Self imposed prison.

What a strange people we are ! What a strange place this city of Sydney has become !

From before six o'clock in the morning hundreds of thousands of people commence a ritual. They crowd into train carriages or get behind the wheel of their cars and begin a journey from the suburbs to their place of work in the city.

Each year these numbers increase and each year progress becomes slower, despite the government spending huge amounts of money to improve the rail service and build new roads and tunnels to accommodate cars.

Then at the end of each day we reverse the procedure and head home again !

There simply has to be a better way !

Perhaps the answer is to enact a law that freezes the city centre and prevents any further office space from being built. This would redirect natural growth to the outer fringes. Instead of bringing people into the city to work it would take work out of the city to where people live.

Unfortunately it is not likely to happen. It would be too radical an experiment for the movers and shakers of this country - and it would probably be counter productive.

One of the laws of commerce ensures that any commodity in short supply increases in price. Therefore a shortage of office space in this city would mean a huge rise in rents.

There is also the matter of prestige. An address in the Sydney CBD has snob appeal far greater than a similar address in the outer suburbs. Individual streets acquire a cachet as the home of certain professions.

It seems that Sydney - like other great cities of the world - is destined to remain within the " rat race " mentality with an ever increasing access problem. We will hear talk of " decentralization " that will never bear meaningful fruit - and each year the proportion of our lives wasted getting from home to work and back again will get longer !