There's a good feeder bus network in The Hills now. The main problem is that it seems to me that they didn't anticipate that there'd be a large demand for the metro from the Hawkesbury region and that they assumed that people from that region would simply continue using the Richmond line. Well they didn't. Right from day one they went for the metro en masse and patronage on the Richmond line fell. There were virtually no buses connecting the Hawkesbury region to the metro as they were all directed to the Richmond line, so naturally people drove to the metro at Tallawong and Kellyville, obviously overflowing the car parks which are never adequate, nor should they be, provided that there are adequate feeder buses.
Also part of the problem is that the metro was not extended to connect with the Richmond line at Schofields. This is still in the longer-term planning.
Regarding Peter's comment on the capability of the government agencies, Sydney Metro is a sub-agency of Transport for New South Wales which is in general (with the occasional glitch) a capable successor to the NSWGR and DRTT. Sydney Metro was highly praised by the recent Independent Review into Metro West and is fortunate to be managing a railway system that's completely independent of the suburban railway system and line-separated and thus not prone to the problems that chronically beset the latter, no matter how much money has been poured into it over the years. The reason that the public has gone for the metro so strongly is that they've become weary of the chronic failures and unreliability of the suburban system, as well as its slowness and poorer frequencies. The hope is that, by converting and taking over a couple of critical suburban lines (Epping-Chatswood and Sydenham-Bankstown), the metro (M1) will take a lot of pressure off the suburban system and enable it to perform better, especially close to Sydney city. Metro West will also relieve the capacity problems of the Western Line.
Tony P
On Monday 16 September 2024 at 21:50:56 UTC+10 Geoff Olsen wrote:
Regarding feeder buses I was referring to the outer end which I have been lead to believe has been suffering from a lack of both feeder buses and commuter car parking almost from day one. I live at the opposite end of Sydney so I do have personal experience.
I was in Canberra a couple of weeks ago visiting relatives and although I did not get a chance to ride the new tramway I did hear something interesting. It would appear that the opening of the tram line resulted in the cancelation of some bus routes that are nowhere the trams. Other than accost cutting exercise I cannot see a valid reason for this.
Geoff O.
From: 'TP' via TramsDownUnder [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, 16 September 2024 4:05 PM
To: TramsDownUnder
Subject: Re: [TramsDownUnder] Sydney Metro: 5 million passengers in first month.
We won't know the exact amount of transfer of patronage from NSL until full calendar month statistics are available, but there are also a lot of new users. Huge demand for car parking further out. As far as I know, most northside bus services that ran to the city have been diverted to the metro.