This research explores how Australian urban transport programs and policies are responding to changes in transport technology, travel patterns, environmental imperatives and spatial development dynamics in order to offer guidance about future directions and options, and seeks to identify potential policy directions for Australia’s cities and policy arrangements.

Key points:

• Innovations are occurring in urban transport systems internationally across multiple domains, including technological advances as well as policy and institutional development.
• Passive and active responses to innovations in Australian urban transport systems are uneven and fragmented.
• There are many opportunities for Australia’s urban transport policy and the regulatory institutional environment to better respond to innovations, including through greater coordination around agreed national goals, institutional design for innovation, and greater effort to engender cross-sectoral innovation practices.