Corridor planning: the Brisbane approach

PART 1:

Brisbane has benefited more than any other Australian city from a robust approach to area transport planning and corridor transport planning. So much so, I would argue, that rail sometimes comes off second best, because integrated transport planning can tend to put well-planned and funded road capital upgrades, local road improvements and relatively soft proposals for bus upgrades, against rail plans that are never as cogently thought through, with less certain funding, and hence placed in the ‘never-never’ category.

But despite the long start-up dates on some of these plans, they have at least been comprehensive and rational in the way they have addressed the large projected and actual growth in the population of South East Queenland.

For those who have never lived in Queensland and therefore never imbibed that unique Queensland-ness they produce up there, a short explanation.

It is well known that Queensland is decidedly more rural in character than most Australian states, and that ex-Brisbane population was larger than in-Brisbane population (although some of this is a trick of the classification; I would suspect the ‘urban’ population is much larger than the rural). The characterisation is largely correct, though, from my experience.

It famously manifested itself through the perception that Brisbane was a large country town; that though the Parliament sat in Brisbane, many of its members got traction by slamming the city and its spending proposals, and that money was generously syphoned away to non-Brisbane needs, such as very generous subsidies for air services, among many other things.

This characterisation may have been correct many years ago, however, I did not get this feel when I lived there. Certainly the proof is not in the pudding, the standard of a lot of Queensland infrastructure was ordinary to say the least, as a Victorian moving in.

However, what I would venture is that the ‘rurality’ of the immediate area surrounding Brisbane was very striking to me. Some places not 50 kilometres from the CBD felt as though they could have been 1000 kilometres away, such was the change not just in landscapes but in cultures. (Conversely, somewhere like Mackay’s northern suburbs could feel NOT 1000 kilometres away, though it actually is).

This feeling of rural SEQ being actually rural, not ‘fringe’ or ‘dormitory’ or a million other words for it, is obviously passing as more and more land falls into what is called in the USA “ex-urbia” – a suburban area with no obvious focus. But those areas which have not yet fallen under the suburban block still have that quintessential rural feel.

And the rural feel does not immediately die, just because the suburban blocks have arrived. You could not say this about many places in Sydney or Melbourne – for example, no-one would accuse Woodend of feeling 1000 kilometres from Melbourne, or Picton from Sydney.

So why this digression into a the culture of the place? I want to provide some context for just how dramatic the shift to population has been in SEQ, compared with the very similar population increase in Sydney and Melbourne. My own take is that the population increase in Melbourne has been the ‘thief in the night’ – taking away the innocence of a large slab of south-central Victoria without any obvious benefit to the bystanders who woke up and found it had taken place. If anything, people have run a meme for many years that Victoria was suffering from emigration (based on a few short years at the start of the Kennett government) when the opposite was true.

Again I would say, you would not say the change has affected a place like Pakenham as much as it has affected Maroochydore, yet the practicalities (infrastructure, housing, services) is probably not a whole lot different. Both will end up commuter suburbs but one has clearly profited the better for it.

In this context Queensland governments, rather than sleep oblivious to the ‘thief in the night’ sticking a population in that they didn’t know they had, in Queensland they have been all too aware. Because it does not just result in extra bods on trains and cars on the roads, but changes the culture of the place, in a way that Victoria and NSW probably don’t know.

I would also venture that in Queensland the budget prioritising has been largely a matter of when, not if, and getting best value for the transport dollar, rather than arguing whether transport is needed at all, which, if Victoria (and to a lesser extent NSW) inaction can be construed that way, is the debate that has been had down here.

This is the context for developing integrated area and corridor planning in Queensland.

Apart from the political will and funding stream being stronger and more certain, I will posit certain other factors at play. First, coherence in the organisation of Queensland Rail. While there has been much deckchair-shifting, corporatising and ring-fencing and so on within QR, the practical reality is that all business units, freight and passenger, country and city, have agreed on the likelihood of growth and the need for specific action in shared hotspots and bottlenecks, and the need for the taxpayer, and most likely the Queensland rather than the Australian taxpayer, to pay for it.

Second, Queensland Rail and rail transport generally has not developed that toxic dislike from the disaffected commuters and former commuters that affected the southern states. Of course there is a large proportion of the population who don’t or won’t use rail transport in their day. This is the same in all Australian states, and Queensland has large slabs of urban area for whom this is natural, for want of rail transport to those areas. But this toxic dislike is not borne of that; it comes from that vile mix that the southern states knew so well. Political double-speak, management incompetence, and unions running wild, especially in the 1970s and 80s. A whole generation of commuters have graduated from the ‘never catch the train again’ school, and only the high oil prices might bring them unwillingly back again.

I didn’t see that as much in Brisbane though, and I was not surprised to see them so proud of the Rocky Tilt Train, or the Gold Coast Railway, or various other measures, while simultaneously watching Melbourne and Sydney people looking their gift horses in the mouth, such as the Regional Fast Rail.

This confidence I suspect has infected the political sphere, so that a political class with some money to spend, some confidence in the bureaucracy to identify the right policies, and some confidence from the population in these policies, has kept the planning rational and well directed.

