Level crossing replacement is definitely a road transport investment and should be charged to that budget!

While Perth's patronage growth has been spectacular, there's still a long haul as this scene shows!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOq6EnkLNeM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOq6EnkLNeM

In true Australian fashion, people will doggedly tolerate crawling slowly along a congested motorway to using a train that moves along at up to 130 km/h!

Perth's PT patronage has reached 150 million ppa in a city of 2 million people, but when Sydney hit 2 million back in the 1950s, PT was still moving over 700 million ppa. Like any other city here, Perth's motorists are reluctant to give up their cars, but WA has chipped away at the problem far more successfully than in any other state. One of the keys to their success is that, instead of trying to get people to use PT on an all-or-nothing basis (door to door), they've created huge carparks at interchanges so that people can drive themselves from home to a point where it becomes too congested and then they can park and express themselves by train (or bus) to their final destination. The car parking is even included in the Smartrider smartcard.

In addition, what is less publicised (maybe because it's not so glamorous), is that the bus system, which moves the majority of people, mostly on a feeder or cross-regional basis, has also had phenomenal patronage growth, many times higher than in other Australian cities. And of course that's run by three private companies on operating contracts. It's a top notch operation up with the best in Europe and usually with very close headways. I couldn't think of anything more opposite to the blundering, inefficient public operations in Sydney and Brisbane. Most of that is of course down to being properly managed by the agency PTA WA/Transperth which is the critical point. Operational contracting brings efficient and more economic operation.

Tony P
---InTramsDownUnder@..., <mal.rowe@...> wrote :

On 26/05/2017 2:22 PM, prescottt@... mailto:prescottt@... [TramsDownUnder] wrote:

I'd nominate Perth as the local best-practice example.

Hi Tony,

You'll be pleased to hear that the President of Victoria's Public Transport Users Association agrees with you.

Tony Morton also says that it's a good example of how 'cost-benefit' calculations can be misleading.

See today's Age at:
http://www.theage.com.au/comment/are-we-choosing-the-right-transport-projects-20170519-gw8k2l.html http://www.theage.com.au/comment/are-we-choosing-the-right-transport-projects-20170519-gw8k2l.html

Mal Rowe - who reckons that level crossing elimination is a transport investment, but not a public transport investment