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Chapter 2: Sydney, New South Wales

New South Wales is the most populous of the Australian states, with seven million people. Between 1991 and 2000, Sydney's population increased 11 percent, and vehicle-kilometers traveled increased by 25 percent. Freight movement is expected to double in the next 10 years. As the site of the 2000 Summer Olympic Games, Sydney and its transportation system received glowing marks in handling the large numbers of visitors attending the event. The scan team visited New South Wales because transportation planning and decision-making in this state has long been considered at the leading edge internationally. In addition, the state government has adopted a performance-based approach to infrastructure investment that was worthy of investigation.

Governmental Context

The Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) is the agency responsible for road provision, maintenance, management, and use in New South Wales. The highway network in New South Wales consists of about 180,000 km (111,850 mi) of roads, including 14,500 km (9,010 mi) under state control, 3,100 km (1,926 mi) of national roads, and 18,500 km (11,496 mi) of regional roads for which the state provides some financial support. The road network includes 4,700 bridges, which are the responsibility of RTA as well. In addition, RTA manages 32 km (20 mi) of transit ways with 68 km (42 mi) planned. Also, 161 km (100 mi) of bus and transit lanes are on RTA-managed roads, and RTA is responsible for 3,200 sets of traffic signals.

RTA is divided into five major service groups relating to the agency's core businesses: road safety, road maintenance, road development, traffic and transport, and registration/ licensing/enforcement.

Other important agencies in the governmental structure of New South Wales that affect transportation policy include the Ministry of Transport, which provides overall policy direction for transport agencies; Department of Infrastructure, Planning, and Natural Resources, which prepares the metropolitan plan for Sydney; RailCorp, a government-owned corporation, which provides passenger rail services; State Transit Authority, which is responsible for bus and some ferry services; and Department of the Treasury, which mandates procedures and processes for performance management.

Use of Performance Indicators

The history of performance accountability in New South Wales reflects some of the challenges that previous transportation service providers have faced in living up to expectations. For example, New South Wales had a plan for developing its rail infrastructure that reflected an overestimation by elected officials of what could be delivered and an underestimation of costs by civil service engineers. The plan, official for more than six years, became discredited when some expected outputs were not delivered and others had unexpectedly high costs. Dissatisfaction with unmet promises and concerns about media monitoring of the lack of progress led to greater interest in developing a system that provided realistic estimates of transportation system performance and what steps needed to be taken to improve performance.

The mission of RTA is to "deliver the best road transport outcomes, balancing the needs of public transport passengers, cyclists, pedestrians, motorists,and commercial operators." Outcomes are defined in two major categories, community outcomes and business outcomes. Community outcomes are improving road safety, moving people and goods efficiently, maintaining and renewing the road asset, developing sustainable land use and transport solutions, and serving front line customers. Business outcomes are building relationships, leading for performance,developing the agency's people, being accountable, valuing the environment, and making the best use of resources.

The overall planning framework for RTA's performance measurement is shown in figure 12. As the figure shows, RTA has several reporting linkages to other planning elements and governmental agencies. The legislature requires an annual report, which must show the past year's activities and their alignment with the agency's corporate plan (updated every two years). Budgets are established with specific performance agreements put in place to assure the linkage between the monies provided and the program activities. Each unit is expected to have a business plan, and senior executives sign performance agreements that indicate expected annual achievements.

As seen in figure 13, RTA's corporate plan, The Journey Ahead, provides a five-year strategy for RTA, including identification of performance indicators that guide investment decisions. Each RTA core business area has a set of performance indicators that provides an overall framework for operating decisions. For example, the following performance indicators were identified for two areas:

Infrastructure Development

Network and route performance measures

Project and program delivery measures

Performance planning framework for the Roads and Traffic

Figure 12. Performance planning framework for the Roads and Traffic Authority in New South Wales.

The manner of collecting this data provides RTA with the capability of disaggregating performance information to the individual route level. For rural areas, the road network sample consists of 1,000 sections, which are classified by similar functional characteristics. The urban network is divided into links, and the data collected for each link includes a.m. and p.m. peak travel speed (by the floating car method), business hours travel speed, current and forecast volume/ capacity ratios, current and forecast crashes per kilometer, and a composite performance indicator. With such a disaggregation, RTA can develop visuals such as figure 13, which shows performance for a rural highway.

