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| Action for Public Transport (N.S.W.) Inc. |
| P O Box K606 |
| Haymarket NSW 1240 |
| 8 March 2023 |
Action for Public Transport (NSW) or "APTNSW" is a transport advocacy group which has been active in Sydney since 1974. We promote the interests of beneficiaries of public transport - passengers and the wider community alike.
Whle we generally agree with the intention of improving Central station for the passengers, we would like to highlight (in approximately EIS order) some aspects of the EIS and the proposed work which concern us.
Eddy Ave. Plaza - EIS ¶5.2.2
We are concerned that the adjustments to retail space on the western side of the plaza will remove a handy covered walkway down to the important pedestrian crossing. (The tram bridge conveniently continues the cover across Eddy Avenue parallel to the crossing.) Especially if Sydney is to have more wet years like 2022, we think that route should be retained for its cover. We also suggest than any new tiling on the plaza be specified to have slip-rated tiles which might mitigate passenger concerns about falling when walking down a sloping wet surface.
Proofreading the EIS - EIS ¶9
The first two sentences of chapter 9 (Traffic, transport and access) read:
Central station is Australia's busiest transport interchange. Over 270,000 customers visited the station in 2018, the equivalent of about 85 million passenger movements across the year.It is to be hoped that the rest of the EIS was prepared with more care than that paragraph. Does it mean 270,000 customers per day in 2018? If so, wouldn't the yearly total be more like 100 million?
Devonshire St pedestrian tunnel - EIS ¶9.1.1
The EIS remarks that cycling etc. is prohibited in the tunnel and everywhere in the terminal building. Perhaps it is. However, people riding skates, skateboards, pedal bicycles and various battery-powered devices are often seen in the tunnel. That is dangerous.
Moving the tram track in the porte cochere - EIS ¶9.2.1
We are concerned that any benefits of this work might be outweighed by the inevitable disruption to L1 passengers while this work is ongoing. How is this disruption to be minimised? As an illustration, in 2014 before work started on constructing the CBD and South East light rail, a public meeting which the writer attended was told that an innovative form of contracting was to be used. Contractors would be asked to specify in their tenders how long they would need to complete the work. Their contracts were to be written to provide a strong incentive to work to that schedule - there were to be bonus payments for prompt work. Could that be done for anything that disrupts L1 services? [That it didn't work for CSELR construction is not relevant to L1 and the porte cochere.]
In EIS ¶H6.3 we find that the porte cochere work is expected to take six months. What if that runs over? Appendix H goes on to indicate that Sydney Light Rail is considering other work nearby which would disrupt L1 services for an unspecified time.
Ignoring the point about drainage, which doesn't seem very important under a roof, is the intention to ease crowding on the light rail departure platform? Couldn't that be achieved by constructing a suitable safety zone north of the track and using it to load trams from both sides? Doing that would minimise construction disruption.
We suggest that if significant L1 disruption is to happen for any reason, the opportunity should be taken to provide track redundancy somehow, so that inconvenience from any future work can be minimised.
Access to/from the south-west
Taking the Railway Square KFC as a suitable reference point, every suburban platform is more than 500 metres' walk from there. Yet thousands of rail passengers walk past that point twice daily accessing destinations such as the education precinct along Broadway.
This project is but one of many recent proposals that are intended to make things better for passengers. Deplorably, none of them addresses walking distances to the south-west. Some make it worse, e.g. building metro platforms with no access to the south and thereby taking Bankstown and northern passengers further away from the south-west. The much-vaunted Central Walk ignores the south-west.
When will something be done to shorten these walking distances? Despite all its symbolism, Central station access compares very unfavourably with Town Hall where passengers can reach many destinations within five minutes of stepping off their trains.
We would like the above matters to be taken into account in finalising the project and in specifying future projects that overlap this work.