Night fell in the hills of eastern Nepal. It was utterly dark and silent, yet Nepal is one of the most densely populated countries on earth. The darkness was because there was no electricity and the silence was because there were no cars. It was several years ago and on return to Canberra I imagined a great hand reaching down from the sky and grabbing the roads and pulling them up like spaghetti and with them the cars, the services stations, the car ports and the car parks. And then the rest was compacted.
You could walk or cycle from one end to the other in less time it now takes to drive. And it would be so peaceful.
Such cities will never be built. The car is such a necessary luxury.
It is Public Transport Week. It is always some week or other. (Next week it’s All Those Who Missed Out Last Week Week.)
People get bored with the Weeks, so the Public Transport Coalition’s statement of claims sent to Urban Services Minister, David Lamont, did not get much of a run.
There are 38 claims seeking lots of equitable, accessible, ecological, sustainable and socially just things. But there is a core of good sense. There is also a warning about the effect of Gungahlin, but more of that anon.
The dice are loaded against public transport, though.
To have good public transport in Canberra you need about four or five times present patronage, or more. That could take a long time. So it will require long-term vision on the part of government.
Then it requires a raft of other sensible smaller decisions by government towards that end. I am not talking about big-spending stuff, but cost-neutral or even cost-beneficial decisions (like making people pay full economic rate for parking and allowing bus fares but not parking on SES allowances.
These little decisions need to be taken in rapid succession to have any impact in building up critical mass. So they won’t happen. You have to have inquiries, committees, appeals, lobby-group pressure and so on for every decision.
Meanwhile, hundreds of private decisions are being made every day without any fuss or inquiry which make public transport less used. That is, people are buying cars, mainly young people, and people are using them rather than using buses which are inconvenient because they are not patronised enough to make the services frequent enough for them too be convenient. A vicious circle.
It takes a courageous Government to act at the best of times. A minority Government in the year before an election is not the best of times.
So the Government will talk and wait, and sit on its hands and then the decisions will be made for it. The pressures of all those young people in Gungahlin will be too great. Two freeways will have to be built: one hacking through the bush at the top of O’Connor and the other hacking though the bush at the foot of Mount Ainslie. (Categorical denials from the ACT Government and the National Capital Planning Authority will be gratefully received c/o The Canberra Times PO Box 7155 Canberra Mail Centre, 2010).
And the answer is not, as the “”Coalition for Public Transport Week” has wisely seen, a monopoly light rail to Gungahlin only built and operated by the same people developing Gungahlin.
Gungahlin is central to Canberra’s future transport headaches, but it has to be considered along with the rest of Canberra. Transport systems have to be city-wide and integrated with other systems, including the bus system.
However, there is clearly going to be a crunch with Gungahlin. The ACT Government has a housing and policy that will permit 40,000 people there, but has no long-term transport policy that will move these people to and from work.
True, its in-fill and Civic employment ceilings are partial solutions, but without a radical shift to public transport (defying all present projections) or the building of two freeways, Northbourne Avenue will simply not take the traffic. In several years the peak-hour delays will be horrific. Extra right- and left-turn lanes (wrecking the entry ambience) could only be a band-aid.
The central issue is getting people to use public transport, and breaking the critical mass that will make it attractive and at least cost-neutral. At present private transport is hugely subsidised through road-making and uneconomic returns on car-parking space. Public transport is also subsidised to a lesser extent, but very inefficiently. So we have the worst of both worlds at present. That has to change.
(By public transport, I include privately owned transport that any member of the public can pay to get on.)
The public-transport coalition’s approach has the advantage of being an all-fronts attack: tax, fees, new buildings, work arrangements, transport mixes etc. And it does not advocate just chucking more money at the buses.
Unfortunately, it does not deal with questions of competition, regulation and ownership. The taxi industry is classic. The Government limits the licences and auctions them for about $200,000 each. It is a false revenue. The only regulation on taxis should be safety and driver knowledge of the town. Then we would have more of them and they would be cheaper.
Further, if people knew lots of taxis were about, they would be happier to go carless to work (by bus). If parking were $15 or $20 a day, bus an occasional taxi would make sense. (Then you could have residential in-fill on car parks.) Also, with more patronage, private bus operators would enter the market, giving more public-transport choice.
Finally, as the coalition points out, cars should pay for the infrastructure they use through extra fuel taxes, not one-off registration fees. This would give further incentive to leave them at home.
We are doing it with water: reduce use so we don’t have to build a dam. Let’s do it with cars: reduce use so we don’t have to build freeways and clean up the pollution.
But while governments continue present policies it won’t happen, and we will be poorer (economically and environmentally) in the long run.