By Jacob Saulwick & Matt O'Sullivan
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Why does Sydney seem to shut down in the rain?
The reasons, experts said on Wednesday, are varied and historical – but many relate to the difficulty of incorporating coping mechanisms into a rapidly changing city, old in parts, and not always built with extreme weather in mind.
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For Ms Dawson [Sydney’s "chief resilience officer"], the key to coping with weather made more extreme by a changing climate is to build mitigation measures into new infrastructure. In relation to heavy rainfall, for instance, that means trying to disperse water rather than concentrate it
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In relation to the city’s transport infrastructure as well, in which separate rail lines were closed on occasion and in which numerous roads were clogged or narrowed, experts urged governments to build longer-term coping mechanisms into the network.
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Another reason the city’s transport infrastructure grinds to a near halt, Dr Clifton [a lecturer in transport at Sydney University's Business School] said, was because much of the railway is on the surface, making it more susceptible than in Europe and Asia where lines in large cities were often underground.
Michelle Zeibots, the research director of the Transport Research Centre at the University of Technology Sydney, said the city’s ability to cope with wet weather was reduced because of its heavy reliance on links such as the Harbour Bridge which became choke-points. ‘‘When you get to a city the size of ours, you have to make your public transport a lot more diverse,’’ Dr Zeibots said.
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