Driving change: Australia’s cities need a measured response

The journey times of 14,000 Uber drivers in Melbourne are examined, as part of a new measure of congestion in the Australia\u27s four biggest cities. Executive summary Australian governments invest tens of billions in transport infrastructure and undertake a range of policy initiatives every year seeking to improve the functionality of our cities and wider transport systems. Historically, transport policy has focused on measuring inputs, like the amount of money invested in new road and rail projects, or the Benefit Cost Ratio estimated for these projects. But the rapid development of technologies across the transport network is generating a wealth of raw data; offering a largely-as-yet-unrealised opportunity to gain a much more sophisticated understanding of how Australia’s transport systems are performing. Indeed, turning ‘big data’ into ‘useful information’ would allow transport planners, governments and users to better understand how transport is performing – and importantly, to measure how successful we are in addressing transport challenges, as our cities grow. Currently, even major states use individual paper surveys, to try and understand complex commuter behaviours – or use a range of physical measurement tools, to try and understand user demand. But already, we are measuring much more sophisticated data that describes how, when and where people travel – the challenge is turning this huge quantity of data, into reliable information, that is useful and transparent. Infrastructure Partnerships Australia and Uber have partnered together to produce Australia’s first regular measurement of road network performance – the IPA Transport Metric – spanning: Sydney; Melbourne; Brisbane; and Perth. The IPA Transport Metric, released for the first time in this paper, measures travel times across the day – providing new information about how the road network performs in the morning and afternoon peak periods, as well as shoulder and non-peak periods, across three zones: CBD zone; the inner metro zone; and outer metro zone. Uber’s experience running ridesharing services across Australia has the potential to inform and improve urban planning.The IPA Transport Metric leverages data collected from Uber’s ridesharing network to do just that. The IPA Transport Metric captures data from Uber trips, through which a network of data is collected. Each trip is a mobile collection point for key traffic metrics such as travel times. This use of on-vehicle measurement systems will provide a wider, more detailed and granular picture of how the use of our cities’ transport systems evolves over time. In this way, the IPA Transport Metric is a good example of the type of highly valuable information that is already available, at a very low monetary cost – that can be used to improve cities and transport. IPA and Uber have partnered on this project to provide governments and the community with a new tool, which would allow wide visibility of the transport networks performance – its output – rather than only measuring dollars spent, or estimating potential benefits from individual projects. Used well, Uber’s underlying data and that of other transport operators, allows us new opportunities to better target infrastructure investment, assess the actual benefits of individual projects – and to understand how Australia is tracking in developing smarter, better cities and solving its mobility issues

Project Finance for Public Private Partnerships: Evidence from Australia

© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers. PPP projects are contractually complex and require the participation of many actors and a large number of tripartite and quad-partite agreements that connect the actors jointly and severally. Central to the PPP agreement is the role of project lenders, often syndicated and represented by a lead financier and a securities trustee. The party most exposed to project risk in financial terms is the financier. In most project finance arrangements, lenders play an important role in monitoring the consortium's performance under the contract which subsists in parallel to the performance monitoring of the government agency to ensure the services delivered by the consortium meet specification. This paper presents a study using a cross-sectional analysis of PPP financing in Australia with three case studies in Victoria, Queensland, and New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The object of the analyses is to discover common features in the way major infrastructure PPP projects are financed in Australia, identify differences to practices in overseas markets, and gain knowledge and lessons learnt that may inform future PPP policy and private finance in Australia and overseas