AITPM@IPENZ - Last day. Ingenuity now more than ever.

Last day of the conference and I am happy to report on the conference proceedings back from Brisbane. I fully enjoyed my stay in Wellington but... give me Brisbane any day.

The conference day kicked of with keynote speaker Steven Newman, CEO of EROAD. I was hoping that Steven will speak about the work he did on road charging but Steven preferred to speak about future transport systems or as he called it super intelligent transport systems.

The second keynote speaker for the day was Rob Merrifield. Rob has worked for more than 50 years on road construction and management but his passion was always studying the historic development of transportation. From the Diolkos and the other ancient Greek rutways to the 1834 Newcastle upon Tyne railway and other tramway systems in England it seems that archeology takes more and more interest in transport systems of the past.

One of the morning streams was dedicated to the Railway Technical Society of Australasia a joint Technical Society of Engineers Australia and IPENZ New Zealand, formed to further the interests of the railway industry at large and its individual participants. With their upcoming conference CORE 2014 in Adelaide they are directed towards providing leadership for the facilitation and coordination of professionalism in the railway industry and the encouragement of member contributions to the application of railway technology and good management practices.

Michael McKeon from KiwiRai and then Randall Prestige from Target Railway Progress presented current and proposed New Zealand railway projects that will enable more efficient movement of freight and passengers across the country.

Overall the IPENZ Transportation Group 2014 conference was a great opportunity to learn about transport projects from the other side of Tasman sea. There are also  some good opportunities and ideas to enhance the collaboration between IPENZ and AITPM that are worth exploring the following days. I also found some good ideas that we can maybe adopt for our AITPM 2015 conference in Brisbane.

The quest for transport ingenuity is ongoing and more relevant now than ever in the history of 100 years of Engineers of New Zealand.

Olympic Games traffic

I am watching the Olympic Games 2012  opening ceremony and as always my mind goes to transport and traffic. 

The Games being such a huge event, involving thousands of participating athletes, coaches and spectators are such a great challenge for the transportation planners and traffic engineers of each hosting city. 

Even in the hosting city selection procedure, transport and traffic is the second most important aspect of the candidate cities’ proposal after venues. Cities are struggling to persuade the “immortals” that they can manage traffic during the Olympic games in a way that not only will be effective but also sustainable. The games provide the opportunity for the cities to build new transportation system like the Athens Metro and tram. 

But even big transport infrastructure projects like public transportation systems and construction of new motorways and arterials are not enough to ensure that athletes would not need two or three hours of travel to get to their Olympic venue. Transport planning, traffic management and mobility management plays a big role in this task. After all, transportation network capacity is not designed to support all this additional demand for travel. 

One of the traffic management measures used, is sending a significant percentage of the Olympic city’s residents away from the city or having them stay at home. Usually this is achieved by giving civil servants mandatory leave and generally by making it so much more difficult for people to travel to their usual every day destination, so they will prefer to go on holidays or stay home. Again Athens was an example for this with so many Athenians spending their days during the Olympic Games in the islands.

The objective is to enable athletes and officials to get to their events on time. This is accomplished by installing Olympic lanes. Roads or traffic lanes reserved for accredited Games vehicles – athletes, officials and of course sponsors – as well as emergency vehicles. In London there are 30 miles of Olympic Lanes installed mainly on some of the city’s main arterial roads, marked by white Olympic rings painted on to the road. 

No one else is allowed in these lanes, not even black taxis or bicycles and this raises discomfort, protests and even extreme police actions that don't exactly promote the Olympic spirit.  

Trying to achieve optimum traffic management is not an easy task as some of London’s biggest traffic engineering gaffes show. 

Olympic Games have blown out of proportion during the last decades thanks to the commercialization spirit. The sponsors and the often greedy national Olympic committees push to include more sports and more athletes to the Olympic Games and finally cities that host the games do not benefit from them overall.At least it seems that they benefit from some improvement to their transport systems and the added experience in mobility management.

BRT or LRT? Busway or Light Rail?

Few days ago I went back to the Gold Coast for a technical seminar on the new Light Rail Project that is now under construction there. The stage one of the project will cost $ 1 billion to deliver a 13 km route between the Gold Coast University Hospital and Broadbeach. This new public transportation system will commence operations in 2014 well ahead of the Commonwealth Games that Gold Coast will host in 2018. The system in this first stage will consist of 14 trams and 16 stations and it is expected to move 50,000 passengers a day with a capacity to cater for up to 75,000 passengers a day.

The trams are constructed by Bombardier and are 43.5 metres long, 2.65 metres wide and can travel at speeds up to 70 km/h. The trams are the latest generation of FLEXITY 2 Light Rail Vehicles that are used in Croydon and Docklands in London, Nottingham and Manchester, Blackpool and Lancashire. The unique feature for the Gold Coast trams will be of course the Surfboard racks.

