Action for Public Transport (N.S.W.) Inc. |
P O Box K606 |
Haymarket 1240 |
23 October 2013 |
The document purports to be a strategic plan. But the rhetoric does not match the known facts. In their opening statement, the Ministers say that "implementing the strategy will mean a shift to a greater proportion of people using public transport.....especially rail". The current emphasis is however, already on roads. The route of the WestConnex radial motorway has been announced. Some of the $11 billion funding has already been committed. The staged construction sequence has also been announced, as has a construction commencement date and planned completion date.
The cross-harbour rail project, on the other hand, which might be expected to carry the burden of a shift to rail, has not yet even had its route determined. Nor has a total cost been determined or funds allocated. No start date has been announced, let alone a completion date. The matter is urgent; we understand that the new cross-harbour rail has to be working by perhaps 2027 at the very latest.
The Strategy offers no "new" projects which could be identified as "strategic". The only infrastructure within the CBD itself which has not been previously announced is the completion of the CBD cycleway network - hardly a profound project, either in terms of capital commitment or improved access for significant numbers of people.
Projects should have dates and funds attached. Except for WestConnex, they don't.
The document is repetitive. Many of its ideas appear in several places.
Some of the document is difficult to read in softcopy e.g. the diagram on page 5, where the white text on aqua background does not display well.
The positive value of traffic congestion is not recognised. We append a copy of Blunden's 1983 paper on the subject. Note his distinction between two types of congestion.
We need a discussion of Treasury's role in implementing this Strategy. Treasury controls the flow of money - its quantity and its direction.
No specific comments
No specific comments
The diagram on page 5 would benefit from having dates on it, e.g. by calibrating the X-axis in quarter-years
The reference on page 6 to the Opal smartcard ticket making "transfers between services and modes more efficient" is ironic - as implemented, the Opal fare system perpetuates the penalty on mode changes, apparently because of Treasury pressure. Other cities, including many Australian capitals, allow penalty-free transfers between modes.
The discussion of congestion at the top of page 9 should recognise that congestion can have a positive value - see the Blunden paper appended hereto.
The vector K in the map on page 10 is in the wrong place. It should be to the east of vector L.
The last sentence on page 10 says "WestConnex will also mean that traffic that does not need to pass through the city centre has an alternative route". The point with WestConnex is that it speeds up road travel between e.g. Parramatta and the Sydney CBD and therefore can be expected to encourage road trips. This induced traffic should be estimated and taken into account.
The last paragraph on page 15 says "A priority is to unlock capacity in the two most used corridors of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the multiple rail lines through Redfern. This will require an integrated response with a strong investment in heavy rail services and increases in capacity in other modes including light rail, buses, ferries and cycling." Correct, but there is no evidence that such investment is happening. No route has been chosen for the fourth rail corridor through the CBD and no dates have been given for its planning etc. No funding has been announced. Meanwhile, WestConnex was given funds by the Premier the day after it was announced and further funds have been promised by the new federal (Abbott) government. The paragraph does not reflect what is happening.
Similar remarks apply to the long paragraph on page 15: "A new CBD rail line and crossing under the harbour will provide a step change in capacity and will enable the Sydney network to carry an additional 90,000 to 100,000 people per hour across the network in the peak hour. Customers will use a mix of rapid transit, suburban, inter-city and regional services to access the city centre. This will help to unclog the two most heavily used gateways to the city - the multi-modal Sydney Harbour Bridge and the multiple rail lines passing through Redfern and Central stations." Again, the paragraph does not reflect what is happening.
Further, the North West Rail Link has been funded ahead of the new CBD railway even though it does not provide a step change in capacity; rather, it will lead to unacceptable congestion at Chatswood station and generally on the lower North Shore line.
On page 16, "The main focus for the road network is to better manage congestion." This approach is not in accordance with modern thinking. Rather than "managing" congestion, we should be expanding public transport and encouraging developments located where they are capable of being serviced efficiently by public transport.
On page 18, the strategy should recognise that car access to the CBD is inherently inefficient compared to public transport and should not be encouraged. The paragraph on parking should be re-written to acknowledge that parking space is not a universal right but rather one of several levers that could be used to control car access to the CBD.
On page 19 second column, note that Opal penalises transfers between public transport modes. This is not consistent with encouraging public transport use.
The diagram on page 20 should have a date on each action.
Note that the College St cycleway should not be cut or removed until the replacement Pitt/Castlereagh cycleway is completed.
