Public transport as public space: fostering everyday equality among strangers

Every now and again, I give a little 10 minute 'class' for "Self-Improvement Wednesday" with Richard Glover on ABC Radio 702. I've been trying to use these classes to encourage listeners to think about some of the habits and infrastructures that we often take for granted in city life. In the past I've done episodes on the physical geography of the internet, on the role of advertising in public space, and on the urban mobility politics of vertical transportation.

The most recent episode was about public transport as public space. Here's the script we worked from - which draws a fair bit from the Everyday Equalities book I worked on with Ruth Fincher, Helga Leitner and Valerie Preston that came out in 2019.

Public transport as public space: fostering everyday equality among strangers

Crowd standing next to the first electric train in Wynyard Station, Sydney, 1932. Source: National Library of Australia

Discussions about public transport tend to focus on its ability (or inability!) to get us efficiently from A to B. But what about the journey itself? Train carriages, station platforms and other transport like buses and ferries are also some of the most-used public spaces in our cities – many thousands of us share these intimate spaces with strangers every day. What everyday rules and habits have we developed to make that work? What happens when they break down? And how can we create the kinds of positive atmospheres that will make public transport truly accessible for all?

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Sydney’s railway network: spreading us out and packing us in 

Sydney’s urban geography has been shaped by its railways, in more ways than one. 

The story we usually tell about our train network is that it allowed the people to find more personal space in suburban homes away from the more densely packed inner city. Advocating for the electrification and extension of the suburban railway network, Bradfield told a conference of town planners in 1917 that it would allow workers “to reside further afield and enjoy fresh air and sunlight”. 

But as well as letting us spread out, those trains also packed people together in their carriages. In Sydney and other cities where train networks were growing, this was a new – and somewhat confronting – social experience. One of the great early sociologists of the industrial city, Georg Simmel, wrote in 1908:

Before the development of buses, trains and streetcars in the nineteenth century, people were quite unable to look at each other for minutes or hours at a time … without talking to each other. 

Equality or incivility?

Reacting to this new experience, observers at the time veered between optimism and pessimism about what it would mean for urban populations. 

In France in the 1850s, economist and politician Constantin Pecqueur waxed lyrical about the new solidarity and equality that might emerge through train travel:

By causing all classes of society to travel together and thus juxtaposing them into a kind of living mosaic of all the fortunes, positions, characters, manners, customs, and modes of dress that each and every nation has to offer, the railroads quite prodigiously advance the reign of truly fraternal social relations and do more for the sentiments of equality that the most exalted sermons of the tribunes of democracy. 

But others were much more pessimistic.

It wasn’t just that train services in many countries tended to stratify passengers by class into different compartments and carriages. The monotony of the daily commute, the press of the crowd in the morning and afternoon peak, made some worry that people were being treated as mere goods to be efficiently moved through space by this new mechanical form of mass transportation.

Here in Sydney, writing in 1923 around the time of the first train electrification, an editorial writer for The Sun worried that overcrowded trains had:

boxed us up into a straggling mass and killed our natural Instinct to be polite. We have to scramble and fight for the means of getting home and the man who steps aside and says: 'After you,' is the man who walks and finds his late arrival hard to explain. 

By the 1930s, things were getting so crowded during peak hours that train carriages were refitted to remove seats and make more room for ‘strap-hangers’ to squeeze into the standing areas of vestibules and aisles.

Both perspectives, I think speak to the different possibilities of train travel.

Learning to share the space of the train: the unwritten rules of ‘civil inattention’ and physical accommodation

Certainly, the strategies we’ve developed to cope with the intimacy of sharing a carriage with strangers might not initially look too promising as practices of ‘fraternity’ and ‘equality’. 

Trains, along with other public transport spaces, are places where we’ve learnt to practice the art of ‘civil inattention’. In the early days of train travel, reading a newspaper or book was the classic ‘involvement shield’. Now, we have our smart phones to keep us amused during our commute and to keep us socially, if not physically, distanced from our fellow passengers. 

