A Trilogy of BRT (2) Unloved Sydney

Anyone familiar with Sydney's public transport will know the traditional heavy rail network (with the double decker trains) has been enhanced in recent years by the addition of several light rail/tram lines and most recently Sydney Metro - much of which is still under construction. However, as an adjunct to looking at how Transport for NSW manage rail replacement services, I also looked at one of the older pieces of infrastructure, the Sydney busway, or 'T-Way'.  The T-Way is  mixture of dedicated and segregated lanes running between two large urban centres in western Sydney, Liverpool and Paramatta.  

What I found was a quite unloved system....

• Whilst segregated/separate lanes remain in place, they are quite overgrown with weeds
• The stops were run down, missing up to date information or vandalised
• The main route, the T80, was not operating with a dedicated bus fleet, as you might expect (and suspect was contracted) but rather any single deck bus from the Transit Systems fleet

Ticketing was quite conventional - Sydney has a touch-in/touch-out system for smart card users which I quite liked, even if on-bus ticketing and particularly fumbling to find a card to touch-off negates some journey time benefit of the segregated system.  The principle is the same as systems used by Go-Ahead in the UK. However with a couple of breaks of journey on the T80 what I saw was a notable amount of ticketless/fraudulent travel where passengers 'barged' on to board at the centre door.

Without knowing where to find the data to support this supposition, I suspect some of the areas served by the T-Way and T80 bus are not particularly economically prosperous.  Those customers often find it difficult to get the ear of politicians and transport authorities, so it feels a little like the T-Way has been left to fend for itself with little support from the centre, whilst politicians and leaders focus on the high profile new railways.  My brief visit to Newcastle NSW (with the same transport authority, Transport for New South Wales) the same week also showed a very notable degree of ticketless travel on the Newcastle tram line. 

Newcastle tram.