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| Subject: Big-ticket changesSeptember 13, 2003 | |
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Author: The State Government is proposing radical changes to transport services. Joseph Kerr looks at which reforms might make it. |
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Date Posted: Friday, September 12, 06:07:31pm In reply to: Newspapers reporting result--March 7 2003 SMH 's message, "Noteholders have tickets to ride" on Thursday, March 06, 08:38:56am http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/12/1063341771458.html Big-ticket changesSeptember 13, 2003 Print this article Email to a friend The State Government is proposing radical changes to transport services. Joseph Kerr looks at which reforms might make it. The Broken Hill Outback Explorer doesn't carry many people - 73 to Broken Hill and 63 east each week on average - but it crosses 1179 kilometres each way through some of the most sparsely populated territory in NSW to do it. It also runs at an annual loss of $2 million. This week, the NSW Government raised the axe over country rail services as an atrophied limb of the state's public transport network. But the Murray-Darling MP, Peter Black, is adamant the Broken Hill rail link will stay. So confident is he about the future of the service that he's talking water uphill: he wants a second weekly run. "I'm confident the service will continue," he says. "It's inconceivable that [it] could go." The rest of the state isn't so sure. This week the Government dropped a bombshell on almost every resident of NSW when it unveiled an options paper that may mark the most radical reform of public transport in decades. Country rail services were one of the most striking targets in the report, written by the head of the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal, Tom Parry, doing a little moonlighting for the Transport Services Minister, Michael Costa. advertisement advertisement Parry found CountryLink to be a financial basket case, with trains carrying tiny numbers of passengers, most of whom were pensioners, children and other concession card holders. He found many services made little economic sense and that CountryLink operated at a $43 million loss. With large new investments required in trains and track, Parry called for CountryLink to be "refocused", proposing further withdrawals of rail from country NSW in favour of faster and cheaper coaches. Parry struck a multitude of targets, raising the spectre of scrapping the Manly JetCat, canning periodical tickets such as weeklies and TravelTens, charging property owners for land value rises stimulated by new transport infrastructure, billing employers for bringing workers into congested CBDs, charging parents $30 for their children's bus passes and making non-pensioner seniors pay more for travel. If it has a central theme, it is that the increasingly expensive public transport system is running out of money, needing new funding sources and greater efficiency in existing train, bus and ferry operations. Costa insists there will always be public transport subsidies, but like Parry he questions where the benefits should go and what users can be expected to contribute. While the report was only an options paper - Parry is now taking further submissions and will produce final recommendations by December - it unleashed a storm of community concern. However, it appears that in the translation of the broad-brush Parry report into a specific action plan, few expect all the radical ideas to be retained. So which options are likely to materialise? To begin, many of the radical ideas for making motorists pay more are unlikely starters. While accepting that Australian motorists pay significant amounts in fuel excise and registration costs, Parry argues they get weaker price signals from roads than public transport users get from their fares. Toll roads are only a mechanism for privately funding their construction and not a rational approach to charging for road use, Parry says, noting car ownership in Sydney is set to grow from 1.9 million cars now to 2.2 million in 2015. He talks about setting up a string of mini-tolls on arterial roads across Sydney, electronically charging motorists at a rate of between 13 and 21 cents per kilometre travelled - even higher during peak hour - to raise $521 million a year. Parry also considered putting a congestion tax on vehicles entering the Sydney CBD, possibly $6 a trip. But all of Parry's road pricing reforms depend, he argues, on making changes to the fuel excise scheme, which collects $12 billion a year from Australian motorists while only $2 billion of Commonwealth money finds its way into roads and transport. That's a problem because the Federal Government does not recognise any link between the fuel excise money and its spending on roads and is not publicly committed to any significant increase in its transport spending. "It's a problem [that] the current Commonwealth Government is not interested in the states or the cities to some extent and is not made politically responsible for any role there," says Michael Johnson, an associate professor from the University of NSW. Antony Green, the ABC's election analyst, says, "If they want to do it [it's] going to get tied down in