General thoughts on transport in Sydney

I’m writing this post on the plane coming back from Sydney to Auckland (will obviously post it later than this though). It gives me a bit of an opportunity to put together some thoughts on Sydney’s transport system. Many people say that Sydney is like Auckland’s big brother: there are many similarities like the harbour, the bridge, the tower, the natural beauty and so forth. In that sense, Sydney could offer something of a guide to how Auckland could be in the future – if the estimates of Auckland’s rapidly growing population prove true (although I’m not sure whether Auckland’s ever likely to end up with a population of 4 million or more).

I certainly caught a large number of buses and trains over the past week, and a ferry to Taronga Zoo and back. Interestingly, I must say that the bus system impressed me more than the rail system. Obviously Sydney’s rail system is extensive and makes many of the outer suburbs logical places to live – but the rail system felt a bit tired, neglected and over-used. In some respects I was frequently reminded of the New York subway system when catching the train in Sydney – particularly Town Hall and Wynyard Stations have a distinctly similar design – that the system is incredibly well used, very extensive and very effective, but struggles to stay still let alone continually improve itself in the way a rail system really does need to.

I suppose that the problem with upgrading a rail system is the cost, and the time it takes. As comments on a previous post suggested, Sydney has an incredible history of rail projects that were scaled back or didn’t go ahead. There seems to be a growing acceptance that Sydney will need to dramatically increase its rail capacity to the city centre in the future – and it will be interesting to see if that happens, how much it costs, and what the timeframes for rolling it out are.

By contrast, improvements to the bus system can often be made very cheaply and quickly – through measures such as enabling faster boarding, improving bus priority, having legible routes and operating decent frequencies outside the peak hours. In general, I was pretty impressed by what Sydney has done when it comes to its buses – generally through measures that would be fairly inexpensive and quick to implement. Here are some things that particularly impressed me:

• Fast boarding. Sydney has done a lot to make boarding buses quick – with the most obvious being your ability to validate your ticket without having to interact with the driver. 20 people could often load onto a bus in barely a minute, streaming on in two lines and using both the “green boxes” to quickly validate their tickets. Auckland should benefit from this when smart-card ticketing is rolled out over the next year. Further to this, many of the busiest inner-city stops operate as “pre-pay only” during busy times, meaning that everyone needs to only validate their ticket and the bus isn’t held up by people paying cash. Over time it may be useful to roll something similar out in Auckland – although obviously only when boarding via the smart-gate creates a significant time advantage: often paying by cash at the moment is faster than the exceedingly slow-loading go-rider passes!
• Bus priority. I must say I was very impressed by the extensiveness of the bus lanes that operate in Sydney, and the hours of operation for them. Main bus thoroughfares like George Street and Elizabeth Street seemed to have bus lanes of very high quality, both in terms of their length and their hours of operation. This made a massive difference to bus travel times. As I have said many times before, extending bus lanes is the quickest and cheapest way of vastly improving public transport, we need to challenge politicians who say they support public transport to get in behind significantly improving our system of bus lanes: nothing else can quickly and cheaply improve Auckland’s PT system so dramatically.
• Route legibility. In terms of making it simple for people to find their bus in the city centre, I thought Sydney scored reasonably well. Buses beginning with a “4” seemed to run up George Street before heading to western suburbs. Buses beginning with a “3” ran up Elizabeth Street before heading to eastern suburbs. Instead of having very few inner city stops, with most people getting on at one or two places (like Auckland does, causing massive bus congestion) the main streets in Sydney’s city centre seemed to have a large number of stops and therefore the boarding/alighting is more spread out and the buses don’t seem to congest as much. Where Sydney possibly doesn’t perform quite so well is on the general route legibility, with a number of bus routes seeming to take a fairly long-winded and confusing path to their destination. Both routes I caught regularly (the 343 and the 301 for anyone that knows) seemed to be fairly higgledy-piggledy – at least in part.
• Decent off-peak frequencies. While of course I’m sure there are many bus routes in Sydney that suffer from the same problems as Auckland – extremely poor off-peak frequencies, I was impressed by the level of bus provision inter-peak, and during weekends (something I commented on earlier). There’s always a bit of “chicken and egg” when it comes to providing off-peak frequencies: the demand is unlikely to exist until you provide a decent enough service.

Overall, I think what I will take away from the trip (and I was only there for a few days and didn’t have too many opportunities to look at things in much detail) is that focusing on small and relatively cheap things – like measures to speed up boarding, measures to improve bus priority and measures to ensure an easy understanding of where to catch the bus – can make a big difference. In a decently run public transport system all these little things are constantly fine-tuned and improved. It doesn’t cost much money, it just takes some effort on behalf of the agency running the transport system.

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