Icebergs and Wysiwyg: Why private road transport and rail public transport differ
Lachie – this post is somewhat in response to your post on smartpax about the Regional Rail Link.
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A great man once described his railway as 10% iron, but he had in mind a description that enforced the role of people in his business. Not a bad thing in the context of his time, and a way of focussing minds away from worries about the technology being the right thing.
And this is important – for example we see great feats being performed on the Queensland sugar network each year despite the 610mm gauge, and we see India or South Africa hauling large numbers of people on outdated suburban stock. We even see Japan keep perfectly satisfactory 1960s rollingstock performing to specification around the system despite its age. Technology will became the only limitation when you have the people and systems doing the work as they should.
However from an industrial point of view we still have one reservation about Clapp’s claim. Not to 10:90 ratio, but that the system is about being a system, rather than what customer it serves.
I’ve been reflecting on my recent post about incremental versus radical change and how the different interest groups lobby for improvements, and thought it wise to weave this story in with my other thoughts on how public transport meets, or could meet, people’s needs.
With a road network, it is hard to put a foot wrong with expansion. While the political system will always jockey over which improvement comes first, and while you do have some ‘path dependency’ for example, the Eastern corridor Wayne Goss once proposed for the Gold Coast freeway is probably gone for ever, at the end of the day it can be said that each expansion proposed: a) will be used b) can be joined up to another one and c) will meet someone’s needs, whether or not it meets the needs of the traffic you are trying to target.
And this is because road infrastructure is the most wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) of a transport network. In this case, very much 90% bitumen and concrete, and 10% everything else. The everything else namely rollingstock, scheduling, maintenance, operational labour to drive the rollingstock, insurance and other overheads, is supplied by the user. In an urban area, any freeway orientation, no matter how bizarre, is likely to help someone, and be bypassing somewhere.
Even Sydney’s cross-city tunnel is more affected by its lack of competitive tolling versus the free (but congested) option of driving through the city. So this is about financing capital, rather than the capital itself, being the problem. We may yet see this in Brisbane with Campbell Newman’s tunnels, that I gather are set at costs much higher than Brisbane people are used to paying.
For public transport, however, I suggest the iceberg diagram above. Clapp’s comment was very Fordist, with the idea that the railway was a self-perpetuating mechanism, that only needed people to keep it going, rather than any reference to whether it needed to be kept going to meet customer requirements.
And that, for many years, was how it was. Even as profit turned to cross-subsidy (profitable routes subsidising unprofitable ones) and then to pure subsidy (no profitable routes left) the goal of the political system was to keep the edifice going. Of course business managers should focus on winning new business but above their level it is not clear there a strategic rethink on how rail could meet the customer’s needs, rather than its own, until it was too late.
Focusing on urban transport, it is fascinating to see the Sydney Metro being built from the ground up. And this might sound somewhat counter intuitive, but I have chosen my words carefully. Even as an underground railway, it is being built from the ground up. And for all its billions in cost, it is again, only 10% iron.
The plan issued last week makes clear that of course the network depends for its existence on asset investment consistent of digging tunnels, laying track and acquiring rollingstock, but that it cannot be properly conceived without an understanding of what market it aims to serve.
And the identified routes give the game away fairly well.
The first is to beat road congestion. The routes shown tackle front and centre the most congested road routes in Sydney – Military Rd and the Spit from the NE, Victoria Rd from the NW, Parramatta Rd and M4 from the west, Anzac Pde from the south. The rest of the congested road routes are already served by Cityrail to a greater or lesser degree. To beat that it has explicitly identified times that are competitive with road as an objective. Unlike Cityrail, which, despite having clear corridors into the CBD, is not always able to achieve that, due to the complex environment that it has become.
This is why it has been disappointing to read in other places the poor level of understanding among even the rail enthusiast fraternity (who might be inclined to fetish their rail vehicle preferences rather than look at need).
Second, the service standard. Unlike your average expansion proposal on Cityrail or in Melbourne, this project comes with an explicit service standard of ‘turn up and go’. This will leave prospective riders in no doubt as to the convenience of this system over driving. This railway is unashamedly attracting the middle and upper middle class, who weave themselves very complex lifestyles and can’t count on reading a timetable at length to plan their lives. If work does finish at 7 or 8 or 9 and dinner starts at 10 in Pyrmont, then this is the sort of transport system that will meet their needs. Not the classic Cityrail which grew up with strict industrial working hours and an in-out service pattern.
