Councillor Chris Harris

Car sharing programs within the City of Sydney have been highly popular since the first operators started, with Council support, in 2007.  Recently I recieved an email from a Sydney resident who was one of many who found car sharing to be a convinient and sustainable lifestyle choice.  She is moving to Tasmania, where no car sharing programs currently operate, and she asked me to write to the Greens Minister for Sustainable Transport Nick McKim to encourage him to look into the adoption of car share in Tasmania.

Below is some information on car sharing that I sent to Nick McKim. I touched on the history of car sharing in the City of Sydney and highlighted the benefits it could have for communities in Tasmania and elsewhere.

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Car sharing in the City of Sydney  

The first step towards the City of Sydney (CoS) supporting car share programs came in 2004 when I put forward a motion, which was supporteded unanimously, that the City enter into discussions with the Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) about the possibility of assigning parking spaces as ‘car share only’.

Discussions with the RTA were long and drawn out and it was not until 2007 that a set of guidelines were produced, based mostly on the City’s submission on the issue.  By this point, the City had resolved to allocate 12 on-street and 10 off-street parking spaces to car share operators.  The precedent set by CoS may make the process of negotiating with traffic management authorities quicker and easier for other Councils in the future.

At the same time as the release of the guidelines Expressions of Interest were called for from car share operators to use these spaces rent free on a trial basis over two years.  The EoI request also invited operators to apply for additional parking spaces for use over the period of the trial.  Three operators submitted EoIs and the City endorsed all three.  Between them, the three companies requested access to 90 car spaces and the City granted this request.

The car share companies currently operating with the endorsement of CoS are:

GoGet - www.goget.com.au
Flexicar – www.flexicar.com.au
CharterDrive – www.charterdrive.com.au

The trial was a great success, as shown in this report to Council. By the time the City reported back on the results in October 2010 there were now 190 spaces allocated to car share vehicles throughout the City.  Over 4000 individuals and over 500 businesses in the CoS Local Government Area were members of a car sharing program.  By conservative estimates 550 cars had been taken off the roads.  Around 180 new members are signing up to the program each month.  The City’s draft policy on car sharing is now on display here for public comment. 

The existence of an effective car sharing program has a range of benefits including:

Environmental benefits

Car share vehicles are generally newer and better maintained than private vehicles.  A North American study compared the cars used by members of car share programs with cars those users had previously owned and found that on average the car share vehicles were over 4 km/L more efficient than the old private ones. 

Sponsorship of the program means that additional environmental standards can be mandated – in its draft car sharing policy CoS requires all car share vehicles that occupy City owned parking spaces be of at least a 4-star rating according to the Australian Green Vehicle Guide. 

Government support for a car share scheme also allows the government to encourage other innovative technologies - the City has recently installed Australia’s first public electric car charging station, powered by 100% green power, in response to an electric vehicle being added to the fleet of one of the car share operators.  The City has plans to install sufficient photovoltaic energy generation capacity to provide genuine renewable electricity to an expanded fleet of electric vehicles in the future.

Not owning a car makes people think before driving – they only drive when a car is absolutely necessary and look for alternative options at other times, e.g they are more likely to walk for incidental trips like shopping than people who privately own cars.  Membership of a car sharing scheme does not compete with public transport use as private car ownership does – people who own a car will often use the car in preference to paying for public transport in order to ‘get their money’s worth’ or because of the increased convenience.

Lower demand for cars also means less energy and resources consumed in car production – on average the manufacturing of a car produces the same amount of emissions as driving the car over the course of its lifetime.

It has been estimated that each share car removes 8-13 privately owned vehicles from the roads, depending on level of use.  As well as the obvious benefits, less cars on the road improves traffic flow, meaning that cars on the road are running for less time and traffic is less stop start and therefore cars are able to run more efficiently. 

Social benefits

The more people who use car share programs rather than owning their own car the less space needs to be taken up for roads and parking spots.  This leads to more land being available for community purposes, such as bike paths or light rail lines.
 
Membership of a car share program allows people who choose to use sustainable forms of transport the peace of mind of knowing that they have access to a car for situations where there is no other option.

CoS draft policy requires that cars be available for 95% of bookings made at least 2 hours in advance, meaning that the level of convenience is high.  The bigger a car share program gets the more convenient it becomes.

Economic benefits

For people who use cars only occasionally (drive less than 7000 km per year), membership of a car share program is cheaper than car ownership.

The same applies to businesses.  Businesses that require the use of a car only occasionally may also be more inclined to establish themselves in areas with low levels of parking if they can join a car share program.  This could potentially reinvigorate certain areas that are having trouble attracting businesses due to lack of parking.

North American studies have shown that membership of a car share program often prevents households from buying a second car.

Some Universities in the USA run car share programs for their students.  Allowing student organisations to take out co-op memberships of car share programs usable by students provides cars for people on low incomes who use them only very rarely, e.g. for moving house.

