Category: advocacy public policy sustainability governance

Transforming Melbourne for a zero emission world

Post author By Roger Taylor
Post date 26/08/2021
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Melbourne must, like all cities adapt to the changing world around us and this includes the need to achieve zero emissions within a decade. At this stage we don’t know what a zero emission world looks like, let alone how to get there and the transformation required, but a brief view of the transport industry may provide some clues of the extent of the challenge.

A zero emission transport sector will require the removal of all fossil powered vehicles. This includes trucks of all sorts, buses, diesel trains, service vehicles of all kinds, emergency vehicles including ambulances and fire engines, rubbish trucks and so on, cars, aeroplanes, shipping, industrial equipment, farm vehicles and machinery(1). Most of these have no ready zero emission replacement. In many cases the infrastructure required is not available or the technology solutions required are poorly developed or not even apparent. Even if there was one, supply lines and delivery times may be long in a globally competitive environment and the cost to replace them will be considerable. Production will also have to be carried out in an emission and resource constrained environment, which in itself poses huge challenges, and there will be similar challenges disposing of the existing fleet.

Under these constraints the ability to replace the existing transport fleet within a decade is near impossible and we can expect a substantial short fall. This in turn will force severe rationing of vehicles which may prioritise vehicles of greatest importance. This will include essential services and freight for food (2) and other essentials. It will also require major changes in consumer lifestyles which force people to travel less, less often and more efficiently. For personal travel there are few options. Public transport is limited and will never have the capacity to take up the slack and many trips that were previously done by car will have to be done by active transport. This has huge implications for the majority of the city’s population who are car dependent, living in suburbs remote from shops and other essential services and where public transport is poor or non-existent.

The above assumes to some extent continuation of business as usual, that people will continue to live in these poorly serviced areas and have similar jobs. It is inevitable however this will not be the case. Many industries will fail in the changing environment. The airline industry will almost certainly be one of these. This industry is already struggling because of covid and this alone may force its demise, but the technology to create a zero-emission industry does not exist and may never do so and even if it did, the economics may be unsustainable.

This is only one example of a sunset industry. There will be many others that fail in the race to achieve a zero emission world. It is inevitable that new industries will emerge and replace some that fail in the meantime but it is not clear what these will be and where they will be located. This will in turn change people’s life styles and where they live. It will also determine their travel needs and the demand for goods and services and the way they are delivered. There will be flow on effects for supporting infrastructure: the need for it in the first place and the way is it designed and used and managed. The implications for food production, essential services and freight are even more compelling and there appear to be no simple or single fix solutions.

Despite this, solutions must be found and very quickly. What should be apparent is that achieving a zero emission world will require nothing short of a radical transformation for Melbourne as a city and in a way few people imagine. Traditional concepts of sustainability and “the sustainable city” and notions of best practice to achieve it will become irrelevant. The issue will become one of survival and politically fraught. The burden of change will fall most heavily on those who can least afford it and the number, which is already large will increase as the gap between rich and poor increases even further. The burden will also be felt by those who are financially vulnerable, particularly car dependent families with big mortgages and those who cannot find work when their jobs disappear.

Politicians continue to ignore the science, as they have done for more than thirty years despite growing evidence that scientists’ worst fears are being realised. If politicians continue to ignore the warnings or fail to act with the urgency and commitment required the situation will become dire and increasingly ungovernable. Despite this, politicians appear more concerned about their own future and being re-elected, using policies designed to maintain business as usual and promote the illusion that everything will be alright to keep people happy, knowing that bad news does not sell. The reality is there is no good news here – it is bad but could be far worse depending on the choices we make now. The right choice would be to accept the need to achieve zero emissions by 2030 or even earlier and if was the case it is likely the scenario outlined above could play out. If the government fails to do this we can expect business as usual to continue for a few more years but end up with a crunch point of far greater severity and an irreversible hothouse trajectory that would result in global temperatures rising rapidly by five or six degrees or more over this century.

Perhaps we should not be surprised by the lack of a positive response by politicians or the community in general. Human history is littered with stories of the collapse of cities and civilisations and is a story that has been repeated over many thousands of years. Invariably the underlying reason was environmental. Jared Diamond has identified five main reasons for past failures which include:

failure to anticipate a problem (no previous experience, no science)
failure to perceive a problem in progress (no measurements, too complex to observe)
failure to attempt a solution (rational, bad behaviour) rational for vested interests to maintain their dominance
failure to change bad values (irrational behaviour, societal values entrenched)
failure to change other irrational behaviour including psychological denial

In the current situation we have the science and can measure it but the other three continue to dominate. These points were made at a presentation by Dr Graham Turner (CSIRO) at the Sustainable Cities Sustainable Transport forum in 2009, and he concluded with the following comments:

There are success stories of avoiding collapse, but very few within isolated systems
There is a very common recourse to using technology, rather than changing behaviour
It appears that we (modern society) have progressed SLOWLY along the road map toward addressing our global problems
But we now appear to be potentially in the last stage: solution unlikely

The challenge is to prove him wrong.

