measures to speed the operation of public buses. The outward bound bus priority lane at Taylor Square is not obstructed by buses at the stop and takes buses to the head of the queue of vehicles waiting to enter the more restricted lanes in Oxford Street, Paddington. Left turning traffic use the bus stop lane. Oxford Street is a main road so the nutters at City Hall have not been able to introduce bus-calming measures.

More than 10,000 passengers use the Oxford Street bus services every weekday, so needless to say, everything that could be done to tweak the services has been done over the years. Oxford Street would be the oldest established retail strip in the colony with old established church sites and pubs, and it is fully developed - there are no possibilities for bus bays.

Every weekday commuters on the North Bondi to Elizabeth Street route are given a choice of boarding a limited stops service (333) which leapfrogs many of the stops or the ordinary full services - the 380 and 378 and the 381 service that terminates at Bondi Junction. They get to vote with their feet, and they overwhelmingly use the ordinary services. During the AM peak the frequency of services would be based on demand. Bus drivers have to be employed on either side of the peaks so demand is less relevant. From 7 am to 8 am buses depart from the Bronte terminal about every 6 or 7 minutes; 380 services depart from North Bondi around every 5 minutes and 333 services around every 5 or 6 minutes. The all stops services are twice as frequented as the limited stops services. After the peaks the limited stops services are much less popular, with the frequency dropping off to around 10 minutes.

If O'Farrell gets a second term on March 28, 2015, Eastern Suburbs commuters will lose the choice of walking further to a limited service stop or catching a full service bus. As pointed out in the previous post on Ryde buses, with the Oyster (aka Opal) Card passengers enter buses by any door, and the time saved in not requiring limited-stop buses to leapfrog stops would not be significant.

Eliminating bus stops does not only affect merchants, it creates problems for people with mobility disabilities, and makes it less likely that patrons of the many pubs, nightclubs and restaurants along Oxford Street will catch a bus to and, significantly, from the venue.

Be careful who you vote for.

Shoots through the foot like a Bondi tram

The former Albury Hotel, Oxford Street

The Albury Hotel was an iconic gay hotel famous for its drag shows. The art deco facade inspired the facade of the adjacent St Vincent's Private Hospital. It was closed down and the ground floor was converted into retail shops in 2000. This has not turned out to be a propitious move. Retail establishments in Oxford Street, Paddington, once the most fashionable retail strip in Sydney, have been struggling since the opening of the Westfield centre at Bondi Junction - all the premises in the former hotel are up for lease.

Now the O'Farrell government has decided to deliver the coup de grace to this century-old retail strip with a stroke of a purple texta on a map. The modus operandi of the government is well established. A brochure is published two weeks before Christmas with lines and dots drawn on indiscernible maps. In this case, the publishing date was particularly auspicious - two days after the last "information session" on the EIS and two working days before the cut off for submissions. The maps are prepared without any consultation with anyone who will be affected by the decisions and decisions will not be open to change.

I have another whim
To wipe out the Paddington shopping strip

Just as there had been separate tram services to Circular Quay and Railway Square more than 130 years ago, there have been separate bus services along Oxford Street. Commuters from Bondi and Bronte have been switching destinations at Bondi Junction for generations. With the opening of the Eastern Suburbs railway commuters to the east of Bondi Junction have had fast direct routes to more destinations. The Oyster (aka Opel) Card makes switching destinations much easier. For commuters who pass through Bondi Junction, the 378 service to Railway Square would be used only to transfer to the Broadway bus services.

The Oxford Street bus services are needed by commuters whose journeys begin or end in Darlinghurst/Surry Hills, Paddington and Waverley west of Bondi Junction. Most journeys can be made on whichever bus turns up first. The 378 service to Bronte from Lee Street reduces by about a third the number of Oxford Street buses passing though the mother of all "pinch points" in Elizabeth Street northbound, and the Phillip Street terminus.

If O'Farrell gets a second term on March 28, 2015 that will all change. TfNSW has declared a presumably end-to-end BRT from the Manly ferry terminal to Bondi beach. In fact, the purple line is obscured by the yellow blob of "global Sydney" but the text in the 9/11 2012 brochure, SCCAS proclaimed that all bus routes that service the South-Eastern suburbs will only use Elizabeth Street en-route to and from Circular Quay.

Declaring a "rapid bus route" from the Manly ferry wharf to North Bondi means

• "wider spaces between stops - bus stops generally every 800 metres to one kilometre. All buses travelling on a rapid route will only (sic) stop at the new rationalised bus stops".
• "Average five minute wait for the bus, all day every weekday" and they all pass through the "pinch points" in Elizabeth Street northbound.

