ALP doing what the ALP does best.
Looking to can infrastructure that’s almost completed and desperately needed for our housing crisis. A decade later and there doesn’t seem to be any fresh ideas from their previous incarnation.
ALP doing what the ALP does best.
Looking to can infrastructure that’s almost completed and desperately needed for our housing crisis. A decade later and there doesn’t seem to be any fresh ideas from their previous incarnation.
Metros everywhere else in the world (Europe, Asia) are designed with stations very close together, some within 5 walk of each other. The point is you have high density all along the route so most people are only taking part of the journey, not from end to end.
And if you want 20 min between Parramatta to Sydney, the best way is to have a metro with really close stations, and have heavy rail only stop at Parramatta, Strathfield and Central. Have a metro serve all the intermediate stops.
That’s the current stopping pattern for blue mountains trains. The suburbans have an extra stop at Redfern.
The fastest currently is 25 mins. Over 23km. That’s less than 60km/h average. I mean they can cut out Strathfield but after that you’re literally a direct service from Central to Parramatta with no stops in between. And it will be 23 mins at best, whilst cutting out a major interchange.
Realistically the only way you could get it to 20 mins on the current train network is if you use single deckers with at least 3 doors on that route. That would reduce the dwell time and the trains will have better acceleration and deceleration.
But it is at capacity now. There’s no way you’d be able to replace that route with single deckers, it’s practically at full capacity of 20 trains per hour.
The metro serves more stops and will get there quicker. North west has higher average speed than any suburban line whilst serving more stations.
The last thing we need is for stations to be skipped like they do currently. That’s how we get lopsided development. Everyone wants to live where the trains stop and then areas where the trains skip gets neglected.
I would argue this is due to the clusterfuck that’s the approach to Strathfield station and the stretch of tracks between Strathfield and Central. You would get more speed if the lines going across those sections are decoupled, and work is underway to do just that.
The point of this feature is for transit systems with frequent and close stops, which is more stations.
I’m not saying do it now, I’m saying do it after the metro comes online. But I could make the same argument for having metro line that’s sparsely spaced.
But the general point I’m making is, heavy rail was always designed to move lots of people over long distances, and metros are designed to move few people over short distances. Somehow we’re building it back to front. We shouldn’t do that.