Share the confined public space of the train carriage with strangers also involves learning a bunch of physical skills. There’s all the little things we do with our bodies to carve out our own personal space, to make space for others. We also learn to read the non-verbal cues of our fellow passengers seeking to get past us to alight the train, and to avoid lurching or falling when the train starts and stops. 

When all this works, the train carriage becomes a microcosm of the city’s multiculture: Pecqueur’s lovely idea of the train carriage as a “living mosaic” of urban diversity is apt. We rub shoulders with all manner of strangers in a kind of everyday equality.  That experience of equality is sustained by the notion that the train is for anyone, and that we all have a part to play in making it work – even if our relationships with fellow passengers are fleeting, and our actions and solidarities are unspoken.

When public space becomes hostile space

Of course, solidarity among strangers on the train can also break down. I’m sure listeners can name their pet peeves! There are minor infractions like people taking up too much space. And much more seriously, some passengers can become targets of aversive behaviour, harassment, intimidation and violence – sometimes on the basis of their gender, their sexuality, their visible faith, the language they are speaking, or the colour of their skin. 

Interestingly, the very devices that we use as ‘involvement shields’ are now frequently being used by bystanders to witness, disrupt and shame such behaviours. There’s been a growing trend of passengers capturing ‘racist rants’ on their smart phones and re-asserting the equality of the public space.

From hostility to festivity and solidarity?

Not all disruptions of our habitual ways of being together on the train are bad. 

French anthropologist Marc Auge described the train as a space of “collectivity without festival and solitude without isolation”. I love that description! But the collectivity on the train can occasionally be a little festive, and sometimes solitude makes way for connection.

Think of the festive atmosphere that can take hold of a train carriage during special events, like footy fans taking the train to a big game at Olympic park. Or think of people coming to one another’s aid, through small acts of kindness like assisting someone with a stroller or vacating a seat, or through spontaneous expressions of care and solidarity like the anti-racist #I’llRideWithYou social media hashtag that was reposted hundreds of thousands of times following the Martin Place hostage-taking in 2014. 

Tipping the balance towards equality and solidarity: too many sticks, not enough carrots?

What can the transport authorities themselves do, to tip the scales from hostility towards solidarity and equality – especially when they can’t be in every carriage, all the time?

Of course, operating and maintaining the public spaces of trains and buses plays a big role. A special shout out here to all the operators, guards and cleaners who have kept our system going during the difficult last two years of the pandemic.

So too does designing the space to be accessible for all – there are still dozens of stations across Sydney that are only accessible by stairs, without lifts.

Beyond that, there’s been considerable focus on naming and policing the ‘unwritten rules’ of being together. On Sydney trains, there’s plenty of signs and posters telling us what not to do. Don’t put your feet on the seats. Don’t be a ‘hogger’ or a ‘loud talker’ or a “tosser”. And there are surveillance cameras watching over us, and transit officers patrolling trains and stations. 

But if those are the sticks, what about some carrots?

Urban designer Jan Gehl says that a good public space is like a good party – once you get there, you don’t want to leave. I’m not sure that little analogy quite works for a train!

But it does point to the role that care, hospitality and activation might play in making these public spaces work.

A few things come to mind. I like the sign that the Human Rights Commission developed with one of the major bus companies for use in Melbourne a few years ago – it’s simple and positive message was “This bus is for everyone”. It’s welcoming, not censorious.

In other cities I’ve visited, train carriages have been adorned with commissioned poetry and artworks. In Chicago a few years ago, I did find myself hanging around on a train platform much longer than planned – a local blues band were set up at one end, and as well as the music being great, they were keeping an eye on the comings and goings at the station. In Sydney a couple of years ago, on Make Music Day, bands were set up on inter-city train carriages – the opposite of a quiet carriage!

Public Space, Public Transport, and the Public Good

In the scheme of things, when our infrastructure challenges are so great, perhaps investing in these kinds of initiatives seems trivial. 

