Recent attempts to reconfigure urban transport planning in Auckland around conceptions of sustainability have simply reproduced the kind of auto-dominated transport plans that have been pursued since the 1950s, albeit with ‘greener’ rhetoric. Paul Mees and Jago Dodson look at why this has occurred.

A team of researchers from four universities argues that the privatisation of Melbourne’s trams and trains has been an expensive failure. By June 2006, the privatised system will have cost $1.2 billion more in public subsidies than continued operation by the former Public Transport Corporation. They propose that the state government should replace the franchise...

This paper examines the claimed capacity constraints on the Melbourne rail system in detail, utilising throughput standards derived from current best practice, but also from past performance and planning in Melbourne, and concludes that the claimed constraints are not substantiated.

Governments, planners and analysts across Australia agree that mode shift from the automobile to walking, cycling and public transport is desirable for environmental, social and health reasons, but in all our major cities trends are heading in the opposite direction. Various remedies have been proposed, but all have their drawbacks. Road pricing, for example, is...

The purpose of this paper is to attempt an evaluation of the results to date of the Melbourne privatisation process, with a view to establishing whether it represents an improvement over continued government operation.