Re page 27, we think that Sydney Trains' efforts around Central Station could be improved - for example, every map should have a YOU ARE HERE marker on it. And Sydney Trains simply refuses to do anything about incorrect signage on Museum Station platforms, even though personal safety is at stake.
On page 28, The provision of "real time" (electronic) information is no excuse for removing hard copy information as is already happening to the sheet timetables at railway stations. Nobody in authority wants to talk about it!
On page 39 - Ferries - As above, the provision of real time information does not remove the need for traditional hard information, like confirmatory destination signs on the ferries themselves.
On page 40 there is a reference to Sydney's Bus Future. No such document has yet been published - where is it? What is the "three-tiered bus network"?
The whole of page 46, about plans for the new CBD and cross-harbour railway, describes policies which are not reflected in what the Government is actually doing.
The cross-section of Eddy Avenue at the foot of pages 56 and 57 does not show the tram turnback which will have to be at least long enough to hold one 45-metre LRV.
Priority for LRT in mixed traffic The Strategy notes (page 13) that cars and taxis occupy 87% of the capacity of intersections but only carry 35% of the people. This phenomenon will be exacerbated when an LRV is in mixed traffic. The LRV will be carrying many more people than a bus, perhaps 300 passengers, so when a one-person vehicle blocks its path the consequences of the delay are greater. The LRV will be unable to go around other stationary vehicles, as might a bus. A blocking motorist will not be aware of the heightened consequences of his blocking an LRV unless an appropriate education and penalty regime is in place.
Information for public transport users We need:
To encourage public transport use, it needs to be made more attractive:
Wynyard - It's disappointing that the potential for improved CBD access using lanes 7 & 8 on the Bridge, the former Wynyard platforms 1 & 2, and a connection to George Street via Wynyard Street, is not even mentioned, especially given the capacity limits of the present Wynyard Station platforms compared with the trip numbers to be generated by Barangaroo. At the least, in strategic terms, an easement should be established and preserved now, between the Wynyard platforms and George Street, via Wynyard Street.
Rail route - It might facilitate community involvement in the Access Strategy if definitive information were provided about the current status of the rail easements previously referred to as Metro-Pitt and Metro-West. To what extent are they still practically available? Note that they offer different approaches - the western side of the CBD will experience the most growth however the eastern side will remain the larger of the two without growing so much. The Pitt corridor could have an interchange at Martin Place, taking load off Town Hall. The western corridor takes load off Town Hall too but in a different way.
The new harbour crossing will have considerably more capacity than the North West Rail Link needs. There will be scope for the NWRL and a second new line north of the harbour to connect to probably two lines south of the harbour. Note that the plans in Sydney's Rail Future for services to Cabramatta and Hurstville have serious difficulties and might never happen however other connections could be made to existing or new lines.
Bus Priority - Perhaps it's time to again consider more convenient bus set-downs at the inbound stops at Redfern (Gibbons Street) and Museum (Liverpool Street) railway stations. The Museum bus-to-rail interchange was destroyed some years ago in the name of "improved traffic flow"!
Processions - Too many processions, fun-runs, parades for sporting teams, etc cause disruptions by blocking George Street (usually) to pedestrian and bus traffic and causing bus routes to be scattered across the city and bewildering passengers. Only on Anzac Day or occasions such as state funerals should the city's main artery be blocked. Even on Sundays, about 55¹ buses an hour run northbound from Railway Square along George Street, and there are large numbers of shoppers, movie-goers, tourists, and even residents now.
¹ including the route 4xx series, routes 501, M10 and M30, and buses to The Hills district and northern beaches
Cars - A major question is how to deter many cars from entering the CBD. Cordon tolling? Tight controls on parking? Permits? How will the car and truck lobbies be managed?
Cycleways - There should be a clear policy that cycle paths are permanent. For example, the College St cycleway should not be removed or even cut before a replacement north-south route is complete, perhaps Castlereagh St.
