Garry Wotherspoon's otherwise excellent article misses out on one of the main reasons why Sydney has terrible congestions, i.e. growing population. If you don't solve that, you are ultimately wasting your time.

What I can never understand is why population growth is not treated as a problem that can be solved rather than some external factor that cannot be controlled. Unless people such as Garry start to treat it as a controllable input variable, like the quality of the public transport system, then we can only treat half of the disease.

Ironically controlling population growth for Sydney is much easier than getting people to take the train. The immigration minister can trim the immigration quota tommorow and that would solve the problem. This presumes that Costello's irresponsible three child policy does not increase our birthrate.

Carr was not an advocate of rapidly rising population. He may have not spent enough on infrastructure, but the pro-population growth lobby are more responsible for congestion than wa Carr

...and after all THAT spending on roads... a 'major highway' in Sydney is little more than a 'glorified track' in Melbourne... (yes, its a slight exageration) but on the 2 times I've tried to 'escape' from Sydney by car in the past decade, I can testify that the tunnels and 'ways out' of Sydney now are at least 'ok'. Previously, I would look at a directory (from any of the North Westernish suburbs) and shake my head in depressing disbelief at how HARD it was just to get on the Hume Highway.

The one thing which characterizes Sydney is NARROW main roads.. margin for 'lane' error is about 5mm each way before u collide with the other vehicles zooming past with what can only be reasonably characterized as a death wish. (i.e. YOUR death)

But, having said all that, I support a better public infrastructure, though I fear the only realistic way to do it is nuke sydney first, bring in the dozers, (after the radiation has died down) and do a clean sweep and start all over with a nice long straight train line with beautifully fishboning access points to sub urban areas.

The idea of a growth corridor with excellent public transport is something the '3rd world malaysians' not only are thinking about but have already done. Air port is wayyyy out of the city, and a fast train links it with KL, cyberjaya is in between with a level of development that makes our cultural cringe feel like an intolerable burden.

Ozzie ozzie ozzie...fades... dies..

Public Transport? Unless it is safe ,clean and reliable and not influenza no one will catch it.Even with good Govt it will take 10yrs to sort out this mess.The very thing that attracts us here,our beautiful waterways are a double edged sword.The NIMBYS are partly to blame.

The main reason for lack of money for infrastructure is Govt incompetance and waste.Victoria has 240,000 public servants with 5 million people and NSW has 380,000 PS with 6.7 million people.
Using Victoria's ratios,we should only have 321,600 PS.We have 58,400 too many.This represents $3.5 billion in extra wages p.a.

Let's look at all the other areas of waste.Private enterprise when quoting Govt jobs ,have to virtually double their prices to cater for red tape ,time wastage,complicated compliance rules,additional insurances etc.More tax payers money wasted.Last year NSW PS wasted $672 million on workers comp claims.This was 3 times the rate of private enterprise.Most were out on stress leave.Use up all your sick leave,have flexi-days and tell private enterprise to work longer,harder and pay more tax.

If Govts were more responsible and frugle,there would be plenty of money for infrastructure and medical services.We need a rationalisation of the public service to address all it's waste and inefficencies.

Who has the courage to make a start?

Well, I don't live in Sydney, but I do have to agree with Ridd's comments about population growth. In Brisbane and many other places in Australia, the amount of car's on the roads doubles every single year. That's a lot of cars! With many people buying one or two cars, the "car epidemic" seems to be getting out of control, and while it's true that Bob Carr hasn't handled the situation well, I fail to see how the Liberal party would have done any better, because ultimately it comes down to the fact that there *are* a lot of cars and you can only build so many roads. The problem can only be solved by forcing people to use Public Transportation, which is something Bob Carr couldn't and wouldn't do. Congested Roads are not Bob Carr's legacy. It's the legacy of a good economy and a growing population.

Oh, wait one minute, it's not every single year it doubles, it's every single three or five years. My bad. Sorry. But that's still a lot of cars!

The problem is not population growth. The problem is Sydney's population growth, combined with it's narcissistic emotional need to believe that any solution that does not involve Sydney is not a solution at all.

Economic growth for the state is only possible if the state's population continues to grow. The word "state" is not a synonym for Sydney. Shift the focus of population growth out of Sydney and economic growth will continue without the congestion. Carr was nothing more than the head narcissist.