Newcastle : Review of Environmental Factors, April 2016 Submission Professor Howard Dick

Professorial Fellow, Faculty of Business & Economics, University of Melbourne and Conjoint Professor Faculty of Business & Law, University of Newcastle (NSW) and a member of the Hunter Independent Public Transport Inquiry. [email protected]

This Review of Environmental Factors (REF) is the latest in a series of public documents that purport to plan transport development in Newcastle. Like previous consultants’ reports, it is nicely presented but starts from false premises and uses inadequate data to deliver recommendations that do not address the problems at stake. It provides further administrative cover for a highly politicised decision-making process but fails the test of standard practice transport economics and engineering, let alone best practice. It is disrespectful of the community and will deliver outcomes that will be prejudicial to Newcastle, the Hunter and ultimately the state of NSW. My comments are scathing but justifiably so. As a transport economist who has studied and published on the relationship between transport systems and the pattern of urban expansion around the world, I have long been critical of the NSW government’s cavalier approach to transport planning in my own backyard of Newcastle and the Hunter. In 2010 I was scathing about the Urbis cost-benefit study commissioned by the Hunter Development Corporation and which among other serious flaws and errors misrepresented the substantial extra travel time that would arise from truncation of heavy rail as a saving. That egregious error was never corrected and is perpetuated in the latest study, which fails altogether to cost and assess the impact of extended travel times by public transport. It is completely unacceptable that $500 million of public funds are being poured into a controversial transport project without any robust professional analysis but, on the contrary, consistent misrepresentation and obfuscation. TfNSW is either demonstrably incompetent or it has been shackled by ministers for political ends. The process sets an appalling precedent, the outcome is bad policy, and the politics fail the test of responsible government, whether democratic or technocratic. This submission consists of eight parts: A. Mandate and responsibility of TfNSW, B. Terminal illogic, C. Local context, D. Socioeconomic impact, E. Traffic management, F. System development, G. Transparency, and H. Conclusion.

A. Mandate and responsibility of TfNSW

1. The basic task of TFNSW is to deliver a transport system, both private and public, that will meet the needs of an expanding and ageing population in terms of geographic spread, frequency, reliability and comfort. In the Hunter that means serving the needs of a sprawling metropolitan region of around 550,000 people.

2. These matters were addressed broadlt in the Long-term Transport Master Plan 2012. Pro forma the document stands but TfNSW and the NSW Government have demonstrated no will to apply it.

3. In the Hunter, most notably in downtown Newcastle, TfNSW and the NSW Government have relied upon a loophole inserted in the Master Plan that make downtown Newcastle an island of terra nullius exempted from the Master Plan.

4. This exemption was endorsed by the former Minister for Transport who betrayed her own portfolio by accepting that transport planning in Newcastle would become a matter for the Department of Planning & Infrastructure, now given carriage by UrbanGrowth, while TfNSW would be relegated to being an implementing authority. The sad result is that no agency is exercising effective responsibity for the integration of public transport between downtown Newcastle and the rest of the Hunter.

5. The NSW government’s commitment to spend $510m on transport development in Newcastle is welcome but the money needs to be wisely allocated to best meet the strategic needs of the Hunter transport system and demonstrably so. The independent Commonwealth agency Infrastructure Australia has set internationally respectable benchmarks for assessment of public infrastructure projects that are binding upon the states whenever Commonwealth funding is involved. The fact that Commonwealth funding is not being drawn upon for the Newcastle project does not lessen the onus for a robust and transparent assessment that has professional and public credibility.

6. In fact the $500m is being spent entirely to the east of Hamilton and mainly in downtown Newcastle to provide infrastructure that substitutes for what had already existed a more dis-integrated Hunter transport system that already is and will be more demonstrably inferior.

B. Terminal Illogic: Wickham uber alles

1. As a heavy rail terminus, the substitute Wickham ‘interchange’ is functionally inferior to Newcastle station. A proper multi-modal interchange with park-n-rice could have been justified in the more spacious and central location of Woodville Junction but this option has never been properly evaluated. Instead the new Wickham ‘interchange’ is jammed into a narrow funnel where there is not enough space for a good bus interchange and no benefit in terms of park-n-ride. A more minimalist interchange could hardly have been provided.

