Voters to have their say on Sydney’s mess of a transport system

Construction of the light rail network outside the Sydney Children's Hospital at Randwick. Picture: Jonathan Ng

Sydney’s light rail snakes from ­George Street through the inner city to Randwick in Sydney’s east. Double the original budget. Advised against by former Liberal premier Nick Greiner. Damned by the Auditor-General. Unfinished. In the courts.

A $2 billion bonus from the sale of electricity and ports might have funded light rail in a new-release area in Sydney’s greater west and linked it to the rail network. ­Instead, the system has been retrofitted into existing suburbs.

Forget the exemplary bus service we all preferred. Residents of my former electorate will now have to leave buses mid-journey to battle their way on to a tram system with no bigger passenger ­capacity. This light rail was ­designed by the Premier when she was transport minister. Gladys Berejiklian’s whimsical project now squats on a transport corridor that might have hosted an extension of Sydney’s metro. That’s why the government’s own infrastructure council advised against it.

Lousy process explains it. Clean out seasoned middle-managers from the public sector and you lose corporate memory. Someone forgets to tell bidders what pipes and wires lie under the road surface. As a result you end up facing $600 million in compensation to the complaining contractor. You rush planning approvals so halfway through construction you ­realise the line obstructs road ­access to a hospital emergency.

An earlier Coalition government, such as Greiner’s or John Fahey’s, would have thrown out on first sight any project that ­required hacking down Moreton Bay figs that had shaded Moore Park when the Anzacs drilled there.

Now the government that ­designed the light rail is in a dash to approve the Northern Beaches Tunnel estimated at $14 billion and burdened with a mess of public policy implications about tolls, traffic planning and densification of development on Sydney’s northern beaches with its 300,000 population. Any cost-benefit analysis would mandate such a sum go instead to Sydney’s greater west with its three million, but, again, when process is rushed, subtleties get lost.

The government hangs everything on its sprawling WestConnex toll network but, eight years in power, has not opened a single piece of major road or public transport infrastructure in contrast with the previous Labor government, which between 1995 and 2003, delivered the Eastern Distributor, M5 extension and bus transit ways in Sydney’s west plus advanced work on the Lane Cove Tunnel.

But if one thing happens with efficiency in Berejiklian’s Sydney it’s construction of towers, rising like Norman castles across occupied England. Not far from us, on a former industrial site at Pagewood, plans for a forest of them have been forced over local government opposition. But here’s the cruelty: the light rail won’t reach it, dooming the 7000 residents of this mini-city to a bus journey to reach the new trams. No genius thought to stretch the new transport mode to reach this burst of high-density population.

The sad truth? In the old era of accountability and concentrated media attention on Macquarie Street the light rail mess would have forced any transport minister’s resignation. Or in this case, the Premier’s. Now it’s up to the voters.

Bob Carr is a former foreign minister and the longest serving premier of NSW