This new system will be the first light rail system in Queensland. Previous attempts to propose planning and construction of such a system in Queensland’s capital city Brisbane were unsuccessful. Public spending in transportation is directed to the bus system like the CityGlider and CityCats. 

In the traffic engineering – transportation planning community there is a big and long standing debate on the benefits of light rail systems against bus rapid transit systems. The BRT or busway as they are called in Australia is at the moment the preferred choice in Brisbane. Personally I am not sure that there is a clearly superior system between the two. Probably it depends on the urban environment and the characteristics that those systems are to be designed and operate. And while busways are usually less expensive to implement and more flexible and adaptive to changes, the light rail systems give the city a world class image lift and support residential and commercial development along its stations.  

After all, the way busways work in Brisbane, some times they give the impression that we do have a light rail.

  

Commuting from Gold Coast to Brisbane - Part 2. What people do?

My last post was about my impressions of commuting by train from Gold Coast to Brisbane. It is indeed very slow and uncomfortable and that is why the majority of people do not use it. But there is a big number of people living in the Gold Coast and working in Brisbane and a not so big but still significant number of people commuting the other way. So what all these people do every day?

Well I suppose for the people living in Brisbane and working in Gold Coast is fairly easy. They drive each day through the M1 Motorway and find a relatively easy and cheap parking spot in Gold Coast.

But how about people from Gold Coast working in Brisbane? Here is what they do:

First option: They drive to Brisbane but not to the CBD because of the very expensive parking. Instead they drive just outside the limits of the traffic control areas and try to find a free on street parking space.

The most popular areas for this are: Lower West End and Highgate Hill, Buranda, Stones Corner, Norman Park, Coorparoo.

Second option: They drive to one of the many park and ride spaces that Citytrain provides in the suburbs and then take the train. Popular Southeast stations for park’n’ride:

Fairfeild, Yeronga, Yeerongpilly, Moorooka and some Northeast stations like Buranda, Coorparoo and Norman Park.

Third option: They drive to different inner suburbs and then park illegally wherever they think they have better chances of not getting fined.

Of course there are quite a few other options that people follow in order to move from their place of living to the place of work.

But of course all these options are not viable sustainable transportation. They create lots of troubles to people on those Brisbane suburbs and at the end of the day they don’t save that much time and money for commuters.

Commuting by train Gold Coast to Brisbane. Captain Slow is on the driver’s seat

Having to commute every day from Gold Coast to Brisbane I experience first hand the good and the bad of commuting by train. First let me give you some useful data:

The distance from Surfers Paradise to Brisbane CBD is around 77 kilometres and driving through the M1 motorway or as they call it Pacific motorway will take you less than an hour. That is even in peek hours but not when you run onto a road accident that is quite common in M1 motorway which is very heavy on traffic and is considered one of the most dangerous highways in Australia regarding accidents. In those cases total travel time might be as long as two and a half hours.  Plus if you go by car in Brisbane city centre then you have to pay a small fortune every month for parking.

So this is a great opportunity to develop the  sustainable and environmental friendly solution of train commuting. But unfortunately train is not that popular in South East Queensland. And if this is not the case for the people living here, it certainly is the case for the decision makers. And let me explain this:

The rail line that connects Gold Coast (in general and not Surfers Paradise) with Brisbane City Centre is almost 90 kilometres long making a journey from Surfers Paradise to Brisbane a total of one hour and a half.

  That is about 20 minutes by car to Nerang Station -where fortunately there is a free commuter parking- and then 70 minutes from there to Central Station in Brisbane. If we consider the rail distance from Nerang Station to Brisbane Central Station is 75,9 kilometres, that makes the average train speed 65 kilometres per hour. Did you say slow? Actually it is slow,  regarding all train standards and not just highspeed rail. 

But I am afraid that is not the only drawback keeping commuters away from the Gold Coast train. The train is not comfortable at all; The seats are like the ones that you expect from a metro train and not from a suburban train not to mention an intercity train. Certainly if you want to catch an early morning snooze or a late afternoon nap then you must do that on a sitting straight position with the fear of banging your head somewhere.

"Ok I can not sleep but can I use this time to work in my laptop?"  Bad luck again. No tables at all and not enough space to have it even on your lap. 

"How about wireless internet connection?" Only a small number of the trains have that and not in every car. And when you are lucky enough to be in one of those then there is a time limit and a limit in what you can access. So, no youtube videos or other streaming media.

But even you are someone that does not care for all this and you just enjoy reading a good book during trip time then you should take care where you board the train. Almost all trains during the peak hours run full so for the most part of the trip there are a lot of standing passengers. Add to that that the trip frequency is not good having only 3 trains from Gold Coast between 7-8 am and only 5 trains between 7-9 am. 

In one of my next posts I will write about what people commuting from Gold Coast to Brisbane do and what they can do with a little help from state government and the two city councils.