But taking trains and other public transport seriously as public spaces can actually have the effect of making them more accessible to people who need them to get around.

You can have as many train lines as you like, but if they’re not spaces where everyone feels welcome, where strangers can establish and nurture positive strategies for being together in their difference as equals, then people won’t use them. 

For public transport to serve the public good, it needs to work as public space. And this is something that both operators and we passengers always need to work at.

Contesting bus privatisation in Sydney

Back in May, NSW Transport Minister Andrew Constance announced plans to go to competitive tender for buses in the inner west of Sydney - effectively privatising bus services in that densely-populated region.

(In Sydney, bus services in different parts of the city are divided up into 'contract regions'. The government-owned State Transit Authority (STA) currently holds the contract to provide services in four of those regions. Region 6 is the one to be privatised. On average, there are around 3.5 million trips on buses in this region every month - making it the second busiest contract region in Sydney, after the STA-run Region 9 in the city's east.)

Sydney bus contract regions: STA regions 6-9 in blue

This is the latest in a long line of privatisations of urban infrastructures by this government: electricity infrastructure, crown land, government-owned buildings, train lines, ferries, hospitals, land titles registry, public housing all over the city (especially inner city) to name a few. A defining characteristic of their policy agenda is to shrink the role and assets of the public sector.

A terrific union-community campaign is taking shape to oppose this move, and to fight for publicly-owned and operated public transport that serves the public good. Drivers walked off the job for 24 hours the day after the announcement. A couple of weeks later, they swapped their uniform for Hawaiian shirts, switched off the Opal machines that collect fares, and handed out leaflets about the privatisation to happy commuters travelling for free. This month, there's been leafletting at bus stops, letterbox drops, a social media campaign, and well-attended community meetings across the affected area.

I was honoured to be invited to talk to a community meeting about the issue that took place in Pitt St Uniting Church on 28 June, alongside union leaders, community leaders, and politicians from both Labor and the Greens. Here's the long version of what I said, including links to sources. It's a critical analysis of the main arguments being used to support the privatisation.

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I’m here to offer some critical analysis of the case for privatization that has been made by the Transport Minister, Andrew Constance, and his supporters.

There’s a lot at stake here. Tonight we’re talking about the privatization of buses in Sydney’s inner west. But if this goes ahead, it won’t end there. Back in March, Minister Constance told the Australian Financial Review that: “In 10 to 15 years' time government will not be in the provision of transport services”.

He has been strongly supported in this by the Tourism Transport Forum (TTF), a lobby group of tourism and transport operators. Last year, the TTF produced a report on "the benefits of private sector involvement in the delivery of bus services", urging governments around Australia to divest from public ownership and operation of bus services. When Constance made his announcement about inner west buses, they were highly supportive, and urged him to go further: “Today’s announcement the NSW Government will franchise the Inner West STA region is a very good start that hopefully signals a shift towards franchising more and more regions in due course.”

Four main arguments have been used to justify this privatisation. So let's do some fact-checking.

Claim #1: Inner west buses attract more complaints than privately-operated buses

In announcing the planned privatisation, Minister Constance frequently cited the high level of complaints received in about buses in Region 6 - for instance, telling the ABC: "If you consider that the private sector's had 19,000 complaints statewide verse 12,000 in this one region alone something had to give, and when it's complaints about buses not turning up, poor performance, we need to take action for our customers."

Now, it's not easy to check this claim, as the complaint data has not been made public by Transport for NSW. I have asked for the data, and have been told by Transport for NSW that I will need to lodge a Freedom of Information request, which I plan to do.

Guardian journalist Nick Evershed has seen, and analysed, the complaints data. He found that once you take account of the much higher number of passengers that use public buses in Region 6, they don’t receive way more complaints than private buses. Here's his figures:

Nick Evershed analysis of bus complaints. Source: Guardian Australia

This analysis undermines the Minter's claims. Indeed, he surely knew he was bending the truth in citing those statistics out of context.

