Ideas@TheCentre
A plan with no plans
The NSW Long Term Transport Master Plan (TMP) isn’t a plan at all but is a collection of concepts and colourful pictograms that contains no concrete ideas about what is actually affordable or achievable within the next 20 years.
A plan commits to priorities and timeframes that include reasonable contingencies; the TMP commits to nothing. A plan contains cost-benefit analysis, which the TMP says is important but doesn’t attempt. The phrase ‘opportunity cost’ doesn’t appear to be used in the TMP even once. The TMP is an ethereal vision, not a plan.
But more unreachable visions are not what NSW or Australia needs. Infrastructure development has become bogged down in petty political disputes, NIMBYism, and more red and green tape than footballer Greg Inglis. It needs coherency, consistency and accountability.
Governments need to stop putting out hundreds of pages of waffle and start talking dollars and sense. At a minimum, rigorous cost-benefit analysis should be made available to the public before government commits to any new infrastructure. No more announcements without showing where the money is going.
Procedure isn’t the only problem in the TMP though. The eight objectives underpinning the plan focus mostly on ‘improving’ (service quality, liveability, safety, access, sustainability, etc.) but fail to acknowledge that the only realistic way to offer more and better services is for either taxes or charges to go up.
User charges cover only 25% of the costs of public transport now (20% for rail), so most of the additional costs are likely to be borne by the public – not great news because the TMP notes NSW already has ‘one of the most costly systems in Australia and internationally.’ On gene
that basis, the most important objective of the TMP should have been to reduce costs (and that doesn’t mean fares).
Worse still is the story on the roads. The TMP shows there will be no reduction in travel time on any of the major congested corridors as a result of the improvements. In fact, on half of those corridors, travel time will reduce by only 2 minutes compared to the 2031 base case.
There are other flaws too. The TMP skates over risk/reward issues in Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) and funding spats with the Commonwealth. It also doesn’t seem to make any allowances for a second Sydney airport before 2031.
If the TMP is to have any credibility when finalised, it must become less visionary and more concrete. It must include a roadmap of what will be built, when it will be built, and how much it might cost so the public can decide whether they are willing to pay for it. In short, it must become a real plan.
Simon Cowan is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
