Author: Roger Taylor

Why Good Governance Really Matters

Post author By Roger Taylor
Post date 28/09/2020
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Most people only think about “governance” when the government really messes things up and people can see it affecting them – like the botched hotel quarantining that caused the second wave in Victoria which resulted in hundreds of deaths and huge social and economic cost. Some might argue that everyone can make a mistake and no government is perfect but the State government had the opportunity to do much better.

The Victorian second wave of the corona virus was not a result of one thing – it was the failure of the system as a whole with many contributing factors. It is a reminder that the activities and processes governments carry out which we call “governance” are critically important.

There is growing concern that governance standards in this country are declining. We have seen this now in government’s response to the second wave of this pandemic but the problem appears at times in all levels of government today. Often the symptoms and impacts are difficult to see. We have seen this in transport : failure to adhere to accepted/proper standards and procedures including too close a relationship between public officials and private corporations, too much unaddressed conflict of interest, too little transparency, lazy analysis of problems – grasping at instant solutions imbued with ‘optimism bias’, manipulated supporting data, enfeebled public scrutiny, and even egregious examples of outright corruption both at political level and within what used to be trusted departments of the public service. This ‘institutional decay’ was evident in the abortive East-West Link motorway project, the West Gate Tunnel project and the North East Link. More details are provided by William McDougall on his blog https://www.wmcdougall.com.

Whilst poor governance is the main reason we have consistently achieved poor transport outcomes in Melbourne and Victoria generally, the greatest governance failure is reflected in government policy and responses (at all levels) to the climate emergency. Transport for Melbourne does not believe there are easy solutions to this problem but governance needs to be addressed because the quality of our democratic institutions and how they ‘govern” on our behalf will ultimately define who we are as a society and our future.

Tags Covid-19 disaster, failure of governance, State Government, Victoria

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The Future We Must Plan For

Post author By Roger Taylor
Post date 21/09/2020
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This is the subject of Transport for Melbourne’s next forum to be held on 4th December 2020.

It is our belief that planning is a waste of time if you have no idea what future you are planning for. As the covid pandemic has demonstrated It certainly will not be business as usual, yet that is what many politicians continue to hope and plan for and is reflected in many of the major transport projects being pursued or advocated for by government – even today.

Whilst the covid pandemic will be transformative in many ways, its impact will be quickly overtaken by other global changes – principally of an environmental nature which will have a profound impact on everything we do – our way of life. It will also have implications for our values and aspirations and the choices we make now and in the future.
As Prof Johan Rockstrom (Director Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research, Germany) stated recently the Earth is fast approaching a tipping point ie 2 degrees above pre industrial levels which will put it into a new state – Hot House Earth in which global temperatures will rise rapidly to 7 degrees or more by the end of the century fed by positive reinforcing loops which will be impossible to reverse. A 1.5 degree increase was established years ago as the point at which the planet enters the danger zone. According to a new report by the World Meteorological Organisation this may be reached as soon as 2024, and further increases are locked in until 2040 even if we stopped all greenhouse emissions immediately.

It should be noted that global temperatures have been tightly constrained for the last three million years ie within minus four and plus two degrees which defined the glacial/interglacial states for the duration of the Pleistocene. It has been the capacity of the earth’s biosphere to self regulate that has kept global temperatures within this very narrow temperature range during this period despite variations in solar intensity, volcanism and other external factors and maintain the world we know. But Hot House Earth will be very different. It will be a very harsh and alien world and provide a pathway to mass extinction – a process that is already well advanced.

If we want to avoid runaway climate change and Hot House Earth we are running out of time. Indeed Prof Will Steffen reported more than a decade ago there is strong scientific evidence that we have already left the interglacial state – known as the Holocene and entered a new state – the Anthropocene. It is likely this occurred in the 1950’s.

Since that time the impact of human activity on planet has escalated at an unprecedented rate affecting all elements of the earth system. This has been the result of a huge increase in the exploitation of the planet’s natural resources, escalation of pollution, environmental degradation and species loss. The planet is rapidly warming at a time when it should be cooling. One can see evidence of this as the great ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic melt at an accelerating rate. Much of the Arctic sea ice has gone and permafrost is thawing releasing methane gas. We are now witnessing extreme weather events on a scale and frequency well above, by orders of magnitude, that could be explained in terms of natural variability.

As Will Steffen stated recently the Holocene is gone and we will not get it back. The climate emergency is real and there is an imperative to act now and reduce global greenhouse emissions to avoid runaway climate change but that on its own will not be sufficient. It will also be necessary to reverse the impact of much of the human activity on this planet ie pollution, environmental degradation, forest clearing and species loss which has weakened the earth’s self regulating capacity and given us even less time to act.

