THE CBD Metro will run as much as 87 per cent empty during the height of the morning rush hour when it opens in 2015, the Transport Minister, David Campbell, has conceded.

Campbell must be one of the dopiest Ministers in a very, very ordinary front bench.

THE Premier has declared he wants cashless tolls on all of Sydney’s major roads so motorists pay varying fees at different times of the day – an effective congestion tax to cut peak-hour traffic.

Without a simultaneous, and dramatic, improvement in public transport, this is simply another nasty little tax from the State Government masquerading as a transport solution.

TEN years after unveiling its bold transport plan for Sydney, the State Government has failed to build a single one of the five major rail projects it promised.

In a damning indictment, The Daily Telegraph has found that of the five projects outlined by then-premier Bob Carr – fast trains to Newcastle and Wollongong, the Bondi Beach extension, the northwest rail link and the Chatswood to Parramatta line – four have not even been started.

Not a single one!

Meanwhile, rival newspaper the SMH has another positive story about Labor’s latest piece of BS on Sydney transport:

FEDERAL bureaucrats have warmed to Nathan Rees’s vision of a CBD metro rail line underpinning Sydney’s future financial district, potentially freeing state funds to build a revamped Victoria Road metro to Macquarie Park at the same time.

Wake up, it’s never going to happen; just like none of the other bright, shining lies ever amounted to anything in the past decade.

Nathan Rees, however, is clueless. Don’t forget the bizarre ‘love and traffic’ and ‘black panther’ episodes. The evidence is growing, folks.

To tell you the truth, yesterday’s announcement of a $4 billion link to Rozelle and Pyrmont is so politically incompetent and so outrageous from a public administration perspective that it is almost beyond comprehension.

Sydney is a town of two newspapers. The Sydney Morning Herald caters largely to the middle classes close to the CBD and in the eastern and northern suburbs; it is sparsely read beyond those areas and it often looks like it thinks Sydney ends at Parramatta. Unsurprisingly, then, its transport writer sees some merit in the latest NSW Government rail plan:

Unlike the North West Metro, which had to be heavily sandbagged against legitimate concerns that it travelled too far into low-density suburbs – its cost benefits teetering on a precipice – this metro has some redeemable features, even though it was cobbled together almost overnight.

The Daily Telegraph, which caters more for the west of Sydney, has gone after Rees with all guns blazing, and they didn’t miss:

WHILE long-suffering commuters in Sydney’s western suburbs still wait for decent public transport, Premier Nathan Rees yesterday unveiled a $4 billion train to nowhere.

In a move more reminiscent of an inner-west latte drinker than a garbo from Toongabbie, Mr Rees has announced yet another new metro system that will run only from Central to Rozelle.

And Mr Rees and his infrastructure chief David Richmond have asked the Federal Government to pay the entire cost of the CBD mini-metro, designed largely to service finance professionals at the plush new Barangaroo development.

The Daily Telegraph knows how its audience of much put upon commuters from Sydney’s sprawling suburbs will react to the latest ALP betrayal.

Although the ALP draws its political support overwhelmingly from Sydney’s west, its members seem to forget the people they purport to represent as soon as they cross the ANZAC bridge.

Twelve years of ALP Government have been an absolute disaster for Sydney’s public transport and Nathan Rees seems destined to perpetuate this policy-making circus.

Unfortunately, even if the ALP came up with a decent public transport policy nobody would believe them because we have had so many announcements and reversals that the Government’s promises are basically worthless.