Sydney Metro (2008 proposal)
Sydney Metro was a proposed rapid transit railway network in Sydney, intended to connect the central business district with the inner and outer city suburbs Rouse Hill, Westmead, Malabar and lower North Shore. Initially proposed in 2008 as 'Metro Link', the plan was modified and renamed later that year. After half a billion dollars was spent on planning, property acquisitions and a tender process, it was cancelled in 2010.
The fate of the initial Metro proposal was tied to the failure of a plan to privatise much of the then state-owned electricity sector, a plan which would have released tens of billions of dollars in capital for investment in new infrastructure. When the privatisation plan was dramatically scaled back under pressure from the union movement, the Metro proposal was reduced to a nine-kilometre shuttle between the CBD and the inner-western suburb of Rozelle, raising questions about the project's value for money.
The short life of the Sydney Metro proposal was a significant contributing factor to Labor's rout at the 2011 state election.
Although Labor's Sydney Metro proposals were not revived, an alternative rapid transit system was proposed by the O'Farrell government elected in 2011. Construction of this scheme, also known as Sydney Metro, began in 2013 and the first line opened in 2019.
Early proposals
Although Sydney Metro would have been the first rapid transit metro to be built in Australia – and one of only a handful in the Southern Hemisphere – the idea was not new. John Bradfield, the chief engineer who planned the electrification of the Sydney rail network and construction of the City Circle, was heavily influenced by his observations of the New York City Subway and referred to aspects of his scheme as "rapid transit".A true rapid transit system, separate from the increasingly congested suburban rail system, was proposed in 1968 by the State Planning Authority's Sydney Region Outline Plan. At the time, a number of cities were planning or building modern, standalone metros, including Toronto, Lisbon, Montreal, São Paulo, Seoul, Santiago, Washington DC, and Hong Kong.
The authority noted that because Sydney's suburban train system was not built from scratch as a passenger-only network, commuter trains often shared track with long-distance passenger and freight services, constraining reliability. The 1964 introduction of the first double-deck carriages boosted capacity to an extent, but also increased dwell times, swallowing up much of the intended capacity benefit.
SROP's solution was a rapid transit system that would have augmented the city's most crowded rail line, the Main West, with a fast, single-deck operation between the CBD and Parramatta. But though SROP fundamentally shaped Sydney's growth for the next 20 years, the planned line was never built: improvements to the existing railway always took priority. Forty-four years later, a government report was to observe that in delaying the advent of rapid transit, "we have pushed the complex two-door double deck network further than any other operator."
SROP's eventual replacement, a plan called Sydney Into Its Third Century, was released by Labor planning minister Bob Carr in 1988. Although not a transport policy as such, the document set a radical change of direction that unwittingly built the strategic case for rapid transit. Firstly, it broke with SROP's cardinal rule that new development should occur along existing railway corridors. Secondly, it mandated a dramatic increase in urban density within the city's existing footprint.
Christie report
It was Carr himself who had to deal with the consequences of his metropolitan plan, when he was elected Premier of New South Wales in 1995. At first, the needs of the forthcoming Sydney 2000 Olympics – new rail lines to the airport and the new stadium planned by his Liberal predecessors – took priority.Carr's first new rail proposal was the Parramatta to Epping Rail Link, announced in 1998. Something like it – a to line – had figured in Bradfield's 1920 plan. Carr and his transport minister, Carl Scully, built on the idea by extending the corridor westward, via the underused Carlingford branch line, to Western Sydney’s chief employment centre, Parramatta. The need for this western extension was questionable: indeed, Carr and Scully’s successor, Michael Costa, were to remove it from the plan five years later, citing low expected patronage. But the political imperative was clear: Carr owed his 1995 victory to just three electoral districts, all of them in western Sydney. The next priority was the north west, where as planning minister Carr had green-lit future development far from mass transit links. The government's solution was heavy rail from Epping to Castle Hill, and bus rapid transit from Castle Hill to the new suburbs.
