In the first six posts of this Research series we’ve focused on what the Chamber survey tells us about the experience of broken transport in Broome — long waits, no-shows, airport overcharging, late-night safety, dissenting operator views.
This post is a different question. What does that experience cost the town, in dollars, per year?
The honest answer is somewhere between $4 million and $12 million a year. The range is wide because the inputs are uncertain. The point of this post is to make every assumption that produces that range explicit, so anyone who disagrees with us can pull the model apart and rebuild it with their own numbers.
If you skim only one part of this post, skim the assumptions section. The conclusion follows directly from them.
The inputs
Broome Chamber membership. Approximately 350 active members on the most recent member register. This is the universe we are sampling against.
Disrupted-operations rate. 73% of Chamber members surveyed reported disrupted operations from unreliable transport in the last 12 months. We treat the 77-respondent survey as a representative sample of the wider membership. That is a methodological assumption — small-town surveys are vulnerable to self-selection — but the response cohort spanned every major sector, so we are using 73% as the working estimate for the whole register.
Cost per disrupted business per year. This is the variable we have the least data on. We have one verbatim from the survey of a tourism operator who purchased vehicles and hired additional staff — a structural workaround that probably costs that business in the tens to low hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. We have other verbatims describing smaller absorbed costs (missed bookings, taxi vouchers issued, overtime to cover transport gaps).
In the absence of a published Broome-specific cost study, we use a conservative range of $15,000 to $50,000 per disrupted business per year.
The lower bound corresponds to a small operator absorbing missed bookings, occasional overtime, and one-off accommodation-relocation costs. The upper bound corresponds to a mid-sized operator running structural workarounds (fleet purchase, dedicated driver, contracted shuttle).
Both bounds are below what the worst-affected respondents are clearly experiencing. The model is deliberately conservative.
The calculation
| Component | Value |
|---|---|
| Chamber members | 350 |
| Disrupted by transport (73%) | ~256 businesses |
| Cost per business per year (low) | $15,000 |
| Cost per business per year (high) | $50,000 |
| Total annual cost (low) | ~$3.8M |
| Total annual cost (high) | ~$12.8M |
The midpoint of the range is $8.3M per year.
What this number includes
The model captures direct, repeated costs that fall on businesses absorbing the transport gap:
- Lost revenue from customers who could not travel
- Staff overtime to cover transport-related delays
- Purchased fleet vehicles bought solely to substitute for unreliable transport
- Wages of drivers and dispatch staff hired internally to operate those vehicles
- Vouchers and refunds issued to customers as service recovery
What this number does not include
This is the more interesting list, because it tells you where the real cost of broken transport is hiding.
- Workforce participation effects. Hospitality and health-services shifts that go unstaffed because workers cannot get home safely. The wage cost to the worker, not just the business.
- Tourism reputation drag. Travellers who do not return to Broome, or who tell friends not to come, because their first impression was a cash-only kerbside transfer. This is real and large and unmeasured.
- Aboriginal community access to services. Elders, families and patients in Broome and surrounding communities who delay or skip medical appointments, school commitments, and cultural gatherings because transport is uncertain. The cost falls on individuals and on the public health system, not on the businesses we surveyed.
- Compounding economic effects. Businesses that decline to expand into Broome — or out of Broome into the wider Kimberley — because the transport network cannot support the workforce or the supply chain. This is the cost of decisions that never get made.
If you added these in, the cost figure would not double. It would probably be three to four times what the model captures. We are not going to publish that bigger number yet because we cannot defend it line by line. We will defend the $4M to $12M range.
What this number is for
Three audiences.
The WA State Government. When we talk to the Department of Transport, the Department of Jobs Tourism Science and Innovation, or the office of any Kimberley MP, we need a defensible number on the page that says doing nothing about Broome’s transport network has a measurable annual cost to the regional economy.
The Broome Chamber membership. The respondents already know they are absorbing this cost. What the model does is name the aggregate. When a Chamber member sees that the town as a whole is losing somewhere between $4M and $12M a year, the case for collective action — including supporting a rideshare launch — becomes easier to make.
Pearl Coast Rental internally. We are the operator with the most to gain from a working transport network. The model tells us what scale the opportunity actually is, which informs how much we are willing to invest in driver activation, fleet capacity, and community programs. If the cost of broken transport is $8M a year, the opportunity to fix it is large enough to justify a launch the size of ours. If the cost had come in at $400k a year, we would be building a much smaller business.
Where the model is wrong
The most likely sources of error, in declining order of impact:
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The $15,000 to $50,000 per-business range is a guess, not a measurement. A proper economic study would interview a representative sample of disrupted businesses and assemble actual cost data. We have not done that. If somebody wants to fund the study, get in touch.
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The 73% disrupted rate is from a 77-respondent survey. The confidence interval is wide. We could be 10 percentage points off in either direction. We have noted this in post 01.
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The 350-member Chamber register is not the full Broome business universe. There are operators in town who are not Chamber members. The model is therefore an undercount of business-side cost, even before we include the workforce, community, and tourism categories above.
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Cost is not linear. A mid-sized hospitality operator absorbing $30k of disruption costs is not the same kind of disruption as a sole-trader tradesperson absorbing $15k. The model treats them as additive, which loses important detail.
Where the model is right
Even with every caveat above, the order of magnitude does not change.
A 350-member chamber, 73% disrupted, even at a modest $10k per business per year, produces $2.5M of annual absorbed cost. A more realistic rate produces something between $4M and $12M. To get below $2M you have to assume either that the Chamber register is much smaller than 350, or that the 73% is wildly unrepresentative, or that the average disrupted business is only losing a few thousand dollars a year. None of those assumptions holds up against the verbatims.
The cost is real. It is millions a year. It is currently being paid by Broome businesses, Broome workers, and Broome’s visitors — without any of them having been asked.
What we are doing about it
The same things we have been writing about across this Research series. Launching a rideshare operation. Running a fleet. Building a driver development pipeline. Publishing the trip data so anyone can verify whether the cost is dropping.
The 2027 re-survey will measure the disrupted-operations rate again. If our launch has worked, it falls. The model we have published here gives the town a way of measuring how much value that drop is actually worth.