(1) Transport is Australia’s third largest emitter (19%) and emissions have increased by 22% since 2005. Road transport makes up the bulk at 84.2%, with domestic aviation 8.4%. Passenger vehicles (cars) contribute more than half of road transport emissions with continuing growth reflecting population growth and increased travel overall, as well as increased fuel consumption due to a switch to heavier, less fuel-efficient vehicles. It is not clear whether this figure includes emissions generated from the construction, maintenance etc of supporting infrastructure.

(2) The food industry is the fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases (approx. 14%) and faces huge challenges of its own to achieve zero emissions at a time when climate change will make growing food increasing difficult.

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Does expanding motorways really reduce congestion?

Post author By Roger Taylor
Post date 26/10/2020
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The short answer to this question is no, and they usually result in increased emissions.

The evidence is presented in the following article by Simon Kingham, professor University of Canterbury NZ which was published in The Conversation Au edition 7th October 2020

Historically, building more and wider roads, including motorways, was seen as a way of reducing congestion. This in turn is supposed to lower emissions.

Fuel efficiency is optimised for driving at around 80kmh and it decreases the faster you go above that. But with speed limits up to 110kmh, people are likely to drive above 80kmh on motorways — and this means building and expanding motorways will actually increase emissions.

Many countries, especially in Europe, are now looking to lower speed limits partly to reduce emissions.

New roads, new drivers

The most significant impact new and expanded motorways have on congestion and emissions is the effect on the distance people travel.

Historically, engineers assumed cars (and more pertinently their drivers) would behave like water. In other words, if you had too much traffic for the road space provided, you would build a new road or expand an existing one and cars would spread themselves across the increased road space.

Unfortunately, this is not what happens. New road capacity attracts new drivers. In the short term, people who had previously been discouraged from using congested roads start to use them.

In the longer term, people move further away from city centres to take advantage of new roads that allow them to travel further faster.

This is partly due to the “travel time budget” — a concept also known as Marchetti’s constant — which suggests people are prepared to spend around an hour a day commuting. Cities tend to grow to a diameter of one-hour travel time.

The concept is supported by evidence that cities have sprawled more as modes of transport have changed. For example, cities were small when we could only walk, but expanded along transport corridors with rail and then sprawled with the advent of cars. This all allows commuters to travel greater distances within the travel time budget.

Building or expanding roads releases latent demand — widely defined as “the increment in new vehicle traffic that would not have occurred without the improvement of the network capacity”.

This concept is not new. The first evidence of it can be found back in the 1930s. Later research in 1962 found that “on urban commuter expressways, peak-hour traffic congestion rises to meet maximum capacity”.

A considerable body of evidence is now available to confirm this. But, despite this indisputable fact, many road-improvement decisions continue to be based on the assumption that extra space will not generate new traffic.

If you build it, they will drive

A significant change occurred in 1994 when a report by the UK Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Appraisal confirmed road building actually generates more traffic.

In New Zealand, this wasn’t acknowledged until the Transport Agency’s 2010 Economic Evaluation Manual, which said:

[…] generated traffic often fills a significant portion (50–90%) of added urban roadway capacity.

Some congestion discourages people from driving (suppresses latent demand), but with no congestion traffic will fill road space over time, particularly in or near urban areas.

Interestingly, the opposite can also work. Where road space is removed, demand can be suppressed and traffic reduces without other neighbouring roads becoming overly congested.

One of the best examples of this is the closure of the Cheonggyecheon Freeway in the middle of Seoul, South Korea.

When the busy road was removed from the city, rather than the traffic moving to and congesting nearby roads, most of the traffic actually disappeared, as Professor Jeff Kenworthy from Curtin University’s Sustainable Policy Institute notes.

This suppression of latent demand works best when good alternative ways of travel are available, including high-quality public transport or separated cycle lanes.

The short answer to the question about road building and expansion is that new roads do little to reduce congestion, and they will usually result in increased emissions.

Tags failure of governance, State Government, Victoria

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Traffic congestion – Is it a problem?

