Sydney’s plan to split into three cities in as little as 20 years
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
- The first is its geography. The harbour is a giant wall through a big part of the city, with only a few chokepoints where people can cross. These are congested, and constrain the entire road and rail transportation network. The Pacific ocean constrains growth to the east, the blue mountains to the West, and the national park to the south. The only growth corridors are towards the southwest, and northwest - a long, long way from the CBD.
- It's not nearly dense enough. Australians love their free-standing houses, both the McMansions in the new suburbs, and the trendy terraces in the inner city, beloved by Baby Boomers who have a convenient lifestyle while living in an "urban village" - of course, they all bought back in the 90s when it was still affordable. These two types of housing make it incredibly inefficient to build a workable rail public transport network, so a lot of the PT is forced to use busses, which are not as popular, and suffer from the same congestion at the chokepoints as well as the additional car traffic from everyone who isn't well-served by PT. This is a lot of people.
- Any attempts to build higher density housing, particularly in the sainted inner suburbs will be met with cries of "Over-development", even by people who should know better such as the Greens.
I moved to Berlin a few years ago, and it's a comparable city in size to Sydney (3.5m vs around 5m in Sydney). It works far better because it's far denser, and the level of infrastructure provided makes living here a breeze by comparison. Berlin came of age before the motor car, and was geographically constrained for quite a period there by an actual wall. Sydney really started to grow just as the car become popular and widely-owned.
After extension of the city of Berlin in 1921, this lead to it having many "city centres" around which life was formed in a similar way Sydney attempts to achieve now by this artificial after-the-fact split. I’m doubtful it’ll be successful.
I'm guessing that this declaration will have little real effect. The government will try to create new job centres out of Parramatta and Liverpool, as they have been for decades, but the new efforts will he just as effective as the old and people will continue to commute to the CBD and North Sydney arc, where a big chunk of the jobs will remain.
It's not a world leading bit of town planning, but the results of poor planning.
Thats exactly how I feel and how my local Sydneysiders feel as well.
I only lived there a couple years and have since moved away, but the government ineptitude was quite obvious.
This plan must be costing the tax payers millions.
Was there any sort of public vote for this initiative?
Sydney is a slightly different beast though. Its transport problems stem from a mixture of geography, history and lack of/inept planning.
Its roads are generally thinner and crazier due to being a more "organic" in its early planning compared to melbourne (which is built in a planned grid). Sydney literally tore up and destroyed one of the biggest tram networks in the world and converted the roads to automobile.
Meanwhile the combination of the harbour, sea to the east, blue mountains to the west create an increasingly geographically constrained city. Transport options are severely limited out to the eastern suburbs (cynically, partly by desire, they are also the wealthiest suburbs in general). Contrasted with melbourne, which is built on a massive flat plain around a bay, Sydney terrain encompasses hills and valleys to a far greater extent further limiting the engineering options.
Finally, sydney's main airport is comparatively close to the main CBD (almost half as close as melbourne's) which is further limiting the available land within the central area, and resulting in requirements to build a second airport out west to try to increase air capacity to the city.
The result, along with australia's cultural and historical proclivities is a city almost in constant congestion, highest house prices, and with easily the longest commutes in the country. (keeping in mind when viewing comparable stats, that although sydney is out in front, I felt many sydney-siders will rationally try to compensate/substitute their travel times to avoid the congestion).
Lived in both myself. All major cities have congestion, but its at another level in Sydney compared to the other Australian cities. The culture in the office of "accepting crazy travel times to get into work" was insane.
In my experience, I found renting to be much more expensive in Melbourne compared to Sydney.
This may be driven by affluent areas such as Rose and Watsons Bay.
So while these new measures could potentially lower pricing in the housing market for buyers, I could see this having negative affects for the renting community.
There may be a subjective element in being present in Melbourne while rent prices took off which makes Melbourne seem to have become more expensive, but it's not even close.
Edit: for instance, I live within walking distance of Melbourne cbd in a modern 2 bedder with 1 car space. Market rent approx $650 - $750 pw (not even including aberrations like docklands). In Sydney, you have to draw a substantially wider radius and transport time around the city centre and employment hub before you start hitting comparable properties and rates.
https://www.bedssi.com/rental-price-guide-for-australian-cit...
I did find that Sydney had more availability and options (at least during the market period I was searching). Lower Supply and High Demand should drive up Melbourne's price, but as you said, real estate in Sydneys CBD is just more valuable than Melbourne.
In London you quite often have the same issue, and that's a city with excellent public transport coverage (albeit a much more populous city). I have a friend who lives only 5 miles from where I used to live, and transport between our places often involved 2-3 changes, and could easily take 1.5 hours.
It's interesting you cited Melbourne, as I think it's the Aussie city generally considered as having the best public transport.
