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… or SydLink, as its been branded, is — let’s face it — bad. Sydney des­per­ately needed new pub­lic trans­port invest­ment and this was the least costly solu­tion with the biggest polit­ical impact.

Whatever heavy trans­port solu­tion was pro­posed needed to cross Sydney Har­bour, as the exist­ing path across the Bridge is at max­imum capa­city. Instead of going with a new tun­nel under the har­bour, north of the CBD, the state gov­ern­ment decided to cross at Drum­moyne and Glades­ville, which is cheaper, but ends up with St. James as the inter­change station.

What are the polit­ical reas­ons why Metro is the pre­ferred solu­tion? Well, it bypasses the Rail uni­ons, Rail­Corp and vari­ous other organs in the NSW rail Franken­stein. That itself prob­ably sealed the deal for cab­inet. The metro car­riages are also single-deck, mean­ing that the tun­nels that need to be carved out are smal­ler — another sig­ni­fic­ant cost saving.

But why are Metro car­riages only single deck­ers? Because they are mass transit sys­tems designed to carry lots of stand­ing pas­sen­gers, for short dis­tances, and allow for rapid board­ing and alight­ing. A con­tinu­ous stretch of 38 kilo­metres is not Blind Date hd

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a short dis­tance. That kind of a com­mute calls for a heavy rail route.

Now, had the gov­ern­ment pro­posed a Metro sys­tem for inner Sydney, that would have made sense all round. The inner west, City of Sydney and satel­lites have high pop­u­la­tion dens­it­ies, higher reli­ance on pub­lic trans­port, and a strong inter­con­nec­ted­ness. A Metro loop would actu­ally have guar­an­teed pat­ron­age and be eco­nom­ic­ally use­ful. It would also divert pas­sen­gers from the choked CityRail network.

Reliev­ing the core of the CityRail net­work would then allow the gov­ern­ment to con­tinue with its past plans for a new har­bour rail cross­ing, a line from Epping to the Hills dis­trict, and com­ple­tion of the Par­ra­matta – Epping link, which was per­man­ently put on ice. That would be a mass transit net­work worth having.

John Watkins likes to talk of build­ing capa­city

, but that is not what the Metro is about. It is about play­ing catch-up in a region where there is vir­tu­ally no access to good pub­lic trans­port, and where the motor vehicle reigns supreme. Given the prom­in­ence of cli­mate change as the cause du jour Ali Baba Goes to Town full movie

, gov­ern­ments should not be afraid to spend big on this kind of infra­struc­ture. What is the point of a AAA credit rat­ing if you’re not going to use it?