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As a former resident of Sydney, this will change nothing. Sydney is fucked because of a number of interrelated circumstances, none of which are easy to change:
by jlangenauer 9y ago
As a former resident of Sydney, this will change nothing. Sydney is fucked because of a number of interrelated circumstances, none of which are easy to change:
- The first is its geography. The harbour is a giant wall through a big part of the city, with only a few chokepoints where people can cross. These are congested, and constrain the entire road and rail transportation network. The Pacific ocean constrains growth to the east, the blue mountains to the West, and the national park to the south. The only growth corridors are towards the southwest, and northwest - a long, long way from the CBD.
- It's not nearly dense enough. Australians love their free-standing houses, both the McMansions in the new suburbs, and the trendy terraces in the inner city, beloved by Baby Boomers who have a convenient lifestyle while living in an "urban village" - of course, they all bought back in the 90s when it was still affordable. These two types of housing make it incredibly inefficient to build a workable rail public transport network, so a lot of the PT is forced to use busses, which are not as popular, and suffer from the same congestion at the chokepoints as well as the additional car traffic from everyone who isn't well-served by PT. This is a lot of people.
- Any attempts to build higher density housing, particularly in the sainted inner suburbs will be met with cries of "Over-development", even by people who should know better such as the Greens.
I moved to Berlin a few years ago, and it's a comparable city in size to Sydney (3.5m vs around 5m in Sydney). It works far better because it's far denser, and the level of infrastructure provided makes living here a breeze by comparison. Berlin came of age before the motor car, and was geographically constrained for quite a period there by an actual wall. Sydney really started to grow just as the car become popular and widely-owned.
- claudius 9y agoBerlin also has the advantage of only becoming a large single city in the 1920s. Beforehand, there was "Berlin proper" and a number of cities nearby nearly equally large and locally equally relevant (e.g. Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf and Spandau in the west, Köpenick in the southeast and Lichtenberg in the east). Due to there being no cars, travel between those cities was impractical on a daily basis up until the rise of mass transport. This lead to these cities setting up their own city centres with residential areas formed around those city centres. After extension of the city of Berlin in 1921, this lead to it having many "city centres" around which life was formed in a similar way Sydney attempts to achieve now by this artificial after-the-fact split. I’m doubtful it’ll be successful.
- jlangenauer 9y agoThe same thing happened in Sydney - Parramatta was a separate town until (I'm guessing here) the 1850s or so, Camden was until recently a separate town, but it's being swallowed up by the outwards expansion of Sydney.
- mixmastamyk 9y agoSounds just like Los Angeles, minus the harbor.