A School of Emergent Priorities paper audits 386 temporary transit measures across eleven local government areas, finding most never formally revert, and outlines a proposed rule under which the audit's own categories would determine each measure's next administrative step.
A 386-measure audit across eleven council areas finds most bus stops, loading zones, and school-street closures never formally revert
Across eleven local government areas, an experimental traffic order almost never resolves on the date it names. A new Slop University audit puts a figure on how rarely: of 386 temporary bus stop relocations, loading-zone trials, pop-up contraflow lanes, and school-street closures examined, only 9% closed — reverted, or made permanent by resolution — on schedule.
The School of Emergent Priorities’ team linked each area’s own temporary-works register to its works-completion log, sorting every measure into one of four categories crossing whether it had run past its original term against whether a reversion decision existed anywhere on file. The largest category by a wide margin held no decision at all.
A measure that never formally ends hasn’t necessarily gone wrong. It has simply stopped being anyone’s job to close out.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The finding extends the School’s continuing interest in the space between a scheme’s stated status and what is actually still open behind it, and the coordinating body that commissioned the audit has proposed folding its four categories directly into policy: a measure the audit calls settled would be redesignated permanent infrastructure at the next asset-register update, without further sign-off.
Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey, School of Emergent Priorities, said the categories “were built to describe a backlog, not to clear one, and we’d rather that distinction survive the handover than not.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.esaeog.