Sentenced to transportation

Until six weeks ago I was a Londoner and so considered it my patriotic duty to complain about public transport. This is a favourite pastime for Londoners: in fact the phrase normally used (with typically British hyperbolic self-denigration) is that London has a "third-world public transport system". This always baffled me. Quite apart from the fact that a lot of third-world cities don't have public transport systems at all (unless you count tro-tros), London's underground/overground/buses are overall astonishingly comprehensive, efficient and (if you've got an Oyster card) even pretty good value.

The contrast with Sydney is stark. My current address is in North Bondi, an inner suburb just a short walk from one of the country's premier tourist attractions. But, to quote an Australian friend who lives up the road, you can wind up feeling like you're spending your life on buses round here. It's a 10-20 minute bus journey to get to Bondi Junction interchange, from which there are six trains an hour to the centre of the city, which takes a further 10 minutes. If you're planning to meet someone in the centre of Sydney, you're best leaving at least 40 minutes to make it there on public transport, although by car it's just 20 minutes.



This is the reverse of what I'm used to. In London I can't understand why people drive at all: it usually takes longer to get anywhere by car than by walking or taking the tube or a bus. From a relatively central suburb of Sydney, I spend longer getting to the centre of town than I would spend travelling from what in London counted as the desert of Zone 3, so far out that only bold friends dared visit. The situation is even worse in western Sydney, where you must either be able to afford to run a car for each member of the family who wants to leave the house, or put up with a two-hour commute to get to even the most central places.

What is stranger still is that many Sydneysiders seem to actively dislike public transport, to the extent that plans a few years ago to extend the CityRail network to Bondi Beach were canned due to objections from residents. A CityRail stop, they argued, would bring the wrong sorts of people to their beach, and make it more like Cronulla, a more working-class beach with a train stop in southern Sydney. Oddly enough, you don't hear the last part of that argument from Bondites these days. Maybe because it sounds a bit too close to the position of the folk who decided to preserve the, ahem, unique character of Cronulla a few years back by beating up Lebanese-Australians.

The effect of having such a parlous public transport system is fairly predictable. Residents of New South Wales own more cars per head than people in any other state of Australia, and car numbers are rising faster than population numbers. With energy prices, not to mention carbon prices, likely to grow massively in the next few years, the absence of any serious attempt to improve public transport infrastructure is seriously worrying in a city expected to add 40 per cent to its population by 2036. But it's sadly predictable as well: whereas there is money to be made by the state government from waving through residential and commercial property developments, improving transport infrastructure (even under a public-private model) requires the government to take on at least some of the risk and cost.

At the moment, New South Wales politicians seem to have neither the money, nor the vision, nor the will to do anything about that. Sydneysiders, for their part, seem far too attached to their cars to push for change.