The new Sydney Metro City section opened last week, including five new stations: Crows Nest, Victoria Cross (North Sydney), Barangaroo, Gadigal (Town Hall) and Waterloo. Here are some initial thoughts on the new metro and its walkability.
Generally speaking, the metro is useful and good. The speed of connection between the northwest and the Harbour CBD, knitting North Sydney and the city proper closer (which will improve with the Harbour Bridge bike ramp), and generally providing a fast alternative to car travel at the city scale for some key centres are all good things.
Stations
The stations themselves are considered ‘fully accessible’ and have multiple lifts, wheelchair access boarding, information signs, braille, audio loops, places to sit and other important features. They have been celebrated for their architectural quality and cavernous design, which really just means they are very big. The public art and sense of openness are welcome, but the scale presents challenges for accessing platforms in a quick and easy way. The biggest negative is that most stations require two lift journeys for anyone who can’t use an escalator – one to access a mezzanine level where fares are collected, and one to descend to platform level after tapping on with Opal.
This increases the time and effort taken to make transit journeys. Two separate lifts, separated by fare collection, will in most instances mean a more than doubling in access time to the platform. There is nothing wrong with large, airy or even beautiful transport infrastructure, but every second counts with useful transit, which provides access to where people need and want to go. The choice of generally using mezzanine levels appears to be driven by a preference for fare collection away from platforms.
This extra space may provide greater capacity for sharp peaks in demand, and in certain circumstances provides for mixed uses, like food, drink and convenience. Having transit stops like this – with dense and mixed uses nearby and even within the station footprint – is the strongest feature of the metro. This is something that Sydney’s rail network generally lacks, but is possible to change over time with more focus on urban design (and less emphasis on heritage value). Urban stations have the potential to structure a city around transit and lead to higher ridership.
The metro generally furthers the good work being done to reinforce central Sydney as a place for people walking and taking public transport, as opposed to car travel. There are new experiences, such as emerging from a train journey onto the waterfront at Barangaroo, and opportunities to dramatically improve streets, such as Botany Road in Waterloo, and the natural heart of the city centre on Park Street, connecting Town Hall, light rail, George St, Gadigal and Hyde Park.
In short
The good: accessibility / open design / over station development / interchange / places to sit and stay / harbour crossing / waterfront and open space access at Barangaroo
The less good: excessive access time in most stations / off-peak frequency / signal timings around stations / very little bike parking / cost overruns