Where Melbourne struggles is the services as you get out of the inner suburbs. Where the bus services can be a 10 min walk, don't run often enough which is then compounded by them running late so often it forces you to catch an earlier bus because you'll miss your train half the time. So you end up trying to catch a bus that's 20 mins earlier than what you need it to be if you could depend on it being timely. Which means you have to leave the house half an hour earlier than if you just drove to the station.
However if you drive to the station most don't have sufficient parking. So if you aren't there by 6:30-7:00 am you can't get a park.
If you're heading to the city then once you are at the station it isn't so bad. Unless you're on a line where there are no seats and can be forced to stand squished up against a bunch of people for 45 mins.
But where the REAL pain is, is Melbourne's rail system is designed solely to get people in and out of the city. There is no outer loop. Meaning if you are in an say an eastern suburb and want to get to a south eastern suburb it requires going all the way into the city then back out again of a south eastern line.
Take the trip from the eastern suburb Ringwood to the south eastern suburb Clayton. A non peak driving trip would take 30-35 minutes. A train trip, not including the time it takes to get to the train station is triple that. Even in peak times when you can get express trains and driving is congested it's still going to be faster to drive.
""The idea that you can reverse the job centralization process by suggesting adding two new cities ... then (saying) it will happen, is somewhat fanciful, I think," says Searle."
If you superimposed that map of Sydney onto San Francisco (and lets mirror flip it to get the coasts on the same side) - it'd extend from say Mill Valley in the north down to somewhere past Cupertino in the south - and east (away from the coast) to about Pleasanton.
What we think of as "Sydney" is about 40 miles north/south and east/west. The area GoogleMaps tells me is "San Francisco is about 7 miles by 7 miles.
Not saying either is right or wrong, just that you might not know just how large a piece of ground what is meant by "Sydney" represents. We call Sydney a city of 5million people. You say San Francisco has a population of ~850k people. The "San Francisco Bay Area" with 7.8 million people is pretty close to what we call "Sydney", and I think that's 8 or 9 "cities" the way the US divides things up...
In both cases there is a distinction between the city proper and the metro area. Both Sydney and San Francisco are extreme cases, other cases, like Brisbane, Australia or New York City the disparity between city proper and metro area are less extreme.
San Francisco is also somewhat unusual in that its metro area has a different name ("Bay Area"). But that isn't universally true of American cities (it is not uncommon, but not universal either.)
I'm not convinced that there are any fundamental differences between US and Australian usage here.
Having said that - "Sydney City" maps closer (in my head) to "The Mission District" than to "San Francisco" still. Google Maps draws Sydney City as around 1.6 miles north/south and 1 mile east/west. (Although I thn there's a larger "Sydney City Council" area than that, I know some of Newtown has Sydney City parking rules and the rest has Marrickville/Inner West COuncil parking rules, and Newtown is a half mile or so away from where Google Maps draws that border...)
Melbourne has a similar sprawl to Sydney (and lets face it, Sydney and Melbourne are really the only "cities" in Australia, everywhere else is just big or small country towns! ;-) )
I routinely use "San Franciso" to mean "the San Francisco Metropolitan Area." I assume "Bay Area" is more of a local thing.
There's nothing different about "how Australian's do cities" in the sense OP is talking about. You have a central "City of" and a lot of similar, or smaller sized "City of," "Town of," that compose the area we think of as "the city."
Technically that's right, but culturally there is a big difference in my experience (as an Australian who has spent a lot of time in SF Bay Area).
In the Bay Area, when people describe where they live they'll refer to their local city/town first - i.e., Palo Alto, San Jose, Oakland, San Mateo, or indeed San Francisco the distinct city. Sure they might refer to the "Bay Area", as a general descriptor of where they live to an outsider, but they wouldn't normally say "I live in San Francisco" if they live in Menlo Park.
In Australia, people will primarily describe themselves as living in "Melbourne" or "Sydney", and only if the conversation progresses to which part of that city they live in will they refer to the suburb. Even then they'll talk about the local suburb, which is normally distinct from the municipality, particularly now that the municipalities are quite large and encompass several suburbs.
If you live in a given metro area, and you are talking to someone else who you know also lives in that metro area, you are not going to answer "Where do you live?" with the name of the metro area – you are going to describe the part of it in which you live. Conversely, if you are talking to someone who lives on the other side of the country (or the world), you will just name the metro area, because they presumably don't know the geography of that metro area well or at all.
And that's true both in the Bay Area and in Sydney too. If you are sitting in an office in Palo Alto, and the person in the next cubicle asks you where you live, you won't say "Bay Area", you'll be more specific. But if you then come on a business trip or holiday to Sydney, and people ask you where you are from, you probably will just say "San Franscisco", because "San Bruno", "Daly City", "Belmont", "Milpitas", "Fremont", "Hayward", etc, means nothing to the average Sydneysider.
In the same way, if you are sitting in an office in Sydney CBD, and someone else who you know is local asks you where you live, you aren't going to say "Sydney". You'll say "Castle Hill" or "Bankstown" or "Hurstville" or "Penrith" or "Turramurra" or "Dee Why" or "Woolloomooloo" or whatever. Or maybe you'll give a more regional descriptor, like "North Shore" or "Eastern Suburbs" or "Sutherland" or "Inner West" or "Central Coast" or so on.