TfNSW's insistence that a "rapid" bus service from Bondi Junction to Circular Quay will compete successfully with the Eastern Suburbs railway is preposterous, but merchants in Paddington will be callously wiped out without a second thought. The 380, 381 and 378 services which serve the local communities are effectively wiped out, leaving only the limited stops 333 service between Circular Quay and North Bondi. I will break this post into two.

The Member for futile petitions

Businesses in Oxford Street, Paddington approached their local Member of Parliament, the Member for Sydney, Alex Greenwich (I did not vote for him). He was asked to lobby the Transport Minister to have the hours of operation of the bus priority lanes in Oxford Street reduced to allow kerb-side parking to operate for longer. He set up a petition. Nothing more was heard until two weeks before Christmas when the Minister published the brochure indirectly outlining the planned fate for Paddington.

Greenwich was an activist for marriage equality for homosexuals before joining Clover Moore's ticket for the Sydney City Council elections - in which he was unsuccessful. He won the by-election for Moore's seat when she was forced to resign. Now the High Court has unanimously ruled that this is a matter for the Federal Parliament, leaving him a one-issue politician without a purpose.

 Greenwich's submission on the EIS is nowhere to be seen on the Planning & Infrastructure NSW web site which is now listing the submissions received: CBD and South East Suburbs Light Rail. Did he request anonymity or fail to lodge the submission or have I just failed to see it in the 19 pages with 22 submissions each page? The relentless push-polling TfNSW engaged in for months failed to elicit much support.

Greenwich has published his submission on his taxpayer-funded web site. He starts with the assertion that congestion in the CBD costs business around $4 billion a year and by 2020 that cost is expected to double to $8 billion. The Clover Moore ticket belongs to the Bjelke-Peterson school of politics - think of a number then double it. In fact, the EIS (3.1.2) states, without any data to back it up, that this is the cost of congestion across the metropolitan area.

AM peak timetable variance

The figure left from same segment of the EIS (chapter 3.1.2) confirms that the Flinders Street bus services are the least affected by congestion of the services entering the the northern CBD - except for the express services from the south east that are even less congested. The most congested route is Elizabeth Street northbound. Clearly forcing bus passengers from the least congested route onto trams that have exclusive access to George Street and displace buses that cannot avoid using Elizabeth Street northbound will dramatically increase bus congestion in the CBD and the "cost to business". But if Community Independents were capable of elementary arithmetic they would be productively employed.

So where did the push to eliminate bus stops in Oxford Street Paddington, where he has his taxpayer funded electoral office, come from. The EIS submission from Sydney City Council explains everything.

The "Executive Summary" at the head of the submission states:
"The following outcomes have been agreed with Transport for NSW in the Development Agreement.
"The Project will provide:

• The project design will not preclude future expansion of the Light Rail network to Oxford Street, Walsh Bay/Barrangaroo and Green Square".

In fact, TfNSW has no intention of ever running tram tracks along Oxford Street. Chris Lock ruled this out in front of Clover Moore at the Community Forum in April. The third brochure published two working days before the cut off for submissions makes it clear: In the longer term there could be investigation of Bus Rapid Transit for the route.

TfNSW are just humouring the bitches. The elimination of bus stops in Oxford Street is just to keep them in a state of delusion. O'Farrell does not care at what cost this will be to businesses in Oxford Street and to the local communities.

In fact the project design does preclude expansion of the tram network along Oxford Street. Tram services from Oxford Street and Flinders Street have always travelled along Elizabeth Street to Circular Quay. Liverpool Street west of Elizabeth Street never needed to be widened, and now can't be widened.

It can not carry two rails without pedestrianising the street. The ludicrous maps that TfNSW produced to convince people of the Herculean efforts it had made to consider alternative routes for the light rail showed one rail going west along Liverpool Street to George Street and the return rail going west along Goulburn and Campbell Streets.

The closure of Rawson Place makes Liverpool Street west of Elizabeth Street the only entry to Darling Harbour for vehicles from Sydney's south, and the pedestrianisation of George Street would make Liverpool Street the preferred route for displaced traffic to return with a vengeance.

The capacity of Clover Moore and her community independents for self delusion is breathtaking. We are not dealing with sane, rational human beings.

If O'Farrell is not returned for a second term on March 28, 2015 the charade is over. The City of Sydney is saved from destruction and the damage can be repaired.

If the voters in the Sydney electorate elect a representative who will look after their interests and not the interests of people who only want to pass through the area as quickly as possible, then Greenwich will not qualify for the generous superannuation and pensions that politicians award themselves.

As the saying goes they will have shot themselves in the foot.