Newsletter Postscript

Money, Matan and Maslow

Budget Brief(ly)

As promised, a budget follow up. Least said, soonest mended. Here we go:

The Good: $120.9m for Active Transport (viz. cycling): “Developing and delivering projects that expand connected cycleway networks, which increase opportunities for cycling and walking in and around connected centres. Active Transport projects encourage more people to choose walking and cycling as modes of transport”. We look forward to seeing the first corridors being announced shortly. Following the excellent review of the road user space allocation policy, we have no doubt Transport will readily reassign road space to deliver them in coming months.

We are also pleased to see the elevation of Bus Transformation - we hope this means recommendations in the White Paper and Second Report, like the 40 rapid and 80 frequent routes, are rolled out. This could transform walking in Sydney, since people will walk to public transport if the overall journey, including wait time, is more competitive with private cars.

The Bad: The only specific call-outs for walking - in road safety - are more walking-suppression-type investment, including $4.8 million for the planning of pedestrian overpass at Hurstville Primary and $1.5 million for pedestrian safety barriers Blaxland.

Forest Road in Hurstville (in front of Hurstville Public), a four lane road, has already had the royal treatment of pedestrian fencing on both sides, but I guess those gosh darned kids just keep wanting to get their buses or something. It didn’t occur to the road safety boffins that Forest Road is only 2 lanes south and north of the school during school hours so, perhaps, just narrow the road and lower speed limits. Or, reduce the sweeping corner radius, or remove pedestrian fencing (which increases the risk of injury because it obscures sight lines to children - the research is here), or even just read the Centre for Road Safety’s own guidance that deems overpasses as ‘detracting to place’ (Figure 9-1).

The Ugly: Nearly $800m of extra money from a government crying poor (that’s $661m for Elizabeth Drive upgrade, and $110.2m extra for M7-M12 flyovers - the same budget item, since the M7-M12 additional cost is due to the Feds pulling out of that boondoggle, in exchange for part funding Elizabeth Drive, allegedly*). Ugly in the sense of the spendthrift, emission-belching 6 lane road duplicating a 6 lane highway is over 6x the entire active transport budget. We even understand from insiders that Transport’s own traffic model apparently* shows they don’t need to build it.

We also note that despite ‘frequency of public transport’ being customers’ number one complaint (TOPS survey, 2024), there is clearly no predicted mode shift occurring from implementation of the ‘bus transformation’ program. So, either there will be no bus transformation, or one hand is not talking to the other. I guess, though, much like a Hammer seeing the world as nails, the Minister for Roads funds … more roads.

Anyway we’ll spare you how the Government could have found the $3.8bn for 2% active transport spend, $3.2bn for topping up the public school SRS deficit, got the budget back to black etc by trimming the road budget because, let’s be frank, since they even broke their promise to just double active transport spending, it will only depress you further.

*Pending an FOI, being told it is cabinet-in-confidence, court appeal etc.

Something to cheer you up

Natalie Ward raised an interesting question to us in the Rozelle Inquiry - why hadn’t we considered women’s safety. David Haertsch responded excellently, pointing out that first you need to be able to walk in the first place. Running across six lanes of traffic because there was no crossing was, in our view, the primary issue. This idea is succinctly illustrated in the City of Sydney’s Walking Strategy and Action Plan:

The beauty of this diagram is its simplicity, and avoidance of the exact contribution of factors in a given context to given users, for which we acknowledge there is no clear consensus (Bozovic 2020 ‘Why do people walk?’).

Nevertheless, we think that by combining this diagram with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we can also imply another key concept from Maslow - which is that one must satisfy basic needs first to some extent, and then build on those lower-order needs to advance to excellent walking infrastructure. No point in lighting without paths, or trees without crossings. This is a minor tweak, turning the diagram 90 degrees.

The second is that Vivendi has already done regression analysis for walking in Greater Sydney, so we can rank specific factors that influence walking to centres in Sydney (at least) using evidence drawn from their PAWS model, as shown below at right.

So, after much thought, and input from the brains trust from Better Streets and Vivendi (thank you Sara and Nick), we think this diagram below may prove an effective way of communicating both why we need to get the basics right, as well as how specific elements of a quality walking environment fit together.

Here is our first version of this diagram. Comments welcome.