The financial cost of transport in Adelaide: estimation and interpretation

An estimate is made of the total financial cost of transport in Adelaide in around 2007 based on the value of depreciable transport assets at the time and taking account of their economic lives, the cost of capital and annual operating and maintenance costs. Costs are identified separately for each public transport mode, various classes of public roads, traffic policing and various categories of road vehicle. The results show that private investment in road vehicles is three times the value of depreciable public assets. Private expenditure on owning and operating vehicles accounts for an even greater 85% share of the total average annual $7.0 billion financial cost (in December 2006 prices) of sustaining road and public transport in Adelaide. Nonetheless, the total financial cost to the government of providing public transport and road assets and services was substantial, at$0.43 billion and $0.63 billion respectively per annum. An associated indicative analysis estimates the cost of providing public transport in Australian capital cities to be around$10 billion per annum. A little over half of this cost is for capital related costs and the remainder for operations. Average annual investment of $1.5 billion is needed to replace life expired public transport assets

Urban Planning Goes Rural

A major goal of the national program to Build a New Socialist Countryside is to modernise and urbanise the rural built environment. This objective has been bolstered by the extension of state-sponsored urban planning regimes into rural jurisdictions. One of the implications of this is that every administrative village in China is now required to commission and implement a 20-year “master plan” for redevelopment. Through tracing the origins and rationale of key policy initiatives, in the first part of this paper I aim to show how urban planning came to be seen as an appropriate tool for solving a range of intractable rural “problems.” In the second part of the paper, I present a case study of village redevelopment in order to illustrate how the principles of urban planning have been applied to the re-making of rural built environments and the transformation of rural life

Competitive Tendering for Bus Services: The Improved Adelaide Model

In 1994 the Government of South Australia initiated a process to contract out scheduled bus services in metropolitan Adelaide. The services, which currently involve use of about 760 buses that carry 47 million passengers per year in a service area of 880 square kilometres, had been operated by a Government organisation. Services were contracted out primarily on an areas basis, with ten area and four route contracts. By 1996 two contracts had been awarded to a private operator and three to the Government operator following two rounds of competitive tendering. Remaining services were provided by the Government operator through negotiated contracts. A review of the bus contracting system was undertaken in 1998, and features of the system modified, including a reduction in the number of contracts to six area and one route contract. All seven contracts were subsequently competitively tendered and won by private operators: the new contracts commenced in April 2000. The refinements to the Adelaide M odel secured greater interest from industry and keener pricing, which resulted in substantial cost savings. In developing the revised model, particular attention was paid to supplier market considerations. This included the division of responsibilities for service planning between the tendering authority and operators, and incentive structures to align operator objectives with Government goals in relation to service level, service quality and patronage. A number of other aspects of the former model were also revised. The paper also summarises the impacts of the overall competitive tendering process on costs, services and patronage. It draws out lessons learned that may be applicable to other authorities contemplating competitive tendering of public transport services

Emma\u27s Goodnight Song

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