Although this 1998 plan, called Action for Transport, contained a rhetorical commitment to public ownership of train services, both the Airport Link and a proposed Bondi Beach extension were to be operated and maintained by the private sector using government-run trains. This represented the beginnings of a major strategic shift, with future rapid transit proposals to incorporate private-sector operation as a core element.
The following year, a train collision at Glenbrook in the lower Blue Mountains killed seven people and injured 51. Carr and Scully recognised that the rail system needed a serious strategic review, and commissioned a former State Rail Authority boss, Ron Christie, to conduct one.
Christie's conclusions were politically unwelcome. Not only was the scale of investment required vast, but the prerequisite for network growth was an expensive new tunnel under the harbour and CBD, far from western Sydney. Yet the rail chief's warnings could not be ignored:
the inner city lines will all be saturated within the next ten years or so, and there will be a need for a new, alternative route through the CBD, from Eveleigh to St Leonards, in the medium term, most likely by between 2011 and 2015... This project is regarded as being of the highest priority. Without it, the metropolitan rail system will face strangulation and progressive operational collapse.
Christie's report also flagged the potential for a future rapid transit network, marking the mode's re-emergence in official thinking after a long absence. However, he sought to delay implementation of a standalone metro system until his report's 2021–51 "long term", at which time he saw the potential for:
- a Parramatta–CBD–Airport "River Metro"
- a Hoxton Park–Parramatta–Castle Hill "Parramatta Metro"
- a Cronulla–CBD–Dee Why "Central Metro".
Its replacement, announced in 2005, was a Rail Clearways Program to boost the capacity of existing lines and an $8 billion Metropolitan Rail Expansion Programme to add a new underground line to the CBD and extend the network's reach into the growth areas to the north-west and south-west. There was, however, no mention of rapid transit.
Four months later, Carr quit politics, having become the state's longest continuously serving premier. His replacement, health minister Morris Iemma, confirmed the government would retain its commitment to MREP, including it in the State Plan and the Urban Transport Statement the following year.
Iemma as premier
Journalist Simon Benson describes a crucial meeting in late 2007 between Iemma and Labor state president Bernie Riordan during the height of the furore over electricity privatisation:had laid out on his desk a spreadsheet of infrastructure projects … On the bottom half were all the projects the state needed if it was to avoid choking on its own congestion within the next decade. It amounted to more than $25 billion. And that was what they hadn't even announced.
"This is why I am the Premier," he told Riordan, emphasising his belief that it was critical for the privatisation to succeed. "… These need to be done. I need to do these."
Public transport was perhaps the most stark example of Carr's inaction. The issue, Iemma assured voters, was "my highest priority... I hear and understand the frustrations of commuters and am determined to drive improvements."
The smooth-running Olympic transport arrangements had been a triumph for Carr, and so former Olympic Co-ordination Authority head professor David Richmond was the natural choice to head up a powerful new infrastructure development unit within the Premier's Department. One of the unit's recruits was transport planner and future Sydney Metro director Rodd Staples.
The state's transport problem was threefold. First, the existing rail system was expensive to run, not least because the operator, RailCorp, remained tied to old-style industrial practices and excessively high engineering standards. Delivering MREP would have locked in these inefficiencies. Even if costs could be brought under control, the sheer scale of investment required to extend an all-purpose heavy rail system was beyond the state's means. Put simply, MREP was unaffordable in its current form. Third, while the need for additional extensions into the new bus and car-dependent suburbs of the north-west and south-west was clear – and would be aided by the partial preservation of corridors in the past – congestion at the existing and stations meant that to work, any new rail project had to increase capacity in the CBD. Yet there was little electoral advantage to be gained from digging new rail tunnels under safe seats in the lower North Shore and CBD.
The unit's solution – supported by Iemma and Costa – was to sidestep the high costs and industrial risks of the existing RailCorp network and instead begin building a new rapid transit rail system in parallel. The new system would incorporate smaller, lighter rolling stock, reducing construction costs, and be operated by the private sector, reducing operating costs. But despite the savings available via the rapid transit option, the costs were still beyond the state's means.
To prepare the ground for the day when the funding became available, the idea was trailed in the 2006 Urban Transport Statement, though no commitments were made.