But that'd be density done well. Sadly, it's not what we're getting. The CSELR, scarcely deserving either its "light rail" or its "public transport" tag, enables density done very, very badly. Stretched between minimum principle and maximum profit, it feeds vast public costs into vaster private gain. Bastardry of the first order. The "light" rail consumes all before it, for dubious benefit. Illustration: John Shakespeare Bambi Baird is presiding over the Bjelke-isation of NSW. Corrupt? He doesn't have to be. Indeed, if you can rewrite laws and stack boards, it's more efficient not to be. Every night, more trees go. Every day, more parkland is fenced and devoured. Worst of all is, it's unnecessary. You can have light rail and trees, high density and parks. It's a false dichotomy. Like other cities, we could have had both. Indeed, the old Sydney tram, back in the '50s, ran happily alongside the very Anzac figs that have now been felled in its name. And this clumsy, expedient, exploitative headspace drives the project from start to finish.

Light rail typically comprises small vehicles travelling on ground at low speed with frequent stops in a loose, ground-level network that acts essentially as a pedestrian enhancement. That, so far, is what Sydney had, in the old rattler network. Mike Baird's government has knocked down trees in favour of public transport - but it doesn't have to be this way. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer Contemporary light rail is also clean, green and ultra-quiet, with understated stations, in-ground electricity and if you're lucky (and why shouldn't we be?) grassed tracks, as in Berlin and Ostend, flanking avenues (Turin) and hedgerows instead of concrete (Freiburg, Basel). Sydney's CSELR is, by contrast, huge, heavy and fast. For a start, each tram measures a massive 67 metres. This is staggering. The world average is about 27 metres. A standard Sydney bus is 12.5 metres. Our longest current tram is 30 metres. A standard Sydney train carriage 20 metres. So our most venerable and fragile city precinct (excepting the Rocks) will be dissected by trains more than four times bus-length, three times the width of George Street and twice the length of the average Surry Hills block. Imagine what that will do to crossings, cycles and traffic, not to mention streets and atmosphere.

Then there's the clutter. The old Sydney trams had pretty wooden shelters; the new one has 70-metre platforms strewn with machinery boxes. The old had a black spaghetti of overhead wires, whose removal made the sun seem to shine again. Soon, the wires will be back. Excepting the George Street strip, the entire CSELR route from Central to Randwick and Kingsford will be marked by poles and wires 5-7m high, the platforms solid with ticket machines and other junk. As to speed, these immense carriages will travel on narrow inner-city streets at up to 70km/h (world average is about 35km/h). This, and the extra momentum so generated, requires them to be specially reinforced against crumple, increasing the carriage mass from 21 to 31 tonnes. Dangerous? You bet. Yet internally, only 30 per cent of passengers will have a seat. And the terrible thing is, even so big, so seatless and so recklessly fast, the new light rail still moves only 6900 people an hour per direction. Compare that with the almost 16,000 passengers an hour in the 220 buses (or 20 routes) the CSELR claims to replace. So the net effect on public transport capacity into the city is negative. It's a loss. If it's not about useful public transport, then, what is it about? What's the game plan? This is mysterious until you consider the route. It's 12 kilometres long with 20 stops, of which almost half are in the 2.5 kilometres north of Central. This means that the rest of the route averages less than one stop a kilometre (the largest gap is 1.7 kilometres, compared with the accepted ideal of 400 metres). Of these, one is at Ward Park next to Northcott public housing, one serves the SCG and Entertainment Quarter, two serve Randwick racecourse (even the hospital gets only one) and one serves the massive site that includes Daceyville, the first (John Sulman designed) public housing estate in the country, the Eastlake Golf Club and former Gardens R Us site, both owned by Sydney Water.

Public housing, public land, grabby government, rapacious institutions. Remember the SCG's bedroom eyes for Moore Park, and that unexplained nowhere-to-nowhere $38 million bridge (paid for by us)? Recall that 2014 purchase by the "three amigos", John Singleton, Gerry Harvey and Mark Carnegie, who paid $80 million for the underperforming Entertainment Quarter lease? Remember the silence of the Centennial and Moore Park Trust, which is dominated by money men, on the destruction of the trees? Note too that Randwick racecourse already has its high-rise hotel designed for Crown land on Alison Road (why the trees went) and that juicy Wansey Road site fenced off: two stops, two developments. Bear in mind that all NSW public housing is now explicitly up for grabs, and that the golf course and Gardens site belong to Sydney Water. Is it just me? Or is there a pattern here? It's almost like they've said, map all the public land we can rezone for towers. Good. They're the stations. Now, join the dots. So, is CSELR worth the cost, in trees and space and money? Pah. They should be paying us.

Twitter: @emfarrelly ​CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story has been amended to make clear the statement about net negative public transport capacity relates to capacity into the city. The Herald accepts the previously published statement "the net effect on public transport capacity is negative" was incorrect because the 220 buses will be redeployed into the public transport network. The story has also been amended to include a Transport for NSW estimate of 16,000 passengers in 220 buses, and to make clear the 6,900 figure for capacity on the light rail is per direction.