Facilitating the communication between different elements of the city infrastructure is a crucial task, and the transportation system is what the success of communication hinges on.
With the integration of improved transportation system principles into the infrastructure of Melbourne, the environment for purring the growth of local SMEs has been created. Affecting the PPP (public–private partnership) market on an internal level, the changes within the transportation system have incorporated the key principles of the Australian economy and, thus, contribute to the advance of the Australian market.
The most obvious changes made to the Australian transportation system so far, the alterations in the process of decision making process must be mentioned.
With the incorporation of the key economic principles into the supervision of the transportation processes, a rapid increase in the flexibility of the transportation processes for all parties involved (Australian Government vi). The decision making process, therefore, has been shifted towards the reduction of financial risks and the proper distribution of liabilities among the parties.
The recent suggestion of integrating the key economic concepts into the improvement of the city infrastructure has triggered the necessity to reinvent the cost assessment strategies.
At present, the traditional CBA approach allows for estimating the approximate revenue that the Australian government and the local SMEs, as well as major entrepreneurships, are going to attain with the incorporation of the new transportation principles into the city infrastructure, is rather viable.
The new approach, however, will require a rearrangement of financial resources, since the costs for the issues related to transportation, are expected to be cut: “By reducing the comparative cost of public transport as compared to driving, we will encourage more people to use the public transport that is closest to them” (Department of Transport, Planning and Local Transportation (Planning) 101).
Thus, with the integration of the economic principles integrated into the projects related to public transportation, the CBA analysis is most likely to be shaped considerably, with a significant shift of the emphasis onto the economic profitability of the avenues chosen and an impressive benefit acquired from the transportation fees assigned by the new principles of transportation regulation (Department of Treasury and Finance 15).
The positive changes, which the inclusion of the key economic principles into the city infrastructure in general and the system of transportation in particular will supposedly be delivered, also concern the transparency of the financial transactions carried out in the course of the transportation process.
There is no secret that the incorporation of economic concepts into the public transportation processes may lead to considerable ethical issues, including the possibility of money laundering, bribes, etc.
In order to prevent the possibility of compromising the integration of economy and transportation in Australia, it will be necessary to design a system allowing for complete and uncompromising transparency of the financial transactions within the transportation sphere.
Particularly, the cost-benefit analysis (CBA) requires especial transparency. More to the point, the key “institutional and governance arrangements” (Australian Government 6) also need to у as transparent as possible so that the tiniest issues could be located immediately and addressed accordingly.
The concept of public–private partnership is not new to the Australian government. Allowing for a considerable flexibility, the specified approach was been in use for quite a while in a range of Australian regions, including Victoria, New South Wales, etc. (Regan and Smith 365).
Largely defined as toll roads, PPPs have contributed to the evolution of the state economy, as the toll that travellers are supposed to pay makes an impressive chunk of the state budget and is used for the development of the state economy. Therefore, it can be assumed that the implications of applying economic concepts to the projects related to transportation in Australia should be deemed as rather worthy.
Naturally, the specified approach is far from being flawless.
As much space as it provides for the evolution of the Australian entrepreneurship in general and the development of more elaborate logistics approaches in particular, the Plan Melbourne Metropolitan Planning Strategy has several major flaws as well, and the lack of control over the process of using the revenues from transportation as the means to advance the state economy is the key one.
It would be naïve to expect that no money laundering will occur in the process; hence, a more elaborate supervision strategy must be designed. A specific system of reporting can be used as the basis for possible bias prevention.
Despite some of the bias related to the overly optimistic expectations, the success of the new transportation system due to its relation to the economic principles that the Australian private entrepreneurship is guided by is obvious.
The ostensible inconsistency with the standards that are traditionally applied to the assessment of the transportation efficacy in Europe and the USA does not seem to affect the success of the Australian infrastructure update.
More to the point, the changes applied to the Melbourne infrastructure open new opportunities for SMEs and major corporations’ evolution due to a stronger emphasis on the economic aspects of the solutions provided.
Works Cited
Australian Government. “Productivity Commission Inquiry Report Volume 1.” Commonwealth of Australia. 2014. Web.
Department of Transport, Planning and Local Transportation (Planning). “A More Connected Melbourne.” Plan Melbourne. Melbourne, AU: Department of Transportation. 81–109. Print.
Department of Treasury and Finance. Economic Evaluation for Business Cases Technical Guidelines. Melbourne, AU: Department of Treasury and Finance. 2013. Web.
Regan, Michael and Jim Smith. “Infrastructure Procurement: Learning from Private – Public Partnership Experiences Down Under’.” Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 29 (2011), 363–378. Print.