Appearing before a parliamentary committee hearing into the mega project,Parramatta City Council chief executive Gail Connolly said she was concerned the government was looking at boosting housing supply by centring on “bubbles around stations” along the line.
“We should be looking at the entire corridor from Sydney Olympic Park through to Parramatta,” she said.
The council is urging the government to buildextra stations at Camellia and Newington in any revised plans for the underground line along Sydney’s east-west spine. Camellia,home to heavy industry for decades,was dropped as a station site by the previous government about four years ago due to heavy contamination and flooding concerns.
Connolly said the original plans for Metro West focused on the benefits of a 20-minute train journey between Parramatta and the CBD,but were now “massively out of date” and should be reconsidered.
“It’s no longer about travel times to the city,” she said. “No one’s interested in the economic benefit of being able to go from Parramatta to the CBD in 20 minutes in the way that they were pre-COVID.”
She argued that adding stations to the line would most likely cost an extra $2 billion and delay Metro West’s opening by two years,but no one in 100 years would be “looking back and saying that was the wrong thing to do”.