Sydney Metro: Great Success, Missed Opportunity
Key Takeaways
- Sydney’s Metro has been a great success and is rightly earning plaudits.
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However, five strategic mistakes have been made that should be rectified in future Metro projects:
- Mistake 1 - Treating the Metro Project as a Transport Rail project only
- Mistake 2 - Not enough stations
- Mistake 3 - Failure to get multimodal right
- Mistake 4 - The build it and they will come error
- Mistake 5 - Financial Considerations
What Next?
Are you building or planning a new metro line? Are you repeating the strategic mistakes we made in Sydney?
Introduction
Last week was the anniversary of the opening of Sydney’s Metro stage 2 into the Central Business District (CBD), building on stage 1 of the line, which opened in 2019. Stage 3 is scheduled to open sometime next year.
Sydney Metro is one of Australia's most celebrated infrastructure achievements. It has transformed how residents move through the city, delivered world-class service reliability, and earned international recognition for its station design and passenger experience.
While we rightfully celebrate what went right with Sydney Metro, we risk repeating strategic errors that diminished its potential impact. These weren't construction failures or technical shortcomings; they were fundamental misunderstandings about what metro infrastructure should achieve in a modern city.
Having played a tiny role in the project, and as someone who benefits daily from my local Metro station, this critique comes from a place of appreciation, not cynicism. The Metro works brilliantly as a transport system. The question is whether it works as well as it could have as a city-shaping investment.
The five strategic mistakes outlined below aren't just Sydney's lessons; they're patterns repeated in metro projects worldwide. We see the same fundamental error: treating potentially transformational infrastructure as merely another transport project.
For the transport leaders, urban planners, and policymakers reading this, whether you're planning Sydney's next metro stages or designing systems in your own cities, these lessons could unlock huge amounts of value from your investments.
Mistake 1 - The Transport Tunnel Vision
Metro systems don't just move people, they reshape cities. Yet Sydney Metro was planned and delivered through a too narrow lens of transport engineering rather than urban transformation.
This isn't just semantics. When you treat metro infrastructure as a transport project, you optimise for moving people efficiently between points A and B. When you treat it as city-shaping infrastructure, you optimise for accessibility.
The evidence of our tunnel vision is scattered across the Metro line. Take Cherrybrook station, where 3.5 hectares of government-owned land sits undeveloped six years after opening, a prime site for mixed-use development that could house families within walking distance of rapid transit. Or consider the broader pattern: while some CBD stations showcase excellent integration, most suburban stations remain isolated transport nodes surrounded by low-density development and car parks.
This represents a massive missed opportunity. International best practice shows that well-designed transit-oriented development can capture significant value from infrastructure investment, value that can fund additional stations, improve services, or reduce public subsidy requirements. Tokyo's railway companies, for example, develop and own commercial and residential properties around their stations, creating sustainable revenue streams while building more liveable cities.
The fundamental error was organisational. Transport agencies planned the Metro instead of a joint project with urban development agencies. The result was world-class transport infrastructure surrounded by mediocre urbanism.
Future metro planning must start with a simple question: "What kind of city do we want to create?" Only then should we ask how to connect it.
Mistake 2 - The False Economy of Fewer Stations
Sydney Metro's 52 kilometres of track serves just 21 stations, an average spacing of 2.5 kilometres that prioritises speed over accessibility. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes metro systems transformational.
Singapore aims to place every resident within 400 metres of a metro station, requiring roughly 800-metre station spacing. International best practice ranges from 1 to 1.5 kilometres apart. Sydney's spacing means we're missing at least 10 stations that could have dramatically expanded the system's reach and impact.
The logic seemed sound: fewer stations mean faster journeys to the CBD and lower construction costs. But this thinking ignores the broader economic equation.
Each missing station represents thousands of residents and workers who remain car-dependent because the metro isn't easily accessible to them.
Enhanced value capture from rezoning around stations or redirecting funds from road projects could have provided the capital.
The lesson for future projects is clear: optimise for system-wide accessibility, not point-to-point speed. A metro that takes longer but serves dramatically more people delivers far greater urban transformation.
Mistake 3 - Building Car Parks Instead of Connections
By building car parks, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent reinforcing car dependency rather than reducing it.
The root cause was Sydney's transport culture in the early 2010s. Point-to-point thinking dominated: people expected their bus or train to take them directly from origin to destination. The fare system actively discouraged connections by charging double fares for transfers. Multi-modal thinking, seamlessly combining buses, trains, walking, and cycling, was foreign to most planners and passengers alike.
