Getting to work: Smart work centers reduce morning peak traffic flow

Current transport planning in Australia appears to concentrate on increasing supply of transport infrastructure and services and we invert the problem and consider a transport demand management option: smart work centers or hubs located ‘close to load’. Smart work centres are an alternative to CBD office space or home-based work or “third space” options like libraries and cafes. Well-equipped, connected and secure, they are small scale and designed to accommodate small businesses, collaborations and corporate employees working closer to where they live. In principle this is the workplace analogue of water saving devices in the home or distributed energy generation. However, the implementation of smart work centers (SWC) is sparse or close to existing major workplace locations. The research question of this paper is: if SWCs were specifically located near where commuting populations reside (rather than where they work) how would multiple SWCs influence traffic flow on a key arterial road in Sydney? We selected Sydney CBD as a destination zone from the NSW Bureau of Transport Statistics’ origin-destination peak AM data on trips and travel time. We selected only trips by non-mass transit passenger vehicles and used census data to further selected for occupation types that would use a SWC (exclusively Managers, Professionals, Clerical and administrative workers). From this we ranked the origin zones that had the greatest potential for a SWC based on peak AM person hours commuting. For this proof of principle exercise, we selected two segments of Parramatta Road (Sydney’s main western arterial road), which have AM peak flows of ~ 1600 vehicles/hour. From the Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System (SCATS) we obtained vehicle flow rate and speed data for 15minute intervals over the AM peak for the study segments. From this we derived an elasticity of travel time with flow rate with a parabolic regression function. Based on detailed census and traffic flow data, and a conservative assumption about SWC utilization (50%), we find that 8 SWCs can reduce flow by more than 80 vehicles/hour. This equates to all commuters saving approximately 1minute travel time on the study road segments. This is a promising result that suggests further research is worthwhile: investigating the effect of a larger population of SWC on the same study segment; assessing the effect of a larger population of SWC on the metropolitan road network and; surveying the commuting population regarding likely uptake.