Re: Brisbane residents ditch public transport and get back in their cars
  Prescott

It depends what one means by "driving to the CBD". Are these people
actually driving all the way to, or within walking distance to, their
office/shopping etc destination, or are they "park-and-riding" from
carparks on the CBD periphery and are thus public transport users for the
final journey, as well as car users? Much of the patronage of the Perth CBD
CATs (8.5 million ppa), Adelaide's free central area tram and buses (about
8 million ppa I believe) and Melbourne Free Tram Zone (I believe about 20
million ppa) is down to P+R. I don't know the details of where central
Melbourne's carparking is, but I imagine that a lot of P+Ring would be from
Docklands - both private rented spaces and commercial public carparks(?).
Sydney doesn't have a great deal of CBD-periphery parking because of its
geographical constraints and the higher value of the scarcer land which is
taken for better uses than carparking. In Sydney, people are basically
forced to use public transport for at least the last leg into the central
area.

I've done quite a bit of analysis of the 2016 census (as well as using the
excellent Charting Transport site) and I find that when you narrow down to
the actual central local government area or the "suburb" in which the city
centre is located, the picture you get (in rounded figures or close
approximations where the parameters vary slightly) of all-day public
transport journeys to those centres are, in order: Melbourne 38%, Sydney
35%, Perth 26%, Brisbane 16%, Adelaide 12%, Wollongong 11%, Geelong 8%,
Canberra 7%, Darwin 7%, Hobart 5%, Newcastle 4%, Gold Coast 4%.

If you look at the more conventional and differently-defined "urban
centres", you get the more widely-publicised figures of (for 2016) 24% for
Sydney, 16% for Melbourne, 12% for Brisbane etc etc. If you narrow down to
weekday peaks, you get some more dramatic figures like in Sydney iirc about
85%, then a significant gap down to Melbourne.

So, it's not such a simple case, but underlying it to a large extent is
shortage of parking in inner Sydney compared to inner Melbourne. One of the
factors that contribute to the great success of the Gong Shuttle in
Wollongong is that parking is difficult (time-restricted) and scarce and
carparks are eye-wateringly expensive. It's not hard to identify at least
one solution to increase public transport usage.

Tony P

On Monday, 14 May 2018 09:23:27 UTC+10, Mal Rowe wrote:
>

>

> I have been surprised over the last few of these series of census reports

> to see that Melbourne has a much lower use of PT for travel to the CBD than

> Sydney.

> I suspect that a major driver for this is the number of parking spaces in

> inner Melbourne.

>

> The provision of such places is actually increasing due to the aggressive

> development of CBD housing towers - including those approved by Victoria's

> "Mr Skyscraper" (aka Matthew Guy) during the previous term of government.

> See: http://tdu.to/i/56304

> Many of the owners of these apartments rent out the parking spot

> separately to the apartment.

>

> Mal Rowe - not known to have driven to the Melbourne CBD in a long time

>