Australia's peak infrastructure body rejected a $500 million funding request for the Sydney light rail, saying the project would increase congestion and did not stack up economically.

• The assessment claimed "the light rail system does not generate time savings for commuters".
• It identified potential overcrowding, saying the system "would be at capacity immediately and would not be able to accommodate growth".
• The document warned against ignoring the impact on small businesses, claiming "disturbance costs are likely to be substantial and are not included in the current economic appraisal".

A leaked assessment, delivered to the NSW Government in April 2013 and obtained by the ABC and Fairfax media, revealed Infrastructure Australia (IA) had major concerns about the project.

The NSW Government asked IA — which independently assesses the national infrastructure projects — to help fund the light rail, which has since been plagued by problems and delays.

The assessment reveals IA thought the line from Circular Quay to Randwick was poor value, and would be overcrowded and increase congestion on city roads.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-18/nsw-government-was-denied-light-ra...

Picture at top by Gus Leonisky (taken October 3 2018).

I went to China to check out the CRRC trackless tram (they call it autonomous rail transit, or ART). I came back convinced it’s a transformative transit technology.

Light rail is a connecting service. It joins up corridors or links heavy rail stations to surrounding areas and sometimes completes shorter corridors that lack rail lines. Buses were filling these functions in most cities but failing on two fronts:

• buses were not competing with cars so cities were filling with traffic
• buses did not enable denser development to be viable so cities were sprawling rather than redeveloping.

Light rail had many success stories of competing with cars and attracting denser development, so commentators like me did our best to make them policy-relevant (see, for example, here, here and here).

Read more:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/why-trackless-trams-are-ready-to-replace-lig...

The picture at top shows some of the problems encountered by building a seriously solid network of rails: Study the photograph.

In it, I made sure I captured the "utilities" — the electric cables, the gas lines, the phone lines, the drains, etcetera, that once covered by the rails could become problematic for such utilities. Can the high voltage of the tram system disturb data transmission for example? As you know by the number of potholes in your street often started by a utility service digging to fix a pipe, they need access. As well, these utilities CANNOT be concreted into the structure of the rail system. They have to be protected by special casings.

The NSW State Government has settled a year-long legal dispute with construction company Acciona over Sydney's light rail project, agreeing to a $576 million compensation payout.

• With today's compensation payout, the total bill for the light rail project will be more than $3 billion 
• The payout is part of a long-running dispute with Acciona over the complexity of the project
• The first part of the project will be finished in December, with the second part finished in March 

The final payout, confirmed by the State Government this morning, will take the trouble-plagued project's total cost to more than $3 billion — almost double the original price tag predicted by then-transport minister Gladys Berejiklian in 2012.

Acciona sued the NSW Government for misleading or deceptive conduct in April last year. It was initially chasing $1.2 billion over issues relating to the cost of digging up and replacing Ausgrid powerlines for the project, which has turned Sydney's George Street — and parts of Sydney's eastern suburbs — into a construction site. 

The NSW Government accused the company of ordering a go-slow at the time, pushing the already delayed project back further. 

Of the $576 million payout confirmed today, it is understood $129 million will be held back until construction deadlines are met.

The first portion of the light rail, to Randwick in the city's east, must be complete by December. 

The second leg of the project, to the south-east suburb of Kingsford, will need to be finished by March.

The project was supposed to be finished before the March state election.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-03/sydney-light-rail-bill-passes3-bi...

Read from top.

The NSW government’s handling of Sydney's controversial light rail line has been savaged by the Auditor-General, who has highlighted failures in reporting the true cost of the project that has now hit $3.1 billion.

The report, which was released on Thursday, warned that several financial estimates underpinning the government’s entire business case for the project, which was originally costed at $1.6 billion, would not be realised.

It also found Transport for NSW failed to regularly provide financial reports to a project control group set up to specifically monitor the cost compared to funding allocation.

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/nsw-government-failed-to-update-publ...

Light train at central. Picture by Gus Leonisky

Read from top.

See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/37923