Tuesday 31st of December 2024
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joining dots with more traffic jams on a map might give us a sense of achievement but in the end it's destructively ugly...

sydney opera house...

As our pseudo-idiots in charge are planning to spend more and more debt money on roads, tunnels and bridges while selling power stations to pay for some of this extravagance, one has to ponder about the real purpose of this undesirable destruction, reconstruction and ribbon cutting on a rainy day, while some goose with a sword beats you to it...



Overall, such projects like joining some dots on a map with roads might appear attractive but all they do is displace traffic jams from one dot to another until the original dot is completely fullum with cars as well — considering that most of the traffic jams are like plugs trying to get into only one spot: the centre of Sydney. 

Thus from Palm Beach to Parramatta, despite a few traffic divertissement towards Bondi which is at best a traffic jam code-red on summer sunny days and Rookwood where they bury the dead, most of the population of Sydney's burbs wants to go to Sydney where on a glorious days one could not find a better place on earth, apart from the slithering repugnant politicians... The traffic convergence is overwhelming. In the end, no matter how many roads are dug to get there, there is a point at which the convergence ends up like a giant traffic jam from here to eternity, worse than the traffic jam in Dr Who, where people spend their whole life in their cars — like getting married, having kittens and dying in the pits of the crabby depths. 

But there is no magical trap-doors to open the hopeful skies on Sydney's jams as more traffic is added because the contractoring concretors developors rub their hands in glee at the prospect of adding more to the congestion by building taller rabbit warrens with low ceilings on previously lower density housing of 1900s gentility. The town planners of yesteryears may not have been perfect but at least they had a much better sense of society in the way they designed "communities" in which horse-shit on the road was part of the folklore...

Yes, the true purpose of all this ferocious activity of road building, tunnelling for cars and rabbit-warrening is mostly designed to make cash for the Libs (CONservatives)' mates — those rich developers who have been excluded from providing cash for electioneering but did so anyway using various secret networks hidden under the tables. Already more "people" are added to the figures. When a redevelopment was planned last year for 30,000 compacted souls, the exciting new concept by the catholic Baird's team is to jam another 10,000 more in the same surface, while telling us with a big lying smile it's going to be more swell because there won't be any more amenities like parks and schools since most of the "newcomers" would be either single or unmarried (sinning) lesbians... Smiling but idiotically nonetheless adding to traffic woes...

Here we are at the juncture of "town planning" merging with "community destructioning". Town planning on this scale is ugly, though as I mentioned before, most new buildings in Aussieland these days are built on old Bauhaus plans from the 1920s, with hubcaps. 

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A City like Shanghai seems to have done a far better job. It has used a solution represented by a couple of dirty words for the New South Wales CONservatives: PUBLIC TRANSPORT... From 248 miles up in the sky, though, it looks this city still needs to work on its sewage system but I can see it happening at speed. 

Shanghai is only six times the size of Sydney and will be about 10 times the size of Sydney when Sydney reaches 2030 with more massive traffic jams trying to get into a bottleneck, unless as forecast, petrol runs out. 

Yes, despite the price of crude going down the gurgler — a plunge mostly designed to hurt the Russian economy — we are RUNNING OUT OF OIL. Our friends, the despotic Saudis, have been willing to contribute a bit to the sting but they now are already preparing to reduce the flow of the black gold in order to raise these hurting falling prices, so they can extend their huge palaces and pay for the destruction of Mecca. Extra note (28/11/14) I believe our friends the Saudis have been secretly told by dark forces at play to "act" to lower the price of oil until the Russian economy is kaput, which wont happen...

Shanghai has a massive metro network, huge number of buses, taxis and trains — all making "private" car mostly unnecessary... As well it has a fast train going from the city to the main airport more than 30 kilometres away in about seven minutes. Sydney's "private" trains take about 13 minutes on a good day to make the 9 kilometres journey, though you may have to wait a while on the platforms. Not too bad considering the "public" buses used to do the job in about 15 minutes with five time the frequency.... 

