Industry

Transport

Transportation is the backbone of any thriving economy. Today’s challenges of technology, increasing urbanisation, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and more, require robust economic analysis and modelling to underpin public policy decision making, and private sector responses in the market.

Talk to our transport team

The rail, air, sea, and road transportation sectors are undergoing major changes. Regulatory shifts, climate change and the need to minimise emissions, urban congestion, and technology and data innovations such as autonomous vehicles and drones are reshaping the movement of people and goods.

We’ve played an integral role in deciphering these changes for clients in the public and private sectors for over 20 years. Efficient and effective transport policies and regulations are crucial to the economy as they increase competitiveness and support economic growth.

Policy and regulatory reforms: We support complex decision making by applying sound economic tools such as cost-benefit analysis, impact assessment, and real options analysis to identify, develop or evaluate policy and regulatory reforms. We have advised on reforms relating to road pricing and tolling, taxis and ridesharing, driver licensing, heavy vehicles, rail safety, automated vehicles and sector emissions reductions.
Business cases and investment options: Helping clients to develop and critically assess their investment options through the development of robust evidence-based business cases. Including helping them understand how they can build resilience in through their operations and investment decisions.
Regulatory frameworks: In more regulated segments of the sector such as rail, ports, terminals and aviation sectors we have helped clients design regulatory frameworks, incentive schemes and charging structures, and assisted clients to undertake price reviews, efficiency benchmarking, asset valuation, cost of capital assessment, and demand forecasting.
Competition policy: We have particular expertise in competition policy including rights for third-party access and our advice has informed some of the region’s largest competition cases (including the first case resolved under the amended section 46 of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010) and mergers and acquisitions (where we have appeared as economic experts before the Australian Competition Tribunal).

The volume of data and complexity of social issues underpinning the transport sector means policymakers, industry leaders, or stakeholders can find data-backed solutions through economic analysis and frameworks for decisions such as:

Public sector

Developing a regulatory framework for airports to increase the efficiency of airport operations.

Using cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the economic impact of regulatory reforms to improve rail and road safety.

Advising on whether a merger between ride-sharing companies was likely to be anti-competitive, based on a quantitative analysis of substitution between ride-sharing, taxis and other forms of transport.

Developing and assessing major transport projects' business cases.

Analysing financial data to estimate the efficient costs of supplying electronic payments infrastructure in taxis.

Developing a set of pricing principles for road managers to apply in charging for bridge assessments required for heavy vehicle permits.

Private sector

Analysing data to advise an airline on whether allegations of predatory conduct could be sustained.

Developing a Net Zero 2050 roadmap and sustainable aviation fuel strategy to inform policy development.

Estimating the regulatory value of assets using different valuation methods to support efficient investment decisions.

Assessing the climate change-related exposures for a port terminal operator and identifying the implications for the effectiveness of its current regulatory framework.

Using an analysis of comparable firms, estimating the cost of capital for container and bulk freight port services.