best move we ever made exporting her

upped the average intelligence of both cities

“Get over it” has been the clear and penetrating message. And may it penetrate as far as Trioli and Jones whose foam flecked, hair sticking to sweaty-faced rants on the morning after were absurdly overblown.

If only the ministers concerned had the good sense to tell them both to get stuffed.

There was a traffic jam the other night because they are all right wing libertarians who follow the idiotic transport policy of the LDP. lol

No doubt you’re joking to make a point - but yes, if you were taking private transport that night, you may have had to deal with the collective consequences of you and a lot of other people taking private transport.

Maybe next time people might act differently after this experience.

Peter Debnam, leading the pack-rabble otherwise known as the NSW Liberals, was shadow transport minister for a number of years and is quite astute in his estimations and approach to NSW transport issues, despite his tub-thumping approach to other social issues. Transport is an issue with which he was and is deeply engaged, and I know this for a fact based on the time he has personally taken to act on and respond to communications from me in recent years.

what, you mean like introducing the anti-hoon laws?

You have got to be kidding. Solving your problems, or even merely addressing them, does not mean he knows how to solve a state or city transport problem.

Debnam knows sfa about transport. Do the liberals even have a transport policy?

girlgenius is spot on with her comment regarding the distributions of the population and the shifting demands on the transport infrastructure. Where is the fuinded research into suburban demographics and capacity of public transport?

There was a traffic jam the other night because they are all right wing libertarians who follow the idiotic transport policy of the LDP. lol

Fortunately, Canberra is blessed with a pretty good bus system, which includes strategically placed bus lanes. Unlike Sydney, these are not rendered completely useless by on-street parking. So to paraphrase Cap’n Jack Sparrow, I love peak hour; I love tearing my gaze away from the newspaper to look down on all the single-occupant cars as my bus goes whizzing by.

And Mardi Gras is on tomorrow week. Given the febrile, whiny-assed Sydney zetgeist, stand by for the Trioli/Jones Whinge Generator to fire up on the post-parade Monday morning airwaves with stories of entire extended families trapped in a vast traffic jam horror as a bunch of drag queens, leather-persons and local body politicians just meandered up Oxford St - “they didn’t seem to care, Virginia, that we were going to be an hour and seventeen minutes later than usual in getting home and where was the Premier, Virginia, where was the Premier?”

Sorry Sydneysiders, the horse (-less carriage) has bolted.

Firstly, why do people want a different way of getting around the CBD or inner city? Probably because the heavy rail is a suburban mass train system and not that conducive to getting people around the inner city and the bus system is subject to delays as it uses the same system as cars and other vehicles do (the roads).

So what is wanted - a faster more efficient way of moving people around the CBD at least and maybe the inner city as well (which I’d prefer). Light rail seems to be the favourite catchcry. But light rail isn’t the only way of doing this, what’s wanted is just some transport system that works.

Let’s look at light rail for the moment. Assume that the light rail tracks are put on top of a couple of roads in the CBD. The roads are currently very narrow and there’s not much scope to make new lanes for the light rail, so let’s assume that the tracks are put on top of an existing lane of traffic (which might sometimes be a lane of parking).

If cars can drive on this lane along with the light rail trams, then the trams will be subject to being caught up in traffic just as buses are at the moment. If only trams are allowed to drive on these lanes then they won’t be caught up in traffic as much (they’ll only be caught up at traffic lights and other trams), but they will take up an entire existing lane of the road (unless the lanes are squeezed aside for the light rail). In either of these situations, the positives of introducing light rail are accompanied by negatives - either the trams are still caught up in traffic like buses are at the moment, or the non-tram capacity of the road is decreased significantly.

Of course, perhaps parts of footpaths could be reclaimed so that an extra lane for trams could be created.

If you just wanted a lane dedicated to light rail, you might as well just have lanes dedicated to buses and not allow any other vehicles on them.

The more substantive issue is whether the light-rail system is separate from the existing road and rail system, and so not subject to delays in either. This seems to me to be the starting point. I’d like a “light rail” system (or whatever it is) to be separate from the road and rail systems (although with possible interlinks of course) so that delays in one don’t mean delays in another.