federal-state relations. It would make sense for the Commonwealth Government to amend the constitution to send these [excises] back to the states but that's going to take a lot of negotiation." Parry explored a French concept in his report, talking about introducing a "CBD employee" tax, which would charge employers for bringing workers into the city. The NSW Chamber of Commerce was horrified by the idea, but a senior lecturer in urban planning at the University of Technology, Sydney, Dr Glen Searle, doesn't think it a very likely innovation for Sydney. In Paris, businesses had few relocation options that could take them outside the tax's reach, but enterprises here would find it easier to move to avoid the tax. "There could be quite an outflow of activity in those circumstances that leads to dispersal of employment," said Searle. "It could lead to an exodus of [economic] activity and that's not really what the planners want." Reforming the school bus pass system could be a difficult sell, with Costa admitting that fixing the $427 million scheme has beaten the best efforts of several previous transport ministers. It is seen as deeply flawed mainly because no one really knows how many schoolchildren use their passes to travel to school, with transport operators paid by the Government according to a formula based on the number they think they are carrying. Searle says it will be difficult to change because private bus companies - many in Sydney's western suburbs - rely heavily on the student subsidies and use them to fund their whole operations. "Without that they will be in big trouble," said Searle. But some of the other Parry measures could be more achievable, if not palatable. Scrapping periodical tickets such as weeklies, quarterlies and TravelTens is on the agenda because the relatively high subsidies - up to 46 per cent on the peak single fare - make them a target in an environment where revenue from ticket sales has fallen. Searle - like Parry - argues they fail to spread demand, with periodical ticket buyers given no encouragement to travel out of peak hour, during which the system groans under the weight of commuters. But there is a strong political impetus to get rid of them, in the form of the $320 million "smartcard" project to create a single electronic ticket that commuters can use on any form of public transport. Costa recently criticised the project, initiated by his predecessor, Carl Scully, saying the bewildering array of State Transit, StateRail and private tickets needed to be reformed into a much simpler set of ticket products before the smartcard could be developed. Parry argues that when commuters have a smartcard that stores value and is itself the ticket they will carry on board the bus or train, the concept of buying a weekly ticket makes no sense. During that process, some ticket products will disappear, and with Costa having made it clear the fare box component of transport funding is too low, it is likely some of the discounts will disappear too. Green doesn't think the Government will have much trouble selling changes to the $1.10 pensioner excursion ticket, which has long been seen as unfair because it is valid only on public-owned transport and not on the private buses. Even if it were raised to $2.50 "Labor doesn't hold many of those seats" in which it is used, so would not expect an electoral backlash. "I think if you do it far enough out from an election you can actually contain the problem politically," says Green. But does that apply to the slashing of country rail services, which Parry admits have great symbolic meaning to regional people, given their historical importance? Parry specifically named the Armidale and Murwillumbah services in his report, noting they carried only between 50 and 300 people per day, while faster bus services were available. The Northern Tablelands MP, Richard Torbay, threatened "all-out war" if the axe fell on the Armidale service. In Broken Hill, Peter Black stubbornly insists his Outback Explorer service, despite the few passengers it carries and the vast distance it crosses, is protected from closure. He argues it makes economic sense to run the service. Nevertheless, he put in a call in to Costa's office this week and he's keen to stress the Broken Hill run will be staying because it was a key Carr Government re-election promise. "This is a major item for Country Labor in the Sydney meeting next week," says Black of the potential cuts to CountryLink. "It's actually a fact of life that more and more people are travelling with their own car these days than by public bus or rail service," he says, also lamenting the population decline in western NSW. "There's less bums available to put on the seats in the first place." That, in a way, poses the real question for the Government when it finally comes to implement the Parry recommendations. Which way are the bums going to vote? [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] |
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| ERG loses $198.3m in bad season for WA firms September 13, 2003 | WA REPORTING laggards led by ERG have completed a disappointing year by reporting combined losses running into hundreds of millions of dollars. | Friday, September 12, 06:10:12pm |
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