[COM] Victoria Square Upgrade - $24m

[AtD]

urban: The reason behind "Nexy" is a freight bypass around the suburbs. It'd take a lot more than $500m to bring our rail network up to scratch. It's expected to cost $115 million just to re-sleeper parts of the Belair and Noarlunga lines, without any thought of standardisation, adding sparks, new railcars, new bridges, tunnels, etc.

Out of curiosity, how big was Melbourne when they built their city loop?

[urban]

AtD

Salisbury Hwy was a freight bypass around the suburbs until we subsidised it being built out. On & on we go in a vicious circle all the time eating up the best land in the state for growing our food.

If we want a vibrant city with reasonable public transport then we must tighten our urban growth boundaries significantly.

I had heard figures of around $300mil for electrification of the rail network. Leaves $85mil for bringing the trains to vic sq.

[AtD]

I agree with you re: urban growth boundry.

That $300m figure is just to put wires on the existing track, and doesn't include any track upgrades, standization, new rollingstock, stations, services, etc. For contrast, Perth's rail upgrade is costing closer to $2b.

[AG]

Out of curiosity, how big was Melbourne when they built their city loop?

Melbourne's population was approximately 2.8 million when they first opened the City Loop in 1981 (it was completed in 1985 and began construction in 1971). ABS estimates the 2006 population at 3.6-3.7 million.

[Shuz]

I thought that to completely overhaul Adelaide's railway network, and to electrify it, re-sleeper it, upgrade platforms, etc. It estimates well upwards of $550million.

Sourcing the RAA, the South Road was the scenario that interests me, infrastructure costs to triplicate it (3 lanes each way), with respective underpasses overpasses land acquistion, and etc. brings costs to $2,000,000,000.

[AG]

will have a look at this dragonfly bar, sounds good.
Just regarding the prior posts, it irks me when I hear people going on about Adelaide not having the population to support projects. Can I just say that even by American standards, a city of over 1 million people constitutes a 'large city', so its time we all start thinking that we do live in a large city, and develop a good public transport system. I believe that Adelaide is far big enough to support an underground city loop for our train system. It only needs to be 2 tunnels, 1 for south bound trains, 1 for north/west bound trains, so we dont have this dead end station situation

There could be operational issues if tunnels through the CBD only had one track in each direction. This is currently an issue that plagues Sydney's City Circle, Melbourne's City Loop and also the District and Piccadilly Lines on London Underground that reduces reliability across the network in the case of a train breakdown or signal failure in the area where lines and branches share tracks. This usually results in network wide delays when it does happen, or limited to a section of the network. A delay in Sydney's City Circle usually affects at least 4 out of their 10 or so lines.

It would be better to have two tracks for trains in each direction, one for all the lesser busy lines (Belair and Tonsley southbound, Grange and Outer Harbor northbound) and another for the busier lines, also leaving open the possibility for future suburban rail expansions without having to redo the lines through the city to add capacity. Brisbane had this issue right up into the 1990s when it only had two tracks through it's CBD stations, until it built new tunnels to increase the tracks through the CBD from two to four.

[stelaras]

Out of curiosity, how big was Melbourne when they built their city loop?

The loop accorfing to the Metlink site was gradually opened between 1981 and 1985. It was fully operational by 1985. In 1984 the population of melbourne was 2,888,400 people with an average patronage of 15% (approx 433,260 passengers per day). At that point in time Melbourne had 16 radial railway lines and 4 greater metropolitan lines + 3 heritage volunteer operated tourist lines which were not part of the network. They had 26 major tram routes and approx 160 bus routes.

In 1985, 433,260 people were using public transport regularly (thats almost half Adelaides current population). If we compare numbers Adelaide would have to have close to 50% patronage to warrant an expansion of services! That is almost impossible to do. Just for the record current patronage in Melbourne is approximately 22% according to Connex which equates to just 814,000 passengers a day (or almost the entire adelaide population!) The melbourne PT system is running very close to 100% of capacity, and PT usage has been increase at 20% per year for the last 3 years.

