Senate debates

Wednesday, 13 March 2013

Matters of Public Importance

Urban Planning

4:49 pm

Photo of Lee RhiannonLee Rhiannon (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I congratulate Senator Scott Ludlam for moving this matter of public importance on the acute urban challenges in Australian cities. An urgent challenge facing our major cities is solving the growing traffic congestion crisis. Traffic congestion is costing Australia $9 billion a year and estimates say that that will reach about $20 billion by 2020. It is $9 billion already—think of the lost jobs and the lost productivity for business. This is a huge issue.

When I joined the New South Wales parliament in 1999, Sydney residents and businesses were already stuck in traffic jams. You could not wind down your windows on a hot day because the air pollution was so bad. You could not let your kids ride their bikes on the clogged roads. Buses and trains were lagging behind population growth. In the New South Wales parliament the Greens regularly spoke up for public transport and against motorway expansion, but through the 2000s things only got worse. Labor, with the support of the coalition, changed laws to benefit big developers and motorway builders. CityRail's late-running trains became a political crisis. The only way out for the Labor government that they saw was to slash the train timetables. The trains may have run on time for a period, but we got reduced services. The Roads and Traffic Authority was all powerful in this era and, instead of expanding the CityRail network as a priority, the government's road budget was triple the transport budget. We got more motorways and more traffic jams as a result. We got more urban sprawl, not serviced with public transport, and public land was sold off to private developers, locking up strategic transport corridors. Every year the problem grew bigger and the solutions became more costly.

In Sydney there has been a succession of failed toll roads, motorways and tunnels that have simply induced more traffic on our roads. The M5 East tunnel became so heavily congested that the government had to advise motorists to keep their windows closed. The M5, M4 and M2 motorways are like parking lots in the morning and evening peak. The Cross City Tunnel and Lane Cove Tunnel ventures were white elephants that faltered under the weight of rubbery traffic modelling that underpinned their base case financial models

The Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics has reported:

In general, the forecasting performance for toll roads in the world has been found to be poorer than for toll-free roads. There is an asymmetrical patterns of forecasting errors, that is, consistent overestimation. Australia is no exception.

And certainly Sydney saw it up close: so much of the cost when the motorways went under came back to the public. So often road projects are built on these false promises. They make wildly optimistic claims to reduce traffic congestion and divert focus and funds away from urgently needed improvements to the public transport network.

Melbourne and Brisbane have similar toll road problems. Melbourne has a myriad of motorways and toll roads and yet traffic continues to grow. The latest road project, the East-West Tunnel, has been described as the next toll road white elephant. It is being compared to the BrisConnections Airport Link toll road that went into receivership last year.

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