Bus and rail users are playing their part for the environment by avoiding excessive motor vehicle use. This swing towards public transport is as much a response to pain avoidance of the pump and congested roads as it is the superior qualities of public transport.
One suburban Sydney council have made the transit experience pleasurable and effective. Bankstown Station have fused their rail and bus components into a fully connected social entity that elevates it into a lively, social space. Designed by Michael Davies of Tompkins MDA, Sydney, the project involved wholesale landscaping and re-routing of roadways. Spare steel work crowned with a filigree of high performance glazing helped in converting a tangled site. The new bus/rail interchange is 20km to Sydney’s south-west.
Bankstown utilised architecture to create an uplifting quality to combat the mass transit experience. A simple, linear composition of steel and glass from Viridian provided a processional quality defined by its architecture and framed by landscaping.
Rail and bus commuters will be consuming a fraction of the energy: less than 0.1 MJ/per km through combined bus/train travel compared to the average motor vehicle’s 4.0 MJ/per km.