What's more, the Minister's point makes little sense until we know more about the reasons for those complaints. For example, it’s possible that they’re about buses running late, or being full – factors that are beyond the control of the STA and its drivers. This leads to the second claim...

Claim #2: Inner west buses run late more often than privately-operated buses

The privatisation announcement included the claim that buses in the inner west had one of the worst on-time running performance results in 2016.

Well, this claim is technically true. But, as with the claim about complaints it is also pretty meaningless, when the data is offered without any context. Traffic congestion is also much worse in parts of the city covered by public buses. I have crunched some numbers from the Roads and Maritime Services Roads Report. For the period June 2016-May 2017, in the morning peak, traffic crawled along at an average of 54% of the speed limit in parts of the city where public buses operate. In less congested private bus areas, it averaged 62% of speed limit. Congestion influences on-time performance, having effects on punctual departures and keeping to timetabled stops.

On-time running 2016 x AM peak road congestion 2016-17. STA Regions shaded in blue. Sources: Transport for NSW Performance Reports; Roads and Maritime Services Roads Report

So, given the different road conditions across the city, it's just not meaningful or reasonable to compare on-time performance in congested and less congested areas.

Claim #3: Public buses cost more than privately-operated buses

As with all privatisation debates, supporters are talking up the financial benefits of expanding the role of private operators in Sydney's bus network. But their claims in this case are overblown, and/or blinkered.

Tourism Transport Forum CEO Margy Osmond was quoted on ABC news saying that "With a complete franchising of the bus service here in New South Wales, on the basis of research we did at the end of last year, it could mean up to a billion dollars over a five-year period for the NSW Government."

Well, actually, their research did not show that at all. It purported to show that a privatisation of all publicly-owned buses across Australia (ie, not just in Sydney and Newcastle, but in Brisbane, Canberra and Hobart) would save governments up to $1 billion over 5 years (see TTF, On the Buses, p. 4). Back in February, before being in the trenches defending the Minister, Osmond had said full bus privatisation in NSW could generate up to $500 million in savings over the 5 year period.

So ... what's half a billion among friends? Either way, these are big numbers. On what basis are such savings claimed?

The TTF never breaks down their calculations in its report, but it cites a 2005 journal article by Hensher and Wallis in support of its claims about the financial savings associated with privatisation. I've had a read of that article. And while Hensher and Wallis are by no means opponents of bus privatisation, their position is far more nuanced and critical than one might think from reading the TTF report. In particular, they identify several deficiencies in the process of competitive tendering for bus services that are relevant to our situation here in Sydney.

First, they note that the evidence on cost-savings is not particularly reliable. Indeed, they put the word 'evidence' in scare-quotes when discussing cost-savings (p. 300).

Second, while they certainly do think that competitive tendering seems to have generated savings where it has been implemented, they note some concerns about how such savings have been achieved in different contexts. In some contexts, particularly developing contexts, this has been achieved by driving down wages (p. 314). They also worry that "Although competitive tendering is market driven at the time of bidding, given the dominating focus on cost efficiency, it generally provides the wrong set of incentives to do more in line with social obligations or external benefits" (p. 318).

Third, they note that while there are often significant savings in the short-term from competitive tendering of bus services, the long-term is another story: "Evidence is accumulating of cases where some of the initial cost savings through CT are eroded through cost escalation in subsequent tendering rounds" (p. 313).

The competitive tendering of bus services in London in the 1980s provides a case of some of these points. There, it was reported that there was a significant 50% unit cost reduction in bus services between 1985 and 2000. A major factor was a reduction in labour costs. Another factor was a substantial increase in farebox cost recovery - a growth of 60-95% that does not seem to be accounted for by the increase in patronage of 12%, but by higher fares. Further, in the five years from 1995-2000, costs were back on the rise, at an average of 10% per year (pp. 301, 306).

Another case a bit closer to home is Perth. Bus services were privatised there in the 1990s. The TTF report points to cost reductions in the first decade of private contracting (p. 12). But costs have risen since then. The cost per passenger kilometre of bus services run by private operators in Perth has more than doubled since 2002, a rate of increase much higher than inflation over that period.

