I live near a turning circle in a good area of Sydney. There is a Bus Stop there and the government bus there has an ad with a picture of a forlorn looking schoolgirl saying that she cannot have a decent education, so would I donate to The Smith Family so she can.
As the ad displays there, 8 shiny new buses take private school children from the turning circle to 8 different private schools.
It seems that our governments are happy to subsidise ‘choice’ so that they do not have to fund a fair go and we are happy to tolerate an apartheid education system.
Westconnex, the underground freeway network will open later this year. Few realised the extent of it and for a period, trafffic will flow more smoothly.
But it was, is and will be a triple lunacy.
Nowhere else in the world are governments building freeway networks, let alone tunnelling them undergroup at vast cost. Cities like London have congestion taxes, some European cities are even closing their major roads, and it a subject of significant discussion (ww:://h2020-flow.eu/news/news-detail/when-roads-are-closed-where-does-the-traffic-go-it-evaporates-say-studies/). The world is trying to have more public transport to lessen the need for private cars, their cost, their parking and their greenhouse gases- except NSW!
The underground freeways will be privatised, so represent a huge subsidy from the taxpayer, as the private monopolies have a track record of huge tolls and guaranteed revenue. The tolls are already subsidised to lessen commuter pain, which amounts to continuing payments to the toll operators. Chris Minns’ Labor election platform is to subsidise motorists who spend more than $60 a week on tolls. Who are these and how many of them are there? Logistics companies? Couriers? Or tens of thousands of commuters? Naturally there will only be a few toll operators.
The money spent on road tunnels was not spent on a decent Metro system, that would have made most trips unnecessary and taken the cars off the roads. Of course a train tunnel is smaller than a road tunnel, much cheaper to build per Km, carries far more people and does not require ventilation (or very little).
One might ask why all this happened. My theory is that the RTA engineers were far more politically savvy than the State Rail Authority. The RTA were dealing with politicians and building motorways all over the state, wherever they could get the government to pay for them. The SRA confined its thinking to the existing rail network, and thought in terms of better train technology and industrial relations problems, rather than building their network and having a big part in urban planning. And of course the lobbying was probably helped by big bankers and big construction companies and by ex-politicans at Infrastructure NSW, which was set up in 2011 by Barry O’Farrell with ex-Premier and ex British-American tobacco executive, Nick Greiner in charge- a great privatiser.
WestConnex has beavered away at vast but unperceived cost and only attracted attention for its ventilation shafts in suburbia, or the chaos on existing roads as its portals were constructed. Now, for the next few years the affluent and the through traffic will have an easier time of it, and we can continue to lobby for the Metro system.
Web of steel, concrete and cable takes shape below
WestConnex is on track to open late this year, writes Matt O’Sullivan. (SMH 17 February 2023)
The scale and complexity of the final stage of the $17 billion WestConnex motorway project, buried up to 60 metres beneath inner Sydney, becomes clear the deeper workers venture into a twisting maze of road tunnels, ventilation passages and giant caverns for jet fans and substations.
Above ground, inner-city residents and motorists get a sense of the scale – and disruption whenever they pass a massive construction depot for the project on a site that was once the Rozelle rail yards, next to the City West Link roadway. However, the surface work represents only a fraction of the motorway junction below, which features three layers of tunnels.
All up, Australia’s most complex motorway project comprises 24 kilometres of tunnels beneath Rozelle and Lilyfield, about seven kilometres of which motorists will never see because it will be used mostly for ventilation. Once opened late this year, the $3.9 billion interchange will connect the recently opened M4-M8 Link between St Peters and Haberfield, the City West Link, the Anzac Bridge, Iron Cove and, by 2027, the planned Western Harbour Tunnel.
Almost four years after construction started, Rozelle interchange project director Steven Keyser said the focus was now on fitting out the finished tunnels and connecting ‘‘everything together, so it all talks to each other’’ as the targeted completion date looms. ‘‘We have the body built, but we need the brains,’’ he said of the mechanical and electrical systems.
Keyser said other road tunnel projects built in Sydney in the past decade had taught his team that fitting them out with mechanical and electrical equipment often took longer than anticipated. ‘‘We’ve got 1.7 million metres of cabling to run through all those tunnels. It’s a real spider network of cabling,’’ he said. ‘‘The back end takes a lot longer, and we’re scheduling far more intensely to get that right. And so we’re in a good position to open at the end of the year.’’
Keyser said that, while facing disruption from the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires, the pandemic and wet weather, the biggest logistical challenge for the project had been ensuring equipment and componentry arrived in the correct sequence. ‘‘We had 23 road-headers [excavating] and 500 blue-collar workers starting and stopping each day, getting in and out of the tunnels. This is one of the biggest logistical exercises and that’s all hidden,’’ he said.