The proposal has also been explicit about comfort – there won’t be any more than standing in an elevator but again for the target market, who tend to have travelled, that won’t be a problem. Every blog I’ve seen talking about overseas experiences with metros do not talk about the seats or the crush load – but rather how the system added value to the customer by taking them from one part of the city to another very quickly, like an elevator takes you from one floor to another quickly, without waiting too long.
The publications have not been explicit about cost to the user, but I tend to take a different view from most anyway. The system, by being simple and well used, should have direct operating costs to the user fairly low. The existing Cityrail fares over the same distances is probably a ceiling on what it could cost. They’ve taken away the fantasy of private funding so it should not be necessary to get hyper rents compared such as the Airport line.
And even the Airport line, I would suggest, does not suffer from high prices – it suffers from poor quality service. For all of what it costs from Mascot or Green Square, the disappointment is not the price, but that you get the bog-standard Cityrail service when you arrive at the platform face. And that you are constrained to the same old City Circle limitations when you emerge from the northern portal.
I would have no trouble paying $15 or more for a service from the airport terminals to the CBD of the standard of say HK or Tokyo, and the taxi argument is also a furphy – given that what again you are paying for is the convenience that a decent rail service could offer if it chose to. This is what is missing in most Australian rail proposals – what do I the customer want, and what I’m prepared to pay to get it. If people are prepared to pay approx $40 for a linehaul taxi to a CBD destination close to a rail station, that tells me people are prepared to pay a lot for the right service. And you only need to see the taxi queues at Sydney Airport to know this.
So I would be hopeful that the prices charged on the new metro reflect the cost (at a lower unit rate than Cityrail) and also represent value for money against parking, driving, tolls and so on on the same routes.
And the next part of a public transport system that people value is connectivity. I’m guessing that maybe the proposal was not as strong on this as is now being talked up – but a massive bus interchange at Rozelle is the right way to go. The combined bus-metro combo will save a good ten minutes each way off the bus only option, and will be more than competitive with driving on the same route. The more good, high frequency bus services linked into the metro through decent, legible interchanges the more both modes will benefit.
And of course the more the metro route network itself can be expanded, the better for its ridership as the network effect draws more people in.
On safety, while the urban area in general has a crime problem 3 things would encourage me about a metro system.
First, permanent staffing of fixed barriers at all stations, ensuring fare evaders (and ferals don’t pay their fare) aren’t permitted entry.
Second, that the system is envisaged to run at high capacity all day and night. Nothing like a crowd to deter the ferals from picking fights and causing trouble.
Third, the system will be new and encourage pride in its maintenance, unlike some parts of the Cityrail system that send the message that the state doesn’t care.
None of these things are a guarantee of no crime, and there is not much the operator can do to ensure the station entrances remain free of crime (maybe that speaks in favour of placing the Pyrmont station inside the Casino, where its security can do their job).
Finally reliability (which I will wrap into the concept of service standard) – a system like this should have little issue with reliability if it uses off-the-shelf equipment and it is looked after, and this will bolster its ridership as it competes not just with road but with the unreliable Cityrail network between Parramatta and Sydney. Those who value being at work on time will always opt to ride the metro.
To wrap up – rail (and all public) transport meets its objectives when it meets its value proposition – what the customer wants. The metros’ asset might be 90% of its cost but will only be 10% of its value – if the rest is not delivered then it will have been wasted money.
Because the proponents have made these points explicit, I have more confidence in the outcome than say any of the recent Victorian proposals – the Regional Rail Link, the South Morang extension or the Regional Fast Rail projects of this last decade. Or the City Loop before it, which was also well built but poorly defined.
And unlike road, where fetishing the asset is unavoidable because the asset is all it is, rail and public transport systems generally we should beware of fetishing the assets, because unless the whole package is right it will probably be the wrong solution.
you are not a fan of the RRL and yet you are only looking at one aspect of your value proposition.
in short – would Geelong customers prefer a timetable that states 80 minutes SXS to Geelong that is achieved (post RRL) or a timetable that states 70 minutes SXS to Geelong but the train leaves 15 minutes late and then takes 15 minutes extra on track running for 85 minutes and getting to Geelong 20 minutes after the RRL train would have?
reliability of service has often been shown to be a higher priority for PT users than the actual time of travel.
Now that isn’t to say that time isn’t important – but as stated I think the REAL time post RRL will be better than the current REAL time.
