Academics' scathing criticism of Sydney transport planning
"Transport Policies at the Crossroads" is a new paper by Paul Mees and Lucy Groenhart. It discusses travel to work in Australian capital cities from 1976 to 2011.
The full paper may be downloaded from RMIT at
http://mams.rmit.edu.au/ov14prh13lps1.pdf.
The paper makes some interesting observations about Sydney in general and Infrastructure NSW in particular:
The relative success of public transport, and arguably walking, in Sydney in recent decades has occurred despite, rather than because of, government policies.
Public transport plans have been announced and cancelled in a seemingly
endless succession, while the motorway network has been steadily expanded.
Sydney is now the only Australian capital city without a multi-modal public
fare system allowing free transfers between different transport modes,
although there is now a limited range of multi-modal periodical tickets. It
was expected that the establishment, in 2011, of Infrastructure New South
Wales would resolve this problem, but the organisation's 2012 State
Infrastructure Strategy (INSW, 2012) reflects the same policy biases that have
dominated transport planning in Sydney for at least two decades. The strategy
explicitly argues for a redirection of funding away from rail transport
towards roads, despite the much faster growth in rail patronage revealed by
the 2011 census results.
The focus on roads is justified primarily on projections that car travel is
expected to grow more rapidly than in the past (INSW, 2012, Table 6.3, p. 81),
with buses growing less rapidly. The strategy's figures are based on the 2006
census, which as Table 1.1 shows, represented an uncharacteristically low rail
usage rate, and on reported CityRail patronage, which as indicated above seems
to underestimate actual growth rates. In fact, the 2011 census results show
the opposite pattern to that assumed by INSW, with both bus and rail travel
growing more rapidly than car travel. The strategy predicts a 37 per cent
increase in rail patronage over the 20 years to 2031, but the 2011 census
showed a 22 per cent increase in work trips by rail just in the five years to
2011 (Table 1.1).
The Infrastructure NSW report is littered with similar examples of poor basic
research: for example, it states that Line A of the Paris RER has a maximum
capacity of 25-26 trains per hour (p. 110), when the current timetable for the
line, available on the RATP website (RATP, 2012), shows a train every two
minutes through the central station, Chatelet-Les Halles, from 7:54 am to 9:02
am (heading east), or 30 trains per hour. Line A runs exclusively with
doubledeck trains and has one track in each direction through the city centre,
but the report then argues (p. 111) that double-deck trains must be replaced
by single-deck vehicles to lift capacity to 30 trains per hour - the same
figure RER Line A is already achieving!
Infrastructure NSW also justifies the shift to roads on the basis that buses
travel on roads, but the congested roads identified in the strategy, such as
the M4, M5 and Eastern Distributor, parallel rail lines and do not carry
significant numbers of buses.
So while travel patterns in Sydney suggest a real potential to create a
substantially less car dominated city, Infrastructure NSW is planning for
increased, rather than reduced, car domination. The projections on which the
Infrastructure NSW proposals are based have already been shown to be erroneous
by the results of the 2011 census, suggesting that the organisation needs to
urgently rethink its transport priorities.