SOMETHING SHORT OF UTOPIATHE INFRASTRUCTURE CHALLENGE OF MAKING GREAT CITIES: SUB TITLED DRONES ARE GREAT BUT LET’S ALSO CONNECT WOLLONGONG TO SYDNEY BY FASTER RAIL THAN THE CURRENT ALMOST 2 HOURS…AND HOW DO WE DO THAT?

Dr Tim Williams Chief Executive, Committee for

“The infrastructure challenge of making great cities”…

No link at moment infrastructure provision isn’t about making great cities. Cities are orphans of public policy, under powered, under resourced, under-or mis-governed : with inappropriate appraisal processes. City Deals can help

Today I’m going to talk about:• Cities and why are we talking about them- Trends shaping them/policy responses• Infrastructure Appraisal process: it is broke, do fix it :City outcomes vs. siloed modal

thinking and metrics/BCA is a farce. Tolling distorts/need new funding mechanisms- Next gen infrastructure? Paint, brains, coordination, place-making first! - Drones?! Flying before we can walk/Public transport maybe quite important too: 2

hours to Wollongong- Sort out demand not just supply/density done well in city of 8m not sprawl which is

worsening equity and city performance• City governance: no smart city without smart governance and data: ‘Trust in

God;everyone else bring data’• Data driven responsive city• City-making in a digital era: or driverless cars in rudderless cities/Irish question• Future:City Deals?

Cities are it

New National Approach to Cities

 “Historically the federal government has had a limited engagement with cities, and yet that is where most Australians live. It is where the bulk of our economic growth can be found. We often overlook the fact that liveable cities, efficient productive cities, the environment of cities, are economic assets. Making sure our cities and indeed our regional centres are wonderful places to live should be a key priority of every level of government” (Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull). It isn’t(appraisal and governance) and they aren’t (all).

Cities – where the world’s population and wealth is going:

2050 metropolitan population:in aus too there is a ‘re-urbanisation of the economy ‘going on

Where is the money going?

Growth since 2000. Source: Brookings Global Metro Monitor (2015)

New patterns of growth and change

blue is the one to watch

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Where is the money going?Top 20 cities for commercial real estate momentum, 2015

Source: Jones Lang LaSalle

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And the South is increasingly central to global financial flows and knowledge transfers

Talking about money: low public debt borrow now it’s cheap

BTW/Wealthier Aus in a booming south: 2.5% :Aus grew 20% since GFC;US 9%,

EU :0%:overtake UK in 25 years

One example of why cities matter to AustraliaSydney Financial Services alone= Mining in WA: bigger by value than HK and Singapore FS BTW

City economies are increasingly recognized as the heart of the

national economic picture Sydney’s GDP growth: 4% in 2014

Greater Sydney share of wealth rose to 23% and national FS exceeded contribution of mining: 30% of national growth in 2014/15 came from Sydney

CityProjects

1 Singapore 4092 London 3343 Shanghai 2454 Dubai 2345 New York 1696 Hong Kong 1627 Sydney 1258 Beijing 979 Bangalore 9710 Tokyo 9611 Dublin 9112 Paris 9013 San Francisco 9014 Melbourne 8815 São Paulo 8716 Kuala Lumpur 6917 Helsinki 6818 Amsterdam 6319 Mexico City 6220 Toronto 62

Australian cities: very strong investment destinations

Global greenfield FDI 2014

Source: fDi Markets

Brisbane ranked 5th and Perth 16th globally for FDI Strategy

City10 Munich11 Sydney16 Stockholm17 Berlin23 Melbourne24 Hamburg29 Toronto37 Copenhagen47 Brisbane56 Stuttgart57 Calgary65 Perth78 Montreal86 Adelaide90 Vancouver

Cross-border real estate investment

Source: JLL Global 300

Source: Greg Clark

And people:Sydney growing twice as fast as London but Melbourne faster: will surpass

Source: Bernard Salt, KPMG

2012 20610

100,000

200,000

300,000

400,000

500,000

600,000

700,000

800,000

375,100

740,900

ACT population growth (ABS Series B)

+98%

ACT overtakes Tasmania’s pop in 2038: faster than Sydney /does not include NSW areas in city region:up or out?

Arthur D Little Urban Mobility Index

4 Copenhagen10 Helsinki11 Munich13 Berlin36 Montreal38 Toronto46 Sydney50 Melbourne

IESE Cities in Motion, Transport, 2015

4 Copenhagen9 Helsinki10 Munich15 Stockholm17 Berlin32 Oslo35 Melbourne63 Toronto89 Vancouver95 Sydney111 Montreal122 OttawaBased on traffic, subway provision, modal split, bike sharing, smart cards etc

Australian cities: weak transport and infrastructure platforms

Source: Greg Clark

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Cities of low density: sprawl, dispersed suburbia = about 35%

density of LA!Will Sydney carry on with this model as we go from 4 to 8m?