2. The enforced necessity of interchange to a slower mode has significantly lengthened travel time. What had been a 6-minute interim journey from Hamilton to Newcastle is now timetabled by bus as 17 minutes, that is an extra 11 minutes. When Wickham is completed, what had been a 4-minute heavy rail journey from Wickham to Newcastle will become 12 minutes for the journey plus 5 minutes waiting time (REF 4.2.4). In other words, interchange will impose a permanent extra journey time of 12 + 5 = 17 – 4 = 13 minutes through to Newcastle station. That means, for example, a 40% longer journey time from Maitland or Fassifern.

3. TfNSW and the NSW Government have never acknowledged that their policy has functionally disarticulated the Hunter transport system and made local commuting from Maitland and Lake Macquarie longer, less reliable and less comfortable.

4. TfNSW and the NSW Government have also failed to acknowledge that their transport policy in downtown Newcastle contradicts their own former NSW 2021 strategic goal and the policy of Newcastle City Council to increase the peak-hour journey-to-work commute by public transport to 20% by 2016.

5. This Policy dissonance has never been acknowledged because the expressed needs of transport users from adjacent LGAs and indeed within the rest of Newcastle LGA have been blatantly ignored by the administrative and political process. This applies not only to lengthened journey times but also to stonewalling over the long-foreshadowed Glendale rail-bus interchange in Lake Macquarie (top strategic priority for Lake Macquarie Council and Hunter Councils) and the languishing of the bus system with its inflexible routing and timetables and steadily falling patronage.

C. Local context

1. Downtown Newcastle is a narrow peninsula jammed between the Hunter River and The Hill with just four west-east transport arteries: Wharf Road, rail corridor, Hunter Street and King Street. Within the peninsula space is literally at a premium with space for parking severely limited, whether on or off-street.

2. Under the NUTTP, government policy and market forces are combining to bring more apartments and residents into what used to be a commercial and professional precinct.

3. System integration therefore requires smooth traffic flow along these four arteries with optimum use of public transport to minimise vehicle movement and storage (parking). This is the logic of international best-practice town planning as epitomised by Danish town planner Jan Geyl (Cities for People), who was well received in Newcastle as a guest of Newcastle NOW.

4. While light rail is a potential solution to the problem of the peninsula, it does not help the case that this REF ignores the very existence of the peninsula: the word is not once used.

5. Absurdly, the study area does not focus upon King Street except for two blocks opposite Civic Park.

6. On this dubious basis, the REF purports to justify light rail while ignoring the existence of the peninsula with all its constraints, seeks to close off the rail corridor and take two lanes out of another (Hunter Street) without proper consideration of the full impact upon the only other two arteries, namely the zig-zag of Wharf Road and narrow and hilly King Street, which cuts through the cultural and university precinct.

D. Socio-economic impact The socio-economic impact study (Technical Appendix 5) applies no recognised transport methodology. It is neither a cost-benefit study, nor a business case. At best it is a list of impacts with brief and casual notes. In terms of transport economics, it has no professional credibility. In the absence of either a cost-benefit study or a business case, the expenditure of public money on light rail has not yet been justified. 1. The baseline for comparison is not specified. Because the starting point is the Newcastle Urban Renewal Strategy 2012 and the government’s total program expenditure of $510 million, the baseline should be the service level for heavy rail prior to truncation. Nowhere is this mentioned. Implicitly the baseline is the status quo but using buses from Wickham instead of Hamilton.

2. ‘Potential impacts’ are listed in Table 5.3 with positive or negative impacts rates as ‘minor’ or ‘moderate’ (nothing ‘major’). Nothing is quantified and nothing is weighted.