Like the rest of WestConnex, the Rozelle interchange has been contentious due to the disruption caused to inner-city residents, and the eyesore it has created near Sydney Harbour during the years of construction.
Transport for NSW’s deputy secretary of infrastructure and place, Camilla Drover, said the project would have been far more controversial if early plans for the interchange had been pursued. ‘‘The original scheme for this was all above ground. Can you imagine? It would have been viaduct and overpasses. But the fact that it is now all underground, and we have a park instead, that is the evolution people forget about,’’ she said.
The 10-hectare park, which includes two sporting fields, on the site of the old rail yards, will open late this year when the interchange is completed.
And Keyser said the public would see the construction site change quickly over the coming months as the park began to emerge. ‘‘We’re getting to the stage where you can see what the finished product will look like,’’ he said.
Underscoring the complexity of the underground junction, the state’s transport agency took control of the project in 2017 from a corporation set up to oversee WestConnex after only one bid from contractors to build it was received in the initial tender process. The interchange was also separated from construction of the M4-M8 Link, which forms the other part of the third and final stage of the 33-kilometre motorway project. The upshot is that the risk of delivering the interchange ultimately rests with the government.
While the tunnels for the interchange average 35 to 40 metres beneath the surface, a sump where water is collected before being pumped out is about 60 metres deep. Twin tunnels for the $27 billion Sydney Metro West rail line between the CBD and Parramatta, which will include a train station next to White Bay power station at the so-called Bays West, will be dug even deeper beneath a part of the interchange over the coming years.
For tunnellers, ground conditions have presented a constant challenge during construction. ‘‘It’s always challenging with ground conditions, no matter where you are in the world. Each time we’re digging the tunnels we’re checking the reactions of what’s happening,’’ Keyser said. ‘‘We’re always a step ahead, probing things, making sure that things are only moving to the model. We have probably 5000 instruments around measuring.’’
While sandstone is easier to excavate, softer soil conditions required so-called rock bolts to be installed closer together in the tunnel walls to provide extra support. The closest the tunnels get to each other is about 10 metres. ‘‘You’re basically doing what the Romans did – you’re creating an arch [in the tunnels],’’ Keyser said of the tunnelling techniques.
About a quarter of the $3.9 billion cost of the interchange, being built by contractors CPB and John Holland, has been spent on a labyrinth of ventilation tunnels and related facilities. Three exhaust stacks about 35 metres high, which are connected to the interchange below, have been built on the site of the old rail yards. Large caverns – some about 23 metres high – also had to be dug deep underground for electricity substations and to house giant fans for the ventilation system.
Part of the reason for the mammoth size of the ventilation facilities is the need to design the interchange to cope with a catastrophic event. ‘‘You’re always catering for what is the worst case, which is if something catches fire in the tunnel,’’ Keyser said. ‘‘The standards now are quite high and the design caters for that emergency situation. In the roof, you have a fire deluge system, which is going through its testing.’’
Greens MP for Balmain Jamie Parker, who has been highly critical of WestConnex, said the interchange’s construction had caused major disruption to nearby residents over the past four years. ‘‘Everyone is relieved that it will be over. But the local community feels like they have had such widespread impacts on their homes, and now they have to deal with the longer-term consequences of the three exhaust stacks which should be filtered,’’ he said. ‘‘The impact is really significant, and it is ongoing.’’
While acknowledging the disruption to locals from construction, NSW Metropolitan Roads Minister Natalie Ward said the interchange, along with the rest of WestConnex, would result in significant travel-time savings for motorists once fully completed. ‘‘There are always challenges in construction – it’s messy; it’s disruptive,’’ she said.
‘‘The upside is it gives local roads back to local communities. This area, you might remember, was just disused rail yards; it was overgrown … [and] you couldn’t enter. We are transforming this to see community benefits.’’
There are claims and counter claims for how much electric vehicles (EVs) improve the greenhouse gas situation. The production of batteries is quite energy-intensive, so a large battery car takes about twice as much energy to produce as a normal Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) car.
The ‘payback’ time for that extra energy is about 2 years based on the number of km an average (UK) driver does per year.
But the key variable is how the electricity is generated, both in making the battery and in running the car. If it is made in Asia with coal fired electricity to manufacture the car and then charged with coal powered electricity, there is very little benefit. If the battery is produced by renewable electricity and the car charged with renewable electricity, the savings are more than two thirds by 150,000km.
If you keep your old ICE car for 4 years, it will have produced about the same amount of greenhouse gas as it takes to produce a new electric car. Looked at it the other way, it takes 4 years for a new electric car to pay for itself from an emissions point of view as against paying just for the petrol of an existing ICE car.