Post author By Roger Taylor
Post date 19/10/2020
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Congestion is frequently raised as a huge cost in our cities and it is often promoted in fearful terms like the following : Cities afraid of death by congestion.

The first paragraph reads: “A plan to widen part of Interstate 10 in metropolitan Phoenix from 14 lanes to 24 lanes is the USA’s latest giant superhighway proposal designed to ease the kind of gridlock that some planners say could stunt economic growth.”

Similar messages are being conveyed to government by companies that have a vested interest in promoting similar outcomes in Melbourne. These include Transurban, engineering construction companies, the road lobby and others who have the government’s ear and are defining the transport ‘problem’ in their terms ie in terms of congestion and potential gridlock, and solutions being to build more, larger, and vastly expensive road projects, user pays solutions and public private partnerships promoted with very slick marketing. It also includes finance companies, superannuation funds and others looking for “rent seeking” opportunities.

The current political mindset has been described by Prof Graham Currie “as a negative spiral which focuses on congestion ‘solutions’ in which politicians claim we will solve congestion with big investment. Expectations are raised (despite the fact that congestions can never be solved), congestion gets worse leading to credibility loss , followed by a positive approach which admits congestion can never be solved but will address worst impacts with more big investment thereby lowering expectations and credibility gain because congestion outcomes are as expected”.

But is congestion such a bad problem anyway. Transport analysts such as David Metz in the UK have shown that congestion can have a positive function, that there is no such thing as free flow of traffic (at average 80kph) in a city the size of Melbourne, and that congestion points filter traffic on to narrow city streets preventing terminal gridlock.

This view is supported by Wesley Marshall and Eric Dumbaugh Wesley E. Marshall & Eric Dumbaugh, 2020. “Revisiting the relationship between traffic congestion and the economy: a longitudinal examination of U.S. metropolitan areas“, and their findings that ” current concerns about traffic congestion negatively impacting the economy may not be particularly well founded. “Our findings suggest that a region’s economy is not significantly impacted by traffic congestion.

In fact, the results even suggest a positive association between traffic congestion and economic productivity as well as jobs,”. “Without traffic congestion, there would be less incentive for infill development, living in an location-efficient place, walking, biking, and transit use, ridesharing, innovations in urban freight, etc,” “And if your city doesn’t have any traffic congestion, there is something really wrong.”

If we are to get better transport outcomes in Melbourne we need to change the current political mindset. Instead of thinking about congestion as a cost, we need to persuade government that traffic congestion is an indication that we are not using the transport system efficiently and encourage it to develop policies and strategies to make this happen.

This strategy also avoids the risk of stranded assets as the economy and transport environment change in a post covid world, when social and economic conditions remain depressed and there is greater environmental pressure for change.

Tags failure of governance, State Government, Victoria

advocacy public policy sustainability governance governance public transport traffic congestion value for money

Why Is Melbourne’s Transport System So Costly?

Post author By Roger Taylor
Post date 12/10/2020
No Comments on Why Is Melbourne’s Transport System So Costly?

This has been the subject of extensive research over many years and it is not possible to discuss it in detail in this blog, other than in general terms.

The main reason our transport system is so costly is that it promotes the least efficient modes of travel and transport ie motor vehicles for personal travel and most of the freight task (some of which could be transported more efficiently on rail). This in turn demands more infrastructure to support them and has been supported by city planning and development policies, particularly since WW2.

This problem is compounded when precious funds are wasted on infrastructure we don’t need or would not need if we operated our transport system more efficiently but must still be managed and maintained at considerable cost. Some of this infrastructure takes up valuable city space that could be used for other purposes, such as housing or community facilities including parks or growing food. Transport infrastructure – particularly roads and motorways also contribute to the “heat island” effect by elevating surface temperatures which increase stress, service disruptions and reduce liveability in cities – particularly during heat waves, the frequency and intensity of which is expected to increase in the future.

Melbourne’s transport is also costly because of the way we use it. Our transport fleet needs to be more efficient with a greater focus on fuel economy and operated in a way that minimizes pollution – air, noise and groundwater. We need to minimize impacts on human health; not just from pollution but also from accidents and fatalities. Transport related health impacts manifest themselves in a wide range of diseases: cardiovascular, neurological, respiratory, muscularskeletal diseases, and severe mental health impacts. Many of these the result of physical inactivity more likely to occur in car dependent societies such as Melbourne. There are environmental impacts as well and an imperative to reduce greenhouse emissions.

