transport planning

Originally published as an editorial under a joint by-line with Tim Westcott and Gilda Di Vincenzo in Planning News 34, no. 9 (October 2008): 4.

Coming out and calling for the government to spend up big on public transport can seem a little naïve. “More trains! More trams!” Such calls are seen as the business of lobbyists, not professional planners, who must face up to infrastructure costs and political realities. Two contributions to Planning News in the last 12 months, for example, have made valid criticisms of pie-in-the-sky transport advocacy. In the December 2007 issue, Gavin Alford wrote of the difficulties planners face in avoiding simply delivering wish-lists of proposals that are unlikely to be delivered. A related thought was expressed by Peter Jewell in March 2008, when he reminded planners that “public transport is not a panacea,” and questioned how much public transport improvements could realistically be expected to achieve. These comments pinpoint a real difficulty in talking about public transport. Demanding better infrastructure can become a cop-out: unless we’re the Premier or Transport Minister, it’s somebody else’s problem. At the level of day-to-day practice, Alford and Jewell are right to warn us off such an approach.

Continue reading →

Originally published as an editorial under a joint by line with Tim Westcott and Gida Di Vincenzo in Planning News 34, no. 6 (July 2008): 4.

It is a busy time in planning. The government’s announcement last month of new “Development Assessment Committees” (DACs) to make planning decisions in Melbourne 2030’s Principal Activity Centres (and other – as yet unspecified – sites of metropolitan significance) is just one aspect of a fast-changing planning environment. It occurs alongside the potentially game-changing review of the residential zones; the introduction of the Urban Growth Zone; the fallout from the Eddington Report; and with the still-mysterious review of the Act looming on the horizon.

In this context, it’s a shame that the kerfuffle over the proposed DACs largely overshadowed one of the most important recent attempts to pause and take stock. The report of the Melbourne 2030 Audit Expert Group (AEG) was released simultaneously with the government’s response to it, and it was overshadowed by the story of the DACs and their implicit threat to the role of local government. This is unfortunate, as the AEG report is a solid, well-considered stock take of where we now stand. It mounts a spirited defence of the core ideas of Melbourne 2030, but is also admirably clear in spelling out how its implementation has fallen short.

Continue reading →