FROGS Sydney 2051 Forum: Meyer's Central Corridor as "Extended CBD"

Yesterday, I attended the FROGS (Friends of Greater Sydney) forum, looking at an Action Plan for Sydney 2051.  A number of transport, urban planning, business and community delegates were invited to this forum and some really good ideas were explored.  Presenting at this forum were David Adams of Stratigex and Bob Meyer of Cox Richardson, and a workshop was then held following on from these presentations.

A idea that captured a lot of people's imagination at this forum was Meyer's concept of a Central Corridor for Sydney that incorporates Parramatta CBD and Sydney CBD as dual anchors at the western and eastern end respectively.  Meyer's conception of this corridor was to place it as the epicentre of knowledge jobs, in which agglomeration and geospatial proximity could be facilitated by intensive transport investment so that it would be possible to travel easily across the entire corridor within 20 minutes.  A map of this corridor and the surrounding hinterland is shown below, with the Central Corridor marked in yellow, with then the remainder of Greater Sydney conceived as a hinterland, with subregions to the North, Northwest, Southwest and South.

The Meyer Central Corridor is an "Extended CBD" concept.  Extended CBDs have been proposed for Sydney due to the current eastern skew of Sydney CBD, being located on the eastern edge of Greater Sydney and having much reduced accessibility for the half of Sydney residents living in Western Sydney, eg. Penrith to Sydney CBD is 55km and 40-60mins away by train.  An analogy with New York city was made by Meyer, who noted that Manhattan island had dimensions that approximated that of his Central Corridor (25km long x ~7km wide), and served as the centre of employment for a wider hinterland that included the districts of Queens, Bronx, Brooklyn and New Jersey.  An Extended CBD is also increasingly prominent in urban planning for Greater Sydney, because Sydney CBD is rather compact and geographically constrained compared to other CBDs.

To understand this Central Corridor better, it is useful to compare it to two other Extended CBD ideas: the "Central Region" of the NSW Deptment of Planning Sydney Metro Strategy, and the "Global Economic Corridor".  The Central Region from the Sydney Metro Strategy is shown below:

The main difference is that Parramatta CBD is placed in a separate "West Central" region, which also incorporates areas to the north and south that are presumed to have some connectivity to Parramatta CBD. However, this concept doesn't work as well as the Meyer Corridor as in attempting to define a region connected to Parramatta, it dilutes the "dual CBD" concept of Parramatta as a CBD that services all of Sydney.  It also unfortunately cleaves in half the important East-West transport links such as the Parramatta-CBD trunk rail line (of 4-6 tracks), and Westconnex/M4 (6-8) into two separate halves, rather than considering them as a whole.  The incorporation of Hills council and Bankstown council into one region centred around Parramatta is unnatural, as work/travel statistics indicates only a minority of residents in these council areas work in Parramatta CBD.

The concept of the "Global Economic Corridor" (GEC) traverses an arc from Sydney airport through Sydney CBD, North Sydney, St Leonards/Chatswood and Macquarie Park, and proposals have emerged to extend it to Parramatta and Norwest business park:

This concept has many similarities to the Meyer Central corridor, having Parramatta CBD and Sydney CBD as it's dual anchors but instead of incorporating Olympic Park and Rhodes, places greater weight on connecting Macquarie Park and Chatswood.  Certainly looking at the relative office floor space statistics (using this as a proxy for concentration of Knowledge jobs), the current employment pattern of Sydney does align better with the GEC than with Meyer's Central Corridor.

My initial thoughts were therefore that the GEC was the better Extended CBD concept than Meyer's Corridor on the basis of existing suburban office space.  However, when one compares existing transport infrastructure density, Meyer's Central Corridor wins hands down:

• Trunk Rail Transport (ie: rail line running through most of the length of the "spine" of the corridor): GEC has only one heavy rail line (Epping-Chatswood rail link, with planned extension to Sydney CBD via a second Harbour crossing) vs Meyer's Central corridor has the main west line with three track pairs.  The latter allows a mix of express, semi-express and all stops services, and comes close to achieving 20 minute travel times whereas the former can only support all stops services unless additional express lines are built - an unlikely prospect.  Additionally, the Epping-Chatswood line does not offer any connectivity with Parramatta CBD along it's trunk rail route, in the absence of a Parramatta-Epping rail link.  Verdict: Meyer Central corridor wins by 3-fold margin.
• Radial Rail Transport (ie: rail lines from hinterland converging into the trunk route): GEC has radial lines from the Northwest Rail Link only, with plans to also connect the Bankstown line in the next 8-10 years.  In comparison, Meyer's Central corridor has radial lines from the Southwest (Liverpool, Southwest Rail link, and Macarthur services), the South (Bankstown line connecting at Lidcombe), the Northwest (Richmond line), West (Penrith/Blue mountains services), the North (Northern Line and Main North lines), and the South/East (Illawarra/Eastern suburbs line).  Verdict: Meyer Central corridor wins by large margin.
• Light Rail: the GEC does not currently have any light rail services, although a SE&CBD light rail line is under construction vs the Meyer Central corridor has the Inner West light rail as well as the SE&CBD light rail under construction, and additional Parramatta-based light rail routes are proposed.  Verdict: Meyer Central corridor wins by 3-fold margin.
• Motorways: the GEC has the M2 motorway, connecting to Sydney CBD via the Lane Cove tunnel (3 lanes each way) vs the Meyer Central corridor has the M4 motorway (6 lanes, being widened to 8 lanes and extended east towards the Anzac Bridge and cross CBD tunnel).  Verdict: Meyer Central corridor wins by 30% margin.  (See note below on why motorways crossing Sydney CBD ie M1/Southern Cross drive are ignored for this comparison - ie: common to both).
• Ferry services: the GEC does not have ferry services along most of it's spine, whereas the Meyer Central corridor has reasonably extensive ferry services across it's entire length from Parramatta out to the eastern suburbs.  Verdict: Meyer Central corridor wins.
• Freight Rail: the GEC does not have dedicated freight rail lines servicing it's industrial districts, whereas the Meyer Central corridor has a dedicated freight line linking Port Botany to Enfield, where an intermodal terminal is under construction.  Verdict: Meyer Central corridor wins.

(Note: in making a comparison between the two corridors, focus has been on where they are different ie: inner north vs inner west & Auburn, as clearly they overlap in the eastern end, eg. Sydney CBD, M5 East/Port Botany/Sydney airport are common to both).

Overall, it is pretty clear that the Meyer corridor has much better, higher capacity, better connected multimodal transport infrastructure than the GEC.  Furthermore, new office development at Macquarie Park has stagnated to some degree in the last 2-3 years and instead residential encroachment seems to be a looming issue.  Residential also seems to be taking off at Norwest and Buena Vista centres to the detriment of further commercial development.

Arguably the arterial roads at Macquarie Park are at capacity, due to the enormous traffic generation by the office space there.  There appears to be an unfortunate misalignment between infrastructure and jobs, with the Meyer Corridor being extremely transport infrastructure rich (especially heavy rail), but lacking the jobs growth seen at Macquarie Park in the past 15 years. It is unfortunate that during this time that there has been so much office space and jobs growth at Macquarie Park, to the detriment of the Parramatta ("auto alley")-Granville-Lidcombe-Homebush corridor.  The latter corridor also has extensive industrial land that could be converted to office uses, but unlike Macquarie Park 15 years ago, has extensive transport infrastructure already in place.  The potential of this corridor will be examined further in a future post, but it's pretty clear that of all the "Extended CBD" concepts, the Meyer Central Corridor has the best infrastructure foundations and should be the focus of intensive future employment agglomeration.