This contrasts with Melbourne and Sydney, where one plan after another is written and shelved, or where the truly bold plans are hidden behind a wall of FOI defences till the media have to just about steal these plans.

Moving on from the context of the corridor planning, what is special about the corridor plans themselves?

First, I will outline the mechanics.

Most plans emerge in the first instance from a desktop analysis of the issues, and this is appropriate. Queensland hasn’t yet been down the Perth route to bottom-up planning, from giant town hall workshops, charettes and so on, perfected when Alannah Mactiernan was Minister but I believe not started by her.

While I personally believe the Perth approach is superior, it requires political preconditions – a mature stakeholder base, a gifted interlocutor and chair (in this case, the Minister) and very little conditionality about the eventual funding. With the runs on the board for improving suburban rail, the workshopping done around extending the Northern Suburbs railway into Yanchep and Two Rocks was very credible. With the two large landowners on board, the local council supportive and a Treasury who can at least imagine the possibility that rail transport will one day be needed in that area, the planning environment for bottom-up methods is satisfactory.

Queensland is not that lucky. Ministers, in my observation, have not been prepared to stick their necks out much for rail, and have tended to need the crutch of a strong bureaucracy in Queensland Transport and Queensland Rail to support initiative planning. It may also be the legacy of having dominating premiers, with a penchant for reading the tealeaves and micromanaging.

Once the desktop analysis is complete however, the bureaucracy is reasonably forthcoming in sharing the findings, the workings and the conclusions, neatly packaged into glossy maps and soundbites.

Victorians, starved of information, often don’t even get these. As I complained in an early blog post, the Beerburrum project at least had some very glossy documents and animations. Ninthnotch, in that post, pointed out you can’t polish a turd, and some of Victoria’s projects did not have that merit. Nevertheless, for key Victorian projects such as the Bacchus Marsh and Dunnstown realignments, finding out even basic information on the how, what and why of these projects has proven very difficult.

As that blog post (Using your brains in Steve Irwin country) also pointed out, the bureaucracy, confining itself somewhat to the outcomes of the corridor plan rather than the specifics (as is so often the case in Victoria and NSW) found itself fortuitously the beneficiary of a contractor plan that was better and cheaper.

For those who don’t know the story, the QR invitation to tender had suggested that the existing corridor would be used and that significant line closures would take place, at considerable inconvenience and expense. The successful tenderer found in fact that a double track line built on a new alignment would be faster, cheaper, and would leave the existing track in place, for refuging, extra capacity or a storage siding, they could take their pick. And QR could pocket the saving.

Part of this is attributable to the open, transparent JV arrangements in place, called SEQIP (which I will come to later, as it is downstream of this stage). However, part of this is also attributable, I would argue, to keeping planners to the planning, setting the outcomes for projects rather than rushing into the technicals, a skill, recent times have revealed, they are deficient in. We will never know, now, whether the advice to rip up the second track to Bendigo came from within the bureaucracy, or from a contractor (by which I mean a contractor who was prepared to do the work, not a consultant or advisor).

Could a contractor have offered to achieve the outcome, to a price, and left the 2nd track in place? Might he have gone to Britain for examples of railways using signals to separate trains at risk of scraping each other in tight places like tunnels or heritage bridges?  Or found in Sweden a local railway safely doing 160km/h on 47kg rail? We’ll never know. It is important to keep planners to planning and specify outcomes.

Back to the glossies and the soundbites. Of course I’m not worried about the ‘fluff’ myself, but getting the package properly ‘out’ to the punters, the potential users of these services is important at the ‘exposure’ stage of the consultation. Again, I find Queensland and Western Australia far stronger at this than Victoria, at any rate. The humble public servants who do the shopping centre stands and school visits seem much more at ease than the very tense media shots I see of John Brumby and Lynne Kosky trying to look natural while extolling the benefits of a bit of extra siding in Laverton, benefits they seem to scarcely understand themselves.

The package needs to include: detail (affected landowners, environmental impacts, assumptions about population and demand growth and so on); benefits (in very clear language so that people can see not just that 90 seconds is saved on some curve, but that the journey from Brisbane to Nambour saves 20 minutes when several of these curves are done); and costs, with buffers, inflation assumptions and so on clearly displayed. This latter is where WA ran into trouble. There was nothing surprising to anyone with a skerrick of knowledge about railway construction that Mandurah+Clarkson+Thornlie project copped about 10% cost creep over its budgeted  cost when the first budget was realised (I believe from $1.5 to $1.6 billion all up). Seems perfectly reasonable to me (but not to the Liberals, the West Australian Newspaper or their backers in the inner southern suburbs of Perth). The budget creep in Queensland projects does not seem so newsworthy.

The disadvantage that I conjecture integrated area planning gives rail, however, does not affect corridor planning to the same extent. Perhaps there is an inherent bias in corridor planning to solutions that are corridor based. Even where there is some doubt about the nature of the problem, for example, the interesting conclusions of a study into the area around Hamilton/Airport/Doomben which recommended a rail solution where many of us least expected to see one, rail at least stands a chance of getting a look in.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Tags: Planning and Operation

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Economics, Planning and Operation, Politics and History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.