By Murray Jones, secretary of Thirroul Village Committee

“The Western Parkland City or Bradfield is fast tracked to be Sydney’s third city. Together with the Commonwealth we are committing $20 billion in job creating infrastructure,” Stuart Ayres, NSW Minister for Western Sydney, said recently. He also said that within 15 years this area “will account for more than a quarter of NSW’s population growth” and “the Western Parkland City is often one of the hottest places on the planet during summer”.

With this heat and this number of people, surely a regular surge of Western Sydney’s residents will set out for a day at the beach. For many of those families, access to a surf club will also be an important consideration. Surf safety training provided by surf clubs and their “nippers” programs is becoming the summer alternative to football. Already, for many surf clubs the nippers component is their largest membership group.

The benefits of this uniquely Australian surf lifesaving training is recognised internationally, with a New York Times correspondent being “overwhelmed with appreciation for experiencing the sublime... teaching young people two very Australian values along the way: surf safety and a healthy sense of competition”.

So let’s review beach access for a family from Bradfield or as a proxy, the closest existing town, Bringelly, 4km east. Public transport would require train-bus interchange in city central and the amount of gear required for a family beach visit would make such interchange difficult. So the family car is the most viable option. The red line on the map shows a no-through-road zone that forces beach access to be either north of Liverpool or via Bulli Pass.

Let’s review surf beach access via Liverpool. A quick study of Google maps shows that Sydney’s north shore access from Bradfield is via several bridges. Sydney’s famous south shore beaches are much closer, spread along 20km of coastline from Sydney Harbour to Botany Bay.

Bondi and Maroubra are the two longest at 850m and 1km and are the only two with significant car parking facilities. The other south side beaches Tamarama (100m); Bronte (250m); Clovelly (50m); Coogee (500m) and Malabar (200m) are small with barely enough room for their own local crowds. South side has only 2.95km of beach in 20. Could this shortage of beaches be why Bondi often looks like it does in the photo above?

Further south, Cronulla Beach is 4km long, but half is dedicated to 4WD vehicles. The National Park south of Sydney, with a minimum $12 entry fee, has 1.6km of beach. Garie Beach has a surf club but access takes an additional 10 minutes.

So all of Sydney’s southside beaches add up to 8.6km of surf beach in over 52km of coastline but in practice a family from Bradfield on a tight budget has useful access to less than 5km of surf beach. Also, those who chose the Liverpool route will face a lengthy struggle in traffic though continuous suburbia, then pay for access or parking, only to probably suffer significant crowds.

So what happens if the family chooses the southern route via Bulli Pass? Both Thirroul and Bulli Beach are at least six minutes closer to Bradfield than any of the southside beaches. The route is mostly on a country road through open land and bush scenery, then down the spectacular Bulli Pass.

Wollongong offers easy access to 27km of surf beaches, most with excellent surf clubs, free parking and first-class beach facilities. Doesn’t this make the choice obvious and, if so, why isn’t the impact of this inevitability being considered by State and Local Government?