Up/out? Roads spread/PT agglomerates

#Designperth study showed that for every 1000 dwellings developed in infill sites, it costs the government 3x as much to provide infrastructure for greenfield sites

Even though sprawl costs more!

More emissions

Road building :heart of sprawl in Aus cities: infrastructure appraisal process enables this;and is

worsening this..

Divided city:western Sydney sprawl v Compact city of East=poorer health outcomes/lack of walkability

/commute

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Sprawl =lack of social mobility/health:appraisal!!

• Social mobility — the extent to which children manage to achieve a higher socioeconomic status than their parents — is lower in Atlanta than it is in Detroit.

• So what’s the matter with Atlanta? Harvard study suggests that the city may just be too spread out, so that job opportunities are literally out of reach for people stranded in the wrong neighbourhoods. Sprawl may be killing social mobility

• The apparent inverse relationship between sprawl and social mobility obviously reinforces the case for “smart growth” urban strategies, which try to promote compact centres with access to public transit

• Our appraisal process does not see it that way

• Roads before public transport ; roads before congestion charging even though you cannot reduce congestion by building roads: induced demand problem never considered sufficiently

• Sometimes taking our roads helps congestion and creates more value in cities: never considered in BCAs

Only road pricing works re congestion: BCAs seldom consider it for political reasons

“As a ground-breaking study of congestion management in Los Angeles by the RAND Corporation puts it: ‘any package of reforms that does not include pricing strategies will not achieve lasting reductions in traffic congestion’”

Then we build roads which don’t sort congestion or reduce travel times: oh and we don’t evaluate infrastructure performance afterwards…to improve the process

Induced demand: triple convergence

“Induced demand happens when increasing the supply of roadways actually triggers demand to use them, especially when the supply is free or under-priced. That is, supply can actually create demand. Extra supply does this through initially lowering driving times thereby causing more people to drive and thus cancelling out all initial reductions in congestion. Congestion constrains growth in peak-period trips, but if road capacity is increased, peak-period trips also increase until congestion again constrains traffic growth. This is the ‘triple convergence’ of induced demand.”

Benefits of Congestion Charge - Stockholm

• Recurring charge designed to distribute cars throughout the city

• Traffic reduction of 18%

• Public transport increase of 4.5

• Retailers reported a 6% increase in business• ‘But we needed an expensive new road to sort

congestion out’

Next generation infrastructure might making taking stuff out….

And putting green ,walkable stuff in:the road killed value/ induced congestion

• Janette Sadik-Khan

• Pedestrian and cycling upgrades in New York: garden chairs on Broadway

• Economic uplift

• Retail sales improvements• Liveable,

productive ,accessible

Who needs expensive infrastructure to change a city?Cheap prototyping to show

direction

Cheap change :2007-12 retailers income increased 170%: Paint as next gen infrastructure

Street Fight• Janette Sadik-Khan• “To be successful over the long term, we knew we had to be smart

about measuring the street, but getting the data isn’t easy. It required that we first create an economic methodology. Working with our sister agency, the Department of Finance, which collects taxes and revenue for New York City, we obtained detailed, aggregated retail sales data for the dozens of locally owned storefronts, restaurants, and markets on the streets where we introduced bike lanes, bus lanes, and plazas across the city. We compared the results on these streets with boroughwide and citywide retail sales as a control group. What we found was astonishing: stores along streets where changes had been made reported increased sales, far outperforming overall businesses across the boroughs.”

• Street Fight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution (2016)• Walking’s quite cheap too

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But not in the suburbs: Why people don’t walk in Aus cities: we have designed walking out …

• First we shape our streets then they shape us • Corner store less than 5 mins walk: we walk• Lynx light rail in Charlotte; within year people nr it were

walking 1.2m a day extra and lost 6 kilos.• People don’t walk in aus cities because we have designed

destinations out of reach;kids put on weight in summer hols in aus….

• Does getting to a grocer’s or a doctor or a restaurant without a car seem like a pretty big burden? Can your children walk or cycle to school safely on their own? If you think these are unreasonable questions then choice has been designed out of your area

• Public transit revolution?• Compact city?• Retrofitting suburbia• Or business as usual: quite important to utility planners!