Perth, Bus Costs per Passenger Kilometre, 2002-2016. Sources: WA Public Transport Authority Annual Reports, Reserve Bank Inflation Calculator

As I noted above, Hensher and Wallis are far from advocates of public ownership (much less nationalisation!). But their review comes to the conclusion that a system of 'negotiated contracts' with established providers might be a more effective way to ensure cost efficiencies are matched with effective services levels that meet the important social obligations of a good public transport system.

Guess what we currently have with the STA for Regions 6-9 in Sydney? A negotiated contract, of course! And that negotiated contract has in fact been delivering performance improvements and cost reductions, through the hard work of staff, over the past several years.

Indeed, even the Tourism Transport Forum is forced to admit, in a small-print footnote on the last page of their report: "Sydney buses has begun to reduce its operating costs during 2013/2014, somewhat closing the gap to the private sector" (p. 31). These reductions have continued since then. It was being reported last year that as a result of these reductions, which were often painful for staff, in-principle agreement had been reached between the Government and STA to extend the STA's contracts for a further five years from 2017 with competitive tendering.

Now, Minister Constance is saying that the cost reductions have not gone far enough, and that STA buses still cost more to run than privately-operated buses in the rest of the city. Well, of course they do! The STA also happens to run a much more frequent service than those private operators - with regular services all the way from 5am to midnight, as we found when we mapped public transport frequencies for the Sydney Alliance a few years ago (see below). Benchmarking the STA against private operators with much less frequent services is just not reasonable.

Areas in purple = areas within 400m of public transport that has frequency of at least 15 minutes between 5am and midnight - note the overlap of high frequency parts of the city with STA contract areas. Source: Troy and Iveson for Sydney Alliance

Even the hard-line economists at the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal recognised in their 2015 report into the efficiency of NSW public transport services  that you could not directly benchmark the STA against private operators (pp. 52-57). While they attempted to take account of congestion and weekend services in their comparison, they too failed to take any account of the higher frequency of STA services during the average weekday. So IPART's conclusion that STA buses are less efficient than private operators is flawed. It does not value the STA's role in running more expensive bus services early in the morning and late into the evening. These non-peak services provide an essential social and economic service to the city - for shift-workers, people participating in the 'night-time economy', and many more besides. So comparing public and private here is like comparing apples and oranges.

Phew!

Claim #4: The private sector provides more innovative services

Finally, both the Minister and the TTF make the claim that the private sector will provide more innovative service offerings. The Minister, in particular, seems very enamoured of 'on-demand' bus services - in which passengers can effectively hail a small bus that could adjust its route in real-time. For him, cracking open the market to the private sector might allow such wonders to emerge.

Such services have been trialled now in a few cities – for example, in Helsinki (in a scheme called Kutsuplus that was run by the Helsinki Regional Transport Authority), and in Boston, Washington and Kansas by a company called Bridj. There was plenty of hype about all of these services when they started up. But Kutsuplus, Bridj, and other similar services like Split have all fallen apart in the past few months. Evidently, the subsidies per rider were simply too high. In Kansas City, Bridj services (which were offered in partnership with the public transit authority there, and at least offered union jobs to drivers) were apparently being subsidised to the tune of $1000 per rider in the first six months of their operation. The public authorities and the venture capitalists who were funding the schemes eventually cut their losses.

Surely there are some lessons to be learnt here. It seems that right now, these on-demand, app-enabled mini-buses are no match for mass public transport in dense urban environments, from a cost perspective. So far, it seems the private sector is having no more luck delivering some of these techo-fantasies than the public sector.

Beyond the techno-fantasies, there's plenty of evidence for publicly-owned transport operators providing great, innovative services right here in Australia. Brisbane offers another example of this. There, the publicly-owned service includes a sector-leading Bus Rapid Transit network.

Conclusion: What kind of public transport do we want?

So, the case for privatisation has some big holes in it.

