Experts weigh in on what Sydney has got wrong as a city

Failing to deliver John Bradfield’s original rail vision and failing to take advantage of Olympic Park after the 2000 games are among seven major planning mistakes that have held our city back. See the list.

Failing to deliver John Bradfield’s original rail vision, building roads without enough lanes only to widen them later, and failing to take advantage of Olympic Park after the 2000 games are among the seven major planning mistakes that have held our city back, experts say. 

After issuing their seven “wishes” to keep Sydney moving forward, business and industry leaders have given a blunt assessment of what has gone wrong along the way, in the lead up to The Daily Telegraph’s Bradfield Oration on Thursday.

The infrastructure and planning failures were blamed on short-sightedness, with successive governments lacking the political will or vision to plan for future needs.

That is in contrast to the plans of Sydney Harbour Bridge designer Mr Bradfield, a man who Bradfield board of governors chair Tony Shepherd called a “true visionary”.

Public transport, rail and roads

The failure of successive state governments to embrace Mr Bradfield’s future-focused thinking has led to Sydney playing catch up on public transport to accommodate population growth.

The legendary planner etched out a detailed plan for heavy rail a century ago which included a loop in the inner west and rail out to the eastern suburbs.

The vision was never delivered due to repeated financial constraints including the Great Depression.

“It’s an amazing plan that he put together, but successive governments, the war, the depression, and all those things were the things that stopped (governments) from building the Bradfield scheme,” Business Sydney executive director Paul Nicolaou said.

The city would have had its own London tube or New York subway connecting denser inner suburbs if Mr Bradfield’s railway vision had been built.

The Inner West suburb of Five Dock, which is due to get a metro station by 2030 as part of the $25 billion Metro West project, would have received its own railway station a century ago under Bradfield’s plans.

John Bradfield was ahead of his time.

“John Bradfield was a true visionary,” Bradfield Board of Governors chair Tony Shepherd said.

“His plan for greater Sydney in 1916 which evolved over time, looked 50 years ahead and laid the groundwork for the future development of our magnificent City through a modern transport system using rail, tram, and roads.”

Bradfield’s rail plans went through multiple revisions from the 1910s into the 1920s.

Legislation to build two loops in the eastern suburbs and inner west first passed parliament in 1915.

Bradfield was still revising his plans 10 years later.

Ultimately, the proposed rail lines never went ahead.

Former planner Alex Gooding, who has written extensively about Bradfield’s work, said that if the plans had gone ahead then Sydney would have grown to be “more like parts of London,” with higher-density terraces and five-storey apartment blocks in the inner suburbs.

“What Bradfield envisaged was sort of a scaled-down version of what you have in most European cities,” he said.

Mr Gooding described the railway plan as a combination of the New York Subway and the London tube.

It would have also helped organically build density in the inner suburbs before Sydney began to expand outwards, he said.

Ultimately, it was never to be. A century later, parts of the inner city still remain cut off from rail connections.

“We’re still certainly playing catch-up on public transport infrastructure,” Mr Gooding said.

According to Mr Nicolaou, some of the more recent transport failures also include not extending the light rail to La Perouse and not extending the Bondi Junction rail line to Randwick and Kingsford.

David Borger, from Business Western Sydney, identified stopping the Parramatta to Epping rail line as a major fail.

In 2003, then-transport minister Michael Costa scrapped the Epping-Parramatta section of the Epping to Chatswood line.

On roads, Mr Borger said the M5 should have been built to accommodate more lanes right from the outset. The M5 has been widened multiple times since it first opened.

The new M5 Tunnel after it was widened. Photo: NCA NewsWire/Adam Yip

“It’s cheaper to do something right from day one,” he said.

Mr Shepherd said the transition to faster Metro lines should have happened far earlier, in the 1960s and 1970s.

“At that stage we should have started moving towards a modern Metro system, which the rest of the world was doing,” he said.

Parramatta Road

Former Premier Nick Greiner once said that Parramatta Rd looked like “Beirut on a bad day,” and in 2021, then-Planning Minister Rob Stokes labelled it a “scar through the heart of Sydney”.

Multiple governments have failed to fix the dilapidated arterial route, even after WestConnex was built.

Parramatta Road has been ignored by multiple governments. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

Post-Olympics hangover

The slow development of Olympic Park after the 2000 Olympics was one of Mr Shepherd’s seven long-term failures that have held Sydney back.

“We didn’t run the railway line through to Parramatta, we just had a dead-end train there, and then we didn’t do anything really to develop the site until recently,” he said.

Two decades on, the failure to rehabilitate Sydney Olympic Stadium is also a blight on our record, Mr Shepherd said.

Sydney Olympic Stadium could be the best multi-purpose stadium in the world if a roof was added according to Tony Shepherd.

“With an opening and closing roof it could be the best multi-purpose stadium in the world with a 90,000-seat capacity,” he said.

“We saw it’s true potential in the recent Women’s World Cup.”

Committee for Sydney chief executive Eamon Waterford bemoaned the “lost decade” following the Olympics, where we failed to capitalise on the big infrastructure build.

Planning failures

Recent government failures in overhauling planning laws have tied developments up in red tape and constrained Sydney growing.

Last week, the Telegraph revealed that councils are taking more than four months on average to assess development applications.

Premier Chris Minns is now attempting what his predecessors failed to do and run a broom through the complex and antiquated system.

Indicative of the failure to coordinate the planning system has facilitated urban sprawl without associated infrastructure being delivered.

No 24/7 airport

Unlike Melbourne and Brisbane, Sydney still has no all-hours airport.

This was identified by experts as a handbrake on the city, which will finally be addressed when the Western Sydney Airport opens in 2026.

Western Sydney International Airport will operate 24/7. Picture: Jonathan Ng

Wrong place?

One of the more bold claims, from the Business Western Sydney boss, is that we made a crucial mistake right at the outset.

“The biggest mistake we made was building Sydney in the wrong place,” Mr Borger said.

“Our city would have higher rates of economic growth if we had the city in the centre like many other places.”