Local councils in Australia who adopt strategic transport plans within their jurisdictions benefit from regional transport studies. A prominent characteristic of such studies is the involvement of communities in the project development. Community consultation is a process where the views, opinions, concerns and responses from stakeholders are sought. Stakeholders can be any individual or organisation affected by and/or having an interest in the impacts of transport infrastructure and services. Ongoing community consultation is critical to the success of such regional studies. This paper reports the experience of organising community consultation for the St George Regional Transport Future Directions Study in Sydney. Councillors, community groups, transport suppliers and operators were invited to workshops. On the different stages of the study, the emphasis of the workshops varied from identification of issues to feedback on outcomes. Stakeholders' suggestions for building new infrastructure, introducing new services, and improving existing services and facilities were particularly sought. Based on these suggestions, future scenarios were formed and used as inputs for demand modelling. Improvement options were eventually prioritised. The councils were interested in the highly ranked options and attempted to explore funding options for them. The benefits of community consultation on transport modelling are also discussed in this paper. It is hoped that the St George experience could be helpful to other transport professionals undertaking similar studies. (Author/publisher) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E205861.
Abstract