This is not to say that buses in the inner west, or anywhere else in Sydney, are perfect. Far from it.

But as we’ve been arguing in the Sydney Alliance for some years now, the biggest improvements we could make to public transport in Sydney are about filling the gaps in the network. We need to make sure that everyone is in walking distance to frequent public transport services, that form a coordinated network across the city that can get people wherever they need to go, whenever they need to travel.

That’s the job of … the government! It’s the government who ultimately has responsibility for network planning and service levels.

It seems that Minister Constance and Premier Berejiklian are trying to deflect our attention away from their failings to deliver the integrated network they promised in a series of previous plans. Worse still, they’re trying to redirect our frustration towards the drivers who deal with lousy Sydney traffic on our behalf, and the staff who keep those buses safe and clean.

I’m so heartened to see people in our city not failing for this attempt to divide us, sticking together with the drivers and maintenance workers and demanding that our public buses remain in public hands, serving the public good. And I look forward to working with you as we get ourselves organised to assert and win this demand.

Mapping public transport accessibility in Sydney

Back in November last year, I blogged here about the first Sydney Alliance Transport Assembly, where we launched our campaign for improvements to public transport in Sydney.

It's not surprising that transport is one of the issues that the 52 partner organisations of the Sydney Alliance have chosen to work on together. Being able to get around is so fundamental to just about every aspect of urban life.

Our vision for an integrated and effective transport network focuses on addressing the key accessibility gaps with the following standards:
400  (everyone should be within 400 metres of public transport)
15 (that transport should come at least every fifteen minutes throughout the day)
1 (you should only need to pay once for any journey, no matter how many transfers you make)
S (you should feel safe)
C (it oughta be clean)
A (it oughta be accessible to all, regardless of who you are)
A (it should be affordable)

Since that Assembly, the Alliance's Transport Research Action Team has been very busy working on the 'S' in the formula, to take some first steps on the path to making this formula a reality. We've negotiated with councils to improve lighting in council car parks in several suburbs. We're also building a campaign on night-time staffing of key interchange train stations around the city.

Meanwhile, as part of the preparation for our work in 2013, Laurence Troy and I (both members of the National Tertiary Education Union) have been working together with members of the Sydney Alliance Transport Research Action Team to map the city on the '400' and '15' elements of the formula.

The map on the left shows which bits of Sydney have access to some form of public transport within 400 metres walk. The map on the right shows which bits of Sydney have access to some form of public transport within 400 metres that comes at least every 15 minutes during the day. As you can see, there's a lot less purple in that second map.

This weekend, an article based on the maps was published in the Sun Herald with some follow up stories on ABC Radio and Channel 7 news.  Today Amanda Tattersall (Sydney Alliance Coalition Director) has an opinion piece published in the Sydney Morning Herald.

You can also interact with the maps on the Herald website, which has produced an interactive version on a Google Map layer.

Big props to Laurence Troy, for his fantastic mapping skills. And also to all my fellow Transport Research Action Team members ... yay team!

Anyways, just in case anyone is interested in a little more detail about how and why the maps were made, here's a bit of an 'FAQ' ...

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The Sydney Alliance Transport Assembly

A couple of posts back, I offered up some reflections on the Founding Assembly of the Sydney Alliance, a coalition of unions, community organisations and faith groups working together to "advance the common good and achieve a fair, just and sustainable Sydney". A short couple of months after that event, I was involved in launching the Sydney Alliance's campaign on transport at the Transport Assembly in Penrith, one of the outer-western suburbs of Sydney.

The Transport Assembly was the culmination of six months of action-research by the Alliance's Transport Research Action Team. In May of this year, when the Alliance decided that Transport would be one of the three key issues on which it would work, the Research Action Team was formed. It's a loose, diverse group, comprised of people from across the member organisations of the Alliance who were prepared to commit to working on transport. There's been quite a bit of learning-as-we-go here. One of the first issues to confront the group was that it was difficult to find a time and place to meet that would work for everyone across the city -- especially given some of the very transport issues that the group is trying to address! To get around this, we ended up with two groups, one that has been meeting in the Central Business District and the other that has been meeting in Penrith.

