Before we say thank you very much for the toy train we ought to ask some key questions. How much will it cost? Are there better ways? The answers are: Lots and Yes.
It seems extraordinary that anyone would contemplate a light-rail system in Canberra when we have a bus service that runs empty most of the time and costs about $500 a household.
A feasibility study is under way and will report next month. Now, you do not get many feasibility studies reporting back along the lines: “”This will be a hideously expensive white elephant and we recommend you should not do it.”
No, no. Consultants who do feasibility studies are engaged to say something (ital) is (end ital) feasible; not to say it is not. Anything is feasible in public transport if you pour enough money in.
The theory is that the first section would be built from Civic to Gungahlin. Later it would be extended to Woden, Belconnen and Tuggeranong.
There have been several reports on Canberra’s transport in recent years. In April 1991 the Newman and Kenworthy report “”Towards a More Sustainable Canberra” floated the light rail idea. Also in 1991 the Commonwealth Parliamentary Joint Committee on the ACT’s inquiry into Gungahlin Transport Links recommended light rail be looked at.
Light rail was becoming very trendy, just like spaghetti freeways were in the 1950s.
The following year, the ACT Government commissioned DJA (Denis Johnston and Associates)/Maunsell Pty Ltd to study future public transport options _ notice, (ital) public (end ital) transport options, not the total transport options. The light-rail band-wagon was off and running, to mix a few metaphors.
It reported in sections from September 1992 to July 1993.
It found it difficult to estimate costs of light rail for Canberra because there are no precedents for “”small” light rail systems. This should have alarmed transport planners. What it mean was that no other city of Canberra’s size in the world has been stupid enough to contemplate such a thing.
The minimum investment would be $50 million, or $2000 a household in the completed Gungahlin.
A significant further cost not factored in is the loss to ACTION of its prime routes which light rail will consume.
From ACTION’s point of view the only good thing about light rail is that it will make its deficits look small by comparison.
There is an odd collusion of interests in light rail for Canberra _ government, private and special interests.
The government interest is that the ACT Government knows that Northbourne Avenue is going to get increasingly busy as Gungahlin grows. It will find it very difficult to cut new freeways along O’Connor Ridge and the base of Mount Ainslie without electoral flak, and has not thought much beyond those freeways for solutions.
The private interest is a fairly standard entrepreneurial move to socialise losses and capital profits with an artificial monopoly to be created by a Government without an answer.
One special interest group is the Australian Conservation Foundation to which light rail is a mantra. Light Rail Good. Cars Bad. It does not see that light rail is not sensible conservation if the rail is under-used.
The other special interest group is the unions who get the work to build and run it.
Light rail is excellent in some cities in some circumstances: densely populated cities with poor public-transport alternatives; cities of a million or more with only two or three main employment centres; cities with decaying and over-stretched road systems; cities with a large number of people without private transport or the income to get it.
In short, light rail is excellent for cities with characteristics exactly the opposite of Canberra’s. Canberra has: good roads, five employment centres, a population of 298,000, an under-used bus system and has 87 per cent of its households owning a car.
None the less, the Minister for Urban Services, David Lamont, said last month that he favoured going straight to light rail, rather than creating a dedicated busway first. It is called cutting your options off early.
There is no doubt that if you pack a light train full of people it will carry them more cheaply with fewer pollutants than the same number of people in a bus, aircraft or in cars. But there is no guarantee that Canberra’s light rail will be packed, except perhaps at peak hour.
Running empty trains is no good for the environment. The government is already committed to the social desirability of a subsidised bus service throughout Canberra. The bus service can at best be only partially replaced by a Canberra main-route light rail. The rail can only service some bus routes, so we are still going to have the bus service. All light rail will do is cream off the best business from the bus service between the five main centres.
Of course, you can always make light rail profitable by bending the town to its needs rather than making transport function for the town. And to some extent that is already happening on several fronts.
Subtle attacks are being made on one of the best things to come out of the ACT Planning Authority in its five-year history _ the draft Gungahlin town plan. This plan will mix shops, housing and small offices, unlike Belconnen and Woden where shops are in one place, offices in another and residences further away still. This plan will enable more employment near houses and will generally diffuse employment and shopping.
