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

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.