So a city like Shanghai does not need to devote entire city blocks or massive underground holes to the god of car parking. No need for ugly "metering" council addiction. I would suggest Sydney's councils and government are in a racket to collect huge fees from your Visa and Mastercard, while public transport won't get you where you want or need to go...

So, now that Tony Abbott-the-liar has make a deal with China, we could learn a bit from them about transportation... 

But then what would Australia be without gas guzzlers? I mean those north shore  monstrous four-wheel drives used by unemployed rich mums (about to collect an Abbott nanny-salary) on their way to tennis after dropping the bubs at school by double-parking in front of the private school, funded by the public purse despite their exorbitant fees. 

So, in conclusion, there is a lot to be though about the future of this great city that could be scarred for life by wider roads and new dormitories looking like Chatswood, should the already outdated plans of this 1950s-thinking mob get the go-ahead. 

Just do not forget that after 2032, global warming will destroy a lot of things on this planet — and in Sydney as well. Be prepared.

Gus Leonisky
Your local Town Planner expert...

 

it's not a fourteen story high building...

In the picture at top, massive cruise ships coming into Sydney Circular Quay are like visiting blocks of flats. Here today, gone tomorrow and replaced by the next one.

This one, at about 15 storey high about the plimsol line without mentioning the play deck, the water slide and the chimneys, actually gives a good impression of how much sunlight these huge floaters take away from the city...

the fastest train on earth...

 

 

Current record holder is the Shanghai Maglev, also known as the Transrapid, which has a top speed of 430km/h. It achieves this phenomenal speed by using an electromagnetic field to glide above the track, eliminating the drag caused by wheels.

The train operates between Shanghai and the city's Pudong International Airport, a distance of 30.5 kilometres, which it covers in eight minutes for an average speed of 228 km/h.

http://www.traveller.com.au/whats-the-worlds-fastest-passenger-train-11hr1v

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read article at top where the Maglev is mentioned: The Chinese information is that the train takes only a bit more than 7 minutes to do the 30 kms... not 8 minutes. Its record is 510 km/h top speed.

roads to nowhere and a truckie god...

 



Roads to nowhere
By Paul Cleary

The reach of the billionaire trucking magnate Lindsay Fox extends far beyond the distinctive red and gold Linfox trucks that operate on the nation’s highways in ever increasing numbers. His influence can be seen in the office of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, where a model Linfox semitrailer holds a prominent place on the bookshelf. When Abbott did live interviews from his desk in late 2014, the model truck sat above his right shoulder, while a portrait of Sir Robert Menzies and a Steeden football appeared to his left.


Read more: Roads to nowhere

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eyebrows rule

 

extending the tunnel further to make traffic jam longer...

The motorway tunnel planned to run under the inner west from Haberfield to St Peters will be about one kilometre longer than first announced.

Roads Minister Duncan Gay this week revealed changes to the third stage of the WestConnex motorway, a tunnel to run under the suburbs of Haberfield, Leichhardt, Annandale, Camperdown, Newtown and Enmore.

The tunnel, slated to be built between 2018 and 2023, is planned to link two other large motorway tunnels – another M5 East tunnel to St Peters in the south, and an extension of the M4 to Haberfield in the north – as part of a series of projects called WestConnex.

Mr Gay called the inner west tunnel the "key" to the whole project.

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/westconnex-tunnel-grows-by-a-kilometre-20141201-11xoro.html

 

More cars, more jam underground. Sydney car numbers (possibly traffic as well) increases by 10 per cent per year (compounded — tripled in about 40 years)... Trying to create more "roads" (tunnels) to go to the city is likely to increase the size of the traffic jams beyond belief... I know, this government is also trying to implement a small "tram" system for public transport, but this "tram" would be using the same roads where traffic is already saturated at most times... The whole transport strategy of this ultra-right wing government now lead by the young Baird is ratshit and designed to profit developers rather than fix the transportation problems. When one also consider the high density inhabitation planned as well in some areas, the whole thinking is more like playing a game of ten pin bowling while on ice and on steroid... Idiots.

measuring traffic...