Since May, Transport Team participants have been busy talking to people across the member organisations of the Alliance about their transport issues, as well as reading up on the latest research on transport and meeting with a range of transport experts based in Sydney and beyond. Personally, I've found this really interesting. I've never conducted research on transport before, so compared to some of the other participants in the group, I've had a lot of catching up to do. Those involved in the team include transport workers and advocates in community organisations like the Western Sydney Community Forum and the Cancer Council, folks from various unions and community groups who've had a long involvement in transport campaigns dating back as far as the anti-freeway green bans in the 1970s (and sometimes further!), bus drivers and railway staff who have intimate knowledge of how public transport works and how it might run better, and people like me who are new to transport but fired up to make a change, among many others.

Sydney Alliance Transport Assembly, Q Theatre, Penrith, November 2011

The event started with small groups of people making their way to Penrith on public transport from various parts of the city. These groups conducted some research on the trip, surveying commuters about their experiences of public transport and telling them about the Sydney Alliance. They also chaperoned some members of NSW Parliament who were attending the Assembly. On arrival at Penrith Station, there were bagpipes playing (seriously!!!), and a march to the Q Theatre in Penrith. After the surveys were handed in and some food was consumed, the formalities began...

One of the main purposes of the night was to launch and explain the Sydney Alliance's formula for public transport in Sydney:

400:15:1 SCA².

This formula addresses the different dimensions of accessibility to public transport which have emerged as Alliance priorities through the initial phase of action research.

The 400 is for 400 metres -- meaning that everyone in Sydney should have some form of public transport within 400 metres of where they're at and where they want to go.

The 15 is for 15 minutes -- meaning that public transport services should come at least every fifteen minutes all day, across the entire network

The 1 is for 1 ticket -- meaning that if your trip requires you to change modes of transport, you should not need to buy separate tickets, as is currently the case. 1 ticket should buy you access to the network, not just a single line.

The S is for Safe. The C is for Clean. The first A is for Accessible. And the second A is for Affordable.

Adding all of this up, the formula addresses the different 'accessibility gaps' that characterise the existing public transport system (see Corinne Mulley and Rhonda Daniel's work on accessibility gaps in public transport). The Alliance formula also recognises that Sydney-siders' travel needs are complicated -- we don't simply travel from the suburbs to the city centre for work, although the system tends to be planned with that kind of trip in mind. Rather, in our day-to-day lives we travel to lots of places, for lots of different reasons, at all times of the day and night (only about 16% of trips in Sydney are commuting to work, which constitutes about 28% of the distance we travel -- a large chunk of our travel is much shorter trips for other purposes like shopping, recreation, and services like health and education. See the most recent stats on transport in Sydney here). As such, for public transport to facilitate universal access to a range of activities and services which are central to our lives, it has to provide a network which enables us to access the whole metropolitan area.

Here, our thinking broadly fits with some of the work done by folks like Gustav Nielsen, Jarrett Walker and Paul Mees on the so-called 'network effect' in public transport. As Paul Mees puts it, you want the public transport network to be similar to the road network. The road network is not planned to enable all possible car trips to be taken on a single road. Rather, the roads form a network which provides a kind of mesh that enable car drivers to get anywhere they want to go. The same should be true of the public transport network. But in Sydney, public transport tends to be planned and provided as a series of distinct routes feeding into the CBD rather than as an integrated network which enables trips across the entire city.

To illustrate the '400' and '15' parts of the formula, a group of us produced a series of maps of public transport accessibility and frequency in Sydney. First, we mapped every train station and bus routes across the Metropolitan Area, to come up with an approximate representation of which parts of the city had access to public transport within 400 metres. Then we calculated the average frequency of each bus and train route between 5am and midnight on an average weekday. (Lots of member organisations in the Alliance represent shift workers, so looking at frequencies across the whole day was vital to adequately address their transport needs.) The result was the maps below, which show the extent of public transport coverage at different average frequencies.

