Charging Ahead or Charging Alone? A Triadic Integration Framework for Electric Vehicle, Land-Use, and Urban-Development Policy in New South Wales, Australia

Abstract

Electric vehicle (EV) transition is conventionally analysed as a transport or energy problem, yet its physical realisation - chargers, cables, distribution boards, kerbside space, car parking, apartment buildings, industrial depots - is inseparably a land-use and urban-development problem. This study asks whether New South Wales (NSW) planning documents treat it that way. We assemble a 30-document corpus of official NSW planning, transport, energy, and local-government instruments spanning three analytical categories - EV-centred, land-use-centred, and Cross-cutting (neither purely land-use nor purely EV-focused) - and classify, keyword-profile, and topic-model the corpus using a reproducible text-mining pipeline (regex-based domain dictionaries, TF-IDF/NMF topic modelling, co-occurrence network analysis). We introduce a novel Triadic Integration Score (TIS) that combines cross-domain keyword intensity with distributional balance to quantify, document by document, how strongly EV, land-use, and cross-cutting concepts co-occur. Results show a consistent asymmetry: action- and program-level EV and cross-cutting documents with an explicit cross-sectoral delivery mandate (e.g. the Net Zero Cities Action Plan, TIS = 98.6; Future Transport Strategy 2056, TIS = 94.9) most often name EV infrastructure alongside land-use and net-zero-precinct concepts, whereas core land-use instruments - most starkly the Local Strategic Planning Statement template used by every NSW council and the four Greater Sydney District Plans - contain little or no EV-specific vocabulary despite explicit "transport/connectivity" and "infrastructure adapts" provisions. Network analysis identifies "charging," "infrastructure," and "land use" as the corpus's dominant bridging concepts, while "destination charging" remains domain isolated. We propose a Policy Integration Pathway showing that the weakest cross-domain linkage in the NSW system sits precisely at the local statutory-planning tier - the scale at which EV-ready car parking is delivered. The study contributes an empirical NSW corpus, a transferable Triadic Integration Score, and a diagnosis of where - not merely whether - EV transition and spatial planning remain institutionally fragmented in an advanced sub-national planning system.