Sydney train crush-loading worsens amid endless migrant flood

Late last year, the endless immigration-driven population flood drove Sydney’s train network into meltdown:

Pressure on Sydney’s Town Hall train station has grown significantly during peak periods due to a 23 per cent surge in passengers in just three years, raising the prospect of staff limiting access to platforms more often to avoid severe overcrowding.

The growth underscores the demands on Sydney’s already stretched rail network from a population boom…

Mr Collins said a major surge in passengers at Town Hall during peak periods – especially evenings – was partly due to a near doubling in people catching trains to and from fast-growing suburbs such as Mascot and the Green Square precinct in Sydney’s inner south…

In February, Transport Minister Andrew Constance admitted that “off-the-charts” demand has stretched the train system to its limits:

Sydney’s 163-year-old train network is struggling under the demands of what the government describes as “an explosion in demand”. Last year passengers took more than 413 million journeys on the rail system, up 38 per cent from 300 million in 2013.

And over the next three years a 21 per cent rise in annual passenger trips is forecast…

“A hundred million passenger increase in a five-year period is off the charts, and that’s what we’ve had to cater for.”

Today, The SMH reports that the number of commuters travelling to Sydney’s CBD during the busiest morning hour has risen by 8,000 over the past year, resulting in widespread overcrowding:

With Sydney’s population booming, passenger crowding on trains has worsened over the past year on many of the city’s rail lines during the morning peak…

Overcrowded carriages also make it more difficult for trains to run on time, because of the longer stopping times needed to load and unload passengers.

In a sign of the pressure on the system, patronage on the suburban rail network is growing at 7 per cent a year, compared with the historical growth rate of 1.2 per cent per annum. In the past five years, train patronage has surged by 30 per cent…

“The increase in housing across Sydney’s rail lines will put even more strain on the system in a few years time,” he said. “Every additional person moving into an apartment in Sydney is going to be looking for a public transport option” [Mathew Hounsell, a researcher at the University of Technology’s Institute for Sustainable Futures, said]…

“The increase in housing across Sydney’s rail lines will put even more strain on the system in a few years time,” he said. “Every additional person moving into an apartment in Sydney is going to be looking for a public transport option”…

What does anyone expect? Sydney’s population has increased by more than 1 million people over the past 14 years.

Over the last year alone, Sydney’s population ballooned by 93,400 people on the back of a 77,100 increase in net overseas migration (NOM):

And Sydney’s population is projected to roughly double to nearly 10 million people by 2066 on the back of endless strong NOM:

The fact of the matter is that Sydney will never build enough infrastructure to keep pace with its manic population growth. It hasn’t done so over the past 15 years, and there’s no way it can do so in the future.

Don’t just take my word for it. In March, Infrastructure expert Professor David Hensher warned that Sydney requires “hundreds of billions” of dollars in infrastructure investment to fix current congestion problems, let alone keep up with projected population growth:

The NSW Government has $110 billion worth of plans for Sydney’s transport — but that’s a fraction of what’s needed to fix Sydney’s congestion problems, one of the city’s leading transport expert says…

Professor David Hensher said the investment “just buys a few years of growth before we are back to where we started”.

“The amount of money we would need to put in to make a really significant difference in reducing the traffic on our roads and avoiding crowding on our trains should be in the hundreds of billions — not in the billions that we’re currently investing,” he said.

How’s the ‘vibrancy’, Sydney? And how much worse will liveability get when the city’s population expands to around 10 million?

Blind Freddy can see that the only viable solution to mitigate Sydney’s infrastructure and liveability pressures is for the federal government to dramatically lower immigration (population growth) back to historical levels. Anything else is merely shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic.

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