What Happens When Government Workers Move to the Suburbs?

Abstract

A resurgence of state-led decentralization activity is occurring in Australia, with governments promising to move 20% of all public servants in the city center to middle and outer suburban locations in two of the country's largest cities, Perth and Brisbane, within a decade. The effects of these policies on transport, however, have not been assessed or meaningfully considered by the government. Therefore, this study asked the following: What will be the effects on transport of government office decentralization policies in cities with strong monocentric structures? “Decentralization” may be defined as the process by which city regions increase the proportion of jobs located outside the central business district and its immediate frame. In this paper two key research activities are reported on to address this research gap. An extensive review of previous modeling and travel behavior studies on monocentric versus polycentric urban structures and workplace relocation programs is summarized. This review highlighted mixed results for the transport sector and suggested possible research paths to identify the impacts for cities where decentralization was proposed. The review led to a large modeling effort with the multimodal Brisbane Strategic Transport model to examine the likely impacts for greater Brisbane under specific decentralization scenarios. Results are provided for modal shares, vehicle kilometers traveled, travel times, levels of service on key links, and transit patronage. The type of decentralization policy selected was found to affect reverse commuting and transit use. The results suggested that only those policies directing employment to key rail and busway nodes would mitigate potentially adverse impacts.

Developing Policy Scenarios for Sustainable Urban Growth Management: A Delphi Approach

“…Therefore, the concept of sustainable urban development is broadly linked with urban density, form, design, amenities and infrastructure [144]. This research is based on the idea that we can shape urban development principally by formulating sustainable urban growth policies-even though the terms "sustainability" and "development" are contradicting and for many scholars "sustainable development" is an oxymoron [105,106]. However, still the presented urban management and development approach helps institutions and governments to initiate a thought process for wider and successful implementation of the sustainability agenda, and, consequently, move us one step closer to achieve more sustainable outcomes [145].…”

Short- and Long-Term Impacts of Workplace Relocation: A Survey and Experience from the University of Luxembourg Relocation

“…Sprumont et al [31] used MNL to forecast future modal shifts at the new workplace using travel survey data prior to workplace relocation. Similarly, but at a larger scale, Li et al [33] and Burke et al [32] predicted different decentralization scenarios for 2031 at the city level using transport modeling techniques to estimate aggregated modal shares, vehicle kilometers and vehicle hours travelled. This long-term forecasting approach allows to analyze and test various policy regulations to mitigate the possible drawbacks of workplace decentralization.…”

“…The effect of workplace relocation on commuting patterns became a main a subject of study since the 1960s [13][14][15][16] but this research question has mainly gained popularity in the 1990s (e.g., [17][18][19][20][21][22]) especially thanks to new data collection techniques (e.g., digital surveys). Geographically, case studies are reported for the US [18,[23][24][25][26][27], Europe [1,7,[13][14][15][16][17]19,22,[28][29][30][31], Australia [32][33][34], and Asia [2,20,21]. Figure 1 shows the geographical spread of the studies considered in this literature review.…”

Travel Patterns of Urban Linear Ferry Passengers

“…An overview of the current system characteristics is provided in Table 1. The system services much of the central business district (CBD) of Brisbane, where the vast majority of government and commercial office employment for the city is located (19) as well as the two largest university campuses -the University of Queensland at St Lucia, which is the final terminal up-river, and the Queensland University of Technology at Gardens Point adjacent to the city centre. Key terminals in the network include Riverside, at which many city workers alight to access the city's main business precinct, the Bulimba and Hawthorne terminals where residents have been serviced by ferries for over a century (the heritage listed Hawthorne terminal dates from the 1920s), the Tennerife terminal opposite Bulimba, which has long been a major crossing point on the Brisbane river, and the university terminals at QUT Gardens Point and the University of Queensland.…”