It is my great pleasure to introduce this special edition of TTF Circular today – a recap of TTF & UITPANZ’s Australian Transport Summit held at Sydney’s Westin Hotel on Friday 26 August.

It is hard to believe that this is now the fifth year of the Australian Transport Summit and what an enjoyable and enlightening Summit it was, bringing together some of the best minds and decision makers in transport policy and delivery.
The overarching theme of this year’s Summit was innovation and technological disruption. You’d have to be living under a rock to not have noticed the rapidly changing structure of our economy and the way we interact and use key services. Public transport is a sector that is already benefiting from this revolution and as we heard from many speakers at the Summit there’s plenty more in store to make public transport a more responsive and attractive offering to travellers.

It’s just in the nick of time too because we do face an immense challenge in our cities. That challenge is the rapidly growing cost of congestion – estimated to be nearly $30 billion by 2030 – twice what it is today. A growing city is a sign of success but we know through the daily experience of travelling around our cities that a side-effect of a growing city is slower roads and overcrowded trains, buses, ferries and trams. This is the challenge we need to meet head on with not just extra capacity in more buses, trains, new railway lines and motorways but innovation and technology that allows us to maximise the benefit of the billions of dollars we’ve already invested in our existing transport infrastructure.

This event is a collaboration, and I would like to thank our co-hosts, the International Association of Public Transport Australia and New Zealand – UITPANZ for their support in staging the Australian Transport Summit.

A special thank you to our event sponsors – Cubic, Mastercard, netBI, Transdev, Transport for NSW and Keolis Downer. Your support makes these types of gatherings of our brightest transport minds and organisations possible.