Everyone’s allowed one boring obsession … mine is Sydney’s new Metro
For a longtime critic of the city’s public transport, finally: a little light at the end of the tunnel.
By Benjamin Law
Everyone is allowed one objectively boring obsession. One guy I know has retained so much of the 1990s TV show Gladiators that he can name every beefcake from that show – Tower! Flame! Delta! – within seconds. Get another mate started on Korean skincare and you’ll be bored out of your mind (albeit have incredible skin within days). Someone else in my life has retained tons of useless data about Australian politics with zero useful application, though I acknowledge many have built entire careers around this.
Credit: Illustration by Simon Letch
Yes, all these people are me. Yes, my brain buzzes like a kicked-over beehive. Yes, I have an upcoming three-hour ADHD diagnosis appointment that will hopefully explain a lot. My most annoying obsession, though? Mass public transport infrastructure. Get me talking about trains and metros and I will descend into a dissociative fugue state for hours, monologuing about Singapore’s MRT, Paris’s Métro, London’s Tube and Japan’s Shinkansen, only to look up and realise the person I’ve been talking to has died.
Growing up, my neighbourhood had janky public transport. Every morning, my single mother-of-five hauled us all into her Tarago like a human trafficking operation. Dad drove us around in a Honda so busted up that we could see the road through holes beneath our feet. The alternatives were a crappy local minibus with such shitty suspension you could feel your jagged skeleton at every bump; or railway stations located so far from where anyone lived and so neglected that some literally had half a platform.
So when I visited relatives in Hong Kong at the age of 12, I felt impressed and stunned (and, to be honest, slightly betrayed) to ride the city’s MTR subway network. That system now services almost 5 million passengers a day, with annual ridership surpassing a dizzying billion people. It’s staggeringly efficient. Everything just works. If a train is delayed by mere minutes, it is officially considered a failure that must be reported to the government.
The author in front of Central Station’s world record-breaking escalator.Credit: Courtesy of Benjamin Law
It didn’t matter that my Cantonese is garbage and I can’t read Chinese. All announcements and signs were multilingual. Maps were easy to read and colour-coded. Yes, the human crush could be intense in peak hour (and we may have lost our baby sister at one stage – sorry Michelle) but the main reason this hyper-dense city worked was because of its train network. Right there and then, I promised myself I would move to a big city with amazing transport when I grew up.
When I arrived in Sydney a decade ago, though, I discovered the public transport was … well – not disastrous, but quite ordinary. I wasn’t overwhelmed; I wasn’t underwhelmed. I was … whelmed. The ferries were genuinely great: world-class views of the Harbour Bridge and Opera House for the cost of a tram ticket. (Some even served alcohol!) The double-decker trains were fun, when they weren’t undergoing trackwork. The buses were fine, when they eventually showed up.
People stared through the front window as if they were on a theme-park ride … These were my people.
You can imagine what the NSW government’s announcement of the Sydney Metro did to my brain. Immediately, I signed up to the mailing list. Every update was mind-bendingly dull, but induced pure joy in me. (Behold: tunnels are being drilled under Sydney Harbour! Look: containers of water are being used for safety tests! Here is a minister – in a hard hat!) When loved ones gently queried why I was so enamoured with the Metro, I would froth. “They will be driverless robot trains that will be completely accessible to anyone using prams or wheelchairs and at peak hour will arrive every four minutes,” I barked to the tens of people who listened.
Still, even I had my limits. When the game-changing Sydenham-Chatswood line finally opened in August, carving its way under the harbour and through the CBD, I wasn’t there to celebrate day one. No, I wasn’t among the hundreds of train tragics who boarded the very first trip to depart. No, I didn’t make signs and banners. No, I am an adult. I have a job. I have self-respect. I have a life.
I went that night instead.
“Want to go for a walk?” I calmly asked my boyfriend after dinner.
My boyfriend gave me a sweet and doting look.
“Oh, that’s romantic,” he said, before realising – too late – what day it was.
“Where are we going? Oh wait –”
“We are going to see the Metro!!!”
We caught the train to Central, where I got emotional at the sight of a new escalator. (It’s the longest escalator in the Southern Hemisphere, have some respect.) We boarded trains with no destination in mind. People stared through the front window as if they were on a theme-park ride, while someone squealed with excitement, “We’re under the harbour right now.” These were my people.
It staggered us that this had been built under our feet for years, as we walked to work, picked up kids, went about our days. It was like another Sydney had suddenly opened up beneath us, as magical as Alice falling down a rabbit hole. It was like those scenes from the movies Us and Parasite, where the characters discover whole subterranean worlds underneath them, except this was much, much cheerier, and with less murder.
“It was like another Sydney had suddenly opened up beneath us, as magical as Alice falling down a rabbit hole.”Credit: Courtesy of Benjamin Law
Every station we got off at was an architectural masterpiece, urban cathedrals for the non-religious. Public artwork inspired awe: Nicole Monks’ giant 9.7-metre-high perforated mesh mural of a local First Nations kid named Roscoe at Waterloo; Martin Place’s Muru Giligu – a literal “path of light” connecting the old and new trains. In a country that erased Aboriginal people for centuries, in a city where trains were instrumental in stealing generations of black children from their families, it felt important that one of the new stations was named Gadigal.
Sydney gets so much wrong. Mortgages and rents are inhumane. Our night-time economy remains anaemic. Private school headmasters propose on-campus plunge pools. Alan Jones and Kyle Sandilands became rich and famous here. So the mere fact these trains exist at all sparks unfamiliar emotions. Have we become a proper world city? Did we get something right? Is what we’re feeling … pride?
Months later, the thrill hasn’t worn off. Gadigal Station is a joy, and means fewer of us need to rely on the intestinal M.C. Escher-like nightmare of Town Hall Station. Metro station toilets remain miraculously clean (for now). You could spend hours sitting at the back end of the carriageless trains, just to see how they wind their way through Sydney without complaint or effort. In a world on fire, at least the Metro works. All we need to do now is extend a line all the way to Melbourne.
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