Covid-19 lockdown: Two’s not a crowd on Sydney Harbour ghost fleet

The fog stopped Sydney ferries for several hours last week, but barely anyone noticed. The lockdown has rendered the harbour’s most iconic sight a ghost fleet.

Passengers Giovanni Pipitone and Rosy Scatigna on a near-deserted Manly ferry on Sydney Harbour on Wednesday. Picture: John Feder

The fog stopped Sydney ferries for several hours last week, but barely anyone noticed.

The lockdown has rendered the harbour’s most iconic sight a ghost fleet.

“It’s almost eerie,” a deckhand on the Manly Ferry said.

Passengers Giovanni Pipitone and Rosy Scatigna took a solitary trip across Sydney Harbour on Wednesday to attend a real estate inspection in Manly.

Mr Pipitone, 30, who came to Australia more than two years ago with his partner Rosy, 28, from Italy, said it was “strange” to see the usually bustling CBD empty. “It was deserted; there were just three or four people on the ferry,” he said.

Ironically, the couple, who live in an inner city unit near Town Hall, decided to move to the suburbs for some peace and quiet.

“The city can be really overcrowded sometimes, though not at the moment, so we would like to move to a more peaceful area and be more in touch with nature,” Mr Pipitone said.

He said they were both “very happy” to be in Australia but felt the weight of the pandemic dragging on them, after a long separation from their families in Italy.

“The virus didn’t impact the country the same way it did in Italy but now the biggest concern is that we haven’t seen our family in years now,” he said.

“Hopefully we will soon.”

The Manly ferry crew said barely a dozen people had caught peak hour services, which can ­normally operate at a capacity of 1100 passengers.

The rest of Sydney’s public transport system was doing little better. Only 491,000 trips on ­public transport were completed on Tuesday, compared to 1.2 million on the Tuesday before the ­latest lockdown restrictions came into force.

On the light rail – one of the best gauges of activity in the CBD – passenger numbers were down to 15,000 trips from 55,000.

 

Weekday commuters are not the only ones missing from the public transport system.

Weekend traffic has also taken a hit, with only 478,000 trips counted on buses, trains, ferries and the light rail across Saturday and Sunday.

On the weekend prior to the lockdown, Sydneysiders clocked up 1.2 million trips.

Abdul Bakar has been driving for a bus for 25 years. Currently running the usually busy 333 route from the Sydney CBD to Bondi Beach, he said the only problem he had come up against recently was people refusing to wear a mask.

“I love my job, but when people get on without a mask, or ignore me when I tell them we have hit our 15-person capacity, it is really disappointing,” he said.

“We aren’t allowed to enforce the rules put in place to protect us. That’s the job of the police.”

Uber driver Charles Rin had the opposite experience, saying the latest lockdown had “made people very noticeably more compliant with mask wearing”.

“If people turn up to the car with no masks on then I put my hand up and don’t let them in,” he said.

“It’s my obligation to make sure I’m not inadvertently helping the spread of the virus.”

An Uber spokesperson said the company had seen “less movement on the platform, which looks to show that people are limiting their movement”.