Opinion
Confessions of a T3 commuter: ‘Price of progress’ easy to say when you’re not paying
Jordan Baker
Chief ReporterAmong the tens of thousands of commuters on Sydney’s T3 line at peak hour are harried parents, whose dash to work is book ended by the rigid opening hours of childcare services; drop-off no earlier than 7am, and a hard deadline for pick-up at 6pm.
When the Sydenham to Bankstown stretch of that line shuts down for at least a year from late 2024 to complete its conversion to a metro – as announced by the government this week – and those parents are forced to take replacement buses along gridlocked roads, their workday will no longer be a juggle; it will be a nightmare.
The T3 line is crowded with casual workers, tradies, parents with small children and school students.Credit: Louise Kennerley
The line through south-west Sydney is used by children, too, whose schools are unlikely to be shifting bell times. It’s crowded with casual workers – the area is relatively poor – who travel long distances for work, are paid by the hour, and will lose the reliability of rail for the inconsistency of road.
Who will compensate them for that extra commuting time? Will employers reduce workloads? Will childcare services open earlier, close later and cost more? Will remote working be reinstated to south-west residents alone, with the associated loneliness and workplace disadvantage?
Or will they just have to cop it – missing family time if they have a flexible spouse, taking the professional and financial hit if they don’t, or making up the extra time at night while comforting themselves with the distant prospect of a fancier train?
When the metro conversion is finished, in late 2025 or so, it will open up the south-west. Trains every four minutes will carry more people, and will no longer become entangled in problems on other parts of the network. They will sweep through new city stations and take passengers under the harbour as far as Chatswood and the Hills District.
T3 passengers will be forced into the nightmare of catching replacement buses along gridlocked roads.Credit: Edwina Pickles
But the pain that will be suffered during the birth of this new era of rail travel will be significant. The 100-year-old T3 line has become essential to residents of the city’s south-west because roads through the region are a mess. I know – because I rely on it, too.
Development is already booming in the Canterbury Bankstown area, yet the pothole-pocked four-lane arterial stretching west has not been even slightly upgraded to accommodate the extra population.
During the evening peak, the right lane of Canterbury Road is clogged with people turning into streets with new developments; the left takes the rest of the traffic, which moves at a snail’s pace because of stop-start buses.
Adding dozens of extra buses to carry train passengers at peak hour, as proposed by the government, will turn this crawl into a car park as more commuters get fed up with buses and take to their cars instead.
Jo Haylen – who is now the transport minister – was a critic of the project while in opposition.Credit: Jessica Hromas
The metro was thrust upon the residents of south-west Sydney by the previous state government. It was always going to involve stunning levels of disruption at little electoral cost to the Coalition: the seats were all Labor’s.
The amount of disruption has grown. At first, the closure was supposed to last six months; now it has increased to at least 12 and as long as 15 months. There’s no guarantee that further delays or industrial action will not blow it out further.
There was little justification for the Coalition choosing the T3 rather than a busier line like the T1 for a metro conversion beyond the development potential of the south-west, where there are still small houses on big blocks barely 10 kilometres from the city.
Labor was openly critical. In 2019, Summer Hill MP Jo Haylen – who is now the transport minister, and whose constituents in Ashbury, Hurlstone Park and Marrickville will be disrupted – argued the government had failed to justify replacing a perfectly serviceable train line.
She also raised a concern still held by many in the south-west; that the replacement buses will cause “traffic chaos ... especially when combined with road detours [from work on the metro] and other construction impacts”.
Now it’s Labor MPs – Haylen, Canterbury’s Sophie Cotsis, Bankstown’s Jihad Dib – that are going to wear community anger, which is already surging because of holiday shut-downs, overnight construction noise, and constant disruption to residential streets.
The south-west and city metro will cost taxpayers more than $21 billion. But that will not cover the stunning personal cost to the tens of thousands of residents whose lives depend on train travel, who will not be offered a viable replacement during the shutdown because no such thing exists.
The rest of Sydney will patiently point out that progress comes at a price. But that’s easy to say when they’re not the ones paying it.
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