Olympic Corridor part 4: renewal area map released by NSW Planning

The NSW Department of Planning placeholder (mentioned in Part 2 of this blog) finally has a link.

On it is a map showing Parramatta joined to the Olympic peninsular and to Rhodes in a dashed line.  Interestingly, the dashed line goes up to Rydalmere and Dundas and then ends there, and also the dashed line includes Strathfield train station.  What's missing?  Some precincts being renewed as part of UrbanGrowth's New Parramatta Road project.

The combination of Parramatta to the Olympic corridor within one dashed renewal area that also includes Westmead is all pointing towards the rumoured Parramatta-Olympic-Strathfield light rail route, with an extension west to Westmead via Cumberland hospital grounds and also a spur line running to Rhodes/Wentworth Point and also another spur line running along the Carlingford heavy rail corridor, likely ending at Carlingford.

Olympic Corridor part 3: High bus patronage = not white elephant!

Hills Shire and Parramatta City Council claim that the Olympic Park light rail route would be a "white elephant" for the 300 days per year when there are no special events.  Well, someone must have forgotten to tell TfNSW that.

With over 1600ha of potential urban renewal area, Olympic Park has barely begin the scratch the surface of it's long term potential, and yet already it has very high bus use intensity.  To get an idea of the size of how big 1600ha is, it is bigger than the sum of all of the following put together: Macquarie Park corridor (300ha), Norwest (200ha), Green square (20ha), Bays Precinct (80ha), and Sydney CBD + Redfern corridor (300ha).  Even throwing in North Sydney, Chatswood and St Leonards and the Olympic Park corridor is still bigger.  This 1600ha is located near the geographic centre of Sydney, with underutilised green and open space and riverfrontage.  It's weakness that has prevented it realising all this potential has been insufficient rail transport services, with a Lidcombe rail shuttle being the only weekday access service.

Last week, over 300 new bus services were initiated by TfNSW between Strathfield and Olympic park, accounting for all the additional bus services in the Inner West and nearly half of all new bus services added across Sydney:



Patronage of Strathfield to Olympic Park bus services is now so high during weekdays, that in peak hour buses services are running every 3-5 minutes.  In contrast, Parramatta to Macquarie Park station has only one half the bus frequency of Strathfield to Olympic Park, with patronage only sufficient to justify direct bus services every 10 minutes:

Parramatta Council and Hills Shire should come clean and acknowledge they are just advocating for their residents in Carlingford rather than being truly concerned about getting transport working effectively Sydney-wide.  Strathfield to Olympic Park has double the bus use intensity of Parramatta to Macquarie Park, and light rail conversion should focus on routes where bus use intensity is highest.  Claims about "white elephants" are lies and hyperbole.

Olympic Corridor part 2: Dept Planning to announce further priority precincts?

At present, there have been two announced Olympic Corridor priority precincts: Wentworth Point and Carter St.  However, a new web page on the www.planning.nsw.gov.au website currently only has a place-holder and does not link through to these two announced priority precincts:

Olympic Corridor part 1: Strathfield light rail terminus

It appears Parramatta-Olympic Park-Strathfield is the preferred Western Sydney light rail route, with possible formal announcement of this in the upcoming NSW Budget.

Interchange with Strathfield would be crucial to the efficiency of the eastern end of the light rail line, so how could it work?  First, let's look at existing Strathfield council plans for bus interchange at Strathfield station.  Buses essentially will enter into an underground complex, with buses comprising the middle level of the complex (an underground concourse connecting the station to Strathfield Plaza is situated above and a commuter park and ride is situated below):

Could the light rail also enter the interchange at the same level as the buses?  Probably not.  The bus interchange is located on the southern side of Strathfield station whereas light rail will approach from the north (and may not even get as far as the station).  At the northern side of the station, Leicester Ave is the major road and unfortunately there is significant conflict between pedestrian access to the station and through-traffic.  Leicester Ave comes to a round-about which occupies a valley which permits Leicester Ave to thread beneath the railway line.  I've previously envisaged a pedestrian only green open space being built over this roundabout, to separate out pedestrians walking to the station from cars driving through:

Parking Levy policy and Urban Amenity

The previous post advocated inclusion of Macquarie Park into the Parking Levy Act list of leviable districts.  It is an anomaly of history and the recency of the development of Macquarie Park that has resulted in it being the one major Sydney employment centre which is not subject to the levy.

Competitive Neutrality
In contrast, North Sydney is subjected to the highest tier levy of $2200 per parking space per year yet it is broadly comparable to Macquarie Park in terms of quantum of office space and employment intensity (approximately 800,000sqm each):

The Sydney CBD is the other Tier 1 district.  A Tier 2 rate of $800 per year applies to smaller employment centres like Bondi Junction, Parramatta and Chatswood.  North Sydney and Macquarie Park are competing centres for office based, knowledge worker employment and it is a distortion of the competitive playing field if North Sydney is subject to the Tier 1 rate whilst Macquarie Park is left out all together.  The absence of a levy on Macquarie Park has resulted in higher returns to property owners and consequently higher levels of development at Macquarie Park, at the expense of of Parramatta, Chatswood and North Sydney.  As seen in the above table, the rent per square metre at Macquarie Park remains significantly below these other centres partly because of it's exemption from the parking space levy, which at a parking ratio of 1 parking space per 40sqm office space would be $56sqm (at the Tier 1 levy rate).  Hence, the addition of the parking levy would result in Macquarie Park's rents rising from 321psqm to approximately 380psqm, bringing it closer to it's nearest competitors at Chatswood and St Leonards.

