PM’s wife has plan to save Sydney by splitting city in three parts

AUSTRALIA: To the masses of commuters juggling work, family and miserable traffic jams, it sounds like an idyllic solution.

That vision is for Sydney, a city crammed with 4.7 million people and growing 20 per cent faster than either London or New York, to carve itself into three separate towns.

The city’s future involves new trams, driverless cars, bicycle lanes and people-carrying drones. It is a plan crafted by Sydney’s futurists and led by Lucy Turnbull, the prime minister’s wife and a planning expert, to transform Australia’s largest city into cheaper but vastly larger metropolis with a better quality of life.

Sydney grew quickly into an unplanned sprawl to accommodate the half a million jobs that are concentrated in its small, eastern edge instead of the west where many residents live. The cost of living is among the world’s ten highest but high salaries are a draw to some of the 190,000 migrants who arrive in Australia every year.

The Greater Sydney Commission, the city’s planning agency which is led by Lucy Turnbull, proposes to turn the sprawl into ‘‘one of the world’s most liveable global cities’’. It has published a radical study, A Metropolis of Three Cities.

Urban planners predict that the city’s population will double to more than eight million in the next 40 years. As a result it has become crippled by a series of big construction projects including a seven mile long light rail system into the main business district in the east. The new tramline, which was estimated to cost NZ$1.9 billion and should have been ready next month, is way behind schedule and may never be finished. The property boom has led to a large number of new homes being built with 70,000 flats under construction by the end of last year. A second international airport and a multibillion-dollar, 35km underground motorway system are planned for the three-city scheme.

Turnbull’s vision is to split up the city, allowing most residents to live no more than 30 minutes away from work and other public services.

The plan envisages that people will live around one of three huge new precincts; an eastern harbour city including the central business district; a central ‘‘river’’ city around the geographical centre and further out, a western parkland city that will include the second airport due in eight years’ time. - Sunday Times