Trucking giant Toll Holdings tells its drivers to avoid toll roads as they are not worth the time savings. It might be noted that Air Freight to Melbourne is actually taken by trucks, the only thing being sky high is the prices.The toll roads have the price levels befitting a private monopoly of Transurban. They were sold as lessening congestion. They have taken the money and now we have done nothing for our rail network. There was an article in the SMH of 29/9/21 and also this one:
I was going to write about the farce of the Upper Hunter by-Election, as there was plenty to say about that, so I will start there, but now there is more!
The first thing to say is that the National Party vote fell 2.8% to 31%, which is less than a third of primary votes, yet they claimed a victory! They claimed that this was because they supported coal mining, yet a lot of farmers and those no directly depended non coal though that this was a bad idea, and it is not clear that this overblown endorsement of coal is justified. Labor lost 7.5% to get 21.2% and are now tearing themselves apart- see below for more. The Shooters lost 10.1%, but this may because One Nation entered the race and got 12.3%. Independents did quite well with a total of 16.8%, with Kirsty O’Connell who was anti-coal being endorsed by Malcolm Turnbull and getting 8.8%. These are all primary votes, because almost two thirds of voters did not give preferences, being encouraged to ‘Just Vote 1’ which means that effectively the Primary vote will determine the outcome, creating a massive advantage to the major parties, which translates into a NSW gerrymander where the Major parties get a much higher percentage of the seat than they got of the primary votes. It makes a farce of democracy .
Labor should have benefited from the fact that the by-election was rendered necessary by the incumbent Michael Johnsen being accused of raping a sex worker in Parliament House and denying it but still resigning! But Labor looked very weak because it sits on the fence with coal mining, wanting the current coal miners vote, but also pretending to be the party of progress against climate change. Their sitting on the fence which was disastrous in Queensland in the last Federal election was disastrous again. They should have had a plan to transition out of coal with environmental jobs plan, but they seem incapable of such a strategy. Arguably the State was punished for the Federal deficiency, but NSW State Labor has plenty of incompetence of its own.
Labor, having lost in a by-election where they are supposed to increase their vote seems keen to do a lot of blood-letting. After the years of domination by Obeid and the Right and a history of corruption and nepotism there is a very shallow talent pool. The colourless Jodi Mckay seems to have had no impact on Gladys Berejeklian, despite scandals about sex and asset misallocation, and personal deliberate ignorance. McKay had apparently cobbled together the numbers to survive, and people moved against her. The plausible Chris Minns looked likely to be standing up, but John Barilaro, himself no stranger to questionable land deals in Queanbeyan, released a ‘dirt file’ to stop Minns’ ascent. The file was called ‘Why Chris Minns and Jamie Clements can never run the NSW Labor Party’. Jamie Clements was accused of sexual assault by a former staffer, and of taking improper donations from a Chinese property developer, Mr Huang. Presumably there was also something in the file of substance about Minns also, as he resigned from Shadow Cabinet. It might be noted that he was Shadow Transport Minister yet has not had his voice heard despite the fact that the Liberal strategy of funding underground freeways and selling them as monopolies to the private sector seems to have come from the Los Angeles town planners of the 1960s who recommended getting rid of trams to have private cars as the main means of transport, with a dash of Thatcherite privatisation thrown in.
Labor’s corruption scandals have sapped their talent and seemingly discouraged good people. Carmel Tebbutt, John Watkins and Graham West were very good people who resigned before they might have been expected to.
The Federal Government has discouraged EV uptake and now the Victorian Government wants to tax them to replace the petrol tax that pays for roads.
This is very silly. Roads do not have to be paid for by petrol tax. Any sort of tax will do. Taxes should be used to encourage sensible behaviour, not discourage it.
One other important aspect is ignored in this video and in most discussions about EVs. That is their possible use to stabilise the electricity grid. If they are charged when there is a lot of renewable energy, e.g. in the solar peak during the day, they can be discharged in the evening, so lessening the evening peak. If EV owners paid the day rate to charge and go the evening rate to discharge, they would make money and offset their vehicle cost.It might be noted that AGL (an electricity supplier) is encouraging electric vehicle fleets so that it can use their batteries to do just this, but hey, why would the government let little people in a on a good deal?The action point here is the write to Victorian Govt to stop the tax and facilitate the grid stabilisation by allowing EV owners to pay and be paid at the rate at the time they charge or discharge.
As a child our family moved to Port Kembla, and we lived on Hill 60, just above the rocks where a lot of people have drowned recently.
