So thanks everyone for coming to one of the last non-keynote sessions. I guess when I was thinking about what to present, I wanted to do something that was interesting for me, not something that I'd presented regularly, hopefully interesting for you as well. So I decided to talk about urban mobility in Oceania back in August when I was thinking of topics.

Okay, thanks Alex. And so I'm not from a public transport background, but as Richard said in the introduction, I work a lot with different organisations, different individuals, and a lot of them are working in public transport. So I thought it was really interesting listening to Danielle earlier, who is working heavily with public transport and the government

and kind of doing the analytics on catchment areas and things like that, and then contrasting that with some of the citizens that are collecting their own data in the region and seeing whether there can be a better bridge between government data and the data that citizens are collecting.

So I wanted to contrast a few different places in Oceania. We have quite a diverse region in terms of some of the geographies that we have, some of the types of cities that we have. So I chose four locations. I've got Melbourne selected, Wellington, Suva and Port Moresby,

all very different places as I mentioned. And I wanted to look at urban mobility and what it actually means. And to me, urban mobility means living close to places I care about, so things like parks, restaurants, cafes, obviously work being a very important one, schools, and being able to get there safely.

Also, efficiently, and Danielle mentioned as well, reliable in terms of knowing how long the journey is going to take but also knowing whether your mode of transport is going to come. And so we're going to look at a few different use cases in these different cities of how people are getting through them and some of the considerations around that.

The other thing I think to note, I don't really go into it in this presentation, but it's the role that wealth plays in urban mobility. So the city I'm from, Melbourne, and I think it's common in any city really, you can see the correlation between how people travel and wealth very closely. So it's kind of frustrating, of course, for people from lower backgrounds.

It's harder to get to work, which means that a lot of the jobs that are higher paying are probably out of reach and it can kind of become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So let's get into it, let's look at Melbourne first. I'm going to talk mostly about Melbourne because I'm more familiar with it. Has anyone been to Melbourne?

Hands up, or hands remaining if you took the free tram while you were there. Okay, hands up. Still, if you thought it was a good idea, it was excellent having a free tram. Yeah, so did I, as Kim says, of course it is. So I thought this was excellent, like when I first came to Melbourne as a student, I had to pay and you'd often like would sit at the back of the tram,

where there was like a, so basically you'd stand right at the rear door so that if the ticket inspectors came on, you could kind of tap on as you saw them. Nowadays they're undercover, which makes that very difficult. They wear like hoodies or try to look really hipster. Try and fit in with the Melbourne crowd. But I think it was the Andrews government, but don't quote me on that,

came up with this concept of the free tram zone. And I think most people, as you guys do, think it's an excellent idea. If you're in the CBD area, in the downtown area, you don't need to worry about touching on or off. And then I was speaking to some transport planners, and I didn't necessarily say it was a terrible idea, but they said it's not as great as you think it is.

One of the reasons for that was they'd put so much effort, probably working with organisations like Danielle's and working out tram flows through the city, how long it takes, and they had all this great data that they've built over years. And then all of a sudden you have all these people jumping on and off in the middle of the city, which slows down trams

and makes it a lot more difficult to move throughout the city. So this kind of messed up a lot of the models that that's been a fair while developing. And yeah, that was something that struck me and also brought home the point that transport planning can be a lot more complex than what you just the citizen think of, and so it's not necessarily zero-sum game,

but there are all these different considerations. There is a lot of construction going on in Melbourne now, as you'd see if you walked down the city, and a lot of this is aimed at improving urban mobility. One of the big projects taking place right now is the Metro Rail Tunnel,

which is meant to connect, kind of goes from north near Melbourne Uni down south to what's known as Anzac Station near the War Memorial there. And they're also looking at this loop around the city, and this is to try and change the way that people get around Melbourne. So I mentioned earlier, like the people in the outer suburbs,

it's very hard for them to get to places. Often they don't work in the city, they work in another suburb. And if you look at Melbourne, they have what's known as a monocentric transportation system, where all things lead into the central node, the central hub, whereas other cities like London and Tokyo have what's called polycentric, where you have these loops around it. So they're talking about potentially doing this,

and part of this is because the population of Melbourne is forecasted to grow significantly. It already has. I commented on Twitter here about, in my lifetime at least, it took I think about 20 years to get from 3.1 to 4 million. So almost a million took 20 years,

and then another million was added just in the 9 million after that. Melbourne is changing very quickly. A lot of people are coming to the city, and unfortunately a lot of the transportation planning has been very late. They've been talking about doing the metro rail tunnel or infrastructure projects like it for, I think people have dug up government surveys on this from 40 years ago.

