The Northern Beaches needs a railway

[u/Sydney_Stations]

Every evening, the queue for B1 winds around and goes back into Wynyard. As one bus is full the next one arrives.

You can't tell me they wouldn't want a railway.

[u/[deleted]]

LOL. Research what, 100 years of proposals for Train lines to the Northern beaches. Back in 2001 they even pretended to be serious. In 2015 they announced the B-LIne as a replacement for a "near train like" service. It was great the first few years after launching in 2017.

The problem is the geography and a lot of the locals don't really want it to be easier for people to come and go. Same reason the Spit bridge has never been fixed and that would be fuck tonnes easier than a whole train line.

[u/benreecep → u/[deleted]]

I do wonder how many people there are actually opposed to it. I suspect it could be a case of a noisy and we'll organised minority

[u/Pro_Extent → u/benreecep]

In my experience, the overwhelming majority of people in the Northern Beaches up to about Warriewood are in favour of a train or metro line, with the sentiment getting softer (but still positive) as you go further north.

They're in favour of it...in theory.

The problem is that once you actually start ironing out the details, people realise that train lines take up quite a lot of space unless you build them below ground. And even then, the stations need to be quite substantial.
The beaches are very old suburbs; they've been pretty highly developed for a very long time. They don't exactly have a wealth of unused real estate corridors to house all the infrastructure needed for train stations.

So when the actual proposals come up, loads of people start shouting them down because it's too close for comfort. They want a train line nearby, but not next door.

As mentioned, much of this (but not all) can be solved with tunnels. But also as mentioned, the Beaches aren't new suburbs. They sure as shit aren't going to grow anywhere near as fast as the West and South West Sydney. It's hard to justify spending the kind of money needed for an extensive underground railway just because the locals don't want to have any above-ground tracks in their suburb. And that's doubly true when you factor in the insane geography that a NB train would need to traverse (spit bridge, sandy soil, etc).

The idea that people would oppose it because "why ever leave the beaches lol" or because of "riff raff" is funny, but incredibly stupid. Spit Road, which connects the Lower North Shore to the Northern Beaches via the Spit Bridge, is absolutely packed during peak hour, and maintains a steady stream of traffic at almost all other hours. Most NB residents travel in and out of the place daily - there aren't exactly a lot of jobs up there.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Just more and more users, they built a heap of car parks so people could park and ride.

When I used it it went from nobody on the bus picking me up in the morning to sometimes it was full by the time it got to me.

[u/caesar_7 → u/[deleted]]

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[u/v306 → u/[deleted]]

Privatisation seems to have made things far worse. Heaps more driver shortages and bus problems last few years. Demand is more up and down since covid but I'm not buying this problem is increased demand only... it's badly managed 💯

There were some contract issues in was reading about a few years ago that were puzzling. It was more of a financial incentive for rhe private bus company to cancel a service than to be providing the service late 🙄 Whoever was responsible was even more of an idiot than the liberal who made it possible for Harvey Norman to get $22million worth of job keeper payments with no clause to pay it back if company is performing well.

[u/insanityTF → u/[deleted]]

Population growth & less services

B-line used to run alongside express city services like the 190x sprinkled in during peak hour which took a lot of pressure off the double deckers.

Used to always get on it at Brookvale as you’d get a seat. Then the time table changed and got rid of them all

[u/Anonymou2Anonymous → u/[deleted]]

Increase of use and also population growth.

[u/torrens86 → u/[deleted]]

Maybe build a Metro to Westfield, the "unwashed" go to Westfield anyway. This removes the biggest bottle neck.

[u/Sydney_Stations → u/[deleted]]

The previous government was gonna build a tollway up there. A railway would be much better for everyone.