BrisConnections fails: the horror, the horror
Sydneysider: A personal journey
The financial collapse of Brisbane’s Airport Link project was inevitable and I predicted it. I wasn’t the only one and it wasn’t hard. The debacle, in which billions have been lost, has immediate implications for Sydney.
In September 2011, nine months before the 6.7 km tollroad extravaganza was due to open, I was invited to speak, as convenor of EcoTransit, Sydney’s public transport advocacy group, at the Australasian Airport 2011 conference in Melbourne. This is what I wrote in my report to EcoTransit members a couple of days later:
‘Ah, the airline industry – lucrative, mighty, thrusting, self-confident … as I stood at the lectern and looked out across that endless conference room there were 15 faces as far as the eye could see. It was the morning of the second day and they explained that things had been better on the first day … they’d had more than 20! I’d turned up early so the techie could upload a new version of my PP, looked at the name tags on the table and wondered if I maybe they didn’t issue tags for mere attendees as opposed to speakers. No real coffee. No breakfast. I recalled Ava Gardner’s unfortunate and cruel remark about Melbourne being a great place to film the end of the world.
‘I was on right after an upbeat presentation by Dr Ray Wilson, the CEO of Brisbane’s Airport Link tollway project which has cost $5.6bn [the then estimate – GG]. Dr Wilson had a very slick PP with a real-time simulation of driving the thing. Rail lines to airports would never amount to much and were only a backpacker thing. At the end I asked about government guarantees in the event that traffic doesn’t measure up and he said there were none. And they knew that traffic modelling was ‘a black art’. I’ve no doubt the thing will fail hideously when it opens.’ And of course it did, although it took a few months longer than it should have for the fools who backed it to recognise the inevitable.
It took no special prescience or insider knowledge to make the prediction. One just had to have been around the tollway issue for a few years, kept an eye on actual road use statistics, and owned a cheap pocket calculator. It was a rerun of the dodgy traffic modelling that’s dogged recent Sydney motorways. Once again, the traffic modellers had told the roads’ backers exactly what they wanted to hear. Of course the Queensland roads bureaucrats must have known that the predictions were impossible but they said nothing because they wanted the road. The modellers were predicting traffic levels to rival the Harbour Bridge … in a city half the size of Sydney and, amazingly, the public-private partnership were still believing them. I’ll bet the modellers didn’t warn the proponents that traffic on the Harbour Bridge has actually fallen significantly in recent years.
Speaking next after Dr Wilson, my topic was how to reduce traffic congestion around Sydney Airport with relatively cheap public transport and freight rail infrastructure. It was a joy to be able to throw up graphs showing that the fundamental assumption on which the Brisbane Airport Link was based – the toll-road operators’ wet dream of ever-increasing car use – had long since hit the wall of reality.
I showed that absolute vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT) in Australia’s capital cities had been flatlining for seven long years and per capita VKT was falling like a stone (especially in Brisbane). Public transport use was, in contrast, climbing rapidly, wherever there was spare capacity. I demonstrated how it was possible, in this situation, and with relatively cheap measures, to actually rip great chunks of traffic out of the road system leading into Sydney Airport.
On the way to lunch, Dr Wilson caught up with me and shook hands. “I support you. It’s great what you’re doing,” he said, amazingly. Funny how everybody always reckons they’re on on our side.
The BrisConnections disaster ought to spell doom for Sydney’s equally bizarre WestConnex proposal. Infrastructure czar Nick Greiner’s plan would see Parramatta Rd transformed, after years of disruption and thousands of resumptions, into a six or eight lane PPP motorway to Sydney Airport – or at least to somewhere near it – in trench and tunnel, and for at least three times the cost of BrisConnections.
• Gavin Gatenby’s mini-documentaries on transport issues can be seen at the EcoTransitSydney channel on YouTube.
