Sydney Traffic Chaos and Cityrail Woes

Yesterday I was sitting in the window seat of a Devonshire Street bar in Sydney’s Surry Hills with a local named Gus. It was a Tuesday night, at a time of year when the evening air starts to feel less like atmosphere and more like an aggressive, ethereal defender, protecting the outdoors from humans. In spite of these facts the pub was full and lively and warm. There wasn’t even trivia on, to draw this crowd, or happy hours deals to keep them inside. The content, chattering populous was there for two reasons. One was the venue itself, a traditional brick pub with polished floorboards and a restored wooden bar featuring old style taps. A long wall was covered by a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf filled with hardback collections that would have fit in perfectly in the den of any respectable professor from the turn of the century.
The other reason was, four and a half million people live in Sydney, and after the sun goes down they all have to end up somewhere.
It was Gus who had decided we should choose this venue for our meeting. He had local knowledge, and recommended it as “a nice place to have a drink.” As we sat by the window watching the light traffic on Crown Street go by I was compelled to agree.
As the evening progressed it did not take long for our conversation to turn to the topic of our trips into town, both by car and by train. Public transport and work commutes, I believe, are two of the most popular topics of discussion and contention in Sydney. Others obviously share my theory as every time I see an advert for any of the commercial television stations’ current affair programs they are always yelling “trains!” or “Sydney’s biggest road network fail!” and usually in all caps. The most read section of the Herald and the Telegraph almost always leads with an editorial on Rail changes or an article about road works and delays. It seems like you only have to put phrases like “Sydney traffic chaos” or “cityrail woes” into the title of your article and every idiot will clamour to read no matter how banal the actual content is.
Gus recently had to drive from Barangaroo to Woolloomooloo in mid-afternoon traffic. A twenty minute walk or, as he informed me, a thirty minute drive. After this experience he said he was “astounded” that people would choose to drive their cars into Sydney’s CBD and deal with the congestion, parking charges and one way streets when they could easily arrive by train instead. I agreed with him, saying that I myself would never do such a thing, but I added that after my experience with peak hour trains I could understand why others might make that decision. While I have no problems catching the train that I want and disembarking where I plan to, I have seen enough short people sardined in the morning trains, crowd surfing for the best part of an hour because they can’t reach anything to hold on to. On other occasions I have also witnessed small students and the elderly trying to alight at Redfern or Wynyard stations only for the awaiting masses to decide that the time to board had now come and in the process dragged them back into the train like a tourist in a riptide, forced to look hopelessly out the window as the train carries them away from their intended destination while they’re trapped between travellers in a stairwell, or lobbed up onto a luggage rack.
Following these tales Gus and I both processed what we had learnt from each other. After this moment of thought we simultaneously came to the same conclusion:
“Something needs to be done about Sydney’s trains...” he said.
“And something must be done about Sydney’s traffic,” I finished his sentence.
We nodded a confirmation, and I took another sip from my middy of Little Creatures Pale Ale.