Sydney Just Made a NEW Light Rail Extension Announcement, but

[Greg Sutherland]

Sydney Just Made a NEW Light Rail Extension Announcement, but...

[TP]

The video answers its own question. No, it's not the mode to go all the way to La Perouse, metro is and there's a line to the SE in the long-term metro plan. Metro also has the capacity for the population proposed for the SE region, plus the journey time to the city would be less than a third of the time the light rail would take. The journey time of even the former La Perouse tram was quicker than this light snail would take. All very hypothetical anyway. This government has cut Parramatta Stage 2 short. There's Buckleys of this being built. The proposal is a private one, not from the government.

Contrary to what the commentary implies though, CSELR has twice the design capacity of what it's presently using - a tram every 2 minutes on the main core and every 4 minutes on the branches. That does expect the operation to be run more efficiently than it is at present though.

Tony P

[Geoff Olsen]

I think that this proposal has some merit being better than what is there at present. I agree about the metro but that is 100 years away.

 

For this to work they would first have to learn to run CSELR like a street tramway rather than a heavy rail system. The construction would provide another problem if they insisted on the brutalist concrete track that they have used so far rather than open ballast track as it once was.

 

In all not much hope for either project.

 

Geoff o.

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[TP]

The former La Perouse tram service to Circular Quay took just over 50 minutes. The CSELR takes over 30 minutes just to reach Kingsford from the Quay. It would have to put on an uncharacteristic burst of performance to reach La Perouse in the same time as the old tram. Today's express buses from La Perouse to Hunter St take about 45-50 minutes, depending on traffic. Taking the bus nowadays from La Perouse to Kingsford to interchange with the light rail takes about 25 minutes, then interchange time up to 8 minutes, then just over 30 minutes on the tram adds up to just over an hour. Metro to La Perouse would take about 20-25 minutes from Hunter Street, depending on number of stations.

The La Perouse line was the setting for one of Sydney's worst transport planning disasters. Here we see the first higher density development south of Kingsford in the late 1950s, newly completed and a tram set with appropriate capacity to service such development passing (Rob Caldwell photo):

Three years later these 110-220 passenger trams were replaced by 70 passenger buses and the feasibility of greater density of dwellings to house a growing population in this region evaporated. Even worse, the closure of the trams in 1961 happened just on the eve of the population tsunami of baby boomers and immigrants that hit the universities and tertiary colleges from 1965 onwards, having reached end-of-school age. Being part of that cohort, I well remember the crowding and the hopeless inadequacy of the buses, resulting in my fellow students, those that could, rushing off to buy cars and motor scooters which then crowded out the street parking for blocks around the university. 

What could have been if the Liberals had won the 1959 election:

So we had to wait another half-century, but then everything finally took off like a house on fire. Too good to last - 12 years later we got another do-nothing government and we're sitting here twiddling our thumbs while Rome burns under the onslaught of massive immigration. Been there, done that. What a time to (not) be alive.

Tony P