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There is a turn on the SW3 bus route that has long made me wince, where Sydney Metro’s now-infamous pink replacement bus services are forced to make an unwieldy left turn onto Canterbury Road from Wonga Street, near the Cooks River in Canterbury.
Each morning, I sit among other commuters who brace for impact as some poor driver is forced to swing the bus wide into the outside lane in order to then jam the vehicle leftward into whatever space is available to it on Canterbury Road – all while an audience watches on.
All things considered, I haven’t had it so bad. I moved to Campsie from Sydney’s eastern suburbs late last year and have been held hostage by the chaos lottery these pink buses induce for only the past 12 months. Longtime neighbours of mine have suffered much longer.
The old T3 rail line went dark in September 2024. It was originally meant to be closed for only 12 months. When the south-west metro line opens on Friday morning, I will thankfully be enjoying an early start to my weekend. But for the patient residents scattered between Sydenham and Bankstown, I can only imagine that first commute will trigger ecstasy.
Not just because they’ll get to enjoy the arrival of one of the finest pieces of infrastructure in the country at their doorsteps, but because it’ll mark the end of the pink buses that have put a hex on their commutes for years.
Every time the pink buses come up in conversation, particularly in the early weeks after I moved, I turn straight to Canterbury’s dead man’s turn. My rants are usually met with dead-eyed stares suggesting hysteria. “It can’t be that bad,” I’m told. “Think of how good it will be when the Metro is finally open,” others are quick to console.
But eventually, I’d be vindicated. On the morning of February 11 this year, one driver went into the manoeuvre a little over-confident. The approach was forebodingly fast and sharp. Then, about halfway through the turn, came a yawning metallic groan, so slow and guttural it may well have delivered us all pure catharsis if we weren’t so concerned about the driver beside us.
Once the bus made its way around the corner, its victim came into view: a small yellow Hyundai hatchback, pinned up onto the footpath. The driver, thankfully, was okay. The car, not so much.
This incident, I’ve thought in the months since, can’t be the only one. So my guess is it won’t just be the ecstatic commuters boarding the south-west metro line from 4.31am Friday who will be breathing sighs of relief.
Drivers unlucky enough to rely on Canterbury and New Canterbury roads to get to and from work during peak hour have been forced to drive alongside these buses with the requisite care and caution of a bomb squad. The buses have made the already clogged section of Canterbury Road between the Cooks River and the RSL so bad during peak hour that my friends and I now call it “the Canterbury crawl”.
Then there are the residents of the tight suburban thoroughfares along these routes who, for the last two years, have been forced to acclimatise to the dreaded hum of heavy vehicles bowling through streets too narrow to accommodate them.
I can’t wait to descend the stairs at Campsie station for the first time, for the way it’ll bring the people who live up and down the south-west line closer together and for the way it promises to make all our lives easier.
But right now, I’m almost more excited to be writing an obituary for the dreaded pink bus. May they never return.
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