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Action for Public Transport (N.S.W.) Inc.

Transitways may cut travel times by 13,000 hours a day

posted Friday 13 September 2002
The two Transitways connecting Blacktown to Castle Hill and Parramatta to Mungarie Park will cut time spent travelling in the region by 13,000 hours each day and reduce the number of car trips by 23,000 per day.

These are the predictions of the transport model being prepared for the Environmental Impact Statement for the T-ways, due for release for public comment in November 2002. The figures were released at a public meeting in Parramatta on 4 September. The T-ways are scheduled to commence operation in 2006. The model assumes passengers will walk up to 800 metres to access the T-way stations, the same distance they presently walk to rail stations.

The meeting was poorly attended. Only six members of the public were present, and of those, five were residents abutting the T-way, concerned mainly about bus noise and property values.

APT comment-

APT believes the model is too optimistic and that passengers would not be prepared to walk up to 800 metres to the high-tech bus stops, which would generally lack the shopping and other facilities associated with railway stations. APT also believes that too little allowance has been made for "induced" traffic, attracted to the ordinary roads as a result of the vacuum created by the 23,000 fewer car trips predicted by the model.

The computer-generated aerial views of traffic movements used at the meeting, which showed typical clusters of vehicles moving from one red light to the next, did not take into account the fact that each car would be carrying 1.6 persons on average, while each T-way bus might have up to 70 people on board. The degree of bus priority attainable, the meeting was told, depended a lot on how queuing motor cars might clog the previous intersection in the rear. This approach seems highly unsatisfactory, especially in peak hours, when bus loads could be expected to be consistently high.

It will be interesting to see how the various players make use of the predictions of the model, and how its predictions might be modified in the light of experience with the Liverpool – Parramatta T-way, due to open in February 2003.



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