The New Transport Department, the RTA and Outcomes Management

An appreciation of history and structure helps understand why the RTA behaves as it does.  

The predecessor of the RTA was set up to solve the problem that the road authorities, namely the local councils, did not think beyond their self-interest. Early in the car driving days, once you got towards the edge of a council’s area the main road was a goat track.  Except for some of those built by the convicts, the main roads were shocking.

Encouraged by the newly formed motoring organisations, the State government passed laws to collect registration fees from car owners.  These taxes were hypothecated to a new corporate body, which was to grant the money to council engineers to encourage them into building the missing links of the main roads. (The legislation allowed chief engineers to receive a personal reward for the extra work.) The starting point for this scheme was the classification of what were the main roads and what the local roads.

Within a couple of years the Main Roads Board realised you were nothing in the State power game if you weren’t a public works organisation, so, while council grants still went on, the Board organised to directly do some of the works.

Nothing much has changed. The RTA is still focused on the performance of the main roads – now called ‘arterials’. Councils are still nominally ‘road authorities’. The key planning mechanism is still the decision as to which roads are to be classified ‘arterials’ and which ‘local’.  

And the key performance measure for the RTA is still the average speed of traffic down the arterials. While there has been some accounting for the movement of people in buses, rather than just vehicles, all else is secondary, despite the rhetoric.

In the last couple of decades, the RTA has purported to become a comprehensive road policy body, taking on responsibility for road safety, which surely is a conflict of roles and performance measures.

So much policy outcome flows from the chains of history:

The RTA thinks like a public works authority.  So when it decided to use the private sector to add bits to the network, it thought like a public works authority not a network manager. Only charging for the private constructed and funded bits of road distorted network pricing. As a consequence, there has been inefficiency and inequity.

The ‘look at me’ build solution overcomes all. Faced with a bad safety record along the Pacific Highway the solution was to build over many years a 120kph expressway, rather than reducing the truck movements by using pricing and spending money on freight rail, imposing compulsory rests for all drivers and building some of the road to a lower speed standard for far less cost, less environmental impact and far earlier construction.

To reduce the call on grants to local councils, the classification of arterials has lagged. The result has not been planned networks of higher capacity roads in new suburban areas but a constant upgrading of the old arterial turning its original two lanes into six+ lane wastelands with all the rest of the road system remaining local. Classification has driven planning outcomes.

With the council engineer being in effect an outpost of the RTA there is a strong vertical line of ‘brotherhood’ between the traffic engineers at council, state and national levels. The Traffic Committee membership and the clear division between the planners and the traffic people reinforce this. With the general disinterest of the Planning Department in urban design and the quality of the public realm, it is no wonder Sydney is so backward in the design and use of its roads as part of the public domain.

In order to protect the performance of the arterials, the powers of the RTA progressively have extended into all aspects of local road management. Although the Roads Act sounds like councils are responsible, in fact they can hardly change a thing without the OK of the RTA. When national standards (settled by the cabal of like bodies from other States) are added, preferences for the use of road space for local pedestrian and cycle usage are hard to negotiate.

Protecting the status of arterials is a key objective. One head of the RTA who, with the then prevailing ‘government is a business’ mentality, half seriously threatened to put fences down both sides of all arterials in the city to better serve ‘the customers’ i.e. those who paid vehicle registration. Fair enough, given the imperatives of the organisation and its history, but disastrous for all the other roles played by the strips of land used as roads.  

In the battles between the guilds Ministers for Roads are powerful.  They have significant discretionary funding. There is little outside interference in what the money is spent on. When I was head of planning in one State several decades ago I was not allowed to see the forward program for roads expenditure. That was kept hidden in the Roads Minister’s office and not even seen by Cabinet.   

It will be interesting to see just how the new Department of Transport affects the RTA. The following changes should be considered:

The road funds should become part of the general transport (accessibility) fund, administered by the Ministry and directed at the best solutions to achieve accessibility and safety outcomes.