A Year of the Built Environment talk on cities is the perfect place to renew public debate on public transport. Too often our future is developed in private by engineers and planners who have to advise panic-stricken politicians.
In fact, a good public transport debate is not much about transport at all. The debate is about this city. Our leaders who start the debate from any other perspective go horribly off track. Sydney does that often.
The real debate is the urban debate. What type of city do we want and what type can we afford. What is socially, environmentally and economically sustainable. Transport is just one of the tools available for shaping cities, albeit the most potent.
Get the transport balance wrong and you inadvertently end up with fully decentralised jobs, sprawling housing and full car dependency no matter what your city plan says and no matter what your previous public investments have been.
Get it right and you improve the livability, cut the environmental cost and, most importantly for Treasury, slash the financial cost of running a big, competitive city.
Despite the air of permanent public transport crisis, Sydney is still well placed to move forward. In fact, the crisis will probably prove pivotal because there is now an acute sense in the Labor Party it could lose government over it. With much of the system rotten to the core no number of band-aids will lead to a lasting cure before the next poll.
This year is a turning point in a more comprehensive way.
The government is about to embark on creating a new metropolitan plan for Sydney - a decade overdue.
Over the next year, it will attempt to answer - as plenty of other cities have done - what type of city we want to become.
The basics are already clear. It will still be founded on low density housing on the whole and medium density housing in areas on the transport and services grid. It will build on Sydney's successful centres policy for jobs, leisure and entertainment on transport nodes, and broaden the idea to regenerate the local high street as well.
From these urban goals new governance, regulation and transport priorities will flow.
This type of land use will be dependent on public transport for its mass movement of people into centres and its more economic use of land and capital. Public transport's future, in turn, is dependent on this type of land use.
As we build the plan we can then and only then decide the mix of transport modes and the mix of private and public investment can deliver the vision.
Such a plan is fundamental to making Sydney sustainable. Such a plan is fundamental to equipping Sydney for growth.
Never again should Sydney put up with the opening of ill-planned new suburbs without appropriate transport and infrastructure. Never again should Sydney put up with ill-planned high density development in the wrong places.
The creation of the new Department of Infrastructure and Planning is a good step but they have got their work cut out. The new urgency in the new transport services ministry is long overdue, too, with clarity even more critical.
Sydney's previous transport plan, Action for Transport 2010, is best not talked about. It was, for good reason, taken out the back and quietly shot. The deeply flawed if well-intentioned plan set the city's cause back.
All the public transport projects on it were either based on non-existent or incomplete and flawed analysis - not the shot in the arm for new urbanism. The moment was lost. The rubble that remains of it - part of the Parramatta rail link and some of the bus transitways - remain highly problematic. They remain outside an integrated land use transport strategy.
Indeed, with the Lane Cove motorway opening around the same time, the rail link through North Ryde is guaranteed to be a medium-term $2 billion white elephant, no matter how worthwhile its arguments. It will haunt all requests for expansion capital which follow it into Treasury.
On the transport services front it is with good reason it is all back-to-basics. On rail, the network is teetering.
The Clearways project to unblock the rail arteries is important for two reasons. It makes vital operations more reliable on the very lines which form the backbone of the metropolitan centres grid. The second reason is less exciting yet more telling. That the government is willing to borrow funds to deliver these rescue projects is a sign the political climate on infrastructure has changed.
There is broad agreement among economists that public debt can be pursued for higher-value infrastructure renewal projects which are not otherwise candidates for private public partnerships. Rail expansion projects are not. Motorway expansion projects are. Sydney's dominant investments have been the latter because the projects work well on a cost-benefit front and the financing model works. The trouble is, we get an unbalanced urban portfolio.
Even if there were ready money and willingness to expand the rail network, there's arguably no good reason to do so at present. Take a costly mess and expand it and you'll end up with a bigger costly mess.
Our version of heavy rail is one of the most expensive urban railways in the world to run and one of the most expensive to build. Both issues need to be addressed before credible expansion plans can be undertaken, yet credible expansion plans there must be to serve and deliver Sydney's renewal and growth.
The more compact city that Sydney is building needs faster, higher frequency services. Not slower, less frequent services that the new timetable will bring us in July because of short-term driver and train shortages and reliability problems.
It is door-to-door trip time which determines most people's choice of mode and the government knows it.
Light rail is often touted as the future - but it can also get lost in the past. It only works when it is the right urban tool for the right place. We could pave half the Pacific Highway with the number of press releases that have announced new light rail evaluation studies in Sydney in the past decade. And do not be put off by the lemon which runs innocently enough in Sydney's inner west.
Its operators have the first rights over the expansion of light rail into the CBD - inarguably that right is their only real asset - and if they have any sense they would turn their toy into a showcase before they lose the argument.
It needs to be faster, more frequent. It can be if it adopts the best traffic priority and noise measures to raise its speeds and better utilise its capital. And it doubly needs these improvements to overcome its poor route.
Light rail has had handsome wins elsewhere on short to medium-length urban renewal corridors, where corridor traffic exceeds bus capacity. There have been big flops, however, and Sydney cannot afford to repeat them.
The government's bus reform agenda is better developed.
The Unsworth Inquiry recommendations will change the landscape. New strategic routes, new competitive regions for operators to keep costs low and a dramatic expansion of bus priority measures to increase speeds and frequency. It is about picking the best practice from elsewhere and running hard with a micro-economic reform agenda which pleases passengers and the public purse alike. If it goes on to embrace the last ingredient - getting people to pre-pay for tickets to speed service - then the government will have the public on board.
As each public transport mode faces its overhaul and as the city looks to a new urban plan, the pressure must build to adopt the best forms of integration. We're getting integrated ticketing, for example, but we're not getting integrated fares. You need both.
As each public transport mode is stablised and made more efficient the government also faces enormous calls on its capital as the city plays catch-up for its decades of neglect.
The Parry Inquiry has laid innovative groundwork for raising more private and public funds and it is through 2,000 people turning out to meetings like these and through the media that the government will understand what the public now demands of it.
Sydney's collective urban goals are too big and too ambitious to leave to the hands of a few politicians and bureaucrats, no matter how capable those new hands are.
We might be willing to pay higher fares, like in Munich, if the service is as good. We might be happy to pay land levies like in Copenhagen if the new growth areas are as well planned. Developers might flock to fund commercial transit development like in Perth, Toronto and Washington if the deal is as good. Passengers too could warmly embrace bus transitways, like in Ottawa, if the land use planning is as excellent.
The public will embrace sensible options if they are offered a fair share of the benefits.
The public will embrace a leadership that has the courage to offer it.
This is how Sydney can blend new urbanism with economic rationalism to build our new city.