In June last year, Transport for NSW and Roads and Maritime Services were keen to release draft plans for new cycleways on Castlereagh Street and Liverpool Street. A RMS officer sent the plans to Mr Gay's office, which did not reply for a few days. The bureaucrat chased up with Marie Scoutas, a former ABC journalist and a press secretary to Mr Gay to ask if she'd had a look at the material. "I saw it and decided to stop looking," Scoutas replied. "Are you aware Reg and Duncan have had a meeting about this – on Monday I think? Worth chatting to Reg I think." Reg was Reg Fisk, a former public servant and current advisor to Mr Gay, who at one stage was working in the office as a volunteer.

Mr Fisk acted as a conduit for businesses concerned about the impact of bike lanes on their access, while also making clear his own concerns about the promotion of cycling. In one email to a staffer for Sydney City councillor Christine Forster, Mr Fisk outlined why he agreed with a Miranda Devine newspaper column that labelled cycleways a "win-win for stupidity". "There is a substantial risk that the current green fetish for cycling results in a reduction in the return from public transport and therefore pressures to reduce public transport services as governments seek to reduce their financial losses," he wrote. "Not everybody can cycle and people with disabilities would be more at risk from cost pressures to reduce losses in public services that will result in shifts by the commuting public from public transport to cycling encouraged by the lord mayor." What Mr Fisk did not say, however, was that the state government also has a target to double the proportion of people cycling.

But if Mr Fisk was cool on bike paths, he particularly disliked car-share, the fast-growing business run by companies such as GoGet and which has been promoted by City of Sydney Council. Mr Fisk advised Mr Gay in January 2014 that companies such as GoGet not be allowed to use kerbside parking spaces on public streets. On February 26, Mr Fisk wrote to the chief operating officer of RMS, Ken Kanofski and a senior NSW bureaucrat, Anissa Levy, copying in Mr Gay's chief of staff, to tell them that Mr Gay requested a policy along these lines. "The minister has asked that we get a draft report on allocation of scarce parking space to car share businesses," Mr Fisk wrote. "The report should look at a determination that dedicated car share spaces not be provided kerbside but in commercial car parks," he wrote.

"[Mr Gay] has also suggested that if any are provided on streets they only be provided where existing on-road garden beds are removed. For example, in the area of East Sydney ... there is a largely paved garden closing off Riley Street and, if on-street car share spaces are desired by the council, they could be positioned in lieu of that paved area, returning that alienated road space to effectively road use." But Mr Fisk, who lives in Surry Hills and who has two car-share spots in close proximity to his house, found himself repeatedly frustrated as bureaucrats delayed the development of the suggested policy. By October 13 Mr Fisk tried again in the context of two "flawed" policies the government had or would be making. "With the probability that the Plan for Growing Sydney (the next Metro Strategy) will be up loaded today by Department of Planning and Environment with its various proposals to limit off-street parking and therefore make on-street parking more competitively sought after and, the Apartment Design Guide which has similar flawed proposals, it seems appropriate that we reconsider the RMS position on car-share space allocation," Mr Fisk wrote in a briefing for Mr Gay. (The Apartment Design Guide was released by Planning Minister Pru Goward, and proposed apartments near rail stations would not need to include off-street car parks).

Mr Gay, however, has not acted on Mr Fisk's recommendations, despite complaining to Parliament in November that lord mayor Clover Moore "put a shared car space outside my house". A spokeswoman for Mr Gay said Mr Fisk had always disclosed that he lived near car-share spots. "Ministerial staff are employed to provide a broad range of advice and questions over policy issues, including efficiency of competing uses of scarce road space, which the minister may choose to accept or reject," a spokeswoman said.