TRAMS will become a major part of Sydney’s commute again, the O’Farrell government will announce in its long-awaited final transport plan for the state.
The plan will commit the government to starting construction on a light rail line from Central to Randwick before the next election, with an extension through George Street and the city centre to Circular Quay after that.
The line will run along Anzac Parade, adjacent to the University of NSW, Randwick Racecourse and the Sydney Cricket Ground.
(Tram network in 1921, right.)
It will pass through Surry Hills either in a tunnel or snaking through the streets. Sources said the government was leaning to running trams on the surface to reduce costs.
The final transport plan will also affirm another rail crossing of Sydney Harbour, to be built after the north west rail link is finished at the end of the decade.
And it will endorse the 33-kilometre WestConnex motorway to run between the M4 and Parramatta Road, and then under the inner west to the airport and the south-west M5 Motorway.
It appears to be $1.6 billion for a 12km surface tram line. Even more than the $1.1 billion for LRT on Broadway for pretty much the same distance. And this article claims it will only carry 9,000 passengers per direction per hour. http://m.smh.com.au/nsw/forty-per-cent-of-george-street-to-be-carfree-zone-in-16-billion-sydney-tram-plan-20121213-2bb4j.html
I won’t fall into the trap that others do by claiming that this validates the cost estimates for LRT on Broadway though. Every route is different and costs vary from country to country. It does show though that surface tram can be expensive as other examples show that it can be inexpensive in some cases. It expect they are making a real effort to create a high quality street environment here thus the high cost.
The plan also includes a 25km new road. The whole plan is $25 billion. I expect a good portion of that is other rail project.
Good points about being cautious about cost comparisons.
9,000 passangers per hour per direction is actually fairly high as long as it is not a theoretical capacity and is an anticipated load (for comparison I believe the Calgary Transit mall currently carries less than 8,000 passangers per hour per direction on average days during peak hours)…I would be curious what the anticipated peak load on Broadway is…it is probably less than 9,000 passangers per hour per direction.
By 2041, they are predicting 322,000 trips per day on the Broadway Line. Not sure what the peak load would be but it would likely be somewhat over 9,000ppdph. Maybe 12,000?
At 322,000 daily boardings you would be looking at more than 20,000 peak ppdph. (The Expo Line currently has a peak around its capacity at 16,000 ppdph, and I would expect daily boardings along the expo route to be around 200,000 per day.)
Comparing daily boardings may be a bit of a red herring as some lines have much stronger peaks than others. I would expect the Expo and Canada lines would have stronger peaks than the Broadway line (????maybe????) and traffic on the Broadway line would be more two way than the Expo and Canada Lines. That said if the Expo line currently has 16,000 12-16,000 seems reasonable for a Broadway line in 2041.
Don’t disagree. I assumed myself that a Broadway Line would be less peaked than the Expo is now hence the reference to 20,000 when really a straight comparison would suggest a peak north of 25,000 ppdph.
The Canada Line has relatively good two-way ridership. Much better than the Expo Line. Broadway should be pretty good too.
The news is much bigger than trams. NSW, which has a population about 50% larger than BC, is planning on spending $53 billion on transportation over the next four years and $260 billion over the next twenty years. A good portion of this is on rail and transit.
http://haveyoursay.nsw.gov.au/document/show/602
So, really, $5 billion for Rapid Transit in Surrey and the UBC Line should be really quite doable for this region over the next 8 years.
That seems like a good take home message.
$5-billion for Broadway/UBC and Surrey should certainly doable:
1) The timeline for construction funding would likely be between a 4-6 year span during construction.
2) And it’s not like as if this is completely coming out of the provincial budget either. There’s also the federal government, Translink and municipal government. And there will also be private sector involvement, UBC can be considered as one.
3) For the provincial government’s contribution, let’s say it’s $2-billion combined for UBC/Broadway and Surrey spread over 4-6 years. In comparison, the government’s annual budget alone is more than $40-billion for a single year.
But for this current fiscal year, we are spending $16-BILLION on BC healthcare. That’s about $1.33-billion every month. And in the following fiscal year from 2013-2014, we will be spending $18.5-BILLION on healthcare….these type of increases have been ongoing for much of the last 6 years: public healthcare costs are going way out of control and are increasing way beyond annual inflation and population growth. Although note: I’m not complaining about public healthcare, it’s a great thing, but there’s something quite wrong with it if costs are spiralling out of control year after year. That’s a whole different topic though.
Yet we complain about one-time construction costs over the duration of 4-6 years for things like SkyTrain.
And for those who were skeptical about the Olympics, the same applies. Depending on what you consider as an Olympic cost, B.C. spent $2-3 billion on the Olympics over a span lasting from 2003 to 2010. That’s 7 years where we spent that Olympic money. That’s pocket change compared to the budget as a whole.
our median age is also spiraling way out of control. Maybe an ageing population and increasing health costs that are being experienced all over the western world might have something in common with each other.
Not that I’m saying that it’s impossible to lower health costs, or to improve outcomes, or to improve the system. Western health care does focus a little too much on the expensive stuff, whereas a country like Cuba has very good health outcomes with meager resources by emphasizing prevention. But it’s hardly a surprise that health care costs are rising, or is it exactly a story of bad management.
