ARRB was able to help Mornington Peninsula Shire Council (MPSC) demonstrate to its stakeholders, community and project funders that their investment was well made, delivering significant traffic and economic benefits.
ARRB was able to help Mornington Peninsula Shire Council (MPSC) demonstrate to its stakeholders, community and project funders that their investment was well made, delivering significant traffic and economic benefits. This was shown through a combination of interview techniques, traffic data analysis and economic modeling and assessment. MPSC has a track record in innovating in the transport arena, so we look forward to working together in the future, and helping local traders and visitors have a great day out at the beach.
Most Australians associate summer with school holidays, major outdoor sporting events and long summer days.
Many also remember childhood visits to the beach, which promised a day of sun, fun, surf and sand. For our forbearing parents, there was an additional dimension less looked forward to, that of driving around in the hot sun looking for a parking spot close enough to the beach of choice to avoid complaints and to allow easy ferrying of beach paraphernalia to and from the beach.
Mornington Peninsular Shire Council (MPSC) were aware of this potential barrier to visitors; with beaches all along the Port Phillip Bay coastline, there was a need to ensure a high market share of visitors was maintained for the local economy.
MPSC therefore approached the Federal Government through the Smart Cities and Suburbs Program and secured funding for a demonstration project titled The Mornington Peninsula Smart Parking and Amenities at High-demand Areas. Using Rye as the demonstration township, the idea was to address growing demand on parking and amenity facilities in towns with particularly high number of tourist attractions, and in so doing be more attractive a destination than neighbouring areas.
A critical part of the project was an evaluation of the outcomes; would future investment in the concepts and technologies trialled deliver the transport outcomes desired?
ARRB was engaged by the Mornington Peninsula Shire (MPS) to answer this question in order to ascertain the project outcome and its impact on the community.
This article gives an overview of what MPS implemented, how the effectiveness was evaluated and the findings of this evaluation.
Rye is located towards the Southern end of the Mornington peninsula and is a popular destination for day trips from Melbourne’s Eastern and South Eastern Suburbs. It is roughly 100km from Melbourne’s CBD by road. Its location relative to nearby major centres is shown in Figure 1.
The critical components of the scheme were
ARRB was engaged to provide the overall project evaluation to ascertain the project outcome and its impacts on the community. A before-after comparison was designed and conducted to assess the following expected outcomes of the project:
The ‘before’ and ‘after’ periods are defined as follows:
Additional ‘after’ data was also collected during the January peak season - Saturday 18 January until Monday 27 January 2020 - to enrich the assessment and provide insight into a busier period of the year compared to March.
The following data collection and evaluation methods were applied:
In consultation with the project board members and MPS experts, ARRB developed an intercept survey questionnaire that covered a set of key questions. Respondents were asked about their perception of the traffic and parking situation in Rye town centre (e.g. time savings, perceived congestion, safety) and how they felt about the amenities in the area. The questionnaire also included some background and demographic questions (age, purpose of travel, visitor or resident etc.). It was expected that the subjects would spend 10–15 minutes to complete the survey.
The intercept surveys were conducted in March 2019 and March 2020 targeting as many people as possible within the survey period at Rye town centre and foreshore. The survey covered nine observational sites. Survey hours were from 10 am to 6pm.
The surveys were conducted on the Saturday and Sunday of the Labour Day long weekends (‘before’: 9 and 10 March 2019; ‘after’: 7 and 8 March 2020). It was intended to collect data on busy weekends where high demand for parking is usually observed. A total of nine areas at the foreshore park and town centre were covered (see Figure 2), and a total of 246 respondents were surveyed.
The six sites in Rye where tube counters were installed were:
The eastern and western tube on Point Nepean Road (tubes 1 and 3) as well as the southern tube on Dundas Street (tube 5) captured traffic entering or leaving Rye on the three main roads leading east, west and south.
Additional tubes were installed within Rye on Point Nepean Road near the town centre (tube 2), on Dundas Street near the intersection with Point Nepean Road (tube 4) and on Nelson Street near the Nelson Street parking area (tube 6).
For each of these locations, data - Vehicle volumes, speeds and vehicle composition - for both directions of travel was obtained.
The tube location and location of VMS are shown in Figure 3.
Respondents generally saw improvements during both ‘after’ periods (January 2020 and March 2020) compared to the ‘before’ period (March 2019). This includes less time spent to find parking, increased easiness to find parking and lower perceived congestion levels. Even in January 2020, improvements in major surveyed questions were also noticeable in the survey data despite high peak season traffic volumes. The highlighted findings are:
Traffic volumes and speeds were collected from six tube sites along Point Nepean Road, Dundas Street and Nelson Street for both the ‘before’ period (9 March to 18 March 2019) and two ‘after’ periods (18 to 27 January 2020 and 7 to 16 March 2020). The key findings were:
As stated earlier, supporting the local economy was an important driver of this project, through making Rye a more attractive destination than similar towns by dint of its improved traffic and parking performance. The results described above show that subjectively patrons of the Rye foreshore and shopping precincts felt the smart city project had improved matters, and the tubes showed objectively that their perceptions were based on measurable differences too.
In addition, MPSC wanted to understand if the technology deployed could be used to improve economic outcomes for traders, by ensuring that the occupancy of parking spots was turned over as much as possible; i.e. reducing overstays in order to increase the number of
visitors with access to the shopping precincts. In addition, they wanted to know what travel time savings the system was providing to visitors.
An economic assessment along these lines found that
ARRB was able to help MPSC demonstrate to its stakeholders, community and project funders that their investment was well made, delivering significant traffic and economic benefits. This was shown through a combination of interview techniques, traffic data analysis and economic modelling and assessment. MPSC has a track record in innovating in the transport arena, so we look forward to working together in the future, and helping local traders and visitors have a great day out at the beach.