Presently the RTA or whatever it calls itself now, the Road and Maritime Service or such, has placed a lot of pavement boxes with wires across the affected roads by the possible tunnel exits... The are counting cars... But counting cars can be iffy. for example one can count 10 cars an hour on some roads, but one has to realise that the traffic is so clogged up, that out of thousands of cars compressed on that street, only ten managed to crawl over the measuring bizos. I trust the boffins at the RMS (or whatever they are) know this and make allowances for traffic jams already in existence and that they know that widening roads will only increase the size of the traffic jam IN THE SAME SPOT or a bit further on. But then I might give too much credit to the boffins...

 

See article at top...

the boofheads and their transport idiocy...

 

 

From Elizabeth Farrelly, Sydney Morning Herald 29/01/15

 

Wherever you look it seems the boofheads are back in charge. And I don't just mean Abbott's bizarre elevation of militarists and monarchs. (Defenders of Sir Prince are conspicuously absent, yet I should point out in his defence that his single spoken syllable in my presence thoroughly befits an Aussie knight, being an imperative, "beer!")

No, I mean the diehard collusion of coal, cars and climate denial jack-booting up and down our land. But what saves boofhead culture – or rather, what sometimes saves us from it – is its incompetence. Here the WestConnex debacle offers a textbook case.

I've always felt ridiculously proud that Sydney survived, roughly intact, the 20th century motorway mania that sent so many cities spiralling into self-destruction. It wasn't for lack of wishing. NSW road engineers would have levelled most of Glebe, Chippendale, Newtown, Redfern and Paddington, but for a serendipitous mix of government incompetence and hippie heritage awareness.

The death of Tom Uren highlights this piece of historical luck. The engineers had yearned to build motorways since the 1940s but the enabling plan, red-striping our inner-city like so much prime beef, wasn't gazetted until 1971. By then it was too late. The Whitlam era was already in the wind, with Uren expounding the urbanism that would value cities as places, not just thoroughfares. The inner city was saved.

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Since then, we've watched these same inner-city neighbourhoods flower into the creative hubs that drive the city economy. This makes motorway-madness even starker. Many of Sydney's peer cities across the globe see motorways now as things to demolish, not build, blights on community, drivers of climate change, exacerbators of congestion.

So when WestConnex popped up in 2012, it looked like the decades-late death-rattle of red-striped engineer-think. Greiner's folly. No one really believed they would be daft enough to do it.

It's not like we have the money – $12 billion (in 2012 dollars) for a dying technology? It was widely assumed that the flurry of hasty announcements would end, Utopia-like, in a soft wet fizzle.

But no. The project lives. Now, as St Peters residents choke on compulsory acquisition orders that will raze dozens of homes from their sweet and funky neighbourhood and Newtown gears up to save the soul of King Street, it seems the fat lady of motorway madness may sing in Sydney yet.

NSW already had more land-use portfolios than it could manage: transport, roads and planning, all in separate fiefdoms. But the O'Farrell government wanted more. It set up Infrastructure NSW, a majority private-sector body headed by Nick Greiner (and including, incidentally, three ACs, an OAM and an AO, but as yet no knight), to advise the premier directly. Three years of boofhead daffiness followed.

read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/westconnex-the-road-to-ruin-is-paved-with-more-roads-20150128-12zswr.html

 

 

Thank you, Elizabeth, for pointing the fingers at the boofheads...

The concept here is not so much to provide quicker transport but to destroy old suburbs to provide developers (Liberal (CONservatives) mates mostly with valuable inner city real estate to cash in... In my view, it's corrupt to the eyeballs, especially in the way it is sold (promoted) by Liberal (CONservative) as the panacea for Sydney's transport. It's crap...

 

See also: 

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/21739

 

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/29309