Big global trends:’bright flight’ back to inner city ‘smaller homes, shared spaces, bigger lifestyles’:

time-hungry

Universities all heading back to cities:and Pheonix connects by light rail

42 bB

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Knowledge economy jobs vs housing dispersal:poverty not inner

city but suburban

Dispersed housing &

jobs model (1930-

2001)

Knowledge economy

agglomeration since

1990’s

Virtually no-one in Sydney lives in 30 minute city :structural shift required/PT

46 str

Two Sydneys:what happens as we densify and double to 8m?

• Dickens wrote his novel, A Tale of Two Cities, about London and Paris. A writer with similar ambitions today could easily stay in one city and write a tale of two Sydneys.

• In one Sydney, people live within 10 kilometres of the city centre, where there is almost one job for every resident, and public transport is close by and comes fairly frequently.

• The inner suburbs, which from 2006 have soaked up more than half the city’s overall employment growth, stand in stark contrast to the Sydney more than 20 kilometres from the city centre.

• There are three jobs for every 10 western Sydney residents, compared to eight in 10 for people in suburbs within 10 kilometres of the centre. Outer suburban jobs also pay much less: across the nation, an average of $56,000 a year compared to $77,000 for those near the centre.

• Yet today more than half of Sydney’s population lives more than 20 kilometres from the city centre. And it is this outer Sydney where most population growth is occurring. By 2030s a majority of Sydney’s population will be west of Parramatta. The increasing separation between jobs and people in our large cities is Australia’s great new divide: the city of short and indeed walkable journeys v city of long commutes

Source: Bernard Salt, KPMG

Vertical fiscal imbalance – cities underfunded: with no metro self-gov:

although Sydney now has GSC: our tools and resources are poor for city management

Has been difficult to get on top of this .The symbolic Sydney challenge :

governance matters to city performance:9-5 but still…Denver

contrast and local tax raising for city decided priorities

Source: Urban Taskforce

Case Study: Denver, Colorado

• FasTracks plan passed in 2004 with a referendum

• Big light rail and heavy rail extensions – including airport rail link

FasTracks• $6 billion US plan• 0.5% tax increase approved• Engaged community/users/business• Bonds• And gets money from residential

value uplift in local axes : Feds take that here

• We must innovate around city income

Externalities of agglomeration: the price of success: we have poor tools to manage them – not even good data at

metro level

• High costs: housing, labour, goods, living• Infrastructure investment demand• Social cohesion and integration• Two-tier labour market• Sprawl• Traffic congestion• Pollution• Opposition to growth model

all roads lead to governance and cross gov collab: without , our infrastructure planning is silo’d and non

city focussed

Collaboration off• Sectoral policies

lead• Autonomous

bodies• Hierarchical

system• Spatial disparities

and variation• Low co-ordination

equilibrium• Tax and transfer

payments

Collaboration on• Integrated planning• Cross cutting objectives• Networked governance• Spatial strategy and

cohesion• Cross cutting/catalytic

projects• High co-ordination

equilibrium• Financial innovation and

leverage:

It doesn’t value things properly: area value uplift and city transformation via infrastructre

• Since Bryant Park in New York was improved:– commercial rental values increased by 220%– house prices increased by 5-7% – properties within 2 blocks were more highly valued than equivalent properties further

away (CABE Space, Does money grow on trees)– Value Capture for Public Sector is the challenge as the gains can be privatized while

costs socialised

CABE: Does Money Grow on Trees?we take em out

• Yes.•  • CABE Space has been contributing to a growing body of evidence that demonstrates

how green spaces can offer lasting economic, social, cultural and environmental benefits.

 • “The benefits of good urban green spaces are diverse and wide ranging. Since the

improvements to Bryant Park in New York , commercial rental values have increased by up to 220 per cent.”

 • “In 2005 CABE Space published Does money grow on trees?. It reported research that

used property prices as an indication of the desirability of an area, and looked at whether improvements to parks and green spaces increased the economic activity in the area. It found that being directly adjacent to such parks added a 5 to 7 per cent premium to house prices, and that most properties within two blocks were priced more highly than equivalent properties that were in the same market area but further away.”

• A well-designed, high-quality, connected public realm system can raise property values, enhance economic vitality and increase the tax base.

GI=‘urban infrastructure hidden in plain site’:appraisal needs to recognise this

•  • The potential benefits that green

infrastructure• can provide have been largely under-

appreciated• and unrealised. Green infrastructure is

an urban• infrastructure hidden in plain sight.’ 

And then we have this going on: towards the Data driven responsive city?

• If that weren’t enough we now have this:What does this data driven digital/shared econ/IoT future/present mean for city management?

Tech trends changing how councils/government operate: Australia’s first data driven and responsive

city?

