Should Sydney’s light rail carriages be modified after second death in two years?
Police believe man was crossing track between two carriages when struck, sparking safety debate
For the second time in two years, a pedestrian has died after being struck by a tram on Sydney’s light rail.
New South Wales police said they found a man under a tram carriage in Surry Hills on Thursday afternoon. Paramedics treated him at the scene, but he died.
Police said initial inquiries showed the man was attempting to cross the light rail track between two carriages when the tram began moving and trapped him.
In May 2023, a teenage girl died after attempting to cross a street in Sydney’s CBD between two tram carriages. She became trapped underneath one of them when the tram started moving, suffering fatal injuries.
That two similar deaths occurred just two years apart meant police, the premier, and transport bureaucrats fielded questions from the media this week over whether the light rail network, and the trams themselves, should be made safer.
Dr Geoffrey Clinton, a senior lecturer in transport management at the University of Sydney, said it was “probably wise” for the government to investigate additional safety measures to stop people from attempting to climb over them.
Sydney’s light rail network uses a few different tram models – what bureaucrats call “rolling stock”. What they have in common is that they typically have separate carriages that are coupled together to form a longer vehicle, unlike trams in Melbourne, which have only one carriage.
Many of the trams now have “danger” signs on the joinery between the carriages, warning people not to try to climb over them. Clinton said the state government or the network’s private operator, Transdev, could consider additional signage.
“Or even something like a net between the two carriages to discourage people from trying to clamber through,” he said.
He posed the idea of running the trams twice as frequently with only one carriage, making them half as long, but said it didn’t “seem like a feasible solution”.
“[That] would very expensive to do and wouldn’t add to the capacity of the network, but it would double the labour cost,” he said.
The transport minister, John Graham, declined to comment. A Transport for New South Wales (TfNSW) spokesperson said the man’s death was “extremely distressing”.
The NSW police inspector Anderson Lessing on Thursday said that after speaking to witnesses and reviewing CCTV, it appeared the man had stepped between the tram carriages off the platform at the light rail stop on Devonshire Street.
“There’s obviously risk involved, but it comes back to personal responsibility when you do cross the tram line, and it’s that balance that we have to get right,” he said.
The TfNSW coordinator-general, Howard Collins, expressed his condolences to the man’s family and first responders.
He said the Office of the National Rail Safety Regulator (ONRSR) would work with Transdev to establish whether any safety recommendations could be made or whether the death was “a case of really unfortunate misadventure”.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau and NSW Office of Transport Safety Investigations said they had not reviewed the 2023 death and would not to review Thursday’s one either.
“[We] have reviewed the initial available information and determined that, as in the 2023 occurrence … it is unlikely an independent transport safety investigation would identify any new or unknown transport safety factor that could prevent an incident of this nature from occurring in the future,” a spokesperson said.
The premier, Chris Minns, said he was sorry for the man and his family, but he wouldn’t be drawn on whether the government was considering any safety upgrades.
“The safety regulator’s in place,” he said. “It’s obviously the case that whenever there’s a terrible event like this, a terrible incident, they conduct an investigation.”
Terry Lee-Williams, a transport planning strategist, said it was “awful that somebody died”, but overall, Sydney’s light rail network was safe and “actually quite a low speed system”.
One suggestion for improving safety could be replacing the trams with the concertina-like ones used in Melbourne, he said, but this would be costly.
He said Sydney’s trams were a “standard design” and similar to those operated in many European countries.
“You don’t see much of the Melbourne-style trams around the world because they’re less accessible,” he said. “Sydney has very narrow, windy streets.”
