Bus use rises fastest on the fringes

The growing concentration of jobs in central Sydney does not mean that new transport initiatives should be funnelled into the middle of town.

That is the finding of an analysis of one of the major additions to Sydney’s transport network in the past decade – the high-capacity Metrobuses designed to link employment and growth centres along the city.

On Wednesday, Fairfax Media reported the results of a large survey that showed four out of 10 jobs created across greater Sydney in the past five years had been concentrated in the one council area – the City of Sydney.

Transport planners and other experts said the agglomeration of jobs in central Sydney owed much to the proliferation of ”knowledge intensive” industries in the past decade as well as the city’s historical development.

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But that does not mean that new transport initiatives should replicate those developed in the past, transport planners and experts said.

In an analysis of the city’s 13 Metrobus routes, presented to a transport conference last year, Chinh Ho and Corinne Mulley of the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies at Sydney University found that the greatest growth in patronage was on those routes that bypassed central Sydney.

Read more in the Sydney Morning Herald