In this map, those who live within the yellow shaded areas have some form of public transport within 400m

In this map, those who live within the yellow shaded areas have some form of public transport within 400m that comes at least every 30 minutes during the day

In this map, those who live within the yellow shaded areas have some form of public transport within 400m that comes at least every 15 minutes during the day

As you can see, while Sydney is relatively well-covered by public transport routes, not many of those routes have adequate frequencies to provide decent public transport for people across the city.

There are no doubt those who would suggest that lower density residential suburbs in the north, south and west of the city can't sustain frequent, comprehensive public transport and that densification is the answer. But like Paul Mees, we're not convinced of this. As the Public Transport Users Association in Melbourne puts it

Any city with sufficient population density to cause traffic congestion has sufficient population to support a first-rate public transport alternative.

Of course, the point of the Alliance is not just to raise a series of issues and toss around ideas for solutions, it is to build power and take effective political action. To that end, at the conclusion of the Assembly participants were provided with maps of their region of Sydney, and reps from the Sydney Alliance regional groups were on hand outside the theatre to sign people up who were ready to start taking action to address the gaps in the network.

Reflecting back on the Assembly and the work of the Transport Research Action Team so far, I think we've got at least two big challenges as we continue to develop the campaign... (beyond public transport being, like, a big issue!!)

First, I've found it really interesting that the issues of safety and cleanliness have emerged as very significant issues both to members of the Alliance and to members of the public who we surveyed. When we first presented the idea of a formula for transport at the Founding Assembly in September, it was '400:15:1'. But when we went back to member organisations across the Alliance with this formula, many told us that it didn't effectively capture all of their major concerns. This shouldn't have surprised me, given it has also emerged from previous research on transport accessibility. But I do think it's going to be a real challenge for the Alliance to find ways to address issues like safety and cleanliness that don't resort to the typical punitive 'law-and-order' responses. This is going to be especially important given that one of the other issues on which the Alliance is working is social inclusion. Indeed, the harassment of young people by police and security guards in public spaces and on public transport has emerged as one of the key issues for the Social Inclusion Research Action Team. I'm really excited about the potential for the Alliance to come up with something progressive rather than exclusionary on this issue...

Second, finding ways to build power and take action on public transport presents a particular set of geographical challenges for the Alliance in Sydney. To build an effective campaign on public transport, it's essential that people can connect with the issue and take action 'locally', in their neighbourhoods and workplaces. And yet, we've got to ensure that local actions add up to more than the sum of their parts. After all, a big part of the problem with public transport in Sydney is the fact that local services are not effectively co-ordinated into a network that provides integrated and comprehensive access to the entire metropolitan area. Inevitably, confronting network-wide issues like route structures, ticketing and safety will push us all beyond our localities. For instance, a 'local' safety campaign to get train stations staffed at night would have budgetary implications, and change to local bus routes and timetables would mean changes to procurement contracts between the State Government and public and private bus operators. So, we absolutely need to go local and build genuine citizen participation in transport planning -- that's a crucial ingredient that's been missing from all the expert-driven plans for improving the system which are now sitting on a shelf somewhere gathering dust, never to be implemented. And yet, we also have to make sure that local action is itself co-ordinated across the city -- you could say our organising challenge is to build a campaign that is as integrated and comprehensive as the transport network we want to create...

I'll be presenting a paper reflecting on the Sydney Alliance transport research-action process at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers later this month in New York, at a session on 'Placing Justice and Struggle in Transport Studies'. It's going to be crazy cold I'm sure ... but I'm not complaining!! I just hope that the transport heads go easy on me...

Meanwhile, if you're in Sydney and you'd like to know more or get involved, further details about the on-going activities of the Transport Research Action Team can be found here.


[Note: the ideas above are the product of collective research-action by lots of people involved in the Transport Research Action Team, but it's my write-up, so blame me for any mistakes or misinterpretations!]