Shared Bikes – Way to go Brisbane

Brisbane is the one of two Australian cities with a bike sharing scheme. It is the newest in Australia and the biggest regarding the total number of bikes with 1000 operating and 1000 more soon to be offered. The bicycles in CityCycle look a lot like those of Velib in Paris where the bike sharing scheme is a huge success with more than 20000 bikes on Parisian roads. CityCycle bikes can be found in 104 (soon to become 150) stations in the city centre and the surrounding neighbourhoods. In order to use CityCycle you need to subscribe and then you can ride for free for a period of 30 minutes. As long as the bikes are returned to a station within half-hour intervals the user can ride all day for free. If there is a need for longer usage then there are usage fees.

Bike sharing is a great idea for the cities aiming at providing an alternative to private car use in the city centre, thereby reducing traffic congestion, noise, and air pollution. It is a great practice for cities with parking supply problems. It also aims at supporting the use of public transportation and especially for commuters as it provides the means to the last part of the home to work trip.  Besides the obvious advantages of moving by bike like benefits in health and cleaner urban environment, bike sharing schemes are great for tourists as they provide an easy way to visit more city attractions and reach more city businesses.

There is some criticism about CityCycle especially regarding that is not so successful in attracting users. Major reasons for this are the initially high daily subscription which was 11 $ and the mandatory helmet use. The first issue was recently addressed by setting the daily subscription to 2$ which had an instant effect on rising casual hires. But the mandatory use of helmet is not. Australian bike sharing schemes are the only known bicycle share schemes that operate under a mandatory helmet requirement. But who would carry with him a helmet at all times just to use it on his last part of the daily trip to work? Also who will carry a helmet on the chance that he/she might want to borrow a bike for a quick trip to run an errand? Netherlands and Denmark are the countries with the highest percentage of bicycle use and very low percentage of accidents and no mandatory helmet use. Maybe we can learn from the best.

Shared Space – Streets for everyone

By the term “Shared space” we define the design approach that seeks to change the way streets operate by reducing the dominance of motor vehicles, primarily through lower speeds and encouraging drivers to behave more accommodatingly towards pedestrians. In addition the use of level surface tends to remove a physical and psychological barrier to pedestrian movement. It can also indicate to drivers that pedestrians are not confined to the footway and that they can expect to encounter them in the whole of the street.
The other basic measure in shared space is reducing demarcation. Removing almost every road sign like speed limits and traffic lights increases the amount of interaction taking place between pedestrians and car drivers. Reducing demarcation indicates that the street is meant to be shared equally by all users of the street. Implied priority for vehicles is reduced, as are physical and psychological barriers to pedestrians using the street.

Shared space is not a solution for every city street. But is a great solution for streets with high leisure activity, historical importance and small commercial shops. Shared space enhances a street’s sense of place. As it is an idea based on sustainability all the basic principles of sustainable mobility must be considered. Successful shared space streets do not have to use costly materials, and their maintenance requirements are low.

Such proposals can benefit especially tourist destination cities. All that is needed some open minds and some political support.

Car2Go anyone?

Three years ago a new concept in city transport started in Ulm Germany. Daimler introduced a fleet of  300 Smart fortwo's cars in a car sharing scheme. The idea is pretty simple : Whenever you need a car, one of the car2go vehicles will be waiting for you. Get in, use it for as long as you want to, then simply leave it at any parking space within the operating area. The car2go operating area currently covers Ulm and Neu-Ulm. Various car2go parkspots which are near to department stores and other popular areas are available.
Cost is  24 cents per minute including  fuel, service, taxes, insurance, maintenance etc. Moreover, for one hour a maximum price of 12,90 euros applies. All of that without security deposit and monthly fee. Only a one-time registration fee of 19,00 euros becomes due and will be charged to your banking account.
In Ulm and Neu Ulm they instantly loved it. Daimler realised they had something that can make a difference.  Many European and American cities inquired about the project. So now the same car2go car sharing scheme works in Vancouver, Austin and San Diego in America and Hambourg, Amsterdam, Wien and Lyon in Europe. In San Diego Daimler is trying emission-free electric vehicles.
I dont know if this advanced car sharing scheme is "The first personal public transport" as Car2Go website  claims but surely is a thing that we will be viewing more and more in the years to come.
Any Australian cities interested?

Welcome to mobility management Australia

I want to welcome you all to Mobility Management Australia blog.

In this blog I will try to inform you on issues of mobility management and the way they can provide solutions to traffic and transportation problems in Australian cities. This is a blog for everyone and not just traffic and transportation engineers and planners. So I will try to make it as simple as possible and avoid using "heavy" scientific terms.

There will be information on what is Mobility Management and what is sustainable mobility. There will be also information on practical solutions adopted by Australian and European cities that helped them tackle traffic problems. There will  be also interesting mobility and urban practices and article links.
The rest you will see them in time.

Hope you enjoy
Kyriakos Tyrologos
Traffic, Transportation and Urban Planner
Gold Coast
QLD