So I'm unconvinced that this cultural difference you perceive between Australia and the US is actually real.
But if you then come on a business trip or holiday to Sydney, and people ask you where you are from, you probably will just say "San Franscisco"
No, people from the Bay Area don't say that, and indeed it's considered by purists to be a faux pas to ever say you live in San Francisco if you live in a different city in the Bay Area.
In the context you've described, someone who lives in Mountain View would normally say "I live in the San Francisco Bay Area", or "I live in Mountain View, near San Francisco", but not "I live in San Francisco".
Whereas someone who lives in an outer suburb of metropolitan Melbourne or Sydney would just say "I live in Melbourne/Sydney".
Let's just remind ourselves why we're having this discussion: the root commenter was explaining for US readers what Australians mean when referring to "Sydney", in this context of discussing the possibility of breaking the city up into three parts.
The point stands that the valid US equivalent here would be "San Francisco Bay Area", not "San Francisco".
This custom is not confined to the Bay Area, but it does vary from place to place. It's not a function of American English, it's about the culture and governance structure of the area in question.
Someone from Brooklyn, New York might describe their home locality as "Brooklyn" or "New York City" (or indeed their neighbourhood in Brooklyn, e.g, Williamsburg). But it's perfectly valid for a person from Brooklyn or Manhattan or Queens to say "I live in New York City" as the five boroughs are all contained within the municipality of NYC.
In Los Angeles, someone from Santa Monica or Beverly Hills might just say to a foreigner "I live in Los Angeles" for simplicity, even though they're separate municipalities from the City of Los Angeles, though they're all within Los Angeles County. Whereas someone in Pasadena or Malibu would more likely name that as their home town, even though they're also in Los Angeles County.
I'm not so familiar with specific customs in many other major metropolises, but certainly the metro areas of Seattle and Boston are collections of separate cities - I.e., Redmond, Washington and Cambridge, Massachusetts are referred to by name as distinct from Seattle and Boston respectively.
But I'll again remind you of the whole point of this discussion: in Australia we have a fairly straightforward understanding of what is meant by city names like Melbourne or Sydney for the purpose of discussing a topic like this news story: it refers to the greater metropolitan area.
In the US it is less straightforward and sometimes quite different depending on where you're talking about, e.g., SF Bay Area, hence the root commenter's helpful clarification for US readers.
Pretty much all the major cities in the U.S. are like this.
We know how to do sprawl.
I just don't see how splitting into three cities solves any of these problems. Now they are three separate governments with different amounts of funds/budget.
The Easter Harbour District with the CBD should garner the highest budget and thus have more runway to build infrastructure, but what about the other two cities?
Will they still be able to benefit from the tourism revenue from the CBD and Harbour?
I'm most skeptical of the Western District becoming its own thriving and independent CBD.
Granted I was lucky when I lived in Sydney, I was able to afford to live close enough to walk everywhere. I hated driving though, the traffic mainly but always fearful of accidentally turning onto a toll road. I'm still dismayed about the governments insistence on big toll highway projects.
Sydney and Melbourne’s populations are both growing way too fast for the Governments to keep up with infrastructure, schools, hospitals, etc. even if they were competent... (The Federal Government sets the skilled migration rate, which is unusually high compared to other OECD countries, but the states have to pay for the infrastructure. At the same time, there’s huge slack in the employment market with up to 20% unemployed or under-employed).
I’m so glad my family moved away from Sydney when I was a baby... If you can find a good tech job, life is much better (and cheaper) in Brisbane.
Finding one job is easy. However what's the contingency if that job goes (bust, relocate, get fed up with the politics, etc)
People seem to flock to major tech hubs because they are more likely to be able to find a replacement job. There's less competition for jobs in Brisbane, but there's fewer jobs available, and it's harder to leave one job on Friday and start a new one on Monday.
The plans to create a CBD in the west are centered around the new airport to be built in 2026. Seems pretty ambitious as this will likely serve smaller domestic flights.
All three problems are self inflicted. Some have labelled Australia a "Population Ponzi". We could just stop doing it to ourselves. But then house prices might collapse, followed by the banks, and no land owner wants that. Apparently just reducing the intake is not an option. [1]
[1] https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2018/03/four-corners-fails-...
Do residents of an area actually behave like this? Those who can afford to may live anywhere they want. But only those who own their own businesses can determine where they work - the rest have to work in a particular location. And the choice of where to live involves many trade-offs including commute distance.
My intuition would say that splitting up Sydney will have no effect on resident behavior but that having three governments will be less efficient than one with taxes going up accordingly.
But it will provide three times as many jobs for the class of people that decides on these matters.
It's hard not to be cynic about politics when institutions "self-reform" by expanding in non-obvious (and likely more expensive) ways.