I went to Port Kembla Infant’s School, which was overcrowded but interesting. Half the kids there came from the migrant hostel in the old WW2 army camp where ‘displaced Persons’ (as WW2 refugee families were called) lived. These kids arrived in kindergarten without a word of English. This was taken as normal by the teachers, who just plugged on. The kids from the hostel were called ‘Hostels’, but it was a descriptor rather than a pejorative. By the time we got to 2nd class in our 4th year (Kindergarten, Transition, 1st Class, 2nd Class) there was no difference between Aussie borns and Hostels. There were 46 in my 2nd class and girls filled the top 6 places. There was minimal racism in kids leaving this school.
There was no anti-discrimination legislation or bureaucracy in the 1950s but all the parents had jobs in the steelworks or associated industries and the Housing Commission was building suburbs full of affordable housing as fast as it could. If you had a go, you got a go. The ABC Radio had an awkward segment before the news called ‘Learn English with us’ where some somewhat stilted practical speech exercises lasted about 2 minutes. I used to wonder how the new migrants all tuned in for this little segment if they could not understand the rest. But the intention was there.
In 1966 there was a movement demanding ‘State Aid for Church Schools’ on the basis that they had paid their tax, and now they had left the state system they were paying twice. The government wanted to win the election, and this was seen as critical for the Catholic vote. The Democratic Labor Party, which had split from the ALP were the champions of this and still represented a significant threat to the ALP as they preferenced the Libs. State Aid came in.
Some time later there was a lot of emphasis on ESL (English as a Second Language) classes at TAFE, which were held during school hours. Their target was migrant women and their objective was to encourage English speaking to allow the women both to meet each other and to participate in society more easily. John Howard defunded the programme; ‘user pays’ was the new paradigm.
I now live in Sydney in a relatively central affluent suburb. Each morning 8 private school buses start near my door ferrying students to 8 private schools. No public transport needed- the school takes care of it all. Others students in private school uniforms catch subsidised public transport to the schools of their parents’ choice. But the cost of ‘choice’ is ‘residualisation’. Schools where there are a lot of ethnic students suffer from ‘white flight’, and so have concentrated social disadvantage and a lack of native role models. One school I visited in Western Sydney had had a stabbing in the playground about 25 years ago. The school photos in the foyer had no white face for the last 20 years. That was as far back as the photos went.
When we wonder if the Cabinet have any idea how the poorer folk live, my opinion is that they do not. These social dynamics have now been going for long enough that it is possible to be old enough to be in Cabinet and have no idea how the other half live. Some think that people without jobs have ‘wasted their opportunities’ or have alcohol or gambling problems. Add a little self-ri ghteous religion, ‘the poor are always with us’, a touch of arrogance and a peer group that thinks the same, and you have policies that are increasingly dismantling the fair go and equity that should be at the heart of our culture. It may be that you cannot make all people equal, but you can give all children equality of opportunity, and all adults enough to live on. We have to change direction and do just that.
Here, at the risk of being repetitive, is an article on Christian Porter.
One of the ways to finance new infrastructure projects is to capture the extra value that they produce. A rail line makes a suburb far more valuable, particularly the areas around the stations. As it is planned some areas can be sold, or the government can develop the central areas and charge higher rates or a percentage of the increase in value when the land is sold. Simply to buy the land, built the railway and let the developers make all the profit is just plain dumb and is why there are so few rail lines in Western Sydney.
But there seems no sensible plan. The Federal government paid 10 times as much for some non-vital land to a mate, and now seems to be squeezing smaller landholders as they compulsorily acquire the land. If the land is going to be worth a lot more because of the railway, the people who are forced to move should get a bit extra for their trouble. This is only fair.
What is needed is a public formula that gives a fair price when the land is acquired and some value capture for the taxpayer. Railways should be self-financing, with fairness for all.
It seems that the governments are both corrupt and inept. With all the consultants floating around a formula should be proposed, debated, decided and implemented.
There are claims and counter claims for how much electric vehicles (EVs) improve the greenhouse gas situation. The production of batteries is quite energy-intensive, so a large battery car takes about twice as much energy to produce as a normal Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) car.
The ‘payback’ time for that extra energy is about 2 years based on the number of km an average (UK) driver does per year.
But the key variable is how the electricity is generated, both in making the battery and in running the car. If it is made in Asia with coal fired electricity to manufacture the car and then charged with coal powered electricity, there is very little benefit. If the battery is produced by renewable electricity and the car charged with renewable electricity, the savings are more than two thirds by 150,000km.
If you keep your old ICE car for 4 years, it will have produced about the same amount of greenhouse gas as it takes to produce a new electric car. Looked at it the other way, it takes 4 years for a new electric car to pay for itself from an emissions point of view as against paying just for the petrol of an existing ICE car.