Lol, I’ll leave that be. It’s a different discussion, and I’d rather not go too off-topic….except one final point, there’s definitely some bad management and an overinflated bureaucratic workforce in the provincial government that we don’t need. Government can still function perfectly with downsizing. Remember when VANOC asked the provincial government if it could borrow a thousand government managers to fill positions for several months? That’s a sign of the excess workforce we have.
But anyway, my main point is this: compared to annual costs like healthcare, spending money to build $3-billion Broadway transit infrastructural projects over the span of several years is no big deal and is doable. It’s pocket change in comparison. Yet, healthcare costs almost freely expand…next year’s $2.5-billion increase in annual expenditures is nearly enough for the province to build Broadway/UBC SkyTrain all on its own.
Voony, I wish to express my displeasure with the way Gordon Price conducts his blog, Price Tags. Price and his cohort seem to be congenitally incapable of espousing well-tested alternatives.
I am posting here in the expectation Price lacks the magnanimity to accept criticism.
The choir chants and woe betide anyone who attempts to introduce alternatives.
There is more to distributing the amenities of this city than crowding everyone into under ground, expensive shiny trinkets we cannot afford.
There are alternatives: indeed, probably more than my limited capacity describes. Affordable technology is readily available.
Most of us are well versed in techno communication able to free us from ranging the city hour on end from one mindless destination to another: education is now available online, shopping online, medical advice on line, entertainment on line, need I go on.
Established academic institutions, among others should be direcxted to decentralize and commence arranging course on line.
I will not be logging on to Price Tags again. I am, to say the least, disgusted with gang of on line limited intellects with delusions ridiculing alternative voices: its proprietor’s Gauleiter-like entrenched response to anything other than the party line.
Indeed a cohort, of limited, aggressive, humourless, opinionated, minds-so-far-in-the-past troglodytes are no longer worth following.
Awareness of the moribund state of civic and provincial finances should alert us to current chisme and inutile bavardage!
Pie-in-the-sky billion dollar boondoggles should be denied immediately in favour of readily available, inexpensive, contemporary communication and decentralization technology of which we are all familiar.
Submitted: Roger Kemble MA (Brit. Col ’87: urban planning) RCA MAIBC.
I would be cautious about any cost comparison to this line. It runs down the middle of the main street in the centre of Sydney, and the plan transforms it from a busy 5/6/7-lane street into a pedestrianized transit mall. Imagine turning 1st Ave in Seattle – which has a similar feel – into a transit mall.
Sydney has an extensive, grade-separated metro called CityRail. The network branches extensively from the centre, and actually runs under the same street that the tramway will run on in the centre. The eastern suburbs at the other end of the tramway are not served by the metro.
Sydney’s transit problems are bigger than building a new line here or there using whichever technology. The basic problem is the design of their transit network, especially the excessive branching of the metro.
http://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/lightrail-program/sydney-light-rail-strategic-plan
City Rail, Sydney’s aging train system, is extensive but slow and plagued with operational problems, especially the double-decker cars that are so heavy the trains apparently have trouble climbing out of the new Chatswood tunnel (you want acceleration? Ride the SkyTrain). That’s only the beginning of their transit problems, from a user’s point of view: tickets on the trains don’t work on the buses or ferries; the buses are slowed down by the very heavy traffic (and the operators making change for passengers); many of the local trains, and the long distance ones, such as the line we used to take up into the Blue Mountains, stop at every tiny station, and so on. When we lived there several years ago, the State government was promising a single ticket would work across the different systems; I see from their website that they now offer multi-modal passes, but it’s $21 for a day and you can’t buy a multi-modal pass for a single journey.
The State government (mainly using P3s) made a huge investment in tolled motorways in the 1990s; it’s not unusual to spend $25 to $30 in tolls in a single day while making a few stops around the region. For example, it costs more than $5 for a 15-minute run on the M7 through the northwest part of Greater Sydney. People in Metro Vancouver don’t know how good they’ve got it, even with a $3 Port Mann toll. I could write a page just on the tolling system in Sydney. The TReO one implemented here is kind and gentle by comparison.
City Rail’s current light rail system, which runs from Central through the Inner West to Leichardt and beyond, seems very underused. The proposed new one will cover much the same ground as the tolled, tunnelled Eastern Distributor that connects the Harbour Bridge with the airport. But it might get some people onto transit when they go to the cricket — convenience plus the .05 drink-driving limit.
I was in Sydney a couple weeks ago. The MyMulti zone 1 is $40something for a week and it includes all public ferries in all zones and buses and trains in zone 1. It’s not bad for tourists, especially when everything else is double the Vancouver price.
The operational and ticketing problems are obvious. The frequencies are low. The switching and slow speeds through the city loop affect reliability. The ticket lines are long.
The new light rail line is separated well enough, but the route is circuitous and that makes it slow and less useful to its target market.
I should mention that the pass doesn’t include the large surcharge for getting on or off the train but not the bus at the airport.
I was amazed at how many mostly empty buses they run down George Street (which suggests the bus network also branches excessively), while a crowd waits around for the free downtown circulator that supposedly comes every ten minutes. This tramway will displace those buses?
Further to mike0123, I recall the surcharge for the airport run on the train was $10. Most people who live in the Inner West (the suburbs on the south side of the harbour west of Central Station and the CBD) take cabs to the airport as it’s cheaper than the train and quicker than the lengthy transfer you have to do with bags at Central, which has few elevators and is a sprawling, mystifying mess the first few times you try to find your way through it.