Getting people out of their car: a new rule of thumb

Around Australia, each state Department of Transport or equivalent conducts regular household activity and travel surveys. These are massive affairs surveying thousands of households to understand their travel behaviour. In part the huge amounts of data are needed to calibrate the equally massive strategic transport models that (more or less) predict future travel demands.

Mostly, the data from these surveys is kept confidential which means it is not available to outsiders without special permission. An exception to this is the NSW Transport Data Centre which is brilliant in that lots of the data is released, so you can examine behaviour by local government area. (The outputs of the travel models are, of course, terribly commercially sensitive and almost never shared with anyone)

Not long ago I downloaded a batch of their Sydney data and whacked it into Excel to see what I could do with it.

One of the first things I did with it was to take the figure which showed the average mode share for car driver by LGA (1997-2001 average) and did a simple linear regression against the 1996 'transit access' figures that I had previously calculated for my thesis in 2005.

Transit Access (a percentage) is defined as the proportion of an area that is within 800m of a train station or 400m of a bus route that runs at least every 15 minutes during the day and at least every 30 minute at night and on Sundays. (I had previously developed this measure and found that it was about the minimum public transport level needed to generate a reduction in private vehicle VKT).

This time I was more interested in overall number of car trips, because this can be very important in understanding traffic impacts (and hence infrastructure requirements) of a urban development.

The result of this regression is shown below (my apologies if the graph is a bit blurry)

In short, it shows a 70% correlation between increase in 'full time' public transport coverage and decrease in car driving. I am so happy with this, I am now using it as a convenient 'rule of thumb':

Each 1 percentage point coverage in full time public transport generates a 0.25 percentage point drop in car driver use.

It's not perfect, but it's a start.

SEQIPP 2008 - Exciting times ahead

The South East Queensland Infrastructure Plan and Program (SEQIPP) for 2008 was released yesterday (June 3).

For the past few months various rumours have been floating around suggesting that major transport projects would be pushed back or dropped altogether. It seemed the government wanted to dampen expectations with regards to major projects.

Well, it turns out the rumours were wrong.

I have had a quick look through the SEQIPP document, and in particular the summary tables of works. There is a lot of motorway work, but there is also an incredible amount of infrastructure work now scheduled and budgeted for PT. Most of these are new for 2008.


Rail

$872 million for Darra - Springfield Rail (delivery by 2019)
$1.4 billion for Ipswich to Springfield Rail (commencing 2012)
$1.3 billion for Gowrie to Granchester Rail (Toowoomba Range freight bypass I presume) (commencing 2019)
$550 million for Petrie to Redcliffe (commencing 2019)
$1.1 billion for Robina to Elanora (underway)
$650 million for Elanora to Coolangatta (commencing 2019)
$650 million for Caboolture to Landsborough duplication (underway)
$800 million for Landsborough to Nambour duplication (planning to start now)

and of course the biggie:

$7.3 billion for Inner City Rail Capacity (commencing now)

Bus

$310 million for Centenary Highway bus lanes Ipswich Motorway - Toowong (commencing now)
$2.5 billion for Northern Busway - RCH to Kedron - Bracken Ridge (underway and continues over 20 years)
$3.1 billion for Eastern Busway - Buranda to Capalaba (commencing now)
$365 million for SE Busway extension to Springwood (commencing 2011)

$420 million for a mysterious Brisbane Cross River Bus Access (commencing 2012)
$750 for an HOV network program (commencing now)

and then there is the strangely named

'Public Transport'

$1.7 billion for Gold Coast Rapid Transit (commencing now)
$3.1 billion for CAMCOS - Beerwah - Caloundra - Maroochydore (commencing 2012)
(CAMCOS is supposed to be a suburban rail extension, so I don't know what it is doing here with GCRT that will probably be LRT)

Exciting times ahead!