The metro’s already proved its worth. But will Sydney’s transport mandarins get on board?

Not everyone is pleased by the joining on Monday of the Western Harbour Tunnel to the Warringah Freeway at Cammeray as Sydney gets closer to a whole new stage of traffic infrastructure. Julie Walton is one of the city’s foremost public transport experts.

Julie Walton is an expert on traffic and cities.

Fitz: Julie, thank you for your time. Last year, I did – thank you, thank you all – a particularly well-received interview with Philip Thalis, where I drew on his expertise as our foremost urban designer to make insightful and inciting comments on how Sydney has developed, what mistakes have been made and most importantly what we should do from here. When I asked him for his equivalent expert in public transport, he sent my bus your way. Can we start with the background of your expertise?

JW: I’ve got a master’s in urban planning. I was a board member of the State Transit Authority for nearly a decade and had nearly as long as a Sydney City councillor, where I was chair of the traffic committee and a member of the Central Sydney Planning Committee. And I’m the convener of Action For Public Transport, which started in 1974.

Fitz: OK, you’re hired. So, with that background, would I be right in saying you haven’t popped the champagne cork this week for the latest breakthrough in our growing spaghetti of tunnels, bridges and expressways, which will soon see another crossing of the harbour open up?

JW: No, I did my champagne cork popping with the opening of the metro, which is proving to be a real game-changer. It’s proving its worth very quickly. What I want to see is less road and tunnel building because we’ve spent years throwing money and valuable space at it, thinking that was going to reduce traffic congestion. It didn’t, and it’s been known globally since a study in the 1960s called Trunk Roads and the Generation of Traffic by a UK body called the Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment that this kind of approach doesn’t work. Relief is always temporary, but we did it anyway. Meanwhile, public transport was deprived of the funding it needed, and we wound up with lots of missing links in the rail system.

“It’s proving its worth very quickly.“: Sydney Metro’s Martin Place station. Credit: Oscar Colman

Fitz: But surely, at least with tunnels, they’re out of sight, allowing the peopleoids above ground to come out and play once more, just as putting the huge tunnel under Taylor Square on Oxford St brought that whole area back to life for not having so much traffic roaring through it?

JWS: Yes, underground is better, but the problem is where the tunnels come out. When it comes to the Western Harbour Tunnel, take a look at Haberfield, and you can see pretty much what the future holds for anywhere the tunnel pops up because they always have to. They can’t stay underground forever, and the portals always cause damage to the areas around them. Over in Cammeray, there’s a golf course that has lost a whole lot of trees because tunnels and roads are so destructive of the environment. See, once you build a railway line, when you need to increase the capacity of it, all you have to do is put some more carriages on it or run them more frequently. You don’t need to annex a whole lot of land on each side to keep widening until you wind up with some of those horrific highways that you see pictures of in Los Angeles, with 12 to 15 lanes and not a blade of grass left. In Sydney, we can’t just keep building for expanded traffic, or we will inevitably end up like that.

Fitz: Fair enough. But you’ve been advocating this for – dot three, carry one, subtract two – 50 years, Julie. Is it fair to say you’re losing the battle?

JW: I would say that right through the 70s, 80s and 90s, public transport – and therefore the people of Sydney – was definitely losing because it was the era where people thought that trains were old hat, and it was also the time when governments were bitten by the Reagan and Thatcher bug and thought anything public had to be a bad thing. But there have been some definite wins in the last decade or so in NSW and in other states. Western Australia kicked off with the Mandurah Line, and now we’ve at last started to add to the Sydney rail system.

Fitz: What is your guiding principle on the virtues of public transport? What is the North Star we need to steer by to be a city that organises itself well to move people around efficiently, cheaply and happily?

JW: One is that it is very bad practice to create new suburbs without extending public transport at the same time. For 50 years we’ve let services lag development and faffed about, so now we need a major catch-up. Like at Oran Park, where there’s an alluring train station in the glossy real estate brochures, but not on the ground.

Another key one is that all commuters – public transport users and car passengers – are pedestrians as well. So, if you wreck the streets, you wind up finding that you’ve destroyed your destinations. So the key destinations that make a city lively, that make a city worth being in, are more easily destroyed if you don’t pay attention to them, if you think of everything as a thoroughfare instead of a destination. If you don’t control it, you wind up with cities that are all thoroughfare, [and] no destination. It was Gertrude Stein who said: “When you get to Oakland, there’s no ‘there’, THERE.”

Fitz: That’s more or less what Andrew Denton said to me during the 1996 Olympics: “Atlanta is where old freeways go to die.”

JW: Exactly! And when the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco was damaged by the earthquake in 1989 and torn down in 1991, you know what happened? Nothing. The traffic did not get worse. People adjusted their journeys, found alternatives, and now they can enjoy the waterfront they’d heedlessly and needlessly cut off from their city.