These costs are under reported and tend to be dismissed as the price we pay for progress but they have a profound impact – not just at a personal level but for the economy and livability of the city as a whole. Reducing them requires good governance in the form of sound policy, strategic intervention, appropriate regulation, and effective administration to make it happen. Some cities do a far better job managing them than Melbourne so there is considerable scope for improvement.

There are also costs which some economists and politicians exaggerate such as congestion and use it to justify major infrastructure works, particularly for building new motorways. This will be the subject of my next blog.

Tags failure of governance, inefficiency, State Government, Victoria

advocacy public policy sustainability governance governance public transport value for money

Beware China’s Belt and Road for Melbourne

Post author By Roger Taylor
Post date 06/10/2020
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We have long argued that infrastructure investment must be justified in its merits – on the basis of need (our collective needs and affordability), and fitness for purpose in the most cost effective manner. Further, that the development of infrastructure programs and projects should be the responsibility of relevant government departments as part of a well prepared strategic plan. It should not be used as a political football for other purposes but unfortunately that is exactly what it has become, particularly in Victoria by becoming linked with China’s One Belt One Road (“OBOR”) project.

Premier Andrews has argued that this is a way to increase jobs. That in itself is inappropriate – there are far more effective ways to create jobs and as I have explained in earlier blogs, using it for this purpose always runs the risk of it being used for political purposes for poorly conceived projects developed in haste that we don’t need.

More important concerns have been raised (The Age 6th October 2020) however by Paul Monk, a former head of China analysis at Australia’s Defence Department about “OBOR” being used to subordinate us into China’s sphere of influence in a way that could impose unacceptable political and economic risks. In the same article Senator Patrick said the freedom of Information documentation revealed “an extraordinary case of a state government pursuing a shadow foreign trade policy, quite separate and independent from the federal government”.

Use of grand infrastructure projects to secure political advantage by major powers is not new. The US through the agency of powerful multinational corporations pursued this for decades, convincing poor countries to accept huge development loans to ensure they were forever in debt to US companies, but often ended up taking over strategic assets when promised benefits failed to materialize forcing these countries to default on their loans. Some political analysts believe China’s “OBOR” has similar objectives.

Whilst the Victorian economy may be more robust than many of the third world countries seduced by these schemes, it is vulnerable nevertheless. Business cases for the Victorian mega projects which would be candidates are expected to provide very poor returns and I have outlined this in earlier blogs. These returns, miserable as they may be will be further diminished as we enter a covid induced recession or worse and recovery may take many years. It may also expose us financially – not just for annual repayments which could be onerous but more so when the debt needs to be repaid. Political implications in this case could be profound. We believe these risks are unacceptable and the federal government has every right to be concerned.

Tags belt and road, china, failure of governance, State Government, Victoria

advocacy public policy sustainability governance governance public transport value for money

Why Is Melbourne’s Transport System So Poor And So Costly?

Post author By Roger Taylor
Post date 05/10/2020
No Comments on Why Is Melbourne’s Transport System So Poor And So Costly?

Covid has forced significant changes in our travel patterns. Some of these will become permanent so it is timely to reflect more broadly on our transport system, the way we use it and the extent to which it really meets our needs.

This was a question many people would have asked after returning from a holiday in Europe, Japan, Singapore, China and many other parts of the world where it was easy to get around at relatively low cost without the need for a car. There are many cities that we can learn from that have become accepted as models of excellence and It is not rocket science. Nor are we unique. Some of these cities are not unlike Melbourne and had been confronted with similar problems. Nor is It a matter of cost and whether we can afford it or not. We are a very wealthy city and we can, particularly when so much of the infrastructure necessary to achieve it is already in place. So what is stopping us from achieving from achieving world best practice?

There are several reasons for this and these will be discussed in a series of blogs over the next few weeks but the most fundamental reason is the absence of any desire to change. This is a mindset problem. If government had the mindset to develop a world class transport system it could do so and within a relatively short time. In fact the foundations could be laid within a parliamentary term. So what is this mindset and how do we change it?

The mindset is a collective one, comprising the government itself, the Department(s) that advises it and the community. Overall we seem very comfortable with our grossly inefficient transport system but oblivious to the extraordinary high cost it imposes on us.

Since WW2 much of our city and transport planning has been developed on the presumption that the motor car and road based transport in general will be the transport of the future and this has become embedded in our economy. But the high cost of this inefficient system – not just in economic but also in social and environmental terms is starting to catch up with us and covid is exposing many of the flaws in this strategy. This will be discussed in my next blog.

Tags failure of governance, State Government, Victoria

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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
No Comments on How Can You Tell The North East Link Is A Dud?

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.