After a COVID-enforced hiatus, Victoria’s annual TransportCamp went ahead last Friday at the Melbourne Town Hall, part sponsored by RA member Stantec. The day provided a great opportunity to learn about the issues of interest for a wide range of participants. These included transport companies, agencies and consultancies, local councils, academia and other players in the mobility and transport space.
Transport innovators – such as Matt Briggs, the Victorian Department of Transport’s new innovation head, Adrian Webb, its head of new product development, and David Le Breton, the Head of New Mobility at TransDev – were able to test their ideas in the flexible “unconference” format. Also attending were representatives from important emerging transport areas such as the Digital Twin Victoria project.
The broad issues taken up throughout the day were determined on the morning of the event, via democratised idea sourcing and voting.
These included congestion pricing and regional transport issues; transport revenue generation models; how to wean us off car dependency; the extent to which COVID may have ‘killed’ public transport; post-pandemic flexible working and new horizons for sustainable transport; active transport integration; what should be done with outdated vehicles; land use plans to guide our infrastructure projects; how we can achieve zero growth in traffic congestion; and whether we should make public transport free.
A winner of the “shark tank” idea pitching competition was a journey planner service offering help for multi-modal public transport trips and a “resilience indicator” showing crowding, explanations of service lateness and security incident.