The Warringah Freeway, under construction. Credit: Rhett Wyman

Fitz: Sure, but with another million people being added to the Sydney basin in the next few years, we surely need more tunnels, bridges, and freeways? Isn’t that ipso facto?

JW: We’ve also got a very old and established city with a great deal of heritage and open space in the urban fabric, and to destroy that for the sake of people passing through it is a mistake, particularly when you don’t have to do it. Imagine what would have happened to Glebe if they’d gone ahead with the massive freeway proposal that was meant to go right through the heart of it. It would have been completely destroyed – and if you build the kind of roads you’re talking about, that will actually happen to other suburbs. It is public transport that will better move that extra million and the rest of us around. Where you can usefully spend road money is where people often die, which is on country roads.

Fitz: I did a corporate biography long ago of Carlo Salteri, the co-founder of Transfield with Franco Belgiorno-Nettis, and they were the ones who built the first harbour tunnel. One of the things that stunned me is that even though the toll went up from 20c to $1.20 to pay for it, just for the sake of another 30c, that harbour tunnel could have had three lanes each way instead of two. Can you at least agree with me that was insanity, just as it was insanity for the M5 tunnel south of Sydney Airport to only have two-lane tunnels, not three, that if we are going to build these tunnels, they at least need to be able to cope with inevitable growth?

JW: No. In the end, all you’re doing is increasing the capacity of roads, and no matter how much traffic infrastructure you build, it will never be enough. You could instead, and should be, increasing the reach and capacity of the public transport system. And we’ve spent all this money on roads since the 1960s and 1970s thinking that they would solve congestion, and they clearly haven’t, so I think it’s time to try something else – like putting road money towards public transport instead.

Fitz: To be fair, I had dinner with the-then shadow treasurer Joe Hockey and Gladys Berejiklian on the night before Gladys became transport minister in the government of Barry O’Farrell, and Joe said to her, “Well, Gladys, the measure of your success is going to be how much light rail you produce in your term”. And she actually did hugely expand our light rail and was also the one who pushed hard for the latest incarnation of the metro line which has been so successful.

Then-premier Gladys Berejiklian opens the first stretch of the Sydney Metro in 2019.Credit: Edwina Pickles.

JW: She did indeed, and I’m not here to jump all over Gladys. She’s been one of the better ones, and she actually caught the bus to work, so she genuinely understood what it was like to be a public transport user. But there is a whole lot more that can be done.

Fitz: So if, in the unlikely event that you decide you’re going to stand for politics in the next election, you win, and either Chris Minns or – even more unlikely – Mark Speakman makes you the transport minister, what are the things you would steer by to make Sydney work better in terms of public transport?

JW: I would use metros and light rail to link the radial railway lines so that you can more easily move around the city. I would fill in the missing links so that you don’t have to go to the centre of the city and back out to get on another radial line to somewhere that was quite close to your starting point, as the crow flies. It’s only about three kilometres from Carlingford to Epping, for instance. Short light-rail extension, big service improvement. And I’d increase bus frequencies dramatically – they’re woeful on many routes, and that deters patronage.

Fitz: Would you also work with Clover Moore, who will likely be lord mayor forever, to do what Paris has done and say from 2030 onwards, you can’t bring your car into downtown unless it’s electric?

Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore with one of the council’s EV trucks. Credit: Wolter Peeters

JW: Not at this point. Electric cars are still expensive, so you’d be disadvantaging the people who can’t yet afford them. The ones who can would just sail on by. Besides, electric cars are great; they cut carbon emissions and noise, but they don’t take up less space. And you’re squished just as flat if one hits you. When it comes to electric vehicles, what I’m cross about is the fact that we haven’t got all the buses electrified yet. When he was transport minister, Andrew Constance wanted to get them electrified in short order, but it still hasn’t happened. So that’s where my attention would go. I’d also plant trees along every thoroughfare we could, not on the footpaths but in the roadway itself, with parking in between. That way, they could escape the “Ausgrid Chainsaw Massacre”. That just breaks my heart every time I see it. That would let us civilise the streets, to make them more than just engineering, make them havens for wildlife [and] solve the problem that we have of the trees being seen as an afterthought to the electricity poles and wires, which, by the way, ought to be underground.

Fitz: Mr Speaker, I concur with the learned new transport minister. A while back, some sage mayor or the like did that in the main thoroughfare through Newport and completely transformed the whole area. What was a barren boulevard of bitumen is now a delight, with trees right down the middle.

JW: Exactly. And it is that kind of thing that our attention must be focused on – beautifying the roads we have and bringing in more public transport – not spending ever more money on endless new tunnels and roads that will never solve congestion because they fill almost as soon as they are built. Right now, it’s time for a pivot. Right now, we need to move away from the battle that can never be won because if you provide the number of roads necessary for everyone to easily get where they want to go, there will be no “there”, THERE! But if we pivot to public transport, it can be won, with everyone easily moving around in a still lovely environment.

Peter FitzSimons is a journalist and columnist. Connect via Twitter.

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