The Sydney City Circle underground stations are woefully under-designed for
the work they have to do nowadays. All those who used to say that we need
to revive Bradfield's ideas (their voices have died out lately) needed to
bear in mind that Bradfield was planning for a city of two million people.
Now we're planning for a city of eight million people plus. The double
deckers will continue to get by if some of the pressure is taken off their
system to enable them to operate more efficiently. This is why the
Bankstown line is being taken out of the system (in addition to it being
needed for the Liverpool connection) - in order to ease some of the main
overloaded choke points in the system. There won't be so much fuss about
double deck trains when some of this pressure is off. They'll be fine for
what they do. I rode between Waterfall and Central today. They're slow,
artificially so to a large degree, and the stairs make for difficult
internal access and circulation, but they do the basic job. One train was a
Tangara with fixed seats. I was amused to observe that, as typical in NSW,
the forward-facing seats were filled first!

In terms of sheer volume or density, it is interesting to note in figures
mentioned by Daniel (and adjusted to pre-virus) that the Sydney Metro is
moving about 1,800 people per km per day; Sydney suburban about 1,200
people per km per day; Perth about 960 people per km per day and Melbourne
about 680 people per km per day. Brisbane and Adelaide are fairly miniscule
by comparison. There are numerous factors at play in comparisons.

Tony P