So it's well overdue. I've spoken to people who say that even once it's released, it's going to be at capacity very shortly. But at least it's coming, and at least these things are getting better. In terms of this project, this is aimed at getting people, as I mentioned, around the outer rim of the city. Hands up again if you've taken the Skybus,

either here or even in New Zealand. It's in New Zealand as well. Quite a few people. Does anyone know who owns the Skybus? No? No? No one knows? No, no, no. So you might not have thought this,

but the owner of Skybus across New Zealand and Australia is the Ontario Pensions Fund. So they're one of the biggest infrastructure investors around the world. I guess they've done a good job in taking their large pool of teachers' superannuation and investing it wisely. And they're really milking the situation in Melbourne.

And I think, I don't know New Zealand completely well, but I know you've got it in Auckland as well. In Melbourne, we can't take a tram to the airport. We can pay a lot of money to Uber or taxis. We can pay a lot of Melbourne, a lot of money to airport parking. Or we have the one option, which is more the public route of Skybus. So it's very limited and hopefully this rail line will address that.

Bad news for teachers in Ontario though. The other thing I noticed recently, so I'm not going to talk too much about pedestrian routing, maybe a bit further on, but the other thing I noticed recently walking down Melbourne were these lights.

Maybe Martin, had you seen these lights before in Melbourne, in the city? I can, for people looking down. Yeah, yeah. I thought it was maybe for people who were partially blind, but not fully blind. And then I realised, I looked it up and it turns out this is for people on their phones.

I don't know how widely spread this is going to be, but I took some imagery on Mapillary and you can see, I think this was just a couple of months ago, they were just normal, what do you call them, like tactile paving. Thanks Richard. And now they're still tactile, but they've got these colours on them and they change whether the lights green or red.

But I mentioned, if you actually read the bio or the description of this presentation, I'm very keen about citizen advocacy. What can citizens do to change the infrastructure in their city? So not just have government calculating this, but having kind of more of a back and forth relationship.

Melbourne, I think there's a lot more that can be done, but there is an Australia-wide organisation called the Bicycle Network. That's just one example. 50,000 members. And one of the things recently that they've done, just an example of the way that they approach these problems. So one example is government submissions. So they have these big PDFs that they send to the government

with various recommendations. They also do riding events, like I think the Great Vic Bike Ride is one of theirs. They also do the Around the Bay in a Day. And this raises a lot of funds for them to pursue this work and have some permanent staff. One of the other things that they proposed to government was improvements to this bike lane in St Kilda.

So I actually ride along here quite a bit. And it's one of the better bike lanes in Melbourne, but it's apparently a major cause for incidents. I think there was 63 serious incidents over the last five years. And that was often car doors. You can see like the car doors,

yeah, as people ride along the lane, causing a lot of damage to cyclists. And so that's not good. And that's something that the government has finally decided to address, thanks to the work of the bicycle network. So what they're going to do is actually put in, they're going to remove two car lanes and they're going to put in like a bicycle highway in the middle.

So that's really promising. I want to see more of this. And I think that comes down to being very clear as a bicycle advocacy organisation where improvements need to be made, not just sending a thousand page PDFs, but being quite clear about what needs to change. And another example, I don't actually know the intersection, but they're talking about making more bicycle highways like this,

like you'd see in Copenhagen or something where the bike lanes are very delineated. And we'll talk about some other examples a bit later on. Now we're going to move to Wellington. Now I don't, again, don't know too much about Wellington, but I was looking up some statistics on it.

And I think a lot of the time it's difficult to get the latest statistics. But what I found as far as the more recent statistics was 2013, which is still, I guess, quite a ways away now. But 64.6% of commutes were by car in Wellington. I actually didn't go through the stats for Melbourne, but it's very similar in Melbourne.

And 54.7% more people though, compared to 2001 are using active modes of transport. So I'll show you on the next slide what that looks like. But the thing I found interesting about Wellington was in particular were these bikes,

the dockless bike sharing, which we tried in Melbourne. And as I said, this is why we can't have nice things in Melbourne because these would end up at the bottom of a river in the Yarra. Maybe Wellingtonians treat your bikes a bit more carefully than we do. But we get drunk, we dump them in the river. We're in the middle of the road.

So the government banned them all. And then I think when they came up with the idea of these electric scooters, people weren't too keen to have them in the city either. So they haven't arrived yet. I don't think they will any time soon. But you guys seem to look after your things. And these seem really popular. Hands up who's from Wellington? Hands up who uses one of these two options?

Scooters? Yeah, scooters. No, you don't. Alex, do you have them in Hobart? No. So there's a cycle count here as well.

There's probably someone at this conference who's responsible for it. But I thought this was really cool. Tracking the cyclists on any given street. I think they only do it for one week a year. So much? No. It might be one week a month. Anyway, it's done at intervals. And I'm not sure how much winter and kind of different effects like that,

university versus non-university, are factored in. But like this one example, 17.7 thousand people across that week near Macy University. I think that was one of the bigger ones in this area. So that makes a lot of sense. A lot of students writing to work.

