No thanks Dudley, we've learnt our lesson! They can't do trams properly in
NSW and signs are they never will be able to again. Management of the
construction process may (hopefully) get better as a result of expensive
lessons learned, but I can't see operational design and operation improving
anytime soon. There are too many issues inhibiting that.

After a taste of the costs and consequences on CSELR, I'd say the
government has gone off anything much after Parramatta and the focus will
be on metro from now on. In any case, they've really built - or are
currently building - all of the basic tram lines that were needed. We may
possibly see the Newcastle line extended westward to somewhere and CSELR
may be extended to Maroubra Junction to meet up with the SE metro. I think
from there it would not be difficult (even for this mob) to extend to
Coogee and Maroubra Beaches, but that would be a very long way down the
priority list and would mean a miserably slow journey to and from town
compared to the present bus services. In Sydney, the longer the distance a
tram line goes, the worse the service gets and the lack of seats naturally
exacerbates this. They're best for short distance, high-volume,
high-turnover work where their slowness is not so critcal. With metro it's
the opposite - the further you go, the better it gets.

The main issue from a street transit perspective is to take the load off
the buses on the major corridors where they were overstressed from the time
they took over from the gen2 trams in 1960-61. However, the trams that
replace these buses have to be a value-added benefit in journey time (and
comfort) and we can see the disaster that has unfolded in terms of the
original objective to replace the buses on the SE corridors: buses have had
to be retained to serve the northern CBD and it remains to be seen how the
rest of the buses will reduced to interchanging without a major public
backlash. The only answer to this is to extend the metro system (which will
take some years in terms of queuing priorities) and gradually cut back the
buses on major corridors to a feeder role. For example, in the very long
term, I can see a metro line being built through the Mosman and Warringah
peninsulas.

The problem of Bondi capacity could be addressed by converting the ESR to a
metro line and linking it to a converted Airport line to rectify the
mistake they made making it part of the Campbelltown line (they've already
started looking at the latter). In that case, it wouldn't be too hard, with
the current advances in tunnelling, to do a single station extension to
Bondi Beach, with buses only having to pick up the intermediate traffic.
The government's transport planning brains have been working through all of
these possible solutions and there would be a very long queue for them to
be realised, at a cost of many billions if that money was still available.
However, trams, which have a particular niche to fill, aren't going to
figure largely in the overall picture. The advantages of metro with its
relative ease of contruction and lack of disruption, its automation and its
high average speed which is very significant in a spread-out city like
Sydney, have become overwhelming. Sydney's gen 3 tram revolution has come
and almost gone and it's basically a very good thing and justified where it
has happened, but its implemention needs a big improvement when the current
contracts are turned over in the late 2030s before any further lines are
seriously considered.

Tony P

On Friday, May 22, 2020 at 12:18:56 PM UTC+10, Dudley wrote:
>

> I suspect that many NSW members would like to comment on this. How about

> a tram link from Moore Park via Oxford St and College St to Elizabeth St?

>

>

>

> Regards

>

>

>

> Dudley

>