School of Civil Engineering
Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies
Reference no.1048/0517

Be valued for your exceptional knowledge and experience in Engineering Transport
Great opportunity for a scholar with expertise in Transport Engineering
Full time continuing role (remuneration package: $120-170k p.a. which includes leave loading and up to 17% super)

About the opportunity
Applications are invited for the appointment of a Lecturer / Senior Lecturer in the area of Transport in the School of Civil Engineering, within the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies, to coincide with the launching of a transport major as part of the civil engineering undergraduate program. We are seeking candidates with an outstanding record of research and scholarship with proven and substantial research expertise in transport engineering areas of interest to the school, including, but not limited to, Traffic Engineering, Transport Planning, Freight Transport, Public Transport, Active Transport, Travel Behaviour, Highway Engineering, and Transport Safety Engineering.

The School of Civil Engineering is introducing a Major in Transport Engineering in the BE (Civil) degree program in 2017. You will work collaboratively to implement the new Transport Engineering Major and lead a Transport Engineering research group. You will have opportunities to collaborate with researchers in the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies (ITLS), which resides in the Business School of the University of Sydney, www.sydney.edu.au/business/itls, and has achieved worldwide recognition for its research and teaching on transport and logistics management. You will be also expected to engage with the wider research community related to transport engineering within the engineering faculty and other faculties in the University.

About you
The University values courage and creativity; openness and engagement; inclusion and diversity; and respect and integrity. As such, we see the importance in recruiting talent aligned to these values in the pursuit of research excellence. We are looking for a Lecturer / Senior Lecturer with:

a PhD Civil Engineering or related discipline
teaching experience at tertiary level
excellent academic administration skills
excellent teamwork and communication skills to work with a broad range of internal and external stakeholders.

You will be responsible for teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in one or more of the areas of transport and the supervision of research students in these and other specialist areas. You should be able to demonstrate a commitment to high standards of teaching and to the maintenance of academic standards in a broadly based civil engineering school. The school is committed to increasing its research output and to increasing the number of research students.

About us
Since our inception 160 years ago, the University of Sydney has led to improve the world around us. We believe in education for all and that effective leadership makes lives better. These same values are reflected in our approach to diversity and inclusion, and underpin our long-term strategy for growth. We’re Australia’s first university and have an outstanding global reputation for academic and research excellence. Across our campuses, we employ over 6000 academic and non-academic staff who support over 60,000 students.

We are undergoing significant transformative change which brings opportunity for innovation, progressive thinking, breaking with convention, challenging the status quo, and improving the world around us.

The University of Sydney encourages part-time and flexible working arrangements, which will be considered for this role.

For more information about the position, or if you require reasonable adjustment or support filling out this application, please contact Dan Kuhner, Recruitment Consultant, on +61 2 8627 0934 or dan.kuhner@sydney.edu.au.

If you would like to learn more, please refer to the Candidate Information Pack for the position description and further details.

To be considered for this position it is essential that you address the online selection criteria. For guidance on how to apply visit: How to apply for an advertised position.

Closing date: 11:30pm 30 July 2017 (Sydney Time)

The University of Sydney is committed to diversity and social inclusion. Applications from people of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds; equity target groups including women, people with disabilities, people who identify as LGBTIQ; and people of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent, are encouraged.

If we think your skills are needed in other areas of the University, we will be sure to contact you about other opportunities.

The University reserves the right not to proceed with any appointment.

Candidate Information Pack

Selection Criteria

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Official Post:

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‘Trams’ is the generic Australian term for smaller trains that in the US are called streetcars (in a shared right of way) and light rail (in an exclusive but usually not separated right-of-way).

The history of trams in Sydney dates from 1879-1961. Notably the early trams (dubbed the Juggernaut) were steam powered, as electric power was not yet feasible. Trackage peaked at 291 km in 1923 (the same year as the peak in the US), and ridership peaked in 1945 (also the same year as the US) with over 400 million rides per year, served by up to 1600 cars on the network at any peak times. Voommaps has developed a high-quality stylised map of the peak network.

Books about Trams and Transit in Sydney. I acquired these (for work, on behalf of the University) from the Sydney Bus Museum, in what may have been their customer largest purchase, ever.

Famously Melbourne kept its trams while Sydney engaged in ‘bustitution‘, converting its Tram routes to buses. Unlike the US, there does not seem to be too much nostalgia for Sydney’s disbanded network of trams, perhaps because residential mobility is so high, and so few people lived (or parents lived) in Sydney in the 1940s or 1950s when trams were still running.

On the other hand, the flexible bus networks seem to accumulate circuity in a way that hard-coded tram networks would find difficult. It would be difficult to reroute trams in order to serve a local constituent to the detriment of the system performance as a whole, while buses are easily changed, and these changes seem hard to reverse.

Yet the idea of trams remains more popular than the reality of buses. Some of this is idealisation, some of this is differences in quality of service that are associated with the mode rather than services, and some of this is a real difference in ride quality. This is true so much that a proposed electric bus rapid transit service was pitched as a “trackless tram“.

Bus planning in Sydney. Map via @Kypros1992 in Twitter

Sydney built its first modern light rail line (L1) along an old circuitous goods line in 1997 and extended it in 2014.

A second, more significant line (L2 and L3, denoting the two branches) is now under construction from the city along the George Street spine to the Southeastern suburbs down the Anzac Parade, serving the University of New South Wales. This is a dense corridor with a lot of potential demand, and I suspect it will be busy from day one in 2019, and in retrospect, there will be significant regret that it was not a Metro. The shopping district on George Street is being pedestrianized as the tracks are being laid.

The new light rails are designed L1, L2, and L3 (the L for LRT), but people still call them trams.

Sydney’s second CBD is planned to have another set of lines radiating from the core in Parramatta. The LRT networks will apparently not interconnect directly, at least not in existing plans, but both will connect with Sydney Trains (and perhaps the Metro if the Sydney Metro West line is ever built connecting Sydney with Parramatta). Uncertainty about whether the Metro will be constructed has reduced the size of the Parramatta network, as the eastern leg of the system serves similar areas to the proposed Metro, so they don’t want to build both at the same time. Of course the Metro will have greater station spacings, so the LRT and Metro don’t necessarily compete as much as they complement, but it is an issue in a world with scarce resources, even in Australia. While one could easily imagine extending an LRT eastward along Parramatta Road to the University of Sydney and on to the City somewhere, especially if it were sufficiently separated from the Metro Line, the ‘trackless tram’ serves the same function, and the government can’t do both.

A bi-radial system, with hub and spoke systems centered on different CBDs eventually joining is in fact how the Streetcars in the Minneapolis- St. Paul region evolved.

Another line was mooted from Barangaroo to the University of Sydney, but this proposal has been returned to the sheds.

Is Melbourne better for having kept its trams? I suspect most people would say yes, but I am not convinced. Would Sydney have been better off if it had kept its trams? This is less obvious. Though the cities are similarly sized, if dissimilar topographically, the transit mode share in Sydney (23%) is notably higher than Melbourne (16%). This is due in part to more trains, but Sydney’s buses (+trams+ferries) outperform Melbourne’s trams (+buses+ferries) in journey to work trips as well.