CBD & South East Light Rail

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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by lunchbox »

The Heritage Council has received an S60 Application for a new pedestrian bridge over Kensington Pond in Centennial Park to connect an existing footpath within the park to the Alison Road Light Rail Stop. The cynic in me suggests that Randwick Racecourse might want to facilitate access between the racecourse and cars parked in Centennial Park. There is already a footbridge over the pond opposite Doncaster Avenue, and a "land" bridge about 100m east of the vehicular entrance to the racecourse. Submissions close Wednesday 20 September 2017.
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by Fleet Lists »

http://mysydneycbd.nsw.gov.au/news/firs ... il-vehicle
The first of a brand new fleet of light rail vehicles was officially unveiled in Sydney this week, giving customers an early glimpse inside the modern, new Citadis X05 vehicles that will operate the CBD and South East Light Rail.

Sixty vehicles will make their way from France to Sydney to operate the new light rail system from Circular Quay to Randwick and Kingsford operating as 30 coupled sets, 67 metres in length.

The vehicles are fully accessible with low-floors, double doors, dedicated areas for wheelchairs and prams and low-level on-board passenger intercoms.

Each light rail vehicle set can carry up to 450 people, equivalent of up to nine standard buses. This will mean less congestion on Sydney’s roads and more reliable travel times.

Later in the year the vehicles will undergo testing along part of the track, ahead of services starting operation in 2019.

The CBD and South East Light Rail will provide reliable, high frequency ‘turn up and go’ transport services from Circular Quay and the CBD, to Randwick and Kingsford via Surry Hills, Moore Park and Kensington by early 2019.

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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by Swift »

Yep, import them off a boat like any poor non advanced third world country and pay thru the nose for it.
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by Newcastle Flyer »

Bit slow aren't you Fleet Lists, as they were unveiled almost a month ago! :mrgreen:
Each light rail vehicle set can carry up to 450 people, equivalent of up to nine standard buses. This will mean less congestion on Sydney’s roads and more reliable travel times.
But will that line really mean less congestion on or near said tram extension?
Looks like they are going to have a very, very limited number of seats.
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by Fleet Lists »

Newcastle Flyer wrote:Bit slow aren't you Fleet Lists, as they were unveiled almost a month ago! :mrgreen:

.
Only received the email today.
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by Newcastle Flyer »

Fleet Lists wrote:Only received the email today.
That sounds slower than "snail" mail!

Regarding the picture of this post here on page 113.

The picture shows were the two tram connect, a flatter end. Is that really the case, or are both ends exactly the same?
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by tonyp »

Newcastle Flyer wrote:
Regarding the picture of this post here on page 113.

The picture shows were the two tram connect, a flatter end. Is that really the case, or are both ends exactly the same?
They were originally going to get single-ended trams coupled back to back (which the illustration shows) but they've settled on coupled double-ended trams.

What I really want to know is when the Blue Whale goes into service and on what route? I've ridden the Blue Emu quite a bit but the Blue Whale sounds more exciting. :P
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by hornetfig »

lunchbox wrote:The Heritage Council has received an S60 Application for a new pedestrian bridge over Kensington Pond in Centennial Park to connect an existing footpath within the park to the Alison Road Light Rail Stop. The cynic in me suggests that Randwick Racecourse might want to facilitate access between the racecourse and cars parked in Centennial Park. There is already a footbridge over the pond opposite Doncaster Avenue, and a "land" bridge about 100m east of the vehicular entrance to the racecourse. Submissions close Wednesday 20 September 2017.
umm, do you have a link for this? Currently there's no bridge. The previous bridge was demolished to reconstruct the embankment plus it was not accessible and not really suitable for both pedestrians and bicyclists at the same time.
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by boronia »

It was listed in the gov't notices on Wednesday, but doesn't appear to be on line yet.
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by lunchbox »

^^^^^^ I've checked the documents for the new pedestrian bridge. It's just a larger bridge at the western end of Kensington Pond, close to where the former bridge is/was, opposite Doncaster Avenue. Its southern end will connect directly with the new walkway along the light rail alignment. The design is by Urbis.
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by Frosty »

Let's hope they keep the cost of this pedestrian bridge reasonable not like that $38m Albert Tibby Cotter Bridge on Anzac Pde & hopefully no cost blowouts like the general SELR project.
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by Swift »

Frosty wrote:Let's hope they keep the cost of this pedestrian bridge reasonable not like that $38m Albert Tibby Cotter Bridge on Anzac Pde & hopefully no cost blowouts like the general SELR project.
Don't get your hopes up, if history is a guide. :roll:
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by marcnut1996 »

http://www.lightrail.unsw.edu.au/news/t ... ow-streets
Temporary Traffic Changes on Anzac Parade between Barker and Rainbow Streets
Posted 26 September 2017

A temporary traffic change will move the light rail worksite on Anzac Parade from 10pm Friday 29 September to 5am Monday 16 October.

