Stuck at a bus stop with only NIMBYS in sight

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, DECEMBER 3, 2009 -   There is one area where Melbourne can safely claim to beat Sydney consistently, and to have done so for decades. It's transport. Where Sydney has seen plenty of transport plans announced and ignored for the past 40 years, Melbourne's success has seen the opposite: a consistent approach to transport planning.

The release of the NSW Transport Blueprint is imminent. With it, Sydney finally has a chance to catch up to its southern rival by putting in place a long-term agenda for fixing our transport woes.

The State Government is facing one of its toughest tests. It must come up with a blueprint that outlines integrated transport strategies, spells out how much they cost, how to meet those costs, and sets specific timetables for delivery of individual projects.

To be successful in the long term, the plan needs to be enshrined in legislation with clear and measurable targets, and a funding cycle of at least 10 years to move beyond day-to-day budget variations.

Yet for all that may be in the blueprint, I will greet its coming release with dismay. For one thing is certain, whatever it contains, Sydneysiders will hate it.

No other city I know features the great paradox we have in Sydney: incessant calls for new public transport, for new roads, for new ways to travel to work, in concert with a visceral scream of "no" to anything that may actually solve the problems Sydneysiders complain about.

Consider recent history.

Residents of the inner-west - Sydney's most vocal agitators for more public transport - have taken their well-used placards to the streets to oppose the very thing they claim Sydney needs: a new public transport option, being the inner-west metro.

When the Cronulla riots broke out, Waverley Council urged all and sundry to come to Bondi Beach, as Bondi was a place open and welcoming to all cultures. This is the same Bondi whose residents had only a couple of years earlier killed off the chance for an extension to the eastern suburbs railway that would have brought "westies" on to "their" beach.

But for the fortitude of Laurie Brereton in the face of staunch opposition, the Sydney Harbour Tunnel would not have been built, and thousands more cars would be clogging the Harbour Bridge every day.

The result of the protests in the late 1980s against the monorail, which turned it into predominantly a tourist loop rather than a commuter service to Circular Quay, is a cavalcade of buses belching fumes the length and breadth of George Street.

The corridor for the F6 extension was almost lost to future residents of both Sydney and Wollongong when self-interested locals in one of the state's most marginal seats had a reservation, one which had been set aside for 50 years for a road, classified as a park.

Even Sydney's overwhelming successes, roads like the Eastern Distributor and M2 that remove thousands of cars from local streets, were met with fierce opposition when proposed.

It's our city's favourite sport - trying to stop progress.

The sad reality is that successive governments have been able to get away with failing to act because noisy action groups have put themselves before the common good. Too often the government has paid heed to them instead of the broader community interest.

Only in NSW are transport plans unveiled in the morning papers and killed by 9am the same day. Taken out by a combination of feckless ministers, furious talkback radio hosts, and everyone playing the great Sydney pastime of, "not in my backyard".

The looming transport blueprint will, hopefully, provide Sydneysiders the chance to grow up. They should look at what the plan contains and discuss it in a calm rational way rather than the default position of outrage that too often masquerades as policy debate in this city.

Building infrastructure to benefit the whole city will entail individual losers. It's a fact of life we need to accept. For too long on too many projects we've let the noisy minority stop progress for the silent majority. Until we have a government and a community prepared to deal with the difficult choices - and compromises - involved in all major infrastructure projects, it will be easier for governments of all persuasions

to do nothing.

Unfortunately, while I'm waiting for the plan to be released, I feel like the starter of a car race: Sydneysiders start your whingeing.