Euan, I don't think he's in the audience. But he's captured a lot of imagery over the last few days. A lot of that includes some of the scooters that are going around. And these companies have a big problem in collecting them. Chris, my colleague and I were walking home the other night and we saw someone had hired a budget van to collect all these scooters.

The juices they're called. So it was interesting that the economics behind this seem to make sense that they can rent a van, get paid to collect these and then put them out on the street again. But there's a lot of interest from these scooter companies to have accurate maps that can tell them where a lot of the scooters are and get a more accurate picture of where these scooters are in relation to the dockless bike sharing or maybe even docked bike sharing

and different points of interest across the city. Now the picture is very different in Fiji. This is one of the main streets. This is Greg Lower who captured this going down near the bus terminal which is near the market. Again, it was really hard to get data on Suva.

I wanted to have a lot more and I know some other people have talked about that as well. Getting data across Oceana is not always the easiest thing to do. But one survey I found was from the University of the South Pacific which is very likely to be hosting the conference next year. And it turned out that they did the survey. They had 2,071 people polled

and how they conducted this survey was they said that people participating might win a bicycle. So maybe it's slightly biased. But it turned out that 80% of respondents said they did not own bicycles and 52% said the bus is the primary mode of transport for them. So that's a very different picture in Melbourne

where it really struck me that the majority of people in Melbourne still drive. And that's quite different to the situation in Fiji where it's only 52% or less than 52%. Yep? Yeah, well exactly. That's a big problem. If you don't have the infrastructure, people can't have that option.

And when they don't earn a bike, that's a further problem as well. How am I going for time? Okay, crap. Okay. So I'll finish off very shortly. But the last city I mentioned was Port Moresby. Again, this is a very different picture to the other three cities I mentioned. They use what they call private motor vehicles. In Tanzania, these are called daladalas.

In the Philippines, they're called jeepneys. In Georgia, they're called mashrutkas. But they're all the same sort of thing. It's a private vehicle where people can jump on and off. They have their own routes. Actually, they're pretty smart. They kind of have their own internal GIS systems in their head in terms of routing these routes. But they're not run by the government, which makes them a lot harder to track.

So that's something that we could work on together with Port Moresby is making sure that these are mapped. Even if they're quite informal, you can map them. And the Philippines has shown how to map jeepney routes. If you want to access map features related to mobility, you can go into OpenStreetMap and toggle the Mapillary layout.

There's three that show up that are related to mobility. Bicycle, parking, crosswalks and streetlights. CCTV cameras you can find on Mapillary itself. And they relate to map mobility because of safety at night, which is something people are starting to map and create pedestrian routing algorithms for. And that also comes into is the street you're walking on lit at night?

And there's ways you can visualize that just with the OpenStreetMap tag on the line itself. Lit equals yes. And that could be on the polygon as well. But a lot of that's not mapped. So the use of that is not there yet. But we can fix the map and make it more useful to the government and citizens.

I don't think I have time for that. So I'm going to skip through footpath mapping. But short story is that a lot of it has not been done in our region. So we could probably look at the example of open sidewalks in the US to get some schema on how to map sidewalks properly, or footpaths as we call them.

And lastly I want to finish with a really inspiring story from Ottawa. This is an organization called Bike Ottawa. They've, I think, done a really good job of taking GIS data and getting government to actually enact change. So this is an example from earlier this year. Unfortunately, and this looks pretty good as far as Melbourne's bike lanes,

probably ahead of a lot of other cities. But on the left you can see the green bike lane. Someone died along there. That's right in front of City Hall. And someone died earlier this year. And they took action straight away. They told government exactly what the problem was. You've got traffic on both sides of the cyclist. So they petitioned the government to have a Vision Zero policy,

trying to make sure there's no incidents. And you can see within just like a month or two, or I don't know the exact timeline, but it was very shortly after they put up these barriers to make it harder for cars to cross across. They're also making maps that are very useful for the government to be able to visualize different cycling concerns.

And that includes a really cool one. These crazy bastards ride in the middle of the Ottawa winter. And they actually communicate with each other on how well the roads are paved. Because this could completely change the cycle route that you take. And all that data is being input into the maps that they're creating as well. So, Richard is about to cut me off.

Thank you very much for listening. Help us as a community to map in OpenStreetMap and improve some of the attributes and tags related to urban mobility. And lastly, I just want to finish off. The GoPro has been awarded. Gum Singh won it earlier today. So if you're hoping to win that, bad luck.

She's off the back, so you can see if she wants to share it. Thanks for listening. Two quick questions. I'm really interested in that map of where it's lit in Wellington.

Because we're going out for beers later tonight. It's not very lit. So you're going to have to do what you usually do and stumble home blindly.