Memo to Transport: It’s not compulsory to ruin every beautiful thing

Something amazing has happened in Sydney over the past two years: for what feels like the first time in a long time, we managed to build something beautiful. Not just one beautiful thing, but actually lots!

The city’s seven new metro stations dazzled us with their lush sandstone walls, custom wood benches and spanning marble floors. And before all that, Central Station was given a thorough rejuvenation, transformed from a cold, dying interchange into a light-filled, heritage-conscious transport utopia.

But as quickly as Central Station’s architects, Woods Bagot, could publicise their accomplishments in creating the “very tactile, very human story that focuses on the ease of the passenger journey” (non-architect translation: “we renovated the train station”), Transport for NSW managed to put its own mark on it.

The pristine sandstone walls, the vast open walkways and the glass installed so recently that it was still smudge-free all became targets of the transport agency’s admirably safety-conscious crew, who rapidly took to installing a dazzling array of signs, bollards and posters.

The new $1.3 billion “grand underground cavern” opened in May 2023. By August, the first almost human-sized black corflute bollards began appearing in the middle of the east-west concourse, informing commuters: “We take your safety seriously.”

What followed were nine actions transport staff had banned – and these were just about how to use an escalator. Do not sit on an escalator railing; do not lean on an escalator railing; do not put your feet near the side of an escalator; do not bring a mobility scooter (or wheelchair, or suitcase, or pram, or walking frame, or shopping trolley) onto an escalator.

With 10 corflute bollards across four escalators, you’d better hope illegal escalator usage was non-existent. Credit: Wolter Peeters

Liberal MP Ray Williams found the commonsense “rules” so offensive he asked about them in parliament. “How would someone logistically take any of these items onto a step escalator?”

We soon found out that the 30 signs were an initiative of the Customer Injury Reduction Strategy (a noble cause), developed at a “Station Working Group Level”.

But it seems someone got the message that they were a bit too much because the 30 signs were soon whittled down to a select few and only placed at the bottom of escalators.

A win! But not for long. That hard-working station working group soon managed to deface the metro’s new glass plaza entrance with a variety of giant Orwellian posters warning of 24-hour surveillance.

A Transport for NSW spokesperson said it had received complaints of antisocial behaviour around the area, and that the “temporary signage was posted as a visual deterrent”. (However, transport nerds have confirmed the signs have been used on and off since at least the middle of last year.)

Look, there are worse things going on in the world right now, and Transport says enough people are leaning too much over escalators or taking mobility scooters up them that it deems there to be a crisis. But despite the need, the method is right on trend: the efforts are the perfect example of the ongoing “enshittification” of our public spaces, a phenomenon so popular that Macquarie Dictionary labelled it the word of 2024.

The dictionary defines it, in part, as the “gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided”. Taxpayers spent more than a billion dollars on Central Station as both product and service: as much an A to B enabler as the “very human story that focuses on the ease of the passenger journey”. And, like many things managed by well-meaning bureaucrats, they are gradually deteriorating.

Because, even if they’re locked behind an Opal reader, the beauty of our public spaces matter. We owe it to the tens of thousands of people soon to be living in the high-rises the state government is attempting to build around train stations to make their journeys beautiful.

Clean, gorgeous, and bright yellow: just how Central Station’s architects envisaged it.Credit: Wolter Peeters

Some even see it as a matter of life and death. Lamenting the style of apartments being found in our cities today, Australian architect James Howe recently complained on Instagram that “people figured out a long time ago that human beings need beauty”.

“Human beings don’t like feeling like they’re living in an ugly ghetto. They like living in beautiful places,” he said, suggesting the prioritisation of function over beauty as one contributor to the mental health crisis.

After we asked Transport about the huge CCTV signs, we were told the agency would order some that at least had the correct branding. That has now occurred.

But thankfully we won’t be worrying about beautiful spaces in the future. The state government has already declared the new stations along Metro West, set to connect the CBD to Parramatta and beyond by 2032, will be “no-frills”.

Transport Minister John Graham, who ironically also serves as the arts minister, told The Daily Telegraph the government would “focus our art and museums spending on galleries and museums and our Metro spending on getting people from A to B as quickly and safely as possible”.

He should ask some architects what they think, though I doubt he’d like their answers.

“We’re only a short way into our experiment with abandoning beauty for the first time in human history,” Howe said. “I don’t think it’s going well.”

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