Friday 2^nd July 2004

The 10 kilometre New Southern Railway, or Airport Rail Link, opened on 21^st May 2000¹. The cost of the track and tunnel, estimated to be $712m, was paid for by the New South Wales Government². A private company, the Airport Link Company Pty Ltd, spent about $200m designing, financing, and building four new stations on the Airport line - Green Square, Mascot, Domestic Terminal and International Terminal - which it operates under a revenue-sharing arrangement with the State Rail Authority³.

The Airport Link Company went into receivership in November 2000⁴. Its fate was blamed on patronage of the line in the first few months being only 25% of expectations⁵. The Government has not released a comprehensive comparison of the predicted and actual passenger figures, but it seems undeniable that patronage to date has been lower than was forecast in the planning stage.

The patronage figures under-pinned the economic assessment of the project. In the Environmental Impact Statement, 57% of the economic benefit of the project was said to arise from savings in travel time by persons travelling to and from the airport⁶.

The Minister for Transport Services, Mr Costa, branded the Airport Rail Link a disaster on 2nd June 2003. Of course, as a Labor Minister, he has a vested interest in rubbishing a project implemented by his Liberal opposition, and his claim was made when he was attempting to justify an announcement that the second stage of the long-promised Parramatta Rail Link may not proceed⁷. However, the Liberals have not seriously disputed this view.

While understandable, perceptions that the Airport Rail Link is a disaster are ultimately based on two fallacies.

• Firstly, it was never intended as just a railway to the airport. The line was primarily a network enhancement measure which allowed the whole CityRail system to function more efficiently.
• Secondly, railways are never short term projects. When many of Sydney's railways have been in operation for over 100 years, it is simply foolish to judge the success of the newest line by its performance in the first 3-4 years.

Network Enhancement

Prior to the construction of the Airport Rail Link, all trains along the Bankstown, Illawarra and East Hills lines passed through the Sydenham junction. This is how the Environmental Impact Statement described the situation⁸:

"The Sydenham-Erskineville section, where all three lines converge to run into Redfern and Central is at saturation during peak periods. This is because all Sydney-bound trains converge onto two tracks in the morning peak and Bankstown-bound trains are required to cross these tracks. ....

Two alternative projects to relieve those capacity constraints are:

• the "Sydenham Six Tracks" project which aims to increase the capacity of the section of the network between Sydenham and Erskineville to better serve the south and south-western passenger markets;
• the New Southern Railway, which would link the East Hills line from the Sydney CBD through the airport to Turrella and thus bypass the congested section of the rail system between Sydenham and Erskineville."

Similarly a CityRail planning document from 1992 noted that trains along the East Hills line were heavily loaded during peak hour, and described the Sydenham Six Tracks proposal as being required "immediately", while acknowledging the Airport Link as an alternative⁹.

From the perspective of our railway planners, the Airport railway provided an alternative path into the city from the south and south-west. Without it, the network would not have had the capacity to service the growth in travel which has occurred in the last 10 years.

A comparison of train and passenger numbers before and after construction of the railway confirms the link has allowed for network growth. (Comparisons are made more difficult by the publicly available data not always being presented in the same format.) The Airport Rail Link EIS stated that 31 trains passed through the Sydenham junction in the morning one hour peak period, carrying 29,100¹⁰ people. (It did not specify which period was regarded as the one hour peak, but CityRail documents from around this time state that the one hour peak is 7.30am to 8.30am.) It can be inferred that the theoretical maximum for the period 7.00am to 9.00am was 62 trains, though the system would have had to have functioned perfectly for that to be achieved.

That theoretical maximum, never achieved beforehand, is now exceeded due to the construction of the Airport Link. Trains through the Sydenham junction have been reduced to a more manageable level, with a net increase in services being realised by routing trains to the city via the airport. This is the current CityRail timetable (as at 12th May 2004):

Trains Arriving at Central on Weekdays via Sydenham
Line	7.00am - 8.00am	8.00am - 9.00am	Total
Airport / East Hills	4	5	9
Illawarra	14	17	31
Bankstown	6	5	11
Sub-total	24	27	51
Trains Arriving at Central on Weekdays via Airport
Line	7.00am - 8.00am	8.00am - 9.00am	Total
Airport / East Hills	7	8	15
Illawarra	0	0	0
Bankstown	0	0	0
Sub-total	7	8	15
Totals	31	35	66

In answer to a question on notice¹¹ recently, the Minister for Transport Services indicated that the trains passing through Sydenham in the two hour peak period carried approximately 43,000 people. The 15 trains passing through Airport Rail Link stations during the same period carried approximately 8,300 people.

At 7-8 trains per hour, the airport line is nowhere near its maximum capacity. It has considerable room for growth in the future.

A Platform for Growth

Growth is not, of course, instantaneous. In bemoaning the failure to divert those travelling to and from the airport from cars to trains, the critics have overlooked how the line will transform the suburbs near the new stations.

At the same time that Mr Costa was using the Airport Rail Link "disaster" to cancel the Parramatta Rail Link, other parts of his own Government were planning on the basis of a significant expansion at Green Square, triggered by the building of the station.

Green Square is now subject to a Master Plan devised by the South Sydney Development Corporation, details of which are available at www.greensquare.com.au. The transport plan¹² issued with the 20 year Master Plan shows that:

• In 1996, the population of Green Square was 8,000 and employment was 25,000,
• By 2016, the population is expected to increase by 22,000 and employment to increase by 16,000,
• The Roads and Traffic Authority is planning roads for the area on the basis that 50% of the employees will use public transport and 65% of the residents will either use public transport, walk or be car passengers. Importantly the report notes that "Achievement of anticipated public transport levels will depend on a parking strategy that discourages car usage ...", and
• To accommodate the expected passenger increase, CityRail expects to gradually increase services through the Green Square railway station from about 8 trains per hour in each direction to about 16 by 2021. This will meet expected Green Square rail travel demand but increasing general rail travel demand would result in standing room only for persons travelling northwards through the Sydney CBD in peak periods.