3. From a user viewpoint, which is what matters most, the REF is coy about the crucial issues of extra travel time and extra fares. Buried on p.18 of TA5 is a statement that light rail between Wickham and Newcastle Station will take about 3 minutes longer than the present rail shuttle bus! This is not explained but presumably is because the light rail will have more stops.

4. Transit time of 12 minutes plus 5 minutes waiting time adds up to 17 minutes (REF 4.2.4). This differential of 13 extra minutes for rail passengers (as compared with the former 4-minute rail journey) is not a positive impact as blithely asserted by the REF (p.27), even if light rail is more reliable and more comfortable. This statement is absolutely wrong. The fact that this crucial point is left to the end of the section ‘Access and connectivity’ and not even mentioned at the outset under ‘Changes to travel times’ suggests that it is not a matter of carelessness but of deliberate obfuscation.

5. This egregious error is all the more extraordinary because the usual justification for public transport investment is savings in travel time. In almost forty years of studying public transport around the world I have never known a case where an expensive investment was justified by a substantial increase in door-to-door travel times.

6. The cost of travel time in the Hunter, like anywhere else in the world, is not zero. A precise costing by category of trip and passenger is the proper task of transport professionals and should have been done by GHD and insisted upon by TfNSW who, if unaware of the methodology, are incompetent.

7. Nevertheless, a simple calculation can be done. The adult rail fare from Maitland or Fassifern to Newcastle Station is $3.37. Costing the extra 13 minutes journey time at $10/hour equates to $2.20 or an effective fare increase of 64%; at $20/hour ($4.33) the increase would be 128%.

8. The true situation is even worse because rail passengers transferring to the light rail will pay an extra $2.10 fare because of abolition of the fare-free zone (TA5, 4.2.4). Thus the effective fare at $10/hour for travel time will be $7.63 (a 126% increase or more than doubling); at $20/hour the effective fare would be $9.80 or a 291% increase, that is almost triple what the through rail fare would have been.

9. Such massive increases in effective public transport fares must already have had a dramatic impact upon patronage and on this basis the situation will get worse, not better, when light rail is introduced. How transport professionals could do traffic modelling without referring to the crucial components of fares and travel times and the associated elasticities of travel demand is incomprehensible.

10. In this case, however, the REF, TSNW and the NSW government are not trying to justify the increase in travel times. Instead they appear to be trying to hide, disguise and obfuscate the increase by making ‘access and connectivity’ a matter of easier access across the transport corridor instead of along the transport corridor, which is its primary function.

11. This inversion is all the more remarkable because for the most part it is accessibility and connectivity along the corridor which integrates downtown Newcastle with the rest of the Hunter. In other words, TfNSW is ignoring its fundamental responsibility for improvement of the Hunter transport system (see above) while refusing to acknowledge either its responsibility or its dereliction.

12. There is also an issue of frequency. Albeit with a 5-minute transfer time, rail buses are presently in principle matched with train arrivals and departures from Hamilton. Will this still be the case at Wickham? The REF is silent. If a regular 10-minute frequency is maintained, the implication is that it will fail to synchronise with many majority of arrivals and departures. If so, some connections will be shorter, some longer. This does not suggest greater reliability and, if so, is another negative, not a positive impact.

13. Matters get worse because introduction of light rail will involve reduction in bus services along Hunter Street from 30 to 4 (according to the REF, TA5). TA 4.2.3 suggests that the location of the new bus terminals is yet to be fixed so the impact is difficult to estimate. Nevertheless, it may be deduced that the majority of bus users to downtown Newcastle will also have either to transfer to the or walk a greater distance. Since will run only every 10 minutes (15 at weekend), this will impose waiting time, on average 5 minutes (7.5 at weekends) for each bus passenger across 26 services. This is a big negative that must also be costed. The elasticity effect will be an accelerated reduction in bus patronage.

14. And beyond all this, the plain fact is that a 10-minute tram service along Hunter Street will be inadequate for many potential users even within the precinct and especially so after hours and at weekends when frequency drops to 15 minutes. At present buses offer a service along Hunter Street every few minutes. With light rail, one service just missed will mean almost a 10-minute wait. This is another negative impact. A 5-minute frequency would be appropriate, but of course would require extra tram sets and be more expensive.