The NSW government have decided to add insult to the injury that was the failed CBD Metro by refusing to release 45 boxes of documents relating to land acquisitions and planning decisions carried out for the project.  After wasting half a billion dollars of taxpayers money on the cancelled project the government are trying to hide behind spurious claims of “commercial in-confidence” to avoid further embarrassment.

My Greens colleague in state Parliament Lee Rhiannon has been pursuing the government over this matter and recently former Chief Justice Sir Laurence Street, the independent legal arbiter appointed to determine this matter, issued a report supporting her position.  The report concludes that the majority of the documents the government wishes to keep secret either contain no information that needs to be legally privileged or can be easily edited to remove confidential information such as contact details of individuals or financial information about private businesses.

Justice Street’s conclusion leads me to wonder what the government is so keen to hide in these documents.  I suspect that they want to avoid embarrassment over a poorly structured planning process that worked in reverse of the way these things should.  Rather than plan a Metro because they had carried out a thorough investigation of transport problems in the area and found this to be the best solution they simply determined that they wanted a Metro and then went about trying to find justifications for the decision. 

In the end the government was unable to find the justification it needed for its Metro plan and was forced to scrap it, but not until it had wasted hundreds of millions on planning, publicity and administration.  Even the communities that might have gained some small benefit out of it realised that spending $5.3 billion on a disconnected 7km dead-end rail line in inner Sydney was an appalling waste of money.  It was enough money to fully fund heavy rail connections to the north-west and south west of Sydney that would have made a vastly larger contribution to improving transport across the greater metropolitan area. Plus the leftover funds would have built a significant light rail system in the City and the Inner West

It will also be interesting to see what these documents tell us about the persistent rumour of a secret deal between the State Government and Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore.  While I have seen no evidence of a deal as such I was disappointed, along with many other members of the community, at the Lord Mayor’s reluctance to give the Metro the criticism it was due.  Perhaps she was simply so dazzled by her desire for the upgrades of Town Hall Square that would have accompanied the Metro that she was unable to see how flawed the project as a whole was.

Whatever the case may be, it is now incumbent upon the government to take the advice of the independent arbiter and release the majority of the documents on the CBD Metro.  In the interests of maintaining a transparent democracy and learning from this costly mistake – which cost taxpayers half a billion dollars yet produced no tangible outcomes – I very much look forward to these papers seeing the light of day.     

Image of the Montreal Metro by Denis Jacquerye, use authorised under Creative Commons.  While this image is indicative of what a Metro looks like, the CBD Metro would have never seen such a high level of patronage.  For further information on the campaign by Lee Rhiannon to have these documents released see her letter to the Clerk of the NSW Legislative Assembly requesting they be released as well as Justice Streets report.  

The major parties remain wedded to coal-fired electric power, pinning their last hopes on the ‘clean coal’ theory. But even if collecting, transporting and burying coal’s greenhouse emissions one day turns out to be possible and affordable, the stuff still has to be mined and transported.

On a round trip from Kooragang Coal Terminal to Mt Arthur mine, near Muswellbrook, each coal train burns at least 3,200 litres of diesel (about 1,000 litres empty on the down and 2,200 loaded on the up) and around 40 litres of engine oil, for a net load of 7,800 tonnes of coal.

There are also currently about 70 coal ships queued up waiting to get into the port, predicted to rise to 90 by April.

In contrast, the sunlight delivered to a solar thermal power plant arrives free, every day.

But what about the economic consequences of phasing out coal power generation? Read the rest of this entry »

Sydney’s transport future is the issue du jour now Chris Stapleton and the ‘10,000 friends of Sydney’ have started releasing their strategy.

I support the Stapleton vision because it’s far superior to the government’s feeble Transport Plan.

However it limits itself to current funding levels. That’s a straightjacket in some respects, for instance in settling for frequent buses to serve Sydney’s northwest instead of the planned heavy rail link to Rouse Hill.

Buses would be far less greenhouse-efficient than electric trains, especially if Sydney’s power was being generated by the Solar Thermal plant I have proposed.

The Greens Transport Vision proposes Public Transport Bonds to finance a fully fledged system for Sydney, built on solid spines of metro and heavy rail with buses mostly deployed to fill the gaps.

Yes, this means debt, but this kind of debt carries a far lower interest burden than private finance and can be repaid over several generations just like the 75-year-old Harbour Bridge was. This is not an unfair burden on our grandchildren as they will be enjoying not only the economic benefits of a world-class system but an environmental dividend as well.

Sydney developers appear to have found a new way around size and parking restrictions for new unit blocks.

First they ‘change the mix of units’ in a proposed block, losing some or all of the small, affordable units in favour of expensive three-bedroom units. Then they request a drastically increased number of parking spaces because the buyers of such units will ‘require’ two spaces each.

This in turn pushes the site beyond its allowable floorspace.

The result: Sydney ends up with more cars and less affordable housing - a double whammy to sustainability - and the developer ends up with more profit.

This was the scenario for two Development Applications (DAs) before Council last week, one in Onslow Street Elizabeth Bay, the other on the old Children’s Hospital site in Camperdown. Read the rest of this entry »