NSW train strike: How will you get to work?

NSW train strike: How will you get to work?

AT THE beginning of every year, eyeballs all over the globe focus on Sydney as our fair city lines up alongside London, New York, Tokyo and other major centres to prove itself in their league.

The annual New Year’s fireworks display, showing off the city’s stunning harbour and unique landmarks, convinces not only locals and visitors, but TV viewers from around the world, that our most populated capital at least looks like a real, functioning, world city.

But it’s always a short burst.

Inevitably, at some point in the New Year, we’re reminded our beautiful coastal home is not the energetic, brilliantly-organised, thriving-after-midnight metropolis put on show for the rest of the world in that burst of pyrotechnics.

And this year, the embarrassing reality has hit even quicker than usual with a pay dispute between transport workers and their government employer exposing the city’s failing as a global hub.

A train strike that will all but shut down the city on Monday and throw it into chaos on the eve of our national day will now go ahead, and the issue that’s led to the action shows the “world city” image Sydney tries to lay on is an absolute joke.

Rail workers are refusing to work overtime from Thursday, which we now know means the train system will only be able to reliably function on a public holiday timetable.

The Globalisation and World Cities Research Network (yes, a real thing), considers Sydney an “Alpha” world city. That puts it up there with Milan, Los Angeles and Seoul, and according to the organisation’s definition, means it “links major regions into the world economy”.

But the reality is, Sydney can’t even reliably get its residents to work without transport staff working overtime.

The sad thing about this revelation — aside from that its January timing has given us a far shorter-lived burst of post-New Year’s civic pride — is that it’s not even a surprise.

The city has been consistently proving itself unworthy of its world city ranking for years now.

We lock out our visitors barely hours into a night out by most big cities’ standards, earning the reputation of a giant “ghost town”, leaving visitors bewildered. And we allow our tourist-attracting inner-city entertainment precincts to lose their appeal to the point where they’re better off remodelled as suburban dwellings.

When we do focus on entertainment, it often goes wrong. Food festivals in the past couple of years have frequently been reduced to a race between organisers running out of food and punters running out of patience.

Invite hundreds of people to an overpriced beachside feast but let them resort to ordering pizzas as the wine runs out.

Let them queue for a barbecue in a park only to be told after hours of waiting there’s not enough meat to go around.

Put on a party to watch those world-class fireworks, but make guests queue for hours and miss the main event.

Promoted a giant maze at a secret outdoor location to thousands of paying guests? A few fake vines and knee-high shrubs inside a small Bondi bar should do the trick.

There are too many examples to call these events one-off mistakes by individual organisers or coincidences. These sub-par events appear to be setting or adhering to a standard that Sydney-dwellers and visitors have sadly gotten used to.

The bar just hasn’t been raised.

While events like these are put on by individual organisers rather than tourism or government groups who aim to promote the city on the world stage, those that are fail to set a world-class standard.

Shouldn’t our city’s transport system, at the very least, resemble one servicing a world city? We’re paying enough to live here.

When the year’s first Sydney train meltdown began (that’s right, we haven’t neared the end of January and we’re already on multiple crises), state Opposition Leader Luke Foley described Sydney’s train system as “third world”. While that might be an exaggeration, it’s certainly not world class.