15. These findings are underlined by the change in travel speeds. The train covered the 2.7 km from Wickham to Newcastle in 4 minutes, thus an average speed of 40kph. Tram will take 12 minutes, thus averaging only 13.5kph. But if the 5 minute transfer time is also factored in for rail passengers, the average speed drops to just 9.5kph, barely double a good walking speed of 5kph. This will be an incentive for more rail passengers to walk short distances than wait for the tram and may be a health benefit but it is not in any way a transport improvement. Notwithstanding the potential advantages of light rail, they will not be realised by the slow, infrequent and short-distance running proposed for downtown Newcastle.

16. This analysis is basic transport economics and should be available to any competent project and operational staff within TfNSW. If it is not being done, then taxpayers should be outraged at TfNSW’s dumbed-down incompetence. If the analysis has been done but not yet publicly released, then the significance should be appreciated and TfNSW is bound to transmit the findings to the Minister. If the Minister were to override that advice, he would be reckless and in breach of his ministerial responsibilities to taxpayers and the Hunter community in falsely justifying the $510m of project expenditure. Nothing could be clearer in terms of democratic accountability.

E. Traffic management

1. Longer journey times by rail/bus have already led to loss of patronage and this will be exacerbated by the requirement for most city-bound bus passengers to interchange as well, plus the relatively poor frequency and extended journey time of the proposed light rail. Some discouraged patrons will no longer travel to downtown Newcastle. Others, having commitments there, will seek to drive instead, increasing the traffic and parking burden in the narrow downtown Newcastle peninsula.

2. As above, closure of the rail corridor for transport use beyond Worth Place and the closure of two lanes of traffic along Hunter/Scott Streets for light rail will necessarily move traffic onto Wharf Road and King Street.

3. Wharf Road is not included in the summary Table 8.1 of 2015 traffic volumes, a remarkable omission. Increased traffic along Wharf Road will involve worsening congestion through the zig-zag at Honeysuckle and at Watt Street, both busy pedestrian precincts. It will contradict all logic of opening up the city to the Foreshore.

4. According to Table 8.3, in 2015 King Street handled three quarters the flow of Hunter Street for the section east of Union Street and a few points less to the east of Darby Street. The proposed light rail route east of Worth Place will suppress half the capacity of Hunter Street. If vehicle traffic along Hunter Street thereby also halves, and assuming that only two-thirds shifts to King Street, King Street will be carrying as much traffic as Hunter Street does now.

5. The implications of this shift are nasty. King Street at its eastern end is constrained to two lanes, hilly, under-engineered, and already dangerous to pedestrians in a busy precinct which under the NUTTP is to become more high-density residential. West of Darby Street it cuts between the Council administration block, Town Hall and University campus on one side and Civic Park and the cultural precinct on the other. This precinct should a core of the city’s revitalisation, not blighted by a traffic artery. A likely 50% increase in traffic flow will be dangerous, bad engineering and completely contrary to the logic of revitalisation.

6. On top of this is the insouciant assumption that the expanding residential population ‘will not attract high private vehicle growth’ (T1. 4.3). This statement is sourced to the NSW government’s property developer UrbanGrowth. Undoubtedly some new apartment residents will live and work within walking distance. However, anyone seeking to travel in reasonable time beyond downtown Newcastle will still need a car because truncation, Wickham and the light rail are making public transport uncompetitive. It will be as slow and expensive for local residents to get out by public transport as it is for outlying residents to get in.

7. A further consideration is that the Civic precinct opens southwards towards Darby Street and along Union Street to the Junction. The NUTTP’s preoccupation with Hunter Street, Honeysuckle and the Foreshore has shut out this other aspect. A much busier King Street with clearway will greatly complicate traffic flows along Union and Darby Street, cause queuing problems from turning traffic and be dangerous as well.

