Crossing the Cooks River through Canterbury, I ponder on how our communities will be affected by the Sydney Metro Project. With station closures due to start in July this year, the T3 Bankstown Line Metro conversion project illustrates a pessimistic perspective in my mind. Marrickville, Lakemba, Campsie, and Bankstown are just a few of the major population centres forced to take bus replacements for the estimated 12 months that it will take to complete the project. Yet, these suburbs between Sydenham and Bankstown are just a select few considered for the Metro Project that will ignore the significantly lower socio-economic communities west of Bankstown.
Affectionately named ‘The Area’, the T3 serves as a lifeline for its 200,000 residents, with roughly 20,000 commuters boarding its trains, bound for work and education. ‘The Area’ is mainly home to a plethora of ethnic communities — Asian, Arab, Greek, and Pacific Islander. These communities have historically faced and continue to reckon with racist socio-economic disadvantages ranging from education and literacy to job security and social acceptance by the wider Sydney area. They rely on the T3 for their livelihoods, the railroad to opportunities systematically disconnected from them.
From Sydenham to Bankstown and beyond, a full year’s worth of station closures will significantly impact ‘The Area’ and its communal wellbeing. This is something that will snowball further past the completion of the conversion.
Though completion of the Metro will still provide a metro service for the Sydenham to Bankstown service, a handful of stations west of Bankstown will face potentially permanent closures. As of July 2023, Transport NSW has expressed no interest in long-term operations in the 2030s for the stations starting at Carramar and ending at Sefton. In bureaucratic limbo, permanent station closures may be well within the near future, disconnecting roughly 36,000 residents from their closest train line. Whether or not a T2 City to Liverpool via Regents Park service will exist is up for question, but a direct service to the cultural centre that is Bankstown will not. Birrong and Yagoona face critical danger as these two stations are still in the dark on whether the Bankstown to Lidcombe Service will continue or if a Metro Extension to Birrong will occur. The suburbs from Carramar to Birrong, collectively, are part of Sydney’s most disadvantaged areas, between 5 to 22 percentile ranking within Australia on the Index of Relative Socio-Economic Advantage and Disadvantage (IRADS) in the 2021 Census.
Despite this, communities in these parts thrive through their shared experiences and struggles. ‘The Area’, as Layla Mkh puts it beautifully, is a place that “resists and grows despite feeling like almost everyone in this country is against it”. Disconnecting the poorer parts of ‘The Area’ from its cultural centre adds to the disproportionate socio-economic disadvantages already present.
The Metro Project will sever a lifeline to the major metropolitan area of Bankstown. By taking away the T3 line from Bankstown’s western suburbs, an increase in reliance on personal transport vehicles will come to fruition. Though bus replacements will carry through 2025, traffic on major roads and highways will worsen and vehicle emissions will skyrocket, ultimately contributing to the already disproportionate artificial heat island effect in Western Sydney.
From Ten-pin bowling in Villawood, mad feeds at Al-Taza in Regents Park to the Roundabout Youth Centre’s roller rink at Sefton, late-night Chè at Cabra and ice skating at Canterbury; these places I’ve gone to by taking the T3 and all experiences won’t ever be immediately accessible due to the South-West Metro Project. Direct travel between the city circle and those West of Sydney could involve a bus ‘replacement’, T3 shuttle train, metro service to Sydenham and a final change onto the T4 to city circle service. For the next 16 months, a hole in the train map will further exacerbate the rejection of south-west Sydney by the rest of the city. The death of the T3 spells a disaster for ‘The Area’.