SOMETHING SHORT OF UTOPIA
THE 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

9
Where is the money going?
Top 20 cities for commercial real estate momentum, 2015
Source: Jones Lang LaSalle
9

10
And the South is increasingly central to global financial flows
and knowledge transfers

11

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
14

One example of why cities matter to
Australia
Sydney 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

City Projects
1 Singapore 409
2 London 334
3 Shanghai 245
4 Dubai 234
5 New York 169
6 Hong Kong 162
7 Sydney 125
8 Beijing 97
9 Bangalore 97
10 Tokyo 96
11 Dublin 91
12 Paris 90
13 San Francisco 90
14 Melbourne 88
15 São Paulo 87
16 Kuala Lumpur 69
17 Helsinki 68
18 Amsterdam 63
19 Mexico City 62
20 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
City
10 Munich
11 Sydney
16 Stockholm
17 Berlin
23 Melbourne
24 Hamburg
29 Toronto
37 Copenhagen
47 Brisbane
56 Stuttgart
57 Calgary
65 Perth
78 Montreal
86 Adelaide
90 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

375,100
740,900
0
100,000
200,000
300,000
400,000
500,000
600,000
700,000
800,000
2012 2061
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 Copenhagen
1
0
Helsinki
1
1
Munich
1
3
Berlin
3
6
Montreal
3
8
Toronto
4
6
Sydney
5
0
Melbourne
IESE Cities in Motion,
Transport, 2015
4 Copenhagen
9 Helsinki
10 Munich
15 Stockholm
17 Berlin
32 Oslo
35 Melbourne
63 Toronto
89 Vancouver
95 Sydney
111 Montreal
122 Ottawa
Based on traffic, subway provision, modal
split, bike sharing, smart cards etc
Australian cities: weak transport and
infrastructure platforms
Source: Greg Clark

21
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

27
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

38
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
40

42 bB

43
Knowledge economy jobs vs housing
dispersal:poverty not inner city but
suburban
Dispersedhousing & jobs
model(1930-2001)
Knowledgeeconomy
agglomeration since
1990’s

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

45

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
58

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.
59

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.’
60

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
62

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 Corridor
more 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
72

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
75

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
76

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.
77

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!