Are You Ready For The Public Transport Apocalypse?

This week, Sydney's transport will face its biggest test: an entire commuter rail line, that has operated continuously for 115 years and moves 250,000 people per week, will shut down for at least a year to accommodate its construction.

Billion-dollar city projects can be understood with both medicine and physics analogies. Building them is like performing bypass surgery on a conscious person, and making them work is a delicate balance of space and time - how much space will the project take away from the city, and how well-timed is it with the city's growth?

Too late: disruptive firestorm

The Bankstown Line’s bus replacement plan for its metro upgrade-related shutdown has been criticised for doubling commute times, congesting networks, and being unable to meet the line’s capacity and ridership.

Several years earlier, the closure of Sydney CBD’s main north-south artery to construct a light rail line was also criticised for affecting local businesses and the city’s culture overall.

Even the most well-thought-out plans will subject immediate surroundings to short-term pain. Construction works for Singapore’s North-South Corridor cause frequent reconfigurations of roads, pedestrian and bike paths, and intersections. I’m excited for how it will change how we get around the city, but for now, thanks to this plus the noise, I’m avoiding it whenever I walk cycle. I’m not alone - and that impacts local businesses.

We need to plan well for the disruptive impacts - for how long can businesses survive the drop in footfall, and how much longer will it take commuters to get to work or their destination?

Too early: white elephant

Three numbers grab eyeballs when reporting on any large-scale infrastructure project: the capacity, long-term savings (in transport, that would be time), and cost.

Only one of these numbers will be realised in a typical government’s term.

Not only can an opportunistic media and opposition spin every imperfection, or dollar spent, against a government come election time. Anything from political factors to pure lack of demand may cause nothing to be developed around a transport node for many years - and terms of government, eroding public confidence in any future public transport projects.

They can also accuse the government of a bigger agenda. Take the conspiracy theories surrounding 15-minute cities as an example. Bike lanes are a huge potential long-term benefit, but rely on major lifestyle changes, even if the car-centric status quo is unhealthy. If those lifestyle changes don’t happen quickly enough such that bike lanes look empty, public opposition will.

What if we don’t have a crystal ball?

As explored above, both problems suffer one key problem: people will feel a project’s short-term pain, but not long-term gain, before they judge (election) the project’s decision-maker (government) - so political will to get things done is hard to come by.

Future-proofed planning could assuage this so that shiny new infra can deliver immediately while being prepared for long-term benefits. In Singapore, for example, hollow cavities for underground MRT stations were built on new lines in empty spaces, enabling fast installation of station infrastructure when those spaces are developed.

But not all governments have crystal balls. This is where timing and phasing comes in.

As previously explored, infrastructure projects like new train lines need last-mile infrastructure to connect well to existing destinations and networks. As such, replacement transport routes could be inaugurated to test efficacy and ramp up capacity before an artery is shut down, and infrastructure such as bus lanes could be used to support them. Bike lanes could be set up around a future station site well before it opens.

Such quick projects benefit from their low setup cost and time (e.g. by re-paving a road rather than building a new one) and ability to quickly help a community (short-term connectivity improvements that shorten trip times and bring people to local businesses).

Simultaneous small side-projects that will eventually compliment big infra projects enable incremental benefits that keep the public on side while helping a city vision reach its full potential.