You could have an underground/overground light rail/monorail/other system going north-south and east-west through the CBD and through to north sydney & st leonards, and south to redfern/waterloo/alexandria, and east to edgecliff/bondi/SE suburbs and west to balmain/newton/stanmore/marrickville, or wherever you wanted it go. Of course, it would cost a lot but many cities have created these systems.

One of the things that vexed me most about Sydney was the traffic. And I say that as a wholly public transport dependent, dedicated non car owner. I had a relatively short commute but it was not uncommon for me to wait 30 minutes in the morning for a bus which, at peak times, was supposed to run every 10 minutes. Known bottlenecks meant that after your 30 minute wait you’d see three buses, all full.

It was worse coming home in the afternoon, since the bus home left from Circular Quay and had to make its way up George St in the city. They travelled in packs, for safety.

It wasn’t much better on the weekend.

But from where I was living if I wanted to get in to the city itself, the best option - at any time - was the light rail. The folks who run that service have been lobbying for years to have it extend up through the city as far as the Quay, and none of the arguments I’ve ever heard against the idea made a damn bit of sense.

I remain convinced this would be a good idea. It could be helped by turning some of the main north-south thoroughfares in the city proper into one-way streets - say, George St running north to the Quay, and Castereigh St running south to Central. This is an approach which has been adopted in the CBD of just about every other major city in Australia, and it seems to help.

But an idea - as well as, or instead of this approach - would be to ban private vehicles from the CBD. Bugger a congestion charge, let’s get them off the road altogether.

Anyway, why would you reasonably expect a few hundred thou people spontaneously deciding to all arrive at one small patch of the CBD, on a week night, at rush hour, to be problem free? The sheer hysteria this morning was out of all proportion to what actually occurred. The horror! The horror!

How “spontaneous” was it really? The Fireworks 2 Queens show was heavily advertised as an attraction in advance, certainly we’d already decided to go well before yesterday (although we didn’t stay for the fireworks as my son can’t stand the noise). But where were the accompanying “leave your car behind” ads al la NYE?

I agree the hysteria is overblown, but I think it’s fair enough to be concerned at the competence of the event planners specifically and the robustness of our transport system generally.

It’s actually far worse. There’s virtually no public transport to speak of. Aucklanders are far more car reliant than Sydneysiders and the traffic snarls - in a city a quarter the size of Sydney - are far worse.

“Also, surely the Auckland experience should have made the various bureaucrats and Ministers more aware of the potential congestion problems with throngs of sightseers instead of trying the excuse “oh, we didn’t expect sooo many peeeeopleâ€??”

Take notice of a NZ precedent Tig? C’mon.

Anyway, why would you reasonably expect a few hundred thou people spontaneously deciding to all arrive at one small patch of the CBD, on a week night, at rush hour, to be problem free? The sheer hysteria this morning was out of all proportion to what actually occurred. The horror! The horror!

Also, surely the Auckland experience should have made the various bureaucrats and Ministers more aware of the potential congestion problems with throngs of sightseers instead of trying the excuse “oh, we didn’t expect sooo many peeeeople”?

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/search/story.cfm?storyid=0005EE6F-FCC7-15D6-84CF83027AF10106

And then Sydney’s transport happened.

We have got the transport system we deserve, after smugly and complacently all these decades looking down our noses at cities we used to consider “backwards” like KL & Bangkok which now have better transport systems than Sydney.

And it got that way because NSW voters have never sufficiently punished a government for transport failures. Carr/Iemma Labor deserve the boot, but they probably won’t get it because transport just doesn’t seem to be a vote-changer for Sydneysiders.

What’s doubly unfortunate about all this is that the alternative premier Peter Debnam, leading the pack-rabble otherwise known as the NSW Liberals, was shadow transport minister for a number of years and is quite astute in his estimations and approach to NSW transport issues, despite his tub-thumping approach to other social issues. Transport is an issue with which he was and is deeply engaged, and I know this for a fact based on the time he has personally taken to act on and respond to communications from me in recent years. Too bad the NSW Libs are so infested with weirdo religious fanatics and ill-disciplined dilettantes to be effective. Or that NSW Labor can’t recruit Debnam to be Transport Minister….too bad politics always gets in the way of appointing the best person for the job…