But this cultural limitation didn't have to become an infrastructure limitation. Cities worldwide had already demonstrated integrated transport networks where stations serve as mobility hubs rather than car park destinations. The Metro project was the perfect opportunity to accelerate Sydney's evolution toward this more sophisticated model.
Instead, we locked in the old paradigm with concrete and steel. The alternative was always available: segregated cycle lanes feeding into secure bike storage, dedicated bus lanes with signal priority, and mixed-use development that reduced the need to travel elsewhere for daily needs. The terminal station at Tallawong genuinely needed some parking, but this should have been the exception, not the rule.
The deeper lesson extends beyond transport: when building transformational infrastructure, don't just respond to current behaviour, actively shape what you want your cities to be like.
Mistake 4 - The "Build It and They Will Switch" Delusion
Sydney Metro's impressive patronage numbers mask a disappointing reality: we built world-class infrastructure but failed to create compelling reasons for people to abandon their cars. The majority of new passengers didn't switch from driving; they switched from buses and other rail services, shuffling existing public transport users rather than expanding the market.
This pattern isn't unique to Sydney. London's Elizabeth Line, despite its transformational impact, shows similar mode-switching data. The uncomfortable truth is that high-quality public transport alone doesn't overcome the structural advantages we've built into car travel over decades.
Consider Macquarie Park, one of Sydney's largest employment hubs, now served by three Metro stations. The precinct offers everything transport planners dream of: frequent rail service, bus connections, and dedicated cycling infrastructure. Yet the vast majority of workers still drive to the area's business parks, which provide thousands of free parking spaces mere metres from office entrances.
This reveals the fundamental flaw in our approach: we improved public transport while leaving the car alternative untouched. Free workplace parking, abundant street parking, and car-optimised urban design continue to make driving the most convenient option for many trips, regardless of how excellent the Metro service becomes.
The solution requires coordinated policy intervention, not just infrastructure investment. Cities that successfully achieve mode shift combine excellent public transport with deliberate disincentives for car travel: parking levies on employers, reduced street parking, congestion charging, or simply allowing density that makes car ownership impractical.
Sydney Metro represents a massive public investment in creating alternatives to driving. However, without addressing the policies that make driving artificially cheap and convenient, we've essentially built a premium service for existing public transport users.
The lesson for future projects: infrastructure investment must be coupled with demand management. Building better public transport is only half the equation; the other half is removing the subsidies for cars.
Mistake 5 - The Commercial Opportunities Hidden in Plain Sight
Around the world, public transport budgets are being put under pressure. This is a consequence of the fallout of COVID, ageing populations and cost-of-living crises.
This means that we need to become much better at focusing on increasing public transport revenues and controlling our costs. Alas, many public transport authorities are struggling with this. Sydney is no exception.
Unfortunately, Metro has missed opportunities for additional revenue streams. I have already talked about the mistake of providing free parking - millions in foregone annual revenue that could have funded additional services. Meanwhile, the conspicuous absence of advertising throughout Metro stations and trains, standard practice in metro systems worldwide, represents substantial lost revenue that could have been invested in better services.
Sydney chose purity over pragmatism, creating stations that look pristine but at the expense of funding better transport.
Staffing decisions are compounding this error. Despite building a driverless system specifically to reduce operating costs, recent union negotiations on Sydney’s non-metro train lines resulted in unnecessary additional staffing.
Cities worldwide are discovering that public transport systems must increasingly find diverse revenue streams rather than relying solely on farebox revenue and government subsidy.
Conclusion
Sydney's Metro represents both a triumph and a learning opportunity. While its operational success deserves celebration, the strategic oversights outlined above reveal how much greater its impact could have been with more integrated thinking from the outset.
The core lesson is this: metro projects are not just about moving people efficiently, they're about reshaping cities. When we treat them as isolated transport infrastructure rather than catalysts for urban transformation, we squander their potential to create walkable, connected communities while also undermining their financial sustainability.
For transport leaders planning future metro lines, whether in Sydney or globally, the question isn't just "how do we build great rail infrastructure?" It's "how do we use this infrastructure investment to create better cities while ensuring long-term viability?" This requires breaking down silos between transport planning, land use policy, and financial strategy from day one.
Cities worldwide can learn from both Sydney’s successes and our oversights to build metro systems that truly transform urban life. Metro infrastructure is expensive and permanent; you want to maximise the benefits you get from it.