Works will take place on Anzac Parade between Barker Street and Rainbow Street, Kingsford and will include:
  • temporary relocation of the construction site
  • movement of barriers
  • line-marking, traffic signal adjustments
  • the establishment of new traffic arrangements
  • installation of light rail track
  • kerbside drainage works.
Traffic and Pedestrian Changes
The following traffic and pedestrian changes will be in place:
The light rail worksite will divide the two northbound lanes on Anzac Parade from Gardeners Road to just south of Borrodale Road, Kingsford.
The light rail worksite will occupy the eastern side of Anzac Parade from just north of Middle Street to Meeks Street.
Traffic on Anzac Parade northbound will not be able to turn right onto Meeks Street or Middle Street.
The bus stops north of Gardeners Road will be temporarily closed and relocated between Borrodale Road and Strachan Street from 4am on Sunday 1 October.

Anzac Parade will remain open during all work and where possible two traffic lanes will be maintained in both directions. New traffic arrangements will be in place around the worksite. Construction speed limits may apply.

Pedestrian footpaths will remain open.

Localised traffic control will be in place to assist motorists, pedestrians and cyclists with the new traffic arrangements.

Image
In summary, Kingsford bus stops (City bound) stands A-C along Anzac Parade will be moved.

There are also other new traffic arrangements near Barker Street but no public transport services will be affected by these arrangements. (http://www.lightrail.unsw.edu.au/news/n ... ker-street)
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by Frosty »

Interesting will these temporary northbound stops be a seperate bus bay from running traffic or be like the Doncaster Ave stop in the lanes.

That’ll be annoying trying to transfer from to and from the southbound Anzac Pde stops to the Gardeners Rd Dacey Gardens stop.
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by boronia »

There doesn't appear to be any provision for bus bays at these stops, traffic will come to a standstill behind buses, as now happens southbound along Anzac Pde.

Meeks St has been closed off for months now, nothing new here.
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by Jurassic_Joke »

So Andrew was originally actually against this entire project.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/nationa ... a4e66eba81
Soon after he became NSW Transport Minister, Andrew Constance asked bureaucrats what it would cost to dump Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s controversial $2.1 billion CBD light rail project and whether abandoning it was possible.

Bureaucrats told him and his senior staff the contract signed by then transport minister Ms Berejiklian was watertight and cancelling it would create “sovereign risk” and be too expensive, The Australian has learnt. Since then Mr Constance has had to make several announcements about the light rail line and praised it.

After the 2015 Coalition election win, Mr Constance was moved by former premier Mike Baird from Treasury to Transport, with Ms Berejiklian made treasurer, ahead of her becoming Premier less than two years later.

According to an account of one early meeting, Transport for NSW secretary Tim Reardon and other senior bureaucrats told Mr Constance there was “sovereign risk” in any attempt to dump the line. “The words he (Mr Reardon) used were ‘the Spanish have tied us up in knots on the contract’,” a source in the meeting said.

“The contract was signed in such a rush, every alteration we want to make is costing us five times as much as it should have.

“There was a view (in Mr Constance’s office) at the time that this was a dog of a project.”

At another meeting, bureaucrats again told Mr Constance and his senior staff the project could not be cancelled.

The Australian has learnt two big Australian infrastructure construction companies will not bid for work for the Parramatta light rail project, which the government reannounced yesterday, partly because of dramas associated with the CBD light rail. Lend Lease and John Holland have decided not to bid for the design and construct part of the plan.

A combination of difficulties the Spanish contractors Acciona have had removing and replacing utilities in the CBD and the way the Parramatta deal has been structured has put them off, sources at the companies confirmed.

Yesterday Mr Constance did not deny his 2015 wish to cancel the CBD light rail project.

“Any new minister receives a full brief of current projects, what stage they’re up to and makes an assessment of whether projects provide good outcomes and should proceed,” he said in a statement yesterday. “Sydney light rail proceeded because it will provide a great outcome for Sydney. We do not comment on ­internal meetings.”

Mr Constance and Ms Berejiklian announced a preferred route for stage two of the $3.5 billion Parramatta light rail yesterday, from Rydalmere north of the Parramatta River to Olympic Park. A first stage, from Westmead to Carlingford, is due to be com­pleted in 2023.

Yesterday the opposition questioned how the project would be funded, given the state budget allocated only $1bn to the project.

The Australian revealed yesterday the government was pulling out all stops to block the release of documents on the CBD light rail project, which the opposition thinks may show Ms Berejiklian misled the public when she said a $500 million blowout was for improvements. The Auditor-General found 94 per cent of the rise was “was due to incorrect estimates in the business case”.

Asked why the government would not release the documents, Mr Constance told parliament yesterday the matter was being handled “at arm’s length” by the department and there were “commercial sensitivities”.
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by Swift »

The Spanish based contractors must have some non translatable words to describe us back home (where they should have stayed).
They were probably chosen purely because they were thought to be the cheapest, in the traditional Liberal way of doing things.
I saw an interesting US video on choices of mass transit and in it they stated that the typical light rail line costs $200 million. That's no more than AU$270 million.
The 1.5 lines of this crooked project could be 10 times that. With the snails pace of work being carried out that I see and the huge rates of pay the workers are getting -I over heard a worker mention $80.00 an hour on the weekend, you can see the $ cost mounting before your eyes every time you pass the endless construction zones.
Let's hope the truth comes out before election time so these turkeys are made to pay some sort of penance for this financial quagmire. They deserve to be thrown out of office just for this.
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by Jurassic_Joke »

Agree wholeheartedly.

