Rail commuters driven parking mad

When you can’t find a parking spot at the railway station after 6.30am you know that Sydney’s hard-working commuters are being let down, writes Miranda Devine.

IN commuter car parks at railway stations from Berowra to Leumeah you can’t find a parking spot after 6.30am.

People are having to park so far away that they pay Ubers to get them to the station.

And now the NSW government is trumpeting 4,000 new commuter car spaces promised across eight stations on the Sydney Metro northwest line.

That won’t even touch the sides.

In Campbelltown, for instance, 100 new residents are arriving every week. If even 10 per cent of them are rail commuters and 4000 car spots were allocated to their local stations they would be used up in less than a year. It’s a joke.

Western Sydney is already home to two million people — nearly 10 per cent of Australia’s population, and growing — and more than 200,000 residents commute out of the region every day.

Commuter car parks often are the only way to access public transport but they fulfil less than half the demand.

Take Schofields station, which opened in 2011 with a woefully inadequate 230 parking spaces and a further 60 spaces promised in June. It’s a bandaid on a gaping wound.

Frustrated Central Coast commuters, with four-hour round trips each day to work, now have to drive to Hornsby to find parking near a station where NIMBY councils are slapping them with $110 parking fines.

Instead of building an unwanted light rail from the Sydney CBD to Kingsgrove along a route already well served by buses, the NSW government should have spent the money on the more useful but unsexy project of building underground multistorey commuter carparks at rail stations in suburbs where there are no alternative transport options. You could get a lot of carparks for $2 billion and give hardworking people back precious family time.