Action for Public Transport (NSW)

This submission, by Action for Public Transport (NSW) Inc., is in response to a call for comments on the draft Long Term Transport Master Plan.

The draft master plan, including "Sydney's Rail Future" which is apparently to be taken as the final master plan for that mode, and "First Things First" which presumably includes the last word on Government plans for road, collectively have many omissions and anomalies. Prominent among these are:

Consistency:

• The relationships among the three documents are not clear. For example, do large public transport projects need Infrastructure NSW approval?
• There is theoretically a policy supporting a hierarchy of suburban centres. However, policies to expand urban motorways work against this policy.
• Again, there are policies to reduce car use and increase public transport ridership. However, any plans to build urban motorways such as West Connex run counter to these policies.
• The draft master plan states that all projects will be assessed properly before approval. It is far from clear that such assessment is happening at all, let alone properly. In particular, there is inadequate analysis of the extra traffic that the road projects will generate. In the case of West Connex, however, the lack of analysis did not inhibit an immediate government announcement of $2 billion to start work.
• Major announcements continue to bypass the master plan process, one conspicuous recent example being the lifting of the 3.2 million TEU annual shipping container cap on Port Botany. The trial of B-triples on the Hume Highway looks like becoming another example.

Durability:

• If the master plan et al are to survive through the terms of several ministries and/or governments, there will have to be a non-political person or committee appointed to control execution of the plan. There is nothing to indicate that this might happen.
• For the plan to survive, it will also have to be credible.

Major omissions:

• There is generally a lack of strategic planning with target dates, projected costs, and an indication of how the costs are to be funded.
• No corresponding metropolitan planning document has yet been released. Transport and land-use must be planned together.
• Integrated public transport ticketing seems to be steaming ahead, with a trial of Opal smartcard tickets on ferries to commence in December. However, there has been no announcement of integrated fares, apparently because Cabinet has yet to approve them. The failure of the former Tcard scheme shows clearly that fares must be integrated before tickets.
• Nothing is to be done about high-speed rail or even fairly fast rail. On the contrary, commuters from the Central Coast may one day have to change trains at Hornsby.
• Nothing is to be done in the foreseeable future about overcrowding at Wynyard station (which can only worsen as Barangaroo develops) or Town Hall station. Rather, extra passengers will be shipped in from the NWRL to add to the pressure. In particular, a new City railway and second rail crossing of the harbour have been deferred despite the many benefits they would have.
• Little or nothing is said about our over-dependency on imported fuel or about the need to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Nor is there any plan for dealing with soaring energy costs.

Particular items:

• There seems to be a presumption that because most journeys in Sydney are made by car, the city needs more motorways before large public transport projects. This is fallacious. And much of the road amplification proposed is radial motorways; these were discredited by the 1960s.
• There are too many statements about what the government has done. There are too many pointless statements like "we will work with .... " and too many plans to make plans some unspecified time in the future.
• Only about three items in Action for Public Transport's April submission received any attention in the draft master plan.
• Political interference in minor decisions continues. The clearest recent example is bus route 311, which Clover Moore continually tried to preserve and extend. The extension has recently been announced and will commence the same weekend as the by-election for the seat of Sydney needed to appoint Ms Moore's successor.
• The single-deck railway planned for the Rouse Hill line is inappropriate for an outer suburban line with stations about 3 km apart. The strong support it is receiving from the government is presumably for reasons other than its suitability for the need. Also, the plans for expanding single-deck services seem likely to constrain options for expansion of the double-deck network.