ABSTRACT
Sydney barely used the Games to foster its transport vision and failed to implement the holistic and comprehensive urban development strategy that the city’s planning department had laid out in its master plan. What Cashman (2006) teasingly titled Sydney’s “bitter-sweet awakening” also holds true for the transport legacies of the millennial host city Games. In the run-up to the Olympics, Sydney invested in urban freeways and rail systems that accommodate Sydney’s development strategy only to a very limited extent. As the center of Olympic activity, Sydney chose to transform a heavily polluted brownfield into a greenfield, Homebush. While this project was on the drawing board for years, the catalytic Olympic momentum that truly could have transformed Homebush, the center of Olympic activity, was not used to its optimum shortly after the Games. In particular for transport, planners took a short-sighted view. To make Homebush accessible for Olympic peak loads, a rail loop, stations and access roads had to be built. These investments, however, did not integrate the area into the regional structure of Sydney’s northern suburb, but rather were an add-on to the transport system designed by Olympic transport needs. Since then, Sydney has made multiple efforts to transform the Olympic infrastructure into a viable and thriving legacy for the future. Since the Games, Sydney has made strides to improve its legacy and successfully transformed Homebush from a polluted brownfield into beautiful parklands with lively communities (Cashman 2011).
