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Melbourne Transport |
Common Urban Myths About TransportMyth:
More money is spent on public transport than on roads
Fact:
Government budget figures have been rendered virtually meaningless by the
shift to a particularly misleading form of 'accrual' accounting. Figures
for public transport in particular have been padded with fake costs to make
them look artificially high. When one tallies up the real figures instead
of the rubbery ones, it is the road system that absorbs the greater share of
expenditure.
The 2004 Victorian Budget was a typical road-lobby bonanza, with $552.7 million in new funding for roads and virtually nothing to improve public transport services (apart from $3 million for bus lanes and the reannouncement of a $30 million tram priority programme). Responding to criticism of the budget, Transport Minister Peter Batchelor issued a press release saying that the 2003 Budget allocated $1.41 billion to public transport and only $725 million to roads in the 2003-04 financial year.
The intent was presumably to argue that more money was being spent on
Victorian public transport than on Victorian roads. This was certainly the
spirit in which Batchelor's statement was seized on by commentator Neil
Mitchell, who published an article in the Herald Sun on 11 May 2004
claiming that the government was pandering to The Minister was not lying here: his statement was carefully worded to ensure that it was technically and literally correct. Under the 'accrual' accounting used by the Victorian Government, there is a great difference between money allocated in a budget statement and money actually spent. Many economic commentators, such as The Age's Kenneth Davidson, have noted that government budget figures are today almost meaningless as they are riddled with accounting devices understood only by those with years of training in accountancy. For example, the reported budget figures for metropolitan train and tram services are much, much larger than the actual subsidies paid to the operators. Under the contracts that applied in 2003, the total subsidy to all four train and tram operators was $256 million per year: the budget figures are three to four times larger! Just some of the ways in which public transport is made to seem more costly than roads are:
Of course, none of this is to deny that at present, spending on each public transport passenger is much higher than necessary, and may even exceed the equivalent spending on each motorist (though our subsidies page suggests this is not the case). This is due partly to low patronage, resulting from unattractive services (as described on our running costs page), and partly to the inflated subsidies won off the government by the private operators. These subsidies, much of which go straight to the operators' profit margins, are higher than they would need to be if the system were in public ownership and with competent, coordinated management.
The Government should certainly not be proud of the fact that it is wasting public money propping up the privatised, uncoordinated mess that Victorian public transport has become. It is telling that Vancouver's budget for roads and public transport in 2005 was equivalent to just $180 per resident, compared to $430 per resident in Melbourne - and yet Vancouver's public transport runs at higher frequencies than Melbourne's and charges lower fares. Nonetheless, since the release of the Meeting our Transport Challenges statement in May 2006, the government has tried to seek approval for the vast sums it spends on operator subsidies, as if fattening private operators' bottom lines is a substitute for good planning. So the government makes much of having allocated another $6.5 billion to public transport over ten years (much of it inappropriately), without asserting any control over the $6.5 billion it will already (on present trends) be giving Connex and Yarra Trams in subsidies over that time. The proper measure of whether the government is succeeding or failing in its running of public transport is not how much money it's spending, but what outcomes are achieved. Despite all the dollar signs, Meeting Our Transport Challenges does little more than continue the status quo as far as passengers are concerned. With the exception of some long-overdue bus improvements and a few extra night services, there are no plans for more frequent services. In fact we seem to be going backwards from the status quo, because the government appears to have given up on even talking about its target of 20% mode share by 2020, let alone taking steps to achieve it. The latest strategy makes no mention at all of the 20% target; instead, figures within it show that mode share has actually declined, from 9 per cent to 8 per cent between 2000 and 2005, despite more money being spent on subsidies to private operators in that time than was spent under public ownership in the late 1990s. What our public transport needs is not more money, but planning expertise. Properly planned and managed, the public transport system could provide a much higher level of service than it currently does, for very little additional cost. On the other hand, even a modest boost to road capacity requires large additional expenditure on roads, as we see in each successive State budget. © 2007 Public Transport Users Association Inc. (PTUA), Victoria, Australia. ABN 83 801 487 611. Last modified: 5 January 2007
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