The resurgence of public transport usage in many Australian cities over recent years has renewed the focus of policy makers on how public transport could play a greater role in the urban mobility mix of the future. It has also coincided with an increased occurrence of stress on existing public transport infrastructure to cope with growing passenger numbers as well as residential and job growth in established, transit-accessible areas. These trends suggest that a fundamental rethink is needed about the way in which public transport networks and service patterns can be reorganised and re-equipped to effectively service Australian cities of the future.

This paper will provide an overview of the performance of public transport networks in Australia’s five largest cities using the findings from the Spatial Network Analysis for Multimodal Urban Transport Systems (SNAMUTS), with particular emphasis on the constraints experienced from insufficient service levels and incoherent network development in the context of increasing urban intensification. It will then turn its attention to the SNAMUTS work in European cities in order to find examples of public transport supply that appear to cater for a greater geographical expansion of good public transport accessibility in a metropolitan region, as well as provide relief to network stress. How do cities facilitate a land use-transport interplay that embraces a higher public transport mode share in activity-rich urban areas without bringing the system to its knees?

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The State of Australian Cities (SOAC) national conferences have been held biennially since 2003 to support interdisciplinary policy-related urban research.

This paper was presented at SOAC 6, held in Sydney from 26-29 November 2013.

SOAC 6was the largest conference to date, with over 180 papers published in collected proceedings. All papers presented at the SOAC 2013 have been subject to a double blind refereeing process and have been reviewed by at least two referees. In particular, the review process assessed each paper in terms of its policy relevance and the contribution to the conceptual or empirical understanding of Australian cities.