According to RTA officials, these measures are used to develop route-level strategies as well as an overall investment program. Strategic plans are created for road corridors with different options considered for highly deficient links.

Business Area: Road Maintenance

The government has adopted a policy of asset management that views infrastructure as a long-term renewable asset, and that requires agencies to manage assets on a life cycle basis. RTA has developed a road asset policy that links maintenance decisions to network performance. A hierarchy of outcomes and outputs has been developed for measuring performance of maintenance efforts. This hierarchy consists of the following:

Commitments

Safety

Retained value

Reliability

·        Provision of consistent route conditions

The performance framework for infrastructure maintenance includes the specific measures shown in table 7.

Rural highway performance in New South Wales

Figure 13. Rural highway performance in New South Wales.

Table 7. Maintenance program performance measures.

Performance reporting, which covers all of the performance measure categories shown in table 7, includes such measures as community satisfaction levels, number of structurally deficient bridges on state roads, asset valuation, distribution of construction period for state and national roads, average age of bridges, ride quality, pavement, and durability of paved rural roads. Contractor assessments are also part of the maintenance program assessment, including quality of work, time management, environmental management, contract administration, and level of cooperation with RTA engineers. Figure 14 provides an example of how this information is presented to agency decision makers.

Sample presentation of asset management information

Figure 14. Sample presentation of asset management information in New South Wales.

The New South Wales Treasury provides guidelines for reporting government agency outcomes. Each agency is required to develop a results and services plan ( RSP ) to "demonstrate the relationship between the services the agency delivers and the results it is working towards." The questions the RSP is supposed to answer include the following:

To make this reporting more user-friendly and understandable to non technical audiences, the Treasury has developed a new "results logic" that each agency must follow in its reporting (see figure 15). The major changes from the old approach and terminology are shown in table 8.

Table 8. Change in performance terminology in New South Wales.
Old New

Outcomes

Results

Intermediate outcomes

Intermediate results

Outcome achievement indicators

Result indicators

Outputs

Services

Output performance measures

Service measures

Intervention logic

Results logic


Results logic for performance monitoring used by the New South Wales Department of Treasury.

Figure 15. Results logic for performance monitoring used by the New South Wales Department of Treasury.

In this approach, the terms are defined in the following way:

Results

Services

Intermediate results

Result indicators

Service measures

The key philosophy of this approach to performance reporting and budget approval is that each agency must constantly demonstrate value received for the money it gets from the government.

Other performance accountability documents used as part of this framework include an annual report, budget submittals, and individual employee performance agreements( usually targeted at advancing specific projects through the project development process).

RTA officials stated that the performance management framework provides a constant,high-level focus on road safety, customer interaction, network reliability, infrastructure asset condition, and employee time lost because of injuries.

Congestion

The 2000 Olympics provided Sydney with a great incentive to upgrade its traffic management system. With the expected surge in vehicles and people using Sydney's transportation system, RTA officials put in place advanced traffic surveillance and control systems that are a legacy of the Olympic Games. Perhaps the greatest benefit was an enhanced traffic management center ( TMC ) that provides 24-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week management of the road network. TMC has 170 staff members, with up to 18 traffic controllers working per shift. More than 400 closed-circuit cameras feeding into TMC monitor and control traffic flows. Electronic lane changing (with actual movement of low-rise barriers from one lane to another controlled from TMC ) is used to optimize throughput at key bottleneck points, such as the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Variable message signs, variable speed limit signs, radio communication with all public transit buses, and rapid response incident management patrols are all managed from the operations center. A memorandum of agreement has been signed with the police for handling incidents on the state road system. Transit and police representatives at the center coordinate responses to incidents requiring a multi agency response. In addition, TMC has adopted a policy of sending customer calls directly to operators on the TMC floor. As might be expected from this wide-ranging data collection capability, much of this network control is accompanied by the ability to collect data on network performance.

Another substantial data collection asset is the Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System ( SCATS ), developed by RTA to provide coordinated traffic signal strategies for the road network. Not only does SCATS allow for the optimal control of a signal network, but it also can be used to provide a "green light corridor" that expedites emergency vehicles through the network by giving them a green light progression. For the recent rugby world championship in Sydney, this capability was used to speed teams and other officials to different locations in the city(100 green light corridors were used in one day) . Through its commercial unit, RTA has sold SCATS to 85 metropolitan areas in 15 countries. Because of the ubiquitous nature of the SCATS application at intersections in Sydney, RTA is able to collect a range of data on traffic flows and delays.