8. Parking. While the extended travel times for rail passengers have already encouraged a shift to private vehicles and imposed more pressure on downtown parking, a consequence of running light rail up Hunter/Scott Street beyond Worth Place is the permanent removal of 267 spaces (at T1.iv given as 280) and the suppression of 83 peak- hour spaces in King Street, also the removal of loading zones and motorcycle spaces. While this loss of parking could be regarded as intrinsic to a public transport strategy by discouraging car usage, it imposes further inconvenience for car users if they are not willing to switch to the more costly and slower light rail (see above). It also foreshadows loss of customers to adjacent businesses from these high turnover spaces. All this should be costed into a proper cost-benefit study.

9. Cycleway. Ironically, for what claims to be an integrated planning strategy, the REF does not address the needs of cyclists. A new cycleway along Hunter Street had been part of the original NURS 2012 plan. Its future route is now up in the air and the REF is silent on the matter. It does state in TA1 at 4.2.6 that the cycleway along King Street will be maintained, but given that King Street will become busier and more dangerous, this is a further drawback of the proposed light rail scheme. Given that cycling is fundamental to best-practice urban renewal, the omission is extraordinary, another glaring failure to integrate policy.

10. Use of the corridor. Traffic analysis alone would suggest that light rail should be provided along the existing rail corridor and certainly not diverge as early as Worth Place. Although there are numerous examples on on-street trams, no-one has yet shown a case where light rail was taken out of an existing dedicated corridor in favour of on- street running in tram mode along an immediately adjacent busy road. The well-known cases of the Melbourne rail corridors to St Kilda to Port Melbourne and the Perth case of the Fremantle rail corridor all demonstrate the wisdom and functionality of retaining the corridor for genuine, fast light rail or, in the case of Fremantle, heavy rail.

11. While there may be merit in diverting the tram onto Scott Street at Perkins Street and completing a loop back down the Mall, as Newcastle Council has suggested, the option should be assessed on the merits by traffic engineers and then subject to peer review and community consultation.

F. System Development

1. The essence of good transport planning is the careful staging of network expansion and coverage. This matter is not addressed in the REF but separately in TfNSW/UrbanGrowth, Newcastle’s public transport future (April 2016), which draws lines on a sketch map with little regard to topography, existing alignments, efficient running, transit time or construction cost.

2. This matter is intrinsic to the REF because the layout at Wickham suggests that westward expansion will be made unnecessarily difficult and expensive to engineer.

3. Moreover, westward expansion with more services suggests a higher than 10-minute frequency running to the east of Stewart Avenue. Indeed, a 5-minute daytime frequency is probably required anyway to make the light rail user-friendly. The case for using the corridor would be further enhanced but the single-track chokepoint at Stewart Avenue would then become a critical constraint. Sound project development does not waste money building in obstacles and redundancies.

4. Much coverage is being given in the media to the success of the Gold Coast G:Link light rail. While it is indeed impressive, the relevance for Newcastle is being misrepresented. First, whereas the Gold Coast is a long, narrow, high-density strip, Newcastle-Hunter is a sprawling, low-density city. Second, whereas the Gold Coast line is 13km with and being extended, the Newcastle line is only 2.7km without engineering for extension and, in any case, extendable only in one direction. Thirdly, the Gold Coast line did not substitute for heavy rail but for very inadequate buses. Finally, at an average speed of 30kph, G:Link provides the benefits of light rail running: the Newcastle shuttle will be a light rail vehicle operating just as a tram. In short, whereas the Gold Coast light rail has been a realistic investment in the future, the Newcastle light rail is still a political thought bubble that awaits thorough study and analysis.

5. Meanwhile, as pointed out above, the public transport needs of the rest of the Hunter are simply ignored. The strategically essential Glendale rail-bus interchange has yet to receive any commitment and funding from the NSW Government, notwithstanding that a proportion of the funds being wasted would allow that project to be finished. Likewise the bus system languishes pending the magic wand of the foreshadowed private operator, whose fortunes will be tied to this ill-conceived light rail project.

