Light rail typically comprises small vehicles travelling on ground at low speed with frequent stops in a loose, ground-level network that acts essentially as a pedestrian enhancement. That, so far, is what Sydney had, in the old rattler network.
Bambi Baird is presiding over the Bjelke-isation of NSW. Corrupt? He doesn't have to be. Indeed, if you can rewrite laws and stack boards, it's more efficient not to be. Every night, more trees go. Every day, more parkland is fenced and devoured.
Contemporary light rail is also clean, green and ultra-quiet, with understated stations, in-ground electricity and if you're lucky (and why shouldn't we be?) grassed tracks, as in Berlin and Ostend, flanking avenues (Turin) and hedgerows instead of concrete (Freiburg, Basel).
Sydney's CSELR is, by contrast, huge, heavy and fast. For a start, each tram measures a massive 67 metres. This is staggering. The world average is about 27 metres.
This is staggering. The world average is about 27 metres. A standard Sydney bus is 12.5 metres. Our longest current tram is 30 metres. A standard Sydney train carriage 20 metres.
So our most venerable and fragile city precinct (excepting the Rocks) will be dissected by trains more than four times bus-length, three times the width of George Street and twice the length of the average Surry Hills block. Imagine what that will do to crossings, cycles and traffic, not to mention streets and atmosphere. Then there's the clutter.
The old Sydney trams had pretty wooden shelters; the new one has 70-metre platforms strewn with machinery boxes. The old had a black spaghetti of overhead wires, whose removal made the sun seem to shine again. Soon, the wires will be back. Excepting the George Street strip, the entire CSELR route from Central to Randwick and Kingsford will be marked by poles and wires 5-7m high, the platforms solid with ticket machines and other junk.
As to speed, these immense carriages will travel on narrow inner-city streets at up to 70km/h (world average is about 35km/h). This, and the extra momentum so generated, requires them to be specially reinforced against crumple, increasing the carriage mass from 21 to 31 tonnes. Dangerous? You bet.
Yet internally, only 30 per cent of passengers will have a seat. And the terrible thing is, even so big, so seatless and so recklessly fast, the new light rail still moves only 6900 people an hour per direction. Compare that with the almost 20,000 passengers an hour in the 220 buses (or 20 routes) the CSELR claims to replace. So the net effect on public transport capacity is negative. It's a loss.
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Bambi Baird is presiding over the Bjelke-isation of NSW. Corrupt? He doesn't have to be. Indeed, if you can rewrite laws and stack boards, it's more efficient not to be. Every night, more trees go. Every day, more parkland is fenced and devoured.
Contemporary light rail is also clean, green and ultra-quiet, with understated stations, in-ground electricity and if you're lucky (and why shouldn't we be?) grassed tracks, as in Berlin and Ostend, flanking avenues (Turin) and hedgerows instead of concrete (Freiburg, Basel).
Sydney's CSELR is, by contrast, huge, heavy and fast. For a start, each tram measures a massive 67 metres. This is staggering. The world average is about 27 metres.
This is staggering. The world average is about 27 metres. A standard Sydney bus is 12.5 metres. Our longest current tram is 30 metres. A standard Sydney train carriage 20 metres.
So our most venerable and fragile city precinct (excepting the Rocks) will be dissected by trains more than four times bus-length, three times the width of George Street and twice the length of the average Surry Hills block. Imagine what that will do to crossings, cycles and traffic, not to mention streets and atmosphere. Then there's the clutter.
The old Sydney trams had pretty wooden shelters; the new one has 70-metre platforms strewn with machinery boxes. The old had a black spaghetti of overhead wires, whose removal made the sun seem to shine again. Soon, the wires will be back. Excepting the George Street strip, the entire CSELR route from Central to Randwick and Kingsford will be marked by poles and wires 5-7m high, the platforms solid with ticket machines and other junk.
As to speed, these immense carriages will travel on narrow inner-city streets at up to 70km/h (world average is about 35km/h). This, and the extra momentum so generated, requires them to be specially reinforced against crumple, increasing the carriage mass from 21 to 31 tonnes. Dangerous? You bet.
Yet internally, only 30 per cent of passengers will have a seat. And the terrible thing is, even so big, so seatless and so recklessly fast, the new light rail still moves only 6900 people an hour per direction. Compare that with the almost 20,000 passengers an hour in the 220 buses (or 20 routes) the CSELR claims to replace. So the net effect on public transport capacity is negative. It's a loss.
SMH Read More
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