25 Results

Any optimist who thinks civic virtue is flourishing in our cities should have a look at the ease with which public transport fare evaders rationalise and justify their behaviour

It’s true emissions from public transport aren’t as low relative to cars as is popularly imagined, but the savings are still significant. And there are other good reasons to invest in worthwhile transit services.

Many newer rail-based transit projects aren’t cost-effective. Too often it’s assumed one transit project is as good as any other. More effort needs to go into building the right projects in the right places.

In Australian cities, public transport use correlates with population density. More importantly though, it correlates with the degree to which population is concentrated.

The latest release of the American Community Survey provides a reminder of the enormity of the task of shifting commuters into more sustainable modes. Transit’s mode share barely moved over the last 11 years despite large investment in new systems.

Earlier this week I looked at a new survey of public transport use by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). My interest then was in how many people use public transport. This time I’m looking at what the ABS survey tells us about why travellers use public transport. The Bureau asked a sample of adults living [...]

Public transport travel in Australia’s capital cities gets a massive, growing financial subsidy (see exhibit). Passengers don’t pay for any of the capital costs and on average only pay for around a third of operating costs. Yet in spite of the subsidy, public transport only accounts for around 10% of all motorised trips. The single [...]

It seems Australian governments don’t want to tax and they don’t want to spend. Given the enormous changes happening in our cities, that’s an untenable strategy. As I noted recently, the revenue foregone by the abolition of indexation of the fuel excise is now estimated to be $5 billion per annum but the government isn’t [...]

Many people are surprised by the relatively small share of urban passenger travel made on public transport in Australia. Notwithstanding a slight narrowing of the gap in recent years, cars still dominate travel in capital cities, accounting for 85% of all motorised travel in Sydney, 89% in Melbourne and 90% in Brisbane. Their share in [...]