Getting it right: the Sydney Metro Tuesday, June 2, 2009 By Riccardo I’m glad my recent post on incrementalism received a lot of responses and debate. I’ll move on from that to talk about the recent experience of the Sydney urban rail system under the dying government of Nathan Rees. I’ve blogged a few times on what I see as the paradox of a dying government with a history of poor decision-making and inappropriate relationships – actually getting it right. How is it I can say it is right when: -the route is incomplete and somewhat hard to justify -the cost seems exhorbitant for the short length involved -the outcry from those areas that missed out, such as the NW suburbs, is deafening -and the federal Infrastructure Department found it so wanting, it missed out on funding? My answer to this paradox is: because they have got the service model and technology right – and everything else is something that can wait for another day. Why is this important? Because Australia has had, for a very long time, perhaps since the beginning, a misconceived and misapplied approach to rail planning and investment, and a poor operating culture, which incremental investment approaches have only perpetuated. A dying government, in its last days and with little financial or planning credibility left, has actually thrown the right spanner in the works, called a halt to the Australian rail paradigm once and for all. A commendable step. We’ll have to see if this line survives the transition to a Liberal Government. Planning: First of all, the Sydney Metro gives primacy, above all, to addressing congestion issues: the primary motivator for sensible passenger rail investment in Australia. Where the people are in abundance, that’s where rail needs to be. Not where they vote (still not many voters in the CBD itself to fill with pork). Not in areas of ‘deprivation’ or those areas deemed worthy by social workers or whatever. The system is aimed specifically at two types of congestion – rail congestion on the Cityrail system, especially at the existing stations of Town Hall and Wynyard. I will confess I would like to see more work on how these two stations could be modified to improve capacity, but I accept the basic premise, and wonder at the danger of having 6 platforms, loaded with full double deck trains, and a fire breaking out. How would you clear that many people? The other form of congestion is of course road congestion. Victoria Road, especially from Gladesville inwards, is one of Sydney’s busiest road corridors that is not freeway, nor has a parallel rail alternative. Again, I can foresee alternatives to a metro on this route – but support the fundamental view that it is congestion visibly driving the investment. A turn-up-and- go 100% reliable and quick rail service to the CBD will be very competitive with driving on the route, and steal much market share. Secondly, the Sydney metro is planned as an expandable system. You might say “aren’t they all” but it is clear to me that some rail enhancements in Australia are anything but. Look at Melbourne’s City Loop for example. Expandable doesn’t just mean route length – it means that you can ramp up services perhaps 5 fold over the original brief. An off the shelf metro, as planned for Sydney, has a starting spec of 5 minute headways, but can likely take 1 minute headways if and when it gets busy enough to do so. This is amazing. Can Melbourne’s City Loop accommodate a 5-fold increase in traffic? Granted, it was set up to accommodate 3 minute headways, but seems to struggle as it closes on that mark. The rest of the Sydney system cannot cope with service expansions. The easy wins, such as going from single to double deck, started in the 60s and were complete in the 80s. There is still more need for track amplification but some key locales, for example Strathfield to the City, will not cope. Sourcing The realisation that Australia is not the place for custom manufacture of rail track and rollingstock has only taken 150 odd years to percolate into the transport bureaucracies. Rail innovators need some core characteristics – considerable existing support for rail, a risk taking culture, and environments that actually require innovation (such as the need for speed). Australia has none of those three things, and any rail innovation in urban areas is doomed as a result. It becomes an ugly ducking (Melbourne’s 4D), a political target (the Tangaras in Sydney) or destined to never reach its potential (XPT). I’ll grant the Sydney double deck interurban (Comeng V-set) program has been a raging success over the years, possibly due to the ‘actually requiring innovation’ criterion being met, due to the large pool of Central Coast and Blue Mountains commuters. Sydney’s metro, by being promoted blatantly as off-the-shelf, turns that 150 years of culture on its head and gives the planners the confidence that outcomes will be met, and the public the confidence that it will be just like the ones they’ve ridden overseas. Operation The planned operation of the system is just out of the Transport Textbook, with most of my training track concepts adopted (not that I invented any of them!) I sometimes wondered if I was going crazy, pointing these things out in hostile places like Railpage only to have seasoned posters in that place suggest that these things don’t matter. Clearly they do, and when the chequebook is open wide enough for someone to implement them, they are. These concepts include: -a published service standard (which happens to be TUAG, but that is not the point, the point is that it is published, unlike say the service standard to Penrith, which is what? -a service standard of TUAG -realisation that dedicated rollingstock are needed for the line (fitting the rollingstock to the line) -single deck stock (high density and high speed loading and unloading) -cross platform interchange and no single seat journeys -dedicated operator, not part of Cityrail. I maintain that it is the passenger’s job to change vehicle and the coordinating authority’s job to plan interchanges and timetabling, but it does not matter who operates the vehicle as long as they achieve the service standard applying to the service. Of course the other key operational characteristic is driverless operation. I won’t turn this into a union-bashing thread, but it is clear that the union parasite has killed its Cityrail host. Unless is can be removed, there is no way the sorts of operational improvements Cityrail needs can be implemented, especially with a dying Labor government at the helm. These people will be thinking about their lives after political office, and won’t be making enemies in the union movement between now and then. But it will be hard for the union to argue for drivers in a system that can run without them. Funding While it is regrettable the money is not available to extend the system further, it appears to me that a ‘line in the sand’ has been drawn against Treasury whiteanting, and the money, though exhorbitant, is somehow quarantined for the project. Contracts and so on are clearly being drawn up so that the Libs can’t overturn them without considerable expense (although there are plenty of precedents in Sydney including Maldon-Dombarton, several iterations of the Eastern Suburbs line and so on). In marketing terms, I’ve noticed the Government ’sticking to its guns’. Clearly someone in charge believes what they are doing – a pleasant change for a Melbournian used to plastic smiles and thinly veneered spin. Conclusion The project has a lot to be critical of, but I believe I have pointed out that, at its heart, it is the right project. The right technology, the right operational setup, the right planning approach and acceptance of core transport truisms about what make urban transport tick. I’ll hold judgement on whether the right funding model and right terminus have been adopted. I do have every confidence the outcome is somewhere between ‘no regrets’ and ’should have done it decades ago’. I fear more for Melbourne which, if current plans are accurate, has not learnt the lessons of 150 years of pain and grief. If we see Siemens electrics running through to Sunbury on tracks shared with Vline and freight, but then pretending to deliver a ‘metro’ service under the city, then they have learnt nothing – from the City Loop debacle, or from the Dandenong line dramas, or even from the period of decline and marginalisation in the 1970s and 80s, when commuter rail so demonstrably failed to meet the needs of a changing city, yet was so admirably clung to by bureaucrats and unions alike. This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 6:11 pm and is filed under Economics, Planning and Operation, Politics and History, Victorian Transport Plan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. 20 Responses to “Getting it right: the Sydney Metro” Jarrett of HumanTransit.org June 3, 2009 at 10:22 pm I’ve worked extensively on station area planning around driverless metros, and commuted on one when I lived in Vancouver. The real payoff of driverlessness is not in sticking it to the unions; there will still be a staff and it will still be unionised, but there may be fewer than one per train. The point is to reduce the cost of increments of frequency.