During a depression maintaining local roads does have the advantage of creating jobs where the unemployed live, unlike the Great Depression road schemes in this country that built ‘scenic drives’ in remote locations. Highway and railway works are less likely to be spread around in the same useful way as local road works.

The point you seem to have missed from my previous comment is that the operational employment that flows from building new PT routes will also occur when building new highway routes as a consequence of the induced traffic effect. Where new railways need new drivers, new station staff and new signals and train maintenance staff, the induced new traffic from new highways will need new mechanics, new panel beaters, new brakepad and tyre fitters, etc. Assuming, of course, that the majority of vehicles are serviced at the recommended km intervals rather than at the recommended time interval.

So I guess the difference in “jobs creation” comes down to the bus and train drivers, and all the other jobs that are created in a public transport system. Not the MAIN advantage of public transport, but in times like we have at the moment certainly not something to completely ignore.

There is a flaw to this part of the argument. New roads induce more traffic thereby creating many long-term jobs for those maintaining and panelbeating cars and so forth.

Road and rail works that are primarily concrete pours are very capital intensive, but not actually that labour intensive. That is one good reason for not throwing huge amounts of money at major new urban infrastructure such as the CBD tunnel or Waterview connection, even if either project was ‘shovel ready’. Fortunately ordinary highways in this country are built with flexible pavements so construction accounts for a much smaller proportion of life-cycle costs than is the case for the concrete pavements typicaly used in the USA and maintenance accounts for a much higher proportion of life-cycle costs.

If the objective is to funnel funding into shovel ready transport projects to stimulate unskilled and semi-skilled employment then catching up on maintenance backlogs is the obvious area where the money needs to be spent. Unfortunately no politician has ever made a name for themselves by ensuring that public assets are properly maintained, they all want a monument that they think will make their name immortal.