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.