public transport- from business point of view

Let's get serious about public transport

http://business.theage.com.au/lets-get-serious-about-public-transport/20080227-1vb5.html

John Legge
February 28, 2008

N ALL the discussion about public transport, nobody seems to have seriously tackled the question: What is it for?

Alan Moran, of the Institute of Public Affairs, writes as if public transport is some sort of concession to latte-sipping social engineers, hell-bent on forcing people to give up car driving and live in flats or townhouses. Moran extols American cities such as Atlanta and Houston, where public transport carries a negligible proportion of the total number of journeys, mainly schoolchildren and the infirm aged.

The Public Transport Users Association treats the provision of public transport as a moral and environmental issue. This does not directly contradict Moran, and may even give his supporters some comfort. In fact, there is a solid economic reason for public transport: the rail backbone of Melbourne's public transport system is critical to the survival of Melbourne as an economic entity.

In cities without public transport, where all commuters use private cars, three times as much space must be made available for car parking as is required by office and retail workers. If parking in an all-car city is mainly at ground level, the city becomes a few office buildings in a sea of car parks; and as the city grows, people have to walk increasing distances from where they parked their car to where they work; while more of the available space is needed for roads.

US experience suggests that when an all-car city grows beyond a population of about 400,000, it chokes on car traffic and the result is that conurbations such as Los Angeles have no CBD in the sense that Melburnians understand it. Rather, there is a necklace of mini-cities, each smaller than Adelaide, connected by a network of overcrowded freeways.

The Melbourne CBD generates more than $ billion a year in net annual value from buildings worth, in total, more than $25 billion. If we converted Melbourne to Moran's vision of an unplanned, all-car city, at least two-thirds of this value would be destroyed: the loss of rental income in the CBD would be greater than the entire operating cost of the public transport system.

Put slightly differently, every worker who uses public transport to get to his or her job in the CBD or St Kilda Road frees up sufficient car parking space to provide office accommodation for three further workers and doubles the value of the land converted from parking to production.

This is the logic that has led American cities such as Dallas and Los Angeles to invest heavily in both light and heavy rail projects. These projects link their suburbs to their centre, reversing the urban blight that turned large areas of these cities into bombsite car parks.

This same logic causes Melbourne's public transport planners to concentrate on increasing the speed and efficiency of the radial train network. Triplication allows a route to support more express trains, with the potential of halving travel times on longer journeys. Abolition of zone 3 forms part of the same pattern. By making long-distance commuting cheaper, the CBD and St Kilda Road can draw on a larger pool of workers, while shortening travel times will make commuting to the city attractive to workers who might otherwise take suburban jobs. The proposed north-south rail link (Caulfield-Windsor-St Kilda Junction-Domain Interchange-City/Flinders Street-City/Melbourne Central-Haymarket-Melbourne University) will add nothing to the reach of the network unless it continues from Melbourne University to Doncaster. But it will add a lot to its attraction for commuters and to the network's support of real estate values in the city and its St Kilda Road extension.

Translating US experience to Australia needs to be done with care. Most Australians, when they think of the US, think of New York or San Francisco. Both these cities have substantial public transport infrastructure and a real CBD. Moran's fixation on Houston is idiosyncratic at best.

Moran should take some comfort from the fact that when the Government refuses to extend the tram/light rail network, or consider an orbital railway, it is singing from his hymn sheet. Tram and light rail extensions, and an orbital railway, offer paths to serious increases in public transport use, and the Government's refusal to consider either shows how shallow its commitment is to environmental sustainability.

The Public Transport Users Association would be more effective if it took the economic significance of the radial rail system more seriously. The prosperity of the CBD is one of the reasons that Melbourne can afford to invest in environmental sustainability.

John Legge is a teaching fellow at Swinburne University.