G. Transparency: Politics uber alles

1. Part of the reason why TfNSW has not followed through with master-planning and lived up to its responsibilities may be that it no longer has the will and the in-house expertise to do so.

2. Decades of attrition mean that TfNSW has become little more than a commissioning and collating agency for private sector consultancies. As we have seen with the Wickham and light rail projects, consultants are commissioned to prepare glossy reports on fairly arbitrary, stepwise aspects of these projects that will move them forward according to the political and administrative imperatives set out in the brief.

3. Consultants are well paid to acquire sufficient knowledge of a project to make a plausible analysis and present it well for public scrutiny according to pre-determined recommendations. Once the report is accepted by government, they have no further responsibility for the outcome, however flawed it may be. The commercial incentive is political, to be on-side with the government of the day in order to win further contracts.

4. No-one in NSW, including TfNSW, is any longer exercising effective responsility for overall integration of the system in terms of long-term technical and user compatibilities. To the extent that transport expertise remains, it would be a brave public servant who would put his/her career on the line by recommending against locked-in government policy. Where leaked documents reveal that such recommendations have been made, the minister has over-ridden them and suppressed the documentation under the guise of cabinet confidentiality.

5. What may sadly be observed is the degeneration of NSW transport policy into farce. Amidst a barrage of political spin, glossy PR and the pretence of community consultation, politically inspired transport projects are driven forward without regard to strategy or system logic and without any respect for the communities they are purported to serve. Behind all of this may be seen the fairly visible hand of the property sector, including the NSW government’s own agency of UrbanGrowth, and the self- interest of consultants who are bankrolled by TfNSW and UrbanGrowth.

H. Conclusion The misrepresentation of benefits and costs of the Wickham terminus/Light Rail shuttle and the failure to weight and quantify them, the insouciance in traffic impacts and the lack of attention to integrated transport planning and system development demonstrate that the REF, like the project itself, is fatally flawed and that TfNSW is either unable or unwilling to manage the project in any way that can be justified to the taxpayer or to the Hunter community. That is not to say that a well-designed and well integrated system cannot incorporate light rail. As the Hunter Independent Public Transport Inquiry (www.hipti.org.au) argued, light rail does offer scope for a new spine to the Hunter public transport system with scope to run on existing alignments through to Calvary Mater Hospital, Callaghan university campus, Wallsend and ultimately beyond, also along the completed Inner City Bypass to Jesmond and . In Newcastle. These options have yet to be taken on board by TfNSW, which as yet is just scribbling in texta on a basemap. This REF and its whole sorry context show that in the Hunter at least TfNSW has abandoned all but the pretence of being a professional transport authority of international standing, aware of and applying international best practice. Instead the $10 million of taxpayer funds allocated to planning public transport is being doled out piecemeal to consultants have become a splendid gravy train, the only train now running along the vacant transport corridor. The terms of reference are calibrated to predetermined outcomes and evidence is being used very selectively and interpreted to serve that purpose. Consultants fulfil their brief, get paid, and move on to the next job. Ultimately TfNSW is responsible for applying sound transport planning and is patently failing to do so. Whether it any longer has the analytical expertise to do so is a moot point. Sadly, the people who live in the Hunter are being treated as fools. In a charade of ‘community consultation’, community views are repeatedly canvassed in contrived ways and then, whether by transport users or by professionals, are either ignored or acknowledged pro forma, trivialised and dismissed. That trust which should be the foundation of good government and a healthy democracy has been systematically abused over several years by government agencies and ministers with their own hidden agendas. Government documents have been engineered, facts are routinely suppressed, analysis is either not undertaken or not released for peer review. What is released is massaged by the political spin doctors to stay ‘on message’. The Hunter deserves better than the ‘Utopia’ [ABC=-TV] comedy-cringe style of decision- making. We live here. We have to live with the consequences of political manipulation and the elevation of property interests above the public interest. Light Rail can be a pathway to a better city and region but the project so far and this REF are not a viable or credible basis for decision-making. It is high time for TfNSW and the NSW Government to step back and take stock before any more money is bone-headedly wasted.