• Open data• Data analytics• Online citizen engagement• GIS

Data sharing and collaboration between city governments and digital cos:new PS delivery and last

mile

• The whole notion of PT changing and with it city planning – tech enabled MicroTransit/Uber : carless development?

Seoul sharing city• Bringing all types of the collaborative

economy together

Chicago works for you

Chicago: WindyGrid/array of things“What would a Fitbit for Chicago look like?”

• Monitoring the “vital signs” of the city to make quicker and smarter decisions and allocate resources, eg. spatial data, emergency calls, transit and mobile locations, building information, geospatially-enabled public tweets

• Provides: situational awareness, incident monitoring historical data retrieval, real-time advanced analytics

• Open-source application – for improvement by other cities and developers

Some examples: Kansas Smart City Corridormore than just transit: city management:NEXT GEN INFRASTRUCTURE PLUS

RAIL/DATA ANALYTICS/IOT FEEDING BACK INTO CITY MANAGEMENT. HERE? George Street

And then...Home of ‘Madame La Maire J’ai une idee’

Not just govt creating public services: co-production online Waze: Community Based Traffic and Navigation

NYC 311: data analytics and platform for understanding your place/service and changing it: what does it mean?

Big city analytics complemented by local data and responses Microsoft- HereHereNYC

Citizens as creators not just consumers

• Really important Digitally engaged citizens come to see themselves as facilitators of public services, not just as consumers fighting for a bigger share of council pie .

• Whereas consumers demand more services from govt, citizens demand more participation. BRIDGING GAP BETWEEN TECH AND LI[MPING WORLD OF GOVERNMENT can restore the public’s faith in politics and civil servants’ faith in public service .

• GIVE PEOPLE NEW TOOLS AND GET THEM EXCITED ABOUT GOVERNMENT again. You can give People opportunities to be the agents of culture change.”

• Save money/deliver more

Collaborating with business and universities to compete: data sharing

• Silos are helpful, when they’re the protective structures that store grain, but they’re a hindrance when it comes to big data. We’re collecting a near infinite amount of data these days, but much of it is tucked away by various entities that lack communication and sharing platforms.

• Collaborations UNIVERSITIES AND CITY GOVS TOGETHER• Last month, Rice University and the City of Houston announced a

data-sharing partnership as part of the national Smart City Initiative. • Rice brought on Klara Jelinkova, former chief information officer of the University of Chicago, to build an urban

data platform specifically for the initiative. They will put data sets from their own researchers into the platform, as well as new sets from the City of Houston. The third step is still in the works. City department heads and researchers at Rice will soon meet to discuss what research questions are currently most important to the city.

• “Every department collects different types of data, in different ways, at different times and for different purposes,” This is likely true both of the city and of Rice, and Kinder wants to do something about it. They’re structuring the Institute as an interdisciplinary entity, and they’re creating ties across sectors in Houston.

• The Institute has collected, but not yet linked three data sets: about 30 years of public opinion surveys, Houston Independent School District student performance data, and Texas Medical Center’s health data. “When we connect this data we can connect the dots between education and health, absences and student performances, medical visits and medical problems. “the network of data-sharing partnerships that the Kinder Institute project creates will hopefully generate similar un-siloed synergy

Procurement :public procurement eats innovation

• Get hackers and coders not consultants. They are free to let their minds wander, hunting for problems, spitballing solutions..

• Procurement/Apps competitions/collaboration is less expensive and more innovative

• With NYC BigApps, started in 2009 as the City’s first open data initiative, it has awarded $300,000 in prizes and received more than 500 submissions, engaging thousands of New Yorkers.

• citizen coders can experiment and make mistakes, at no cost to the taxpayer, in the quest to create impactful solutions. By participating in the program, coders, as in Chicago, are mentored through the development process by agency representatives. Innovation is less constrained by red tape and products can be refined more efficiently.

• Imagine being able to state a problem and then work cooperatively with companies to figure out a joint solution scalable across multiplier cities with payment to be allocated based on value added performance

• Procurment Challenge.gov :eBay for procurement invite solutions and collaboration online

• Use hack days/social entrepreneurs and citizens ,procure for innovation

Without improvements to city governance and infrastructure decision-making…

• Without improvements to city governance and infrastructure decision-making and funding Aus will continue to miss out on the potential of its cities, as investment decisions are made without reference to their impact on the competitiveness and economic performance of its cities.

• Major investment decisions must be shaped by a more holistic view of cities’ needs. This must start with the cities’ own growth imperative and be supported by strong risk analysis, rather than a narrow transport appraisal system that assumes the development of the economy is broadly independent of the transport system.

• Cities need to have funding guarantees that cut across political cycles, fiscal devolution that allows cities to keep a greater proportion of the tax revenue generated by investment, and additional powers over transport services.

