In the coming year, Malcolm Turnbull will hopefully start to justify all those pictures of himself catching the train. And when he gets to working out how to justify those pictures, he will not find himself short of suggestions for things he can do for the city, and particularly for western Sydney.

When Turnbull claimed the top job in 2015, he seemed to take upon himself the mantle of the urban reformer. His vision for the city – dense, environmentally sensitive, public transport oriented – was one of the central ways in which he differentiated himself from his car-loving and train-hating predecessor.

But, to outward appearances at least, Turnbull has done little to implement his vision in the past 15 months. The fact that he catches the train to and from meetings may, in itself, be an attractive symbol of Australian egalitarianism. And it may capture something of Turnbull's own (perhaps faded) pragmatic brand of progressivism. But the point of going into politics, of course, is not to catch the train to work: the point is to work to make the trains better.

There is impatience for something to happen. Consider what NSW Premier Mike Baird told Turnbull at a meeting of premiers in Canberra this month. Baird, who is building more roads and rail in NSW than any state leader in generations, in effect told Turnbull the federal government could be helping the state do still more.