So, plain as day Adelaide does not have the numbers in users to support this.

it irks me when I hear people going on about Adelaide not having the population to support projects

No one ever said that adelaide isn't big enough. We argue that the patronage (use of public transport) is not adequate enough to support such massive costs in infrustructure to build them (even if its just 2 tunnels) (see stats above).

Unfortunately because of our extremely low density we have to spend our infrastructure money over a very large area.

Have you compared the urban sprawl of Melb and Sydney to that of Adelaide? Ide say that those two cities are sprawled over a much larger area than Adelaide. The infrustructure costs would be relative.

[AG]

Brisbane constructed railway tunnels (2 tracks) connecting Roma Street and Central stations in 1889 and between Central and Brunswick Street in 1890, when it's population was still less than 200000, and managed to support this by running through services between north and south, rather than operating loop services like in Sydney and Melbourne. Loop services aren't necessary in Adelaide, but crosstown via CBD would create crosstown routes that get more use than just commuters heading to and from the CBD.

[Cruise]

Adelaide has the population for large projects. Unfortunately because of our extremely low density we have to spend our infrastructure money over a very large area. For example we are now spending $500mil on the Northern Expressway (with fed help) to replicate the Salisbury Hwy. That money could have undergrounded the entire South Rd or upgraded the rail system and relocated the train station to vic sq.

500million to buil a tunel along the entire length of south road? that will get you half the way (if that)

500million to upgrade the rail system? No Way multiply that figure by 1.5 and you might be getting somewhere

We waste a lot of money subsidising poor quality housing on the fringes of the city. The same money spent on quality low cost housing such as the Whitmore Sq project around train stations would inject much needed vitality to the inner urban areas and provide the critical mass needed to justify upgrading our public transport networks.

pfft, low quality housing? have you gone and had a look at whats being built out there? it not low quality, just low density.
Although it will be interesting to see what happens with the Playford North project goes they got 314 hectares of land to do something with, and the existing areas to upgrade (the new super schools will be incorperated into the project).
I just hope this isnt another lost oppertunity, Remember these areas where never intended to be part of Adelaides metro area. Id the Elizabeth area fell like its own city once more.

The area in question

urban: The reason behind "Nexy" is a freight bypass around the suburbs. It'd take a lot more than $500m to bring our rail network up to scratch. It's expected to cost $115 million just to re-sleeper parts of the Belair and Noarlunga lines, without any thought of standardisation, adding sparks, new railcars, new bridges, tunnels, etc.

Funnily enough the Nexy would not be needed if the original salisbury freeway was built, they owned the land and all and are now still selling off the land.

[Tyler_Durden]

will have a look at this dragonfly bar, sounds good.
Just regarding the prior posts, it irks me when I hear people going on about Adelaide not having the population to support projects. Can I just say that even by American standards, a city of over 1 million people constitutes a 'large city', so its time we all start thinking that we do live in a large city, and develop a good public transport system. I believe that Adelaide is far big enough to support an underground city loop for our train system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Un ... itan_areas

Adelaide would barely scrape into the top 50 largest populations if it were in America. Adelaide also doesn't have any surrounding populations to draw upon, unlike many USA cities, or most other regions of the world for that matter. An underground city loop just is a crazy idea. You may think it would be cool to have one, but that's hardly a good reason. If we are going to waste money we should waste it on an iconic, architecturally significant building, something unique, not an underground train track.

[urban]

500million to buil a tunel along the entire length of south road? that will get you half the way (if that)

500million to upgrade the rail system? No Way multiply that figure by 1.5 and you might be getting somewhere

Half of South Rd, if that gets us from Anzac Hwy to Port Rd I'm happy.

2/3 of the way to an upgraded rail system is much closer than we are now.

pfft, low quality housing? have you gone and had a look at whats being built out there? it not low quality, just low density.
Although it will be interesting to see what happens with the Playford North project goes they got 314 hectares of land to do something with, and the existing areas to upgrade (the new super schools will be incorperated into the project).
I just hope this isnt another lost oppertunity, Remember these areas where never intended to be part of Adelaides metro area. Id the Elizabeth area fell like its own city once more.