This paper distinguishes between congestion due to inefficiency and that due to the pressure of demand. The former kind needs to be attacked with vigour but the latter should be embraced as an ally and used to achieve a better utilisation of the modes and a more balanced distribution on the ground of interacting land-use activities. |
Or in the night, imagining some fear, | ||
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!" | ||
A Midsummer Night's Dream |
The traffic engineer no less than his structural or electrical engineering counterpart needs his Hooke's or his Ohm's Law. Much of the early research carried out at the School of Traffic Engineering after it was established in the University of New South Wales in 1956 was concerned with the application of queuing theory to traffic flow phenomena and it was not long before an Ohm's Law of traffic emerged. It relates the time taken to traverse or pass through a traffic facility (a length of road, an intersection, a toll booth, a baggage counter, a cash register channel at a supermarket) to the level of the traffic flow or demand rate in a very characteristic way. Unlike its structural and electrical counterparts which give simple linear relationships between strain or voltage (the analogues of travel time) and the stress or current (the demand rate or flow of traffic) the relation between travel time and flow is highly non-linear. The travel time rises slowly at first but as it approaches the capacity of the traffic facility the increase is rapid and asymptotic to the capacity ordinate. This behaviour taken together with the fact that the demand slackens as the journey time increases ensures that a traffic system will settle down into an equilibrium state. The implications of this are profound and completely at variance with the traditional wisdom that has encouraged the transport planner to provide capacity pro-rata with an open-ended extrapolation of demand lest our cities suffer a thrombosis and collapse.
Now the foregoing dash of theoretical jargon is only presented here to allow me to assert in simple words that there are two kinds of congestion - one arising from inefficiency and a much more dramatic kind that arises from pressure of demand. The former is an enemy and must be confronted, the latter needs to be embraced as an ally. The first kind of congestion may be thought of as the "Main Street" problem that results from a bad mix of through and local traffic, inadequate pedestrian facilities, poor parking provision and controls. It is further manifested in inefficient traffic signals and intersection layouts, lack of right turn pockets, inappropriate frontage land use zoning, insufficient road/rail transfer terminals, intrusion of through traffic into local streets, poor signing and road marking and so on endlessly. It is fair to say however that the on-the-job professional traffic engineer has, over the past two decades, resolutely and successfully attacked many of these problems, to the extent that twice as much traffic gets around our towns and cities as well as half as much did twenty years ago.
When the traffic/transport engineer entered the urban planning lists his principal challenger was the other kind of congestion - the virtually unbounded demand for car travel. Initially he sought to overcome it by recommending more and more road capacity. In Sydney five 8-lane freeways were to converge on the city' s doorstep at Ultimo. Although the era of super-imposing massive rural type freeways on established urban land use and transport structure has passed, the transport planner is still ready to prescribe a major bridge or a clover-leaf interchange to solve a bottleneck problem. In some cases such solutions may be justifiable but not generally. Just such a proposal has recently been the subject of the Warringah Transport Corridor Inquiry - but that is sub-judice right now. We can however use another currently debated problem to gain insight into the mechanism of congestion and its effect on the land-use infrastructure of a city. It is the question of a second Harbour Bridge in Sydney.
The existing bridge is one of the great traffic concourses of the Nation and has the capacity to handle road traffic at the rate of 15,000 per hour. But if only 500 vehicles were to approach its great deck between 8 a.m., say, and one minute past there would be acute traffic congestion and a prima facie case for duplicating the facility there and then. A demand intensity of 500 vehicles in one minute produces a flow of 30,000 per hour and the bridge can only handle them at half this rate. What, of course, the hapless 500 do is to spread themselves out over two minutes and all is well. The spreading goes on up to two hours even in big cities, and in the case of the Sydney Bridge this, together with a modest occupancy rate of say 1.25 persons per car, allows nearly 40,000 persons to move between north and south. One particularly important point to stress is that any individual traveller suffers no more delay than that corresponding to the critical speed (some 30-40 km/hr) of operating the facility at its full load. He is not delayed or congested for the whole period of the peak as popular opinion tends to surmise. The spreading of the demand does call for some programming of the trips and there are perceived disadvantages associated with this. However a great deal of the spreading occurs naturally, due to the spatial distribution of destinations beyond the bottleneck and when one takes account of staggered working hours and flexitime arrangements the Shakespearian bear may well be imaginary.
But there is more to consider. As the peak stretches, public transport alternatives (if any) become more attractive. In the case of the Sydney Harbour Bridge there is capacity for a further 30,000 person trips per hour in just one direction of movement. But more importantly, when all transport capacity is used to its "tolerable" upper limit people are influenced to change the pattern of demand. Committed individual desire lines may not change much but new developments and growth patterns may change dramatically. The Sydney Harbour Bridge illustration can be expanded to tell something of its own life story. When it was opened just over half a century ago, Sydney's North Shore was a collection of "villages" around the railway stations and the Warringah Peninsula was a holiday resort. Today North Sydney is a city the size of Adelaide and the Peninsula has jobs within its boundaries for about half of its 60,000 workers and many of the 30,000 external jobs its workers need are available on the north side. The North Shore has major market and commercial centres at Chatswood and Hornsby and a university, the growth of which is undoubtedly encouraged by its relatively good accessibility with respect of its competitors on the south side.