This is the world we must plan for.

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A Bad Case of Tunnel Vision – A Dirty Problem

Post author By Roger Taylor
Post date 07/09/2020
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Our politicians love building tunnels. It has been said “a politician is someone who on seeing the light at the end of the tunnel orders more tunnel”. The quote is anonymous but in Victoria it is certainly true. In Melbourne we are already digging the West Gate Tunnel and Metro Rail Tunnels, and shortly the North East Link and later the Suburban Rail Loop and the Airport Rail link – all with tunnels attached. All projects have question marks over their viability but one of the first things the government should do with any of these projects is check where it can put the dirt.

This sounds simple and elementary but it is becoming a real problem. This is not just because of the huge amounts involved but because much of it is contaminated with highly toxic chemicals. This is especially true for the West Gate Tunnel.

In the case of the West Gate Tunnel the problem is so bad it has threatened the viability of this project. This issue has been covered extensively over many months by The Age newspaper. In 6/3/2020 it reported “Secret borehole tests reveal PFAS contamination in soil near Coode Island – where a toxic inferno was triggered by a chemical explosion in 1991 — is so severe that dumping the waste in landfills would be impossible without very expensive treatment. Contaminated soil on the West Gate Tunnel’s construction site on New Street, South Kingsville”. The problem is so severe it brought the project to a standstill and the builders threatened to walk away from it.

The toxicity of the soil in this area was well known and engineers involved in the development of this project should have anticipated this or at least done some soil tests first at the beginning of the feasibility and planning stage. But this is only the beginning of this State Government’s tunneling odyssey and the question remains – where will it put the dirt for all these tunnels – now and in the future? It is time the State government stopped digging holes (not just in the ground but in government finances and debt creation) and started to do some planning and re-evaluate the merits of these projects.

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Covid has created a perfect opportunity for people who want to travel by bike

Post author By Roger Taylor
Post date 31/08/2020
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As reported by Timna Jacks in The Age public transport rides have dwindled to 9% of normal levels and are unlikely to recover fully for years to come as a direct result of the covid pandemic. But now is not the time to reinvest in more private car travel. Whilst it is true there will be more congestion on the roads as more people go back to their cars we know that building more roads and providing more car parking will not solve the congestion problem – it never has and only feeds it. There is an overwhelming imperative – environmental, social and economic to resist this and promote alternatives.

One of these is active transport – particularly cycling and e-biking which can be provided at minimal cost. There are huge benefits promoting cycling. It is accessible or should be for almost everyone now – particularly with the arrival of e-bikes. It is dirt cheap, particularly in comparison to the private car (which is important in a time of recession, particularly for young people who are bearing the brunt) and provides huge health and environmental benefits. It can also be linked with public transport ie by carrying them on trains. Buses and trams should also make this option available, but it should certainly be possible for people with small folding bikes.

What governments need to do is create a safer environment for people to ride ie make roads safer for cyclists. This can be done very cheaply using a variety of measures but it needs a change in government mindset at all levels to do this and that is something the community should be demanding now. Government should be reminded that if this can be achieved in cities like Copenhagen where 62% of Copenhageners choose to bike to work and study Melbourne can get many more people on bikes instead of cars if we create the right environment for bike travel.

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How Can You Tell The North East Link Is A Dud?

Post author By Roger Taylor
Post date 25/08/2020
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Smart cities stopped building motorways long ago, some of them never built them realizing they were hugely costly and did not solve their transport problems in the first place. In short the business case for the community as a whole simply did not stack up.

In Victoria the government has overcome this problem by constructing them in a way that makes them viable on a commercial basis by over- designing them and creating a monopoly situation in which alternatives are made more difficult, and passing the risk onto a third party like Transurban. Tolling companies require sweateners from the government to enable them to make these deals profitable (at the public’s expense ofcourse). In the case of the Westgate Tunnel project the sweetener was a ten year extension of hugely profitable tolling rights to City Link plus a significant contribution to the capital cost of the project.

The State government has attempted to use these strategies for the North East Link. Its original purpose was to act as the final link for a ring road but in order to make it more profitable for a toll operator It has grossly overdesigned it in a way that also promotes city bound traffic from Melbourne’s north east. As a result the cost of the project has ballooned. Despite these inducements the business case is so poor the private sector is reluctant to take it on. On this criteria alone the project is a dud.

But it gets worse. Both projects are propped up by biased traffic forecasts and distorted business cases to get them across the line (and garner federal contributions). These are based on business as usual projections that do not anticipate a covid induced recession. The State government now says it might build it themselves then run the tolling themselves (presumably at a massive loss). I rest my case – the project is a terrible dud.