• Better transport, land use planning and city devolution go hand in hand.

Wrong Appraisal process to prioritise transport

• There is a mismatch between federal and state governments’ ambition to boost jobs growth and economic prosperity in cities and the system used to prioritise transport investment and funding.

• It is a system that developed during an era in which only modest budgets were available for managing the decline of cities: ill-suited to today when cities are once again the drivers of the country’s future growth and success. Investment decisions, often heralded as economic decisions, are made without reference to their impact on the competitiveness and economic performance of cities.

• Centralised decision-making means transport decisions are evaluated independently of their impact on the economy or interaction with other policies, something which astonishes non-economists and even some politicians.

Appraisal needs reform• The city-shaping and wider economic benefits of

major transport infrastructure investment are under-recognised,

• • Transport projects are not evaluated at a

strategic level, or on the basis of the contribution they make to a preferred urban structure, and related economic or sustainability outcomes. They are typically conceived narrowly with only travel related benefits and costs in mind. Or top down with political selection for ‘pet projects’.

Reform appraisal…• There is an insufficient understanding of the distinction

between ‘city-shaping’ and ‘follower’ infrastructure in terms of project formulation, and through the investment process. City-shaping transport projects demand a more concerted ‘whole of government’ and spatial approach to evaluation because they will have cross-portfolio implications.  Such projects should part of making metropolitan plans, which represent a comprehensive, cross agency ‘view of the future’.

• • Cost Benefit Analysis is universally applied to evaluate

projects but is inadequate for major city-shaping projects which have long lasting and reverberating effects on how a city ‘works’. Conventional CBA restricts measured impacts to ‘first round’ and direct effects of projects. 

Reform appraisal 

• Vertical fiscal imbalance in Australia means the states opt for projects which appear to satisfy national goals, such as freight route upgrades, rather than urban public transport projects which struggle to satisfy conventional cost benefit indicators. It also makes projects which can attract private financing such as toll roads, more attractive to states with limited revenue sources.

“[CBA] has been of little use in developing long term plans or influencing decisions on large scale projects. Recent large projects have been announced as ‘happening’ by Government before CBAs have been completed or as in some recent examples even started. For these projects, CBA has become an exercise in retrospective justification with all the ensuing biases and cynicism that such a process entails [.…] it may instead be wiser to recast the problem at a higher planning level.”

Douglas and Brooker, 2013

Appraisal process: It is broke, do fix it

Identify city problem and do option appraisal

Option appraisal “is often the most significant part of the analysis. Initially a wide range of options should be created and reviewed. This helps to set the parameters of an appropriate solution. A shortlist may then be created to keep the process manageable, by applying the techniques summarised below to high level estimates or summary data. The ‘do minimum’ option should always be carried forward in the shortlist, to act as a check against more interventionist action.”

UK Green Book

IA(too)politely pointing out current appraisal not robust

• WestConnex was the major priority project put forward in Infrastructure NSW’s 2012 State Infrastructure Strategy. The Strategy employed a multi-criteria prioritisation framework to decide between infrastructure options. Infrastructure Australia believes a more robust analysis would have seen WestConnex considered against, and in conjunction with, a broader set of options for addressing Sydney’s longer term transport needs. The design for WestConnex has evolved from the original business case, and the cost of the project has increased. A more comprehensive options analysis may have identified these evolutions or other approaches earlier in the planning and delivery process, potentially mitigating some risks around project certainty and scope.

What we do now…

What we should do…

A new city deal for Australia prototyped here?

• A move, influenced by the emerging City Deals in the UK, from a federal government grant model for specific initiatives determined by centralised funding formulae and modal appraisal methods...

• ….to a ‘city outcomes’ investment based approach determined by a city collaboration involving state and federal governments and the city council: a package of shared outcomes and investments agreed by the collaboration; and funds not for separate projects but a ‘city business plan’ or investment framework

• Towards a multi-tier government/council(City Deals)accord• New approach to funding : preference for Strategic investment to deliver growth

based upon the needs and potential of the area, rather than on siloed funding streams and the timing of government bidding rounds

• Should also lead to reduced national and local bureaucracy via a local, more efficient appraisal and due diligence process,

City Deals?Plus governance reform like GSC+ surely?

• A clear shared vision and narrative• City deals = cross government/cross tier collaboration• Program or business plan for city shaping not just

separate infrastructure projects • Defined plan for implementation and regular

monitoring of progress• Hard and soft infrastructure• Hardest and most important thing: place

management with infrastructure enabling growth in a timely coordinated way

• Build on this? GSC for every city? Metro self govt!