Shambles at Green Square Train Station - Overdevelopment causing crisis

I have been sounding the warning for several years now about the impact of the redevelopment in and around Green Square.

It is one of the largest urban renewal projects ever undertaken in this country and by the time it is finished, the population in just three square kilometres will be a jaw dropping 61 000. It will be the most densely populated area in Australia, bar none.

It is approaching a crisis point.

Tuesday morning, last week, I had a constituent send me a photo of Green Square train station. It was extraordinary.

There were queues of people backing up off the platform, and up to the station mezzanine, where they were being prevented from descending to the platform by station attendants, because even the platforms were over capacity.

Not only are the trains too full, but now the platforms can’t even accommodate the passengers, and they are being prevented from even entering the station. 

Matt O’Sullivan, in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald, reported that weekday patronage at that station has surged by 80% in just three years, jumping from 11 000 to 21 000 daily visits between 2014 and 2017. https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/transport-mess-passengers-at-one-sydney-station-nearly-double-in-three-years-20181119-p50gwf.html

But Green Square is nowhere near finished. There are hundreds more buildings yet to be finished and tens of thousands of more residents to come, some in the very near future.

I have always held the intellect of this government in very low regard, but even this astounds me.

Make no mistake: the NSW Liberals, over eight long years, have done this themselves.

When Premier Keneally removed the station access fee at Green Square and Mascot stations that line was jokingly referred to as the “ghost train”.

Has no idiot understood that you just can’t keep increasing population density, even on a transport route, if you cannot increase the capacity of the transport network? 

I’ve been calling for a moratorium on further population and density increases in Green Square for five years, but the NSW Government has just ignored me. Now we are going to pay the price. 

There are no new roads, the buses and trains are full, and there is no way to increase capacity. Sydney, under the NSW Liberals, is slowly suffocating itself.

Everywhere you go in Sydney, but especially in my electorate, apartment blocks spring up, seemingly overnight. Every block in Sydney is being transformed from a shop or a terrace house into a multi-storey unit development. It is time for this madness to stop.