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Investing in Public Infrastructure

Post author By Roger Taylor
Post date 17/08/2020
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Are we getting value for money and what we can do to achieve it

Infrastructure is the latest buzz word on every politician’s lips. It is seen as the answer to restoring our staggering economy, an opportunity to promote economic growth and create more jobs. Governments at every level are spending a lot of money building new infrastructure projects. The Victorian government’s “Big Build” boasts the delivery of approximately $70 billion of transport projects including 119 major road and rail projects and the creation of over 15,000 jobs across Victoria. But most of this is being spent on a small number of mega projects. The latest on the Victorian government’s drawing board is the Suburban Rail Loop (SRL). The Government says it will be “the biggest public transport project in Australian history” with a proposed start date of 2022 and completion date of 2050. The guestimated cost at this stage is ‎$50–100 billion” although is it likely to be much higher given the absence of a detailed feasibility study and an increasingly uncertain economic environment which is likely to compromise many of the assumptions that underpin its viability. The question we must ask – is this investment in areas where needs are greatest? Are we getting value for money, remembering that it is our money government is spending, and what are the risks?

The growth of mega projects is not confined to Australia. As Bent Flyvbjerg (Said Business School University of Oxford) notes in his in 2014 paper “What You Should Know about Mega projects and Why” ” total global megaproject spending is assessed, at US$6 to US$9 trillion annually, or 8% of the total global gross domestic product (GDP), which denotes the biggest investment boom in human history”. But as Flyvbjerg notes they have a terrible track record which he describes as his “iron law” of megaprojects: “megaprojects are systematically subject to “survival of the unfittest,”- “over budget, over time, over and over again

This would not be so bad if these were inherently good projects and designed to meet community needs, but this is rarely the case. As Bent Flyvbjerg notes “Like the Tower of Babel, nations’ rulers want to create the tallest, widest, biggest projects they can; and so often these are driven by ego rather than financial good sense”. He describes these drivers as the four sublimes

the technological sublime as the rapture engineers and technologists obtain from building large and innovative projects, with their rich opportunities for pushing the boundaries for what technology can do,
the “political sublime”, which is the rapture politicians obtain from building monuments to themselves and their causes
the “economic sublime”, which is the delight financiers, business people and trade unions get from making lots of money and jobs from megaprojects. Given the enormous budgets for megaprojects, there are ample funds to go around for all rent seekers, including contractors, engineers, architects, consultants, construction and transportation workers, bankers, investors, landowners, lawyers and developers.
the “aesthetic sublime” is the pleasure designers and people who appreciate good design get from building, using and looking at something very large that is also iconically beautiful, such as San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge or Sydney’s Opera House.

There is a fifth sublime ofcourse and that is the use of capital projects for shameless political pork barreling often linked to pressure from vested interest groups (rent seekers).

And this is how much of the community’s money – our money paid from taxes and charges is now being spent today, and explains to a large extent why many areas of need become run down because they have been starved of funds. All of this is built on debt of course, which ultimately must be repaid but comes at a huge opportunity cost when investment in areas of real need remain neglected. This includes much of our existing infrastructure that is in poor condition because of inadequate maintenance or is in urgent need of upgrading or renewal.

It is time to get back to “basics” and understand what infrastructure is, its role, the way it creates value for the community and investment criteria that should be applied when evaluating and approving projects in the first place. It is also time to start applying proper processes to the evaluation, assessment process and ranking of projects as part of an overall planning framework and plan for the future. At a more detailed level it requires the identification of alternatives. For example many of the outcomes that could be achieved by an SRL could be achieved by improving the bus network, much of it to smart bus standard. This could be achieved at a fraction of the cost and very quickly, probably within a parliamentary term instead of decades and with minimal risk. It would also create many new jobs. There are other options ofcourse. The question needs to be asked why these have not been included in the evaluation process. It is likely this option does not satisfy Flyvbjerg’s sublimes. Whatever the reason pursuing the current trend will rapidly impoverish our State/nation and lead to disastrous social outcomes.

Government financing will become increasingly difficult in the future. This should force a radical cultural change in which governments and the community at large will be forced to do more with less. Some cities have demonstrated how this can be done. Frugal but appropriate and well designed investment in physical infrastructure releases government funds for other areas of need, particularly in social infrastructure: public health, education, research and development, community services, and many others that are highly valued by the community and contribute to its livability and its place as a civil society. It also enables communities to focus more sharply on the social and environmental challenges ahead, challenges that will dwarf those of the past and will need to be tackled seriously and effectively with increasing urgency.

Future investment in public infrastructure must become an integral part of a broader sustainability strategy in which resource use will be a key issue. This will require a fundamental shift in thinking by government and many of its agencies about the role of infrastructure, the way it is operated and managed and the demands placed on it in the future.