Speaking honestly, I for one, am sick and a bit fed up of the flagship street in my own City has been the site of a war zone/bomb site for 2 years now, with recent suggestions that the construction times may likely blow out further. It is depressing seeing it visually and adds to the "dead city" feeling the lockouts have already given it. Innocent businesses are suffering financially. I know in other jurisdictions where they've built a tram line along a main street thats taken less time than this.

I know and acknowledge there was an issue of buses getting stuck for eternity on George Street during peak hour - but the sad truth is, Castlereagh Street is the exact same as the old George St in the arvo peak. A street of fun buses, fun sounds and fun activities, but as soon as you actually board a bus, you go nowhere. Taking a bus from Martin Place to Broadway at 5pm? You could honestly walk instead and give the bus a good run for its money. So tbh, what I'm also interested in seeing sometime soon would be proposed further CBD bus changes after 2019.

That being said, complaining won't really do much at this stage, and we're too far in the contract. So I just hope they stop squabbling and just finish on time for early 2019. I truly want to see it done now as much as the next person. And if they don't, Labor will have some ammunition for the next election (not saying their track record on transport is particularly great either)
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by mandonov »

From a local industry expert who comments on SSC:
pintpot wrote:
According to an account of one early meeting, Transport for NSW secretary Tim Reardon and other senior bureaucrats told Mr Constance there was “sovereign risk” in any attempt to dump the line. “The words he (Mr Reardon) used were ‘the Spanish have tied us up in knots on the contract’,” a source in the meeting said
A bit unfair. Contractors don't write the contract, the client (TfNSW does). So they tied themselves in knots. I can't believe any contractor can tie up a client in knots to make cancellation impossible, but they will price for any cancellation and it is always going to be expensive and poor value. Not unreasonably: bidding is expensive (in the case of a biggish PPP like this it costs tens of millions) and the bid costs need to be recovered; spending commitments in terms of procurement and staffing are incurred very rapidly once one is under contract; the act of cancellation itself a complicated process of what that actually means, because you essentially have to scope a new project of what will get stopped, how, and when, and what happens to residual work/assets half finished; and you as a client are negotiating from a weak position

So it's not contractors who tie you up in knots: it's a simple case of you as a client having to wear the consequences of your actions. Governments rarely want to do this
“The contract was signed in such a rush, every alteration we want to make is costing us five times as much as it should have.
Standard government side whinging. Governments ALWAYS think changes and variations should cost them much less than they actually do. This is the payoff for competitive tendering. Contractors usually have to leave money on the table if they want to win a project - they only way they profit is through realising some opportunities or through change. If the client changes the scope, they have to accept that it's not going to cost the same per widget when they are negotiating with one contractor as they could get when they had 2 or 3 of them under the pump in a competitive environment where they felt the pressure of kissing goodbye to the millions they've spent on the bid

Government forgets the saving they've already taken through that competitive process, and is never reaosnable about how much consequent change actually costs. They also rarely factor in the costs to actually process the change in the first place (program disruption, redesign, etc etc)

Contracts are about transferring risk. In the case of an availability PPP like this one, they're about transferring pretty much all the risk outside of patronage. But transferring risk means that you have also transferred commercial control. The more of that you have transferred away (and again, don't forget the benefits this gave you), then the more it is going to cost you to change. PPPs are ALWAYS the most expensive things to change because the PPP entity will have dozens of contracts set up with various suppliers, financiers etc, all of which also have to be altered. Hence why it costs you >$1bn to cancel East West Link, but you can cancel Perth Freight Link (an Alliance) for maybe $50-$100m
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by boronia »

What is a "typical light rail line"??
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by mandonov »

Video of the construction of the George and Liverpool intersection: https://www.facebook.com/SydneyLightRai ... 009597400/
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by Swift »

boronia wrote:What is a "typical light rail line"??
One deemed an average length in a US city or municipal area. I can't imagine it would be shorter than CQ to Kingston.
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by Tonymercury »

Swift wrote: I can't imagine it would be shorter than CQ to Kingston.
That'd be a long trip.
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by GazzaOak »

mandonov wrote:Video of the construction of the George and Liverpool intersection: https://www.facebook.com/SydneyLightRai ... 009597400/
I think the most complex intersection to do this work in the cbd would be george/druitt/park st, because soo many buses pass though there.... i wonder how that going to work when they closed it

The one connecting the trams between the inner west light rail shouldn't be as bad, as long as they use a chirstmas shutdown to do that...
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Re: Light rail gets the green light: stage 1 UNSW to CBD

Post by grog »

That is a wide intersection, and you only need 2 lanes open to allow buses through (maybe even 1 lane with alternating flow). I'd think they could do it in stages over a few weekends and keep the buses coming through. Otherwise it could be diversions via Pitt/Market and King/Castlereigh.
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