The other factor is that Vline will now be unashamedly allowed to add additional services. There are 12 services that arrive at SXS before 10am on weedays over 4 hours (5.57am arrival, to 9.53am arrival) if that was increased to 16 you go from a train every 20 minutes to every 15 minutes and the ‘lost 5 minutes’ of timetable delay is gained by the train being there 5 minutes more frequently.
further the RRL provides this benefit to Bendigo and Ballarat services as well as Bacchus Marsh/Melton services.
In the immediate term it will provide a train service to West Werribee (Manor Lakes) and in the longer term a train service to the broder Wyndham growth area = no Roweville style complaints about missing train lines.
further the metro network benefits from 20 extra train paths thanks to the removed Vline trains from shared tracks.
As with arguments over the Peninsula Link I think the real question with RRL is how will you spend $4 billion on other projects to provide such a broad range of benefits – such a broad range of additions to the value proposition. You could seperate all the lines in their current corridors and spend $10 billion. you could continue running Geelongs on shared trackage through werribee and upgrade the Altona junctions and teh Newport-Footscray but just fixing Newport Station/Melbourne Road overpass/Tottenham freight line merge would cost $1 billion.
yes this project doesn’t fix the biggest problem for hte Metro network – ie. too many line running into too few tracks in the inner core but that is supposed to be fixed by Metro One. Metro One mightn’t be a perfect proposal in itself but the argument on that proposal shouldn’t then draw in RRL. Get this one good project up and running and then have the argument over which lines, what route etc should be in the metro.
Great post. Apologies for the Sydney centric nature of my reply – it is where I feel most comfortable commenting.
I feel that we are actually getting some good transport decisions coming out of the NSW government and am greatly impressed by what I am seeing and hearing out of the new Sydney Metro Authority – ironically headed by Les Wielinga, previously head of the RTA.
Given this perception about what I am seeing and hearing, I am also quite optimistic about the new integrated transport agency formed in NSW (headed by the same Les Wielinga). I am apprehensive about him having roads under his control again as I don’t know if he will have the tendency to favour them, but I am hoping that his 6 months heading the Metro Authority will have given him a chance to be influenced by the very sensible bureaucrats and planners behind the Metro proposal, and to feel s sense of loyalty to the concept.
But this brings me back to the original post – what potential do you think the integrated transport agency has to correct some previous projects – i.e. retrospectively implement the ‘other 90%’.
I ask this with a specific piece of infrastructure in mind – the North West Transitway. This was delivered by the RTA, and engineering wise is fine and had quite a large potential. I won’t make any judgements about the decision to build it in the first place, since I don’t know what alternatives were proposed, but being delivered by the RTA means that their focus was simply on laying the road.
The problem, however, is that it is under used and has next to no bus priority (this was removed late in the project on the promise of a new, Sydney wide satellite based bus priority system). With an integrated transport agency, I am hoping for this to be corrected. This has potential to enhance to the network effect of the West Metro – alone the North West transitway is only really good for people travelling to Parramatta and Westmead (ignoring for now the Blacktown leg), and maybe some destinations nearby, as the City bound alternative of a direct bus from Rouse Hill is probably quicker.
The smaller target market results in the Ministry of Transport getting away with ridiculously low frequencies for a dedicated busway, which in turn obviously impact the ability to attract new patronage.
The connection to the West Metro at Westmead is going to result in a 27 minute second leg between there and Central (a few minutes more for further into the CBD) – combined with a 25 minute journey from Rouse Hill to Westmead (with some improvements in priority – currently it takes 30 minutes) – if a 5 minute frequency was implemented on the transitway all of a sudden you have an end to end turn-up-and-go journey time of about 1 hour – certain better than the current bus by about 20 minutes, and I dare say competitive with driving. All of a sudden an underutilised strip of pavement is being used and improving travel times to the North West.
Then (and I am going off on a tangent here) you may get some psychological effect where people are travelling to the city faster, but they are also travelling via the employment hubs of Parramatta and Olympic Park. Suddenly when they are looking for jobs they start to broaden their search thinking ‘I could be at work half an hour quicker if I worked at Parramatta, or 15 minutes earlier if I worked at Olympic Park’. This is why I support (really on a tangent now) any northern beaches metro line going via Chatswood and North Sydney, and would like to see more lines focused on Parramatta.
I’m not going to go through in detail but you can take what I mention above when discussing the NW Transitway and apply it also to the Cityrail Cumberland line using the Y link – increasing frequencies between Campbelltown – Blacktown (and beyond) based on the improved connectivity to the City – Olympic Park etc now available out of Parramatta.