I said low quality not cheap. I have seen those houses. Yes they are large but their poor use of space requires additional rooms and circulation space to provide what people want. The design, detailing and construction of those places is universally appalling. They are energy efficiency disasters, make poor use of their blocks, will leak in high wind driven rain and will be horrendously expensive to maintain in 10 to 20 years as their finishes reach the end of their service life. In most cases these homes as constructed fail to comply with the BCA but because councils rarely do inspections and accept non-complying standard details they are allowed to continue to be built. For example not one Aluminium door manufacturer has a standard detail that complies with the access provisions of the BCA.

Unfortunately pressure from industry groups such as HIA has driven down the standard of common building practice to make this type of poor construction the standard.

[AG]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Un ... itan_areas

Adelaide would barely scrape into the top 50 largest populations if it were in America. Adelaide also doesn't have any surrounding populations to draw upon, unlike many USA cities, or most other regions of the world for that matter. An underground city loop just is a crazy idea. You may think it would be cool to have one, but that's hardly a good reason. If we are going to waste money we should waste it on an iconic, architecturally significant building, something unique, not an underground train track.

Many of those US cities that are on that list don't have a commuter rail network at all, and for those that do many of them run limited services. It's not really a good comparison. Yet the city of Zurich (pop. approx 300000) in Europe has a fully developed and well used commuter rail system. It's not population size that matters so much, but the spread of the population and density in a region.

[duke]

A subway would be cool. But yeah, we probably don't have the population at this stage to warrant it. One day it will come though.

Some interesting wikipedia links on some other subway systems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Loop,_Melbourne
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Circle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_U-Bahn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Subway
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Subway

There was actually a good doco about the Beijing Subway on Discovery Channel last year sometime. It showed how they have built subway stations that they don't even plan to use for 5 to 10 years. Now thats urban planning.

[jk1237]

will have a look at this dragonfly bar, sounds good.
Just regarding the prior posts, it irks me when I hear people going on about Adelaide not having the population to support projects. Can I just say that even by American standards, a city of over 1 million people constitutes a 'large city', so its time we all start thinking that we do live in a large city, and develop a good public transport system. I believe that Adelaide is far big enough to support an underground city loop for our train system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Un ... itan_areas

Adelaide would barely scrape into the top 50 largest populations if it were in America. Adelaide also doesn't have any surrounding populations to draw upon, unlike many USA cities, or most other regions of the world for that matter. An underground city loop just is a crazy idea. You may think it would be cool to have one, but that's hardly a good reason. If we are going to waste money we should waste it on an iconic, architecturally significant building, something unique, not an underground train track.

Oh dear, let me reiterate that cities of over a million are large cities. Adelaide has over 1 million people. And oh, how crazy to suggest a underground city loop. Only every 2nd city in the world has one, going through its CBD. I guess all these cities must be crazy, and I guess Adl with its dead end station, must be a perfect model for a rail system. No wonder why so many people use it, NOT! Let me give you an example of Auckland which had a system where its trains ended on the city fringe. They had a crazy idea to build a tunnel to the 'Britomart Centre' in the CBD and guess what - patronage has over doubled on Auckland trains, yes DOUBLED! May i ask what incentive there is to take a train to the city when your destination is either Hindmarsh Sq, Rundle St east, Hutt St, Gouger St. Yes thats right, theres no incentive caus the train station is no where near it so what does everyone do - drive their bloody cars. Now thats crazy!

[Ho Really]

If a tram extension were to go ahead down Grote Street it would make an East-West tunnel under the square a little awkward. Maybe the tram could run down the restaurant strip of Gouger Street instead.

Cheers

I disagree.

An underpass of Grote/Wakefield streets should still be accomplished, with the tramline going underneath (in the underpass) for it to turn left at Pulteney Street and back left onto North Terrace, where it would merge with the current extension. Basically the formation at Victoria Square would be that the tramlines do not intersect. There should be a station in the underpass, with a staircase/ramp link back up to the square above, for those wishing to switch trams at Victoria Square between the North/South line and the East/West line.

Ambitious and expensive, yes, but I think its a marvellous idea.

I thought the idea was for that part of the extension to loop back at Victoria Square. Isn't that what the government proposed? We'll have to see what comes first, the tram loop or an East-West underpass. If both, they may even implement your suggestion.

Cheers