The final ITS -related data collection capability for RTA comes from the widespread use of electronic toll collection ( ETC ) technology for toll roads and bridges in the state. Dual protocol systems allow interoperability with ETC systems in Brisbane and Melbourne. Sydney has about 450,000 ETC tags, a number expected to grow to 1.5 million in two years. More than 900,000 ETC tags are in use in Melbourne. All buses use ETC technology, as do 85 percent of Sydney's taxis.

The Roads and Traffic Management section of RTA has established several outcome and output measures that relate to the operational performance of the road network. Outcome measures include travel speeds, congestion, traffic volumes, and community satisfaction. Congestion measures were the same as those provided to the Austroads national performance indicator database. The team noted that, given the data-collecting capability of SCATS, RTA also monitors intersection congestion for total minutes of delay (see figure 16). Output measures included the following:

Most measures are reported on a monthly basis, although the number of kilometers provided for certain facility types is reported annually.

For other modes of transportation, SCATS is used proactively to monitor and manage bus reliability. Bus lane monitoring is used to measure bus travel speeds, and vehicle occupancy data is collected as well.

Safety

RTA is the lead agency for road safety in New South Wales, spending about AU$120 million (US$87.6 million) each year. The safety program emphasizes engineering, behavioral, enforcement, and regulatory strategies. Although RTA focuses on engineering design as a strategy to improve safety (e.g., divided highways, guard rails, rumble strips, etc.), it also funds police to enforce speed laws on the state road network.

Monitoring intersection delay in Sydney.

Figure 16. Monitoring intersection delay in Sydney.

Over the past 50 years, New South Wales has had a significant impact on road fatalities, recording only 553 deaths in 2003, the second lowest fatality level since 1949, even though population, vehicle-kilometers traveled, and number of drivers have grown significantly. To achieve this impressive record, RTA has developed close partnerships with the New South Wales Police, Motor Accidents Authority, Department of Corrective Services, Department of Education and Training, Department of Health, local governments, and many others.

Key performance indicators for safety include the following:

For program goals, one purpose of national and state road safety plans is to define achievement targets. For example, the National Road Safety Strategy for 2001-2010 states that the number of road fatalities per 100,000 population should be reduced by 40 percent from 9.3 in 1999 to no more than 5.6 in 2010. The New South Wales Road Safety 2010strategy has a more aggressive target of reducing the number of fatalities on New South Wales' roads by 50 percent by 2010.

Similar to the United States, fatality and injury data are collected by the police and forwarded to RTA. Crash data are analyzed to discern significant causal factors (e.g., speed, fatigue, drunk driving, etc.) and programs are redirected or created to deal with the most significant factors. For established programs, RTA conducts benefit-cost analyses to determine which are most effective in helping RTA achieve its safety goals. For example, RTA officials state that crash statistics show that the most effective prevention strategies have been compulsory seat belt use and random breath testing.

RTA officials stated that the key lessons from many years of aggressive safety programs are that engineering solutions are the ultimate consideration for developing a safe system, agencies should target resources (people and dollars) at problems identified through analysis of crash data, and "silver bullets" are rare. They emphasized that it takes a lot of work and commitment to make a difference.

Post-Construction Reviews

All of the sites visited conducted post-construction and post-implementation reviews of a sample number of projects. The New South Wales approach is a good example of the process followed in this review program. As noted in the RTA guidelines, "project post completion reviews provide a principal means of obtaining lessons learned from previous projects. They represent a feedback loop to inform future projects and facilitate a culture of continuous improvement for both project delivery and project outcomes."

The process for post-construction reviews ( PCR s) is shown in figure 17. The review is undertaken about two years after construction has been completed. Teams of reviewers are used to assess different stages of project development, delivery, and impact. Each team is involved with some aspect of total project review. For example, team A could assess project development, and team B could conduct both the project implementation and outcomes assessment effort. Team C might participate in the assessment of some portions of the project development process, as well as work with team B on the outcomes assessment. The primary method for conducting a PCR is to hold a workshop at which officials and engineers answer specific evaluation questions.

Post-construction review process in New South Wales.

Figure 17. Post-construction review process in New South Wales.

Observations

The scan team's most important observations from the visit to New South Wales include the following:

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