Commuters caught in transport ‘black hole’

Commuters in Sydney’s west are fed up with hours of commuting each day and a failure to provide adequate public transport.

Commuter Claire Boulan at Parramatta train station: “It would be nice to get home in daylight hours and not have a 20-minute wait for the next train.” Picture: John Feder

Claire Boulan, 35, catches a train from Springwood in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, to Parramatta each day. The trip takes her one hour each way.

Ms Boulan, who works in the insurance industry, said she was frustrated that the further west of Sydney you lived, the less frequent public transport became.

“You can sometimes feel that you spend your work week waiting at the station,” Ms Boulan said.

She said she felt relieved when the state government announced the Sydney Metro West, which will include an underground interchange with an existing suburban station at Parramatta or Westmead, to allow a fast interchange to metro rail services for those commuting to and from the Blue Mountains.

“It would be nice to get home in daylight hours and not have a 20-minute wait for the next train.”

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Katherine Van Lieshout from Toongabbie, also in Sydney’s west, commutes one hour to the city for work each day and said the Sydney Metro West, announced in 2016, would cut a significant amount of travel time out of her day.

Ms Van Lieshout, 47, catches a bus and train to her office and said arriving home at a reasonable hour on the planned Metro West line would give her enough time to get to the grocery store and prepar­e a meal for her six children.

“It would be nice to arrive home early enough to be able to sit around the dinner table and share a home-cooked meal with my kids,” she said.

Ms Van Lieshout said she had to change her work hours because train delays were so common on the western line during peak hour.

“They’ve had to resort to barric­ading parts of Parramatta train station to help with foot traffic­ because it is so overcrowded and I don’t know how much longer the government is going to wait before they start working to fix this growing problem,” she said.

An extra 420,000 people are expected to move into the corridor between Greater Parramatta and central Sydney over the next 20 years, according to Transport NSW. That growth will increase congestion on the already crowded Western train line.

IT worker Steve Oliver, 28, from Bossley Park in Sydney’s west, commutes two hours each way to get to his office in Paddington. Mr Oliver said he felt transport­ “disadvantaged” living in Bossley Park because it was a “black hole” for trains.