The subway has already shown its value. But will Sydney’s transport mandarins go on board?

Jw: I would say that in the 70s, 80s and 90s, public transport – and therefore the people of Sydney – were surely losing because it was the era in which people thought that trains were an old hat, and it was also the moment when governments were bitten by the bug reagan and Thatcher and thought that something had to be a negative thing. But there have been some victories defined in the last decade in the new South Wales and in other states. Western Australia began with the Mandurah lineAnd now we have finally started adding the Sydney railway system.

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Fitz: What is your guiding principle on the virtues of public transport? What is the north star that we must drive to be a city that organizes itself well to move people efficiently, cheap and happyly?

Jw: One is that it is a bad practice to create new suburbs without extending public transport at the same time. For 50 years we have let the services late and we were done, so now we need a strong recovery. As in Oran Park, where there is A seductive railway station In the lucid real estate brochures, but not on the ground.

Another key is that all commuters – public transport users and car passengers – are also pedestrians. So, if destroy the roads, you end up discovering that you have destroyed your destinations. So the key destinations that make a city lively, which is worth a city, are more easily destroyed if you do not pay attention to them, if you think of everything as an arc route rather than a destination. If you do not check it, you end up with the cities that are all art, (e) no destination. Era Gertrude Stein Who he said: “When you arrive in Oakland, there is not” there “there.”

Fitz: It is more or less what Andrew Denton told me during the 1996 Olympics: “Atlanta is where the old highways go to die”.

Jw: Exactly! And when the EMBARCADERO Freeway in San Francisco He was damaged by the earthquake in 1989 and demolished in 1991, do you know what happened? Nothing. Traffic has not worsened. People have adapted to their travels, have found alternatives and now they can enjoy the promenade that had cut their city without meaning and unnecessarily.

Fitz: Of course, but with another million people added to the Sydney basin in the coming years, do we certainly need multiple tunnels, bridges and highways? Isn’t that IPSO Facto?

Jw: We also had a very old and affirmed city with a large amount of inheritance and open space in the urban fabric, and to destroy it for reasons of people who cross it is a mistake, in particular when you don’t have to do it. Imagine what would happen to Glebe if they had gone on with the massive motorway proposal that was supposed to cross the heart. It would have been completely destroyed – and if you build the type of roads you are talking about, this will actually happen to the other suburbs. It is public transport that is better to move that million extra and the rest of us around. Where it is possible to usefully spend the money of the road is where people often die, which are located on the country roads.

Fitz: I made a corporate biography a long time ago by Carlo Salteri, the transfield co-founder with Franco Belgiorno-Nettis, and were the ones who built the first tunnel of the port. One of the things that stunned me is that even if the toll rises from 20 ° C to $ 1.20 to pay it, only for the good of another 30 ° C, that the port tunnel could have had three lanes on the road instead of two. Can you at least agree with me who was a madness, as was a madness for the M5 tunnel south of Sydney airport to have only two lanes tunnels, not three, that if we want to build these tunnels, do they have to be able to cope with an inevitable growth?

Jw: No. In the end, all you are doing is to increase the ability of the roads and no matter how much traffic infrastructure build, it will never be enough. Instead, you may and should increase the scope and capacity of the public transport system. And we spent all this money on the streets from the 60s and 70s thinking that they would solve congestion, and clearly they did not do it, so I think it is time to try something else, how instead to put the money for public transport.

Fitz: To be honest, I dined with the treasurer of the shadow Joe Hockey and Gladys Berejiklian the evening before Gladys became transport minister in Barry O’Farrell’s government, and Joe said to her: “Well, Gladys, the measure of your success will be the amount of light railway railway that you produce in your mandate”. And in reality he has enormously expanded our light subway and was also the one that hardly pushed the last incarnation of the metro line that has been so successful.

Jw: He really did it, and I’m not here to jump on Gladys. It was one of the best and actually caught the bus to work, so she really understood as it was a public transport user. But there is much more than you can do.

Fitz: So if, in the unlikely case that you decide to defend politics in the next elections, Win Eo Chris Minns or – even more unlikely – Mark Speakman makes the Minister of Transport, what are the things you would drive to make Sydney work better in terms of public transport?

Jw: I would use the metropolises and the light subway to connect the radial railway lines so that you can move more easily in the city. I would like to fill the missing connections so as not to have to go to the city center and go out to get on another radial line in a place that was close enough to your starting point, while the crow flies. It is about three kilometers from Carlingford to Epping, for example. Short Light Rail Extension, great improvement in the service. And I would drastically increase bus frequencies: they are painful on many routes and this discourages patronage.

Fitz: Would you also work with Clover Moore, who will probably be Lord Mayor forever, to do what Paris has done and say from 2030 onwards, you can’t bring your car to the center unless it is electric?

Jw: Not at this point. Electric cars are still expensive, so you would like to disadvantage people who cannot yet allow them. Those who can sail. In addition, electric cars are fantastic; They cut carbon emissions and noise, but do not occupy less space. And you are crushed equally flat if one strikes you. When it comes to electric vehicles, what I am going through is the fact that we do not yet have all the electrified buses. When he was Minister of Transport, Andrew Constance wanted to make them electrify them in a short time, but it has not yet happened. That’s where my attention would go. I would also plant trees along every artery that we could, not on the paths but in the roadway itself, with a parking lot in the middle. In this way, they could escape the “massacre of Ausgrid chainsaws”. This breaks my heart every time I see it. This would allow us to civilize the roads, to make them more than simple engineering, make them paradises for wildlife (e) resolve the problem we have of trees seen as a rethinking to the poles and wires of electricity, which, by the way, should be underground.

Fitz: Mr. President, I agree with the new Minister of Transport equipped. Some time ago, a mayor of Salvia or the same did it in the main street through Newport and completely transformed the entire area. What was a sterile core of bitumen is now a delight, with trees in the middle.

Jw: Exactly. And it is that kind of things on which our attention must be focused – embellish the roads we have and bring more public transport – do not spend more and more money for infinite new tunnels and roads that will never solve congestion because they are filled almost as soon as they are built. At this moment, it is time for a pin. At this moment, we have to move away from the battle that can never be won because if you provide the number of roads needed for everyone to easily arrive where they want to go, there will not be “there”, there! But if we rotate for public transport, it can be won, with everyone that they move easily in a still adorable environment.

Peter Fitzsimons He is a journalist and editorialist. Connect through Twitter.

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