I guess the overall question is – When new projects are completed, is enough effort put into going back and re-examining other related pieces of infrastructure to see what improvements can be made to enhance the overall network effect, and therefore multiply the benefits? I have seen a few mentions of ‘reconfiguring the existing transport network around the Metro’ in documents on the Sydney Metro website, so I believe that in the case of the Metro this is at least the intention – but certainly in the past this has probably not happened.
An excellent post and my best effort is only to relate it a bit to “Marketing 101″. (And I mean marketing in the true “4P” and “7P” sense, not just sales and promotion.)
Australian Railways are not the only businesses that were once “stars”, then for many decades “cash cows”, but which have since slipped into becoming “dead horses”. It’s a common fate for many organisations that are sales oriented (“This is what we do, so buy it!”) rather than market oriented (“This is what you want, so we supply it!”). In the commercial world of course, a persistent sales orientation is a formula for eventual extinction. In the public sector, however, great traditional enterprises can often linger on life support almost indefinitely.
There’s often a tendency to confuse the physical product with its amenity for the customer. One of the classic examples is the case of manufacturers of ice boxes when refrigerators were developed. Those who kept on making superb quality ice boxes no longer exist. Those who understood that the customer really just wanted a gadget that conveniently kept things cold and switched to making refrigerator prospered. Apple arguably had a better product than IBM and its clones, but almost died on the judgement that what was valued was the hardware rather than the software. Apple’s subsequent realisation that it’s not so much the hardware or the software, but what it can do to entertain, communicate, inform and create (preferably from anywhere) that is probably its salvation.
The heroes of yesterday become the tyrants of tomorrow unless they crucify and resurrect themselves today (Joseph Campbell). And so it goes with corporations. Unless they have a clear idea of what their customers actually value and constantly search for (sometimes utterly different) new ways of not just satisfying but delighting their customers, then they are doomed to, at best, mediocrity, and at worst, oblivion.
If and when Metros are running, and running well in Sydney, my hope is that one of their effects will be to cause Cityrail to really rethink how it operates and for them to become a commuter rail system of which we and all their employees can be glowingly proud. I know quite a few of their employees are clever kids. Lets pray enough of them stay with it long enough to make that transformation.
Thanks to all
Lachie- we’ve got two posts going on different forums but the same topic so I’ll keep it brief on this one.
I disagree my plans would cost more than current figures, in fact a lot, lot less. Most of my suggested changes, as I’ve posted, are tiny but significant in what they could achieve.
I have argued that the 1982 Werribee line would do the trick if the rest of the complications were removed. And that would be basically putting Willy and Altona on full time shuttles, and either giving Werribees exclusive use of the Northern Loop, or taking them out of the Northern Loop.
And that’s the rub. Remove the complications. The political overlays. The City Loop suffered from this and I’m not convinced anything has changed.
Lachie, the Melbourne plan is like the cigarette smoker saying he’ll quit after the next packet. Sydney, on the other hand, has thrown the packet away, and lost the address to the shop. Doesn’t mean they will never extend Cityrail again, but adopting a metro system rather than Cityrail means that can’t:
-nominate one metro service as the “River” and send it up to Wyong, cutting across three other services to do so
-run incoherent and unpredictable express patterns
-try to save money by not running services, unlike the Cityrail service where they can go from 15 minute frequencies to 30 minute frequencies, to save money while alienating the passenger base
-muck around with the internal fitout of the trains for political reasons, they will be buying off the shelf
-write a non-standard spec for the rollingstock to favour local suppliers, as the off-the-shelf product will be at best assembled here from foreign designs, but typically a few cars will be delivered whole from overseas.
See Lachie, that is the key message – Australian rail is fundamentally rotten to the core, and misconceived from the start, and the only way out is to do a complete reconception.
I’ll try to do a more detailed RRL post on smartpax where it might be of interest to exclusively Melbourne posters.
Greg, thanks for your comment and no I don’t mind Sydney centric – given Melbourne people are well catered for. Other states, particularly Adelaide would be good to hear from you!
You’ve given a lot of info about the NW Transitway I didn’t know, which is great. Certainly a consistent sub-60 minute journey from Rouse Hill to Central using the bus-metro combo will be an excellent and reliable way of doing it.
