If Sydney’s transport can crumble, pity Athens

Sydney: Atlanta made a hash of it, and despite promises by Sydney to get its Olympic transport system right, things are already going horribly wrong.Pity Athens, the next city to have a go at achieving what urban planners say may be impossible.

"The only solution is not to host the bloody games," said transport expert Patrick Troy, a professor of Urban Studies at Australian National University.

"You're dealing with a big city with a transport system that's under stress at the best of times -- and then you're delivering an extra large load."

The Olympics have grown so big, and their schedules are so demanding, that the challenge of getting buses and trains to run on time has managed to fry the brains of the smartest logistics planners in the United States and Australia.

Perhaps the picture that best illustrates the terrible conundrum is of the Sydney woman bus driver dissolved in tears over her steering column on Wednesday having taken her Olympic passengers on a hair-raising journey during which she stalled, flew across kerbs and took wrong turns before slamming into a post.

"I don't know what to do," the 'Sydney Morning Herald' quoted the distraught woman as telling her passengers.

Neither does Sydney, really, which soon will be swamped by an estimated 600,000 Olympic visitors.

Crazy topography

By all accounts, Sydney has gone further than any Olympic host city has ever gone to reproduce the clockwork efficiency of the Swiss train system.

But for demanding Olympic visitors, that simply hasn't been good enough.Out-of-town drivers have got hopelessly lost between training venues and villages for athletes and media. Buses have turned up late at pick-up points -- or not at all.

Even the president of the International Olympic Committee Juan Antonio Samaranch had his tight schedule thrown off when a bus supposed to take him to the Games' main television centre failed to make it in time.

Now stressed-out drivers have been threatening to walk off the job, claiming they are not being properly housed and fed, and the money they are paid is not worth the aggravation.

On Thursday, Olympic organisers promised the drivers big bonuses if they stayed on. One problem, as Troy points out, is that whereas ordinary commuters can put up with a transport service that occasionally delivers them to the office 20 minutes late, world-class athletes cannot accept waiting in a bus queue as the starter is fingering his gun.

Sydney's transport planners have been dealt a poor hand when it comes to topography.

The city of 4.7 million people is bisected by a harbour, creased by hills, poked by headlands and pocked by coves and bays.

Freeways and a rail link have been constructed to whisk spectators to the main Olympic park.

But unfortunately the city doesn't have a subway system -- or a network of ring-roads. Now that the Olympics are under way, parking has been banned along key routes, special Olympics-only traffic lanes opened and extra police drafted in to keep traffic flowing.

A fabulous job

Urban planners say it would be much easier if the Olympics had a permanent home in which they could dream up a custom-made transport solution involving driverless buses, monorails and moving corridors -- all driven, perhaps, by fuzzy logic.

But the Games hop from city to city and, when they've gone, the transport systems left behind must work for other purposes.

"The idea that you could build a special, futuristic transport system just for the Games is not on," said Troy. "No city could afford that."

He added, "I think Sydney has done a fabulous job."

Samaranch on Thursday answered reporters' questions about the transport problem with a seen-it-all-before weariness.

"Every Games is the same -- it begins with a transport problem," he told a news conference. "I think they are solving the problems."



(c) Reuters Limited.