More on Town Hall from the Herald, Sat 17 May 2008.

Town Hall on track to burst at the seams

PEAK-HOUR congestion at Town Hall station is heading for crisis point as the State Government shifts funding priorities to the north-west underground metro.

The overcrowded station has failed to meet safety standards since 2001 and still lacks fire escape stairs. Each day 150,000 people use the station and this figure is predicted to exceed 168,000 by 2016.

Last week the Government admitted a huge surge of peak-period passengers was beginning to affect CityRail's performance.

The struggle to meet customer demands "is resulting in increased crowding on some lines", the Ministry of Transport wrote to the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal.

"Crowding is the key area of CityRail's performance that, for an increasing number of passengers, is not being met."

The huge number of people changing trains at Town Hall makes the overcrowding worse.

Plans to upgrade the station were deferred when the Government announced it would build a second cross-city rail line with a station on Pitt Street.

A 2005 RailCorp document says that "for planning purposes, all future growth on Town Hall Station beyond 2021 will be absorbed by the new Metro Pitt station". But that plan was ditched in March, when the Premier, Morris Iemma, announced the $12 billion North West Metro and scotched plans to expand CityRail in the city.

Peter Moore, executive director of the International Association of Public Transport, said an upgrade was needed immediately. "It is very urgent," Mr Moore told the Herald. "It should have happened yesterday."

A RailCorp spokesman, Paul Rea, said the operator was analysing the impact on long-term Town Hall patronage of the metros and the decision not to proceed with the second cross-city line.

A 2007 RailCorp spending plan put the upgrade cost at $600 million. With the metro now at the centre of policy, the Government is unlikely to fund a capital project of that size.

A Rail Corp study in 2005 said: "In the peaks, Town Hall station generally falls short of acceptable day-to-day crowd management congestion targets."

And on fire safety, the study said that in 2001 "Parsons Brinckerhoff determined that Town Hall cannot currently be fully evacuated in the morning and evening peaks within times stipulated by the Standards for Fixed Guideway Transit and Passenger Rail Systems".

In 2003, RailCorp moved to install fire escape stairs at a cost of $50 million, but management instead began planning a bigger renovation to substantially increase the station's capacity.

By late 2005, the Government was ready to tender for solutions costed at between $171 million and $350 million. In the end, it focused on a huge upgrade of the station's escalators.