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

Action for Public Transport (NSW) is a transport advocacy group, which has been active in Sydney since 1974. We promote the interests of beneficiaries of public transport: passengers and the wider community.

This is Action for Public Transport's response to a call at https://future.transport.nsw.gov.au/technology/program/overview/ for feedback on the Future Transport Technology Roadmap, 2016.

This submission is being emailed as a single document rather than lodged as answers to the questions in your online feedback form. Several people have been involved in preparing this response and compiling their opinions into your framework would distort their contributions.

The following points are ordered arbitrarily:

• Any proposal to do something should include criteria for measuring outcomes, including the success or otherwise, of the proposal. No such criteria are evident in the Roadmap.
  
  
• Planning in New South Wales, including transport planning and the work of T4NSW, is based on contradictory foundations. Students of Logic 101 learn that anything can be proved from contradictory axioms. Specifically, NSW has separate ministries for Transport, Roads, Westconnex and Planning. Transport policies try to help people ride on public transport, minimising the landgrab for roads and parking. Roads policies facilitate private car travel, even in inner urban areas. Westconnex wants more road vehicles using toll roads, some of them within a very few kilometres of the Sydney CBD. And Planning has the thankless task of putting our destinations within an hour of our homes. As a result, there are many transport projects that were chosen by ministers without regard to their effectiveness in maximising public benefit from public expenditure.

  The planning mix is further complicated by the Greater Sydney Commission (which seems to have good ideas but limited information and no powers) and local government.
  
  

• The glossary on page 85 perverts the idea of demand management in the transport context. DM is supposed to mean doing things that control the demand for transport. The glossary defines "demand management systems" as "Systems, processes and activities that are aimed at efficiently allocating available capacity to meet demand or influence customers' choices about when, where and how they travel." No; DM isn't about optimising the use of expensive capacity. Rather it's about managing/controlling/limiting/reducing demand.
  
  
• The whole project, including flying famous technology leaders to Australia, is about using technology to alter the travel experience. The Roadmap makes clear that it's about mobility. It shouldn't be. People travelling aren't earning anything; productivity only happens when you stop and interact with someone else who's stopped at the same place. The project's objective should be to get people somewhere they can do something useful; using the planning process to relocate the origins or destinations of trips is permissible. The game is ACCESS not MOBILITY. The only beneficiaries from having us perpetually whizz around like orbiting electrons are people who make/fix/sell roads/cars/fuel/parking.
  
  
• Even some pro-car commentators seem to agree. Last week, Wendell Cox said at http://www.newgeography.com/content/005520-access-city that:

  Access for residents to employment is critical to boosting city productivity. This has been demonstrated by researchers such as Remy Prud'homme and Chang-Woon Lee of the University of Paris, David Hartgen and M. Gregory Fields of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Generally, city productivity (economic growth and job creation) can be expected to improve more where employment access is better. Access is measured in the number of jobs that can be reached by the average employee in a certain period of time, like 30 minutes.

  
  
• Proliferating home deliveries might not reduce road congestion. An interesting SMH article "'Choking' fears if home delivery left unregulated" on 16 January 2017 (http://www.smh.com.au/small-business/managing/choking-fears-if-home-delivery-left-unregulated-20170110-gtoyuj.html) begins:

  Everything we desire from the booming convenience economy is now just a swipe of our smartphones away.

  But according to Melbourne academic, Australia's capitals face the same traffic-congested "choking" fate as central London if the burgeoning economy is left unregulated.

  
  
• It is gratifying that the Roadmap recognises the undesirability of too many people sitting too long in their cars for long commutes. Countering urban sprawl, working towards a more compact Sydney, and thereby reducing the need to travel, should be included in the Roadmap's strategies.