And I have more confidence in this than either via Riverstone or the mooted NWRL which would have been fine as far as Chatswood but patch further in – at least until capacity issues at Town Hall and North Sydney has been fixed.
But the bus-metro combo gives the opportunity to have a reliable sevrice from day 1.
And you’re point about revisiting old investments is an important one. Look across the system now and see how many past investments could be made to spectacularly improve with a small change or two.
Oldfart, thanks for your comment. I’m glad you’ve brought marketing into it as that was where I was going with it. Henry Ford’s “you can have any colour you like, as long as it is black.”
Some people would retort, well beggars can’t be choosers yet I would say we only have ‘beggars’ because of the Fordist, Stalinist predict and provide rail system doesn’t meet people’s needs, hence the large amount of driving.
Few gunzels grasp that if PT’s modal share of work journeys went from say 10% to 20%, it would represent:
-doubling of the current patronage
-strain existing systems at the seams
-move the system towards cost recovery
-hardly impact on the road network, that had gone from 90% to 80%
and the tools for achieving this increase in network productivity are infront of us – not requiring billlions and billions (though well targeted, they could help!)
All you need to do is work out what people actually want, then provide that, not what history or politics dictate should be provided, as represents 150 years of Australian rail history!
Just a comment for Lachie and Meej, if he’s reading it
I think a blindspot for some rail enthusiast commentators is to write off the hype around the regional fast rail as just “politicians being politicians” yet I don’t think some realise just how serious the damage to the political system, and its interface with transport planning, this sort of dangerous and wilful spinning and lying is.
This is partly why announcements like South Morang, Tarneit and so on go down like lead balloons. And then the pollies get frustrated and say “see railways don’t generate votes” but its nothing to do with the railways – its broken promises and lies that don’t generate votes.
Riccardo, you’ve finally convinced me that arguing about whether they should be saving the Metro Pitt corridor is wasted breath, and that the metro is a good idea.
Did you see the quote from the PTA about dropping the Whitfords shuttle off-peak? “Other than a couple of heavily-patronised inner lines in North Sydney, nowhere in Australia is there a rail line with better than 15-minute frequencies off-peak – many go out to 30 minutes.
On this basis alone, without taking into account the current significant shortfall in demand, Transperth does not expect the change to result in a drop in patronage.” Accepting mediocrity.
I think Adelaide people hang out on Sensational-Adelaide so you might do some advertising there.
Ricc,
Can I say I agree with you in principle. If we could throw away 150 years of ‘learning’ and go back to first principles we could probably improve practices across Australia’s rails networks.
But in the real world you can’t just throw all of that away. If you were to become premier of NSW or Victoria would you simply sack the entire Departments of Transport employ experts from overseas/academia etc unilaterally approve a $100 million timetable renewal project (that could never have a business case approved for it) and then announce the Victorian/NSW ‘Clearways 2 (or is it 3)’ project that will cost in excess of $1 billion and ultimately result in 15-20% of rail passengers feeling like they’ve got a REDUCED level of service because you’ve stopped Glen Waverley trains or Upfield trains running through the loop? None of that is politically feasible and probably not practically feasible either. Even if you don’t sack everyone are you as premier just going to decree from on high that you know better than all the beurocrats in DOT and/or the train operator?
Sydney’s metro proposals are a great Vision that will cost $20 billion but will they ever get off the ground? will they ever carry as much traffic as CityRail? what is the value of the existing network that is being laid fallow for the metro project?
If we don’t accept that we need to work within the confines of a political world then all of hte posts on these sorts of forums should be subtitle ‘fantasy rail proposal’.
Change needs to come incrementally in this environment. That is why we should commend Connex for taking Werribee out of the loop. Why Cityrail/NSW government should be shot for abandoning clearways. Why we need to Hope that MTR has a few tricks up there sleave to untangle the network. And why we we need to accept that getting any PT project off the ground is a positive step forward.
In the Melbourne context my last comment relates to:
Laverton/Westall short starts – good projects that will allow the simplified service patterns of stoppers from there and expresses from further out.
South Morang – a political project that brings the train 3km closer to a growth area and despite its ridiculously high estimate will include a series of ‘bits and pieces’ upgrades on Epping and Hurstbridge lines that will improve the service on both for 20 million pax per year (made the figure up but you get the poitn).
RRL – new train corridor implemented with urban growth, separates all regional trains from metro trains, creates 20 extra train paths from the west, improved reliability for all services
Metro One – still time to lobby for the ‘right’ metro project but in principle it creates an extra track pair for east and west growth areas and fixes one of hte biggest bottlenecks in Melbourne.
