Research Team: Assoc Prof Akshay Vij, Dr Wei Sun, Dr helen Barrie, Miss Karen Cong, Assoc Prof Debbie Faulkner, Assoc Prof Wei Qian, Dr Ali Ardeshiri
Partners: The Australian Community Transport Association and the iMOVE Cooperative Research Centre (CRC)
Issue
Community transport (CT) is a general term used to describe many different transport services targeted at customers and markets that are underserved by traditional mass public transport services. These may include, among others, older adults, individuals with disabilities, and residents in regional and remote areas. The nature of CT services can vary significantly, depending on the context. CT services may comprise community car services, community bus services, or some combination of both. Some CT services are only offered to individuals who meet specific eligibility criteria in terms of demographic characteristics such as age, income, disability and indigeneity. Some CT services even offer patient and medical transport for eligible customers.
CT services are usually funded through a patchwork of local, state and federal government grants and subsidies. This study specifically examines CT services funded by the Commonwealth Home Support Programme (CHSP). The current level of subsidy support provided by CHSP does not account for variations in the service context. Broadly, the same level of support is offered to all operators, regardless of their service context. In some cases, the cost of service delivery may exceed the level of subsidy support on offer, forcing the CT operator to bear these costs in the short-term, and rendering the delivery of these services financially unsustainable in the long-term.
Aim
To address the need to make community transport financially sustainable, the Australian Community Transport Association (ACTA) and the Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care (DoHAC) are working with 31 selected CHSP transport providers to undertake the Community Transport Pricing Pilot (CTPP) to devise a new way to determine the cost of community transport (CT), along with new policy settings, while also looking to identify innovation that would support a sustainable business model for CT operators. The objective of the CTPP is to develop a more nuanced pricing model such that the level of subsidy support varies commensurately with the costs of service delivery across different service contexts, and CT operators do not have to bear any service delivery costs.
The aims of the CTPP are two-fold:
1. To develop and test a more accurate way of calculating transport costs; and
2. To develop and test alternative policy arrangements.
Outcomes
The outcome of the work will be a Final Report and presentation documenting aims, methods and findings from the study, including but not limited to the following key aspects:
o Does the matrix work in the real world and allow organisations to be sustainable
o Changes/recommendations to improve the NVPM matrix
o Lessons learned that could influence policy improvements
o Any aspects that would hinder national implementation
o Suggestions or key components for such an implementation
o Any benchmarking that has been possible to develop