The migration of office employment away from Chatswood, St Leonards and North Sydney and to Macquarie Park in the past two decades has been to the detriment of public transport use, because (as seen in the previous post), Macquarie Park has rail mode share one half to one third of these competing employment centres.  It is also not a surprising correlated finding that the arterial roads in Macquarie Park are some of the most congested in Sydney.  So there are important wider public interests in ensuring competitive neutrality.

One concern would be the adverse impact on Macquarie Park property owners.  This could be ameliorated by offering them a higher degree of mixed use development rights (as much of Macquarie Park is currently zoned for commercial development only, which has lower profitability than residential development).  Again this will bring Macquarie Park onto a neutral playing field with other North Shore centres, where commercial development does have to compete to a greater extent against residential uses, and which are seeing high levels of residential conversion as a result.

Use of Proceeds to form Public-Private partnerships
There are approximately 30,000 off street parking spaces in the Macquarie Park corridor (not including the further 5000 parking spaces within Macquarie University grounds).   Applying the Tier 2 rate to Macquarie Park would raise about $24 million per annum, or applying the Tier 1 rate would raise about $66 million per annum.  These amounts are not insignificant, as $24 million is sufficient to service interest on an investment of $800 million (assuming 3%pa interest), and $66 million is sufficient to service interest on an investment of $2.2 billion... either sum could provide very significant infrastructure, including a light rail line from Parramatta to Macquarie Park.

This could either be done through a form of public-private partnership or by a debt guarantee provided by State or Federal government (that is repaid from the parking levy proceeds).  According to TfNSW, the Inner West Light Rail extensions and enhancements, the Southwest Rail Link and bus T-ways were amongst the projects funded through the parking space levy in the past:

Project Contribution to Southwest Rail Link	Contribution $38.53
Light Rail Extension to Lilyfield	$16.00m
Contribution towards the North - West Transitway	$50.00m
Jubilee Park Boardwalk Access and Remediation of Light Rail under bridges and viaducts	$4.14m

Rail patronage stats: Opal and Parkling Levy Implications

The Bureau of Transit Statistics last month released it's latest train travel stats package.  The headline conclusion from TfNSW's media release was that March 2015 overcrowding had been reduced despite an additional 6 million journeys to 310 million.  However, more interesting was the data on station barrier counts, which provides a more fine grain picture of on/off boardings at each station.  Unfortunately, this data is only available for 2013 (predating the introduction of Opal).

1.  Daily patronage statistics
The 2013 data shows a bit over 1.066 million NSW rail journeys per weekday.  To put this into context, the Hong Kong MTR, one of the busiest rail networks, has a daily patronage of 4.5 million for a city of 7 million (about one third larger than Greater Sydney/Central Coast/Newcastle/Wollongong).  However, HK MTR likely has an average journey distance of only half that of the 17km per journey average of Sydney Trains/NSW Trainlink, so in terms to total passenger kilometres, Sydney and it's peripheral cities comes much  closer to about half that of the MTR.  This is a pretty good outcome considering the greater car mode share in Sydney and it's peak hour commuter dominance versus the all day use seen in the MTR.

2. Peak hour statistics
The 3.5 hour AM peak (6am to 9:30am) accounts for about 33% of all journeys, the 3.5 hour afternoon peak (3pm to 3:30pm) and the 5 hour interpeak period 22%.  At the granularity of these 3-5 hour blocks, there is actually a well rounded day time distribution, and it is only in the final 7.5 hours of the evening that patronage drops right off to just 13%.  In contrast, my own personal experience of Hong Kong's MTR is that it is busy until very late into the evening, and this probably adds substantially to it's daily patronage.

Table 24 - Trip proportions by period of day
Period	%
AM peak (before 09:30)	33.0%
Interpeak (09:30 to 15:00)	21.8%
PM peak (15:00 to 18:30)	32.5%
Evening off peak (18:30 to 02:00)	12.7%
Total	100.0%

Secret Rail plans part 3: Airport line stations lose out from East Hills overcrowding

Several blogs have speculated on the future of the Airport line, including this blog's thoughts on connecting to SRT and also Transport Sydney's similar analysis.  There is a lot of logic to connecting the Airport line to the SRT, but how does this reconcile with TfNSW's "secret rail plans" to run the Airport line instead as a shuttle to Central?  Which will it be... a shuttle to Central or a branch of SRT?  [However, for alternate views on why the Airport line should not be a branch of SRT and not also terminate at Central see this post.]

First a bit of historical background.  The Airport line was constructed in the 1990's and currently operates as a "detour" off the East Hills line, that offers an alternative route for East Hills trains to enter the city circle from the South.  Stations on this "detour" consists of Wolli creek, Domestic, International, Mascot and Green Square stations  (which I will collectively refer to as "airport stations").   As shown in the overcrowing diagram below, they are predicted to be some of the most congested parts of the entire Sydney Trains network: