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Roughly the same size as the United States, Australia is a country of vast expanses punctuated by highly vibrant urban areas. The concentration of population in urban areas is due in part to how flat and dry most of the country is. Australia consists of eight states and territories, each with its own unique culture and approach to infrastructure decision-making. Because of their long history of innovative approaches to infrastructure planning, and in particular, the use of performance indicators for decision-making, the states of Queensland (Brisbane), New South Wales (Sydney), and Victoria (Melbourne) were identified by the scan team as important sites to visit.
Governmental Context
Australia is a parliamentary democracy with the majority party in Parliament choosing a Prime Minister. The Prime Minister, in turn, selects members of the Cabinet. One characteristic of Australia important to understanding the focus and substance of transportation planning activities in the country is that much of the responsibility and power for such planning resides with the states. Most of the substantive use of performance indicators and its effects on budget decisions are found at the state level. The national government does have responsibility for a national highway network, even though it has suggested that its financial commitments to this network should devolve to the states, a suggestion state governments oppose.
The major national transportation agency is the Department for Infrastructure Planning and Natural Resources, which provides policy advice to the ministers and parliamentary secretary for the transport and regional services portfolio. It also administers funding programs (such as a national black spot program to reduce crashes) and conducts research. The Australian Transport Council ( ATC ) consists of national, state, territory, and New Zealand ministers responsible for transportation. It is primarily responsible for providing advice to all levels of government on issues important to transportation policy. The National Transport Commission focuses its attention on driver and vehicle regulations, standards, and operating rules relating mainly to freight movement. It serves as an advisor to ATC .
Austroads is an association of road and traffic authorities in Australia and New Zealand whose purpose is to conduct research and foster collaboration among its members. Established in 1989, Austroads consists of 11 members (including all three states and Transit New Zealand visited during the scan) with a rotating chairmanship. In 1993, in response to member concerns and interest in outcome-based planning and decision-making, Austroads undertook an effort to identify a set of performance indicators for the road system. Each member is responsible for submitting its data annually. Seventy-two performance indicators were grouped into 10 categories shown in the box.
The 72 indicators, reported by jurisdiction, are on the Web at the Austroads web site. Of these indicators, 21 have been identified as core indicators, or those most important to member jurisdictions:
Austroads' Categories for
Performance Measures
Figure 8 provides an example of how this information is presented for one core indicator. Austroads members use this information not only to monitor trends in their own jurisdiction, but also to support benchmarking comparisons from one jurisdiction to another.
To provide consistency in measurement across jurisdictions, Austroads develops best-practice guides on how data should be collected and interpreted for each measure. For example, the scan team found the Austroads methodology for determining travel time measurements being used at each site visited. This methodology focused on a congestion indicator (minutes per kilometer) and a travel time variability measure.
Figure 8. Austroads' congestion indicator for states.
Of interest as a possible model of nationally defined performance indicators, the Austroads approach clearly represents a state-or jurisdiction-defined "bottoms-up" effort to determine what is really important to agencies most responsible for delivering the road program. In some cases, data were missing from specific measures for certain jurisdictions. When participants were asked why, the response was that these jurisdictions most likely no longer considered such information important to their planning and decision-making. Several officials told the scan team that these 72 indicators were being reviewed for relevance, and that some most likely would be dropped from the list, while others might be added. The user-defined characteristics of this national performance indicator program were of great interest to many members of the scan team.
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