Just over a year ago when the Jubilee of its opening was being celebrated one National Daily pictured it under full load with the headline "A City Facing Strangulation". Might I be so egocentric as to recall that I styled an article published about the same time in the University of New South Wales Quarterly - "The Bridge. Sydney's Master Traffic Controller".
Now I am conscious that the Sydney Harbour Bridge is a long way from Wollongong and I apologise for making it the main theme of my narrative so far. But let me say that this glamour example of the bottleneck problem is not a one-off situation in just one city. Bottlenecks, big and small are of wide spread occurrence in all our cities and they hold the key to the philosophy that large cities should become collections of sub-cities. Such a philosophy should not of course become a doctrine but rather a guiding principle. In the world of real cities topography, history and the existing land-use transport infrastructure call for a great deal of variety in the solutions we devise. Nevertheless we can go about the job of providing for their future with greater confidence if we understand that the strong feedback forces embodied in their traffic allow one to trim the ship without fear of it capsizing. In the discussion so far the feedback mechanism that established equilibrium is, if we relate it to physics, of the negative kind. But feedback may also be positive and this induces rapid growth. This is of course evident in traffic systems and my reference earlier to the growth of Sydney's North Shore after the opening of the bridge is a spectacular example of this. In a somewhat ironical way it is the acceptability of the growth effects of new traffic facilities that has made us reluctant to accept the inevitable tapering off when negative feedback forces take over. This is understandable but the consequence that is often missed is that when a given level of growth takes place the activities concerned go "critical" and further growth can go on in a self sustaining way. Planning should recognise such possibilities and encourage them. Other examples of functionally specific activities that confine the transport task are to be found in the area zoning of schools and the decentralization of shopping centres.
With this background we can now address the general theme of this Symposium. In the sense that transport is the apparent begetter of congestion it is indeed a tyrant. But we have seen that congestion occurs because we all want to get to the same place at the same time by the same mode. Congestion is the inevitable consequence and without full understanding of the process we blame transport. We expect far too much of our transport especially our motor cars. This is due in no small measure to the fact that we spend so much money on them. We also use them inefficiently. What transport organization could survive if it ran its fleet at 20% load factor for something less than 10% of the year? And what of the house-wife who pays $500 per tonne-kilometre to transport home the kilogram of butter for which she made a special trip to the corner shop. The companion theme of the Tyranny of Distance is also worthy of interpretation in terms of the foregoing exposition. Here again distance tends to be viewed as being synonymous with transport when in fact it is directly related to the spatial distribution of land-use activities and here again there is a dominant aspect - the spatial relationship between our homes and our workplaces. Long commuting distances can be traced back to an earlier transport era - that of the high capacity commuter railroad which encouraged the concentration of jobs in a central area and permitted the working population to ebb and flow for long distances to the residential suburbs. The motor car demands a radically different distribution of land-use and the jobs should be dispersed amongst the workers. Much of our recent development has responded to this. As a result we have two radically different partners endeavouring to make a good job of their marriage, and by and large they are succeeding. If one looks to the future the portent is encouraging so far as the task of reducing our commuting travel is concerned. With the steady reduction in manufacturing jobs, future job opportunities will occur more and more in the tertiary and service categories which are more easily located closer to home. If one takes into account the revolutionary impact of electronic "transport" we may in the future not need to leave our homes for work purposes. Trends such as those envisaged will undoubtedly reduce work travel but will no doubt increase recreational travel - we may even spread the traffic peaks of the future over 24 hours!
With this tempting prospect in mind I should quickly bow out for our ally will then have become our friend and transport our servant - a means to an end not an end in itself.
This perspective was perceptively grasped and succinctly expressed
more than two hundred years ago by the great scholar and philosopher
Dr Samuel Johnson. Late in his life he was travelling back to London
after a visit to his birth-place, Litchfield, accompanied by Boswell
who recorded in his celebrated biography the following:
I enjoyed the luxury of our approach to London ..... of being whirled along with such a companion and said to him "Sir, you observed one day ... that a man is never happy for the present but when he is drunk. Will you not add - or when driving rapidly in a post-chaise?" Johnson, in characteristic vein, replied "No Sir, you are driving rapidly from something or to something." |