These projects are about building momentum in Melbourne for rail transport. a chain of rail projects that complement each other and lead to further projects in the same way that for the last 40 years VicRoads has done the same thing with road projects. Celebrate it don’t PTUA it and try to tear each project down.
Thanks Lachie
As I’ve said in the other place – I haven’t aimed to present my thoughts as advocacy, nor do I regard them as dribbling for the simple reason that I’ve tried my best to ground my proposals in the theory.
As for the Cityrail system, you’ve asked what I value it at. The answer is “not much” sorry to say. I’ve suggested previously that from the constitutent corridors of Cityrail you could build a decent system, also modelled on metro principles.
And you would be that much closer to being able to do so in Cityrail because multitrack is more abundant (meaning you could reserve a pair for metro services without blocking other service types) and also because the urban density is higher, meaning the patronage and therefore cost recovery will be there from day 1. Again, my thoughts on the subject derive from theory – I’m not sure how I could influence NSW politics even if I wanted to.
As for my thoughts of what is possible in the real political world, I start from the proposition that if it is done in one Australian state you stand an odds-on chance of doing it in the others. We’re not talking Sweden or Japan here – only if it works in Sydney or Perth, it might work in Melbourne. If it works in Adelaide, then Auckland might give it a try.
BTW I haven’t said the whole RRL project is misconceived. From DPW to the city makes perfect sense and I support this. Having any sort of rail service to Wyndham Vale rather than none is also not a bad thing. And having car sheds beyond the Werribee area is also something I support. So I will congratulate them for doing those things.
And for South Morang, albeit the price tag is very high at least it will begin to sort out some of the constraint on the Epping line.
And running Laverton-Westall shorts is a reasonable idea, though I wonder how long till they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on this one.
And sorry for the extra post, but just a couple of (with respect) strawmen showing through in your last post.
I don’t think it is self-evident that ‘throwing away 150 years’ is a dictatorial act, if anything NSW doing that right now with the Sydney Metro is a sign that even a weak and broken political system can surprise us by getting it right.
I suspect it is actually because that politico-transport system literally reached ‘the end of the line’ and realised that Cityrail could no longer continue the way it was.
If the same bureaucrats (and I’m not just talking planning bureaucrats, but also operations types) had come back with the same basic rollingstock as Cityrail, same operating patterns, same industrial agreements, same approach to treating the customer like dirt…then it wouldn’t work, no matter how much money you through at the problem.
And if that’s the solution in Sydney, why not in Melbourne?
Just had an interesting browse through the forums on the Sydney Metro website. They’re sort of electronic focus groups about various aspects of the design of the system and seem to be attracting contributions from ‘normal’ people, many of whom relate their suggestions to their experiences with overseas metros.
Thanks Oldfart
I have no doubt that once work starts the metro will start harvesting goodwill from the more educated and mobile of Sydney’s population, who will relate the project directly to what they see overseas (and which they can’t do with Cityrail)
The hostile media coverage at present relates to the life-expired ALP government.
I’ll give you my reading of what happened – I’d be interested in others views.
Carr did not stand up to Costa and his cutting, and the Parramatta-Chatswood line suffered massive cost overruns, justifying cutting it to the Epping section (a curious parallel to the Bondi-Kingsford experience too)
Iemma panicked as all the broken promises came in, and pushed for the Rouse Hill line, but with (naturally) the same Cityrail operating model. Concern was voiced in Treasury and elsewhere that it was one more pit to through money into for no return, as Cityrail was irredeemable.
Iemma then pushed for a metro model, but argued for it to go out to Norwest. The incredible expense was not something that could be sustained, and Albo was pushing for a western line instead.
Rees came along and was confronted with several realities. The transport bureaucracy pointed out that the system would collapse if the CBD section was not built, and that it might as well go as far NW as the government could afford to build without Albo’s support.
Then the Western section has been developed as a lightening rod to see if Albo’s money is forthcoming. None of this was ready before the federal budget which made it a laughing stock; but the material is starting to come in during the last week or 2.
So we are left with a project that looks like rational policy developed within the bureaucracy, but a bit like Monty Python’s Black Knight, the arms and legs have been hacked off so we only have the funded ‘centre’ of a metro network, but at least it is the highest priority bit.
And they seem to be hoping the balance of the system might sit there on the books, waiting for better times.