Such a plan is bad for the train business. Let’s have concentrated housing in Gungahlin and concentrated offices in Civic and a monopoly train ride between them.
Further, let’s integrate that with the urban renewal program for the rest of Canberra by having a corridor of high density all along Northbourne Avenue to provide a better market for the train.
And let’s give the cars hell in Civic with huge parking fees.
Lastly, let’s deliberately put off any ring roads that might relieve the burden of through traffic in Northbourne Avenue, so all the Northbourne traffic can be blamed on Civic commuters who must be forced to take the train.
In those circumstances one light-rail route might make a profit for one developer, provided its construction were underwritten by the government and the existing bus service were prohibited from competing.
The equity issue is often raised in the public-transport debate. A paper prepared by Ian McAuley, a lecturer in public-sector management at the University of Canberra, shows that far from providing for low-income earners, rail into the CBD in other Australian cities is used by middle- to high-income people with secure jobs in the centre.
Part-timers, especially women with children, have mixed transport needs at odd times and places _ to jobs in the service industries at odd hours when public transport is infrequent, ferrying kids to crehes and schools and shopping.
More recently, Canberra’s population growth has slowed as Australia comes out of the recession. It is no longer comparatively an economically better place to be. Most previous studies put Canberra’s growth at 1.8 to 2.0 per cent, rising to 506,000 by 2016. Latest Australian Bureau of Statistics, however, put Canberra’s growth at 0.6 per cent for the previous year.
There is now a land glut in Canberra.
Sinking $50 million into a Gungahlin link and perhaps $400 for a total Canberra system seems silly if the population growth is uncertain.
With buses you can add and subtract buses as demand varies. And they run on a road system that is already there and has to be maintained anyway. Even if there was a huge shift to public transport, the road system still has to be maintained for commercial vehicles: trucks to bring goods to feed, clothe and house us.
As well as lower population growth, the changes to employment patterns mean fewer people will be working nine to five in the CBD.
Employment in finance and insurance is falling. Employment in offices in general is becoming more dispersed and decentralised as companies see the financial advantage of moving staff and sometimes head offices out of the CBD to places where rent is cheaper. Communications technology is enabling this. To take an extreme example, the Straits Times in Singapore is hiring a team of sub-editors to live and work in Sydney and their editing work will be moved by fibre cable to Singapore.
Canberra is not immune from those sorts of changes.
Another trend is increased part-time employment. Once again lowering the need for transporting people at peak hours.
The light-rail proponents also ignore technological changes that will make buses and cars more environmentally and economically friendly. Solar and electric energy are likely to supplement or replace internal combustion engines and ethanol fuels are already replacing some fossil fuels.
It is the wrong time to commit Canberra to light rail. The bus system has a long way to go to reach capacity. There is only one serious bottleneck like for buses in the near future and that is Northbourne Avenue. The better way to deal with that is to get rid of the through traffic (which is about half of all Northbourne traffic). That can be done by a road from the Federal Highway around the back of Mount Ainslie connecting with the Monaro Highway with a turn-off to the Russell point of the Triangle.
And there are dozens of suggestions around to improve bus patronage.
There is a bizarre inconsistency in a government about to launch into a light-rail project on one hand, when it has three other policies that directly undermine the use of public transport.
First, the ACT Government has gone to extraordinary lengths to reduce petrol prices for commuters.
Secondly, it over-regulates the taxi industry. A taxi plate costs about $250,000. The interest on that is passed on to the taxi users. Further the limiting of the number of licences creates an artificial scarcity of taxis. High taxi fares and fewer taxis discourage people from using public transport in Canberra. People are scared of being stranded without their car and do not like paying high fares, so they take their car rather than a combination of bus and taxi.
Thirdly, the Government has actively encouraged in-fill and higher densities in the inner north. Many of these people will walk and cycle to work, rather than use public transport.
There is no need for this wasteful and therefore environmentally irresponsible scheme. Light rail was first seen as a means towards the end of moving people about the city. It is fast becoming an end in itself. The end will be to make light rail viable. The means will be:
First to force planners and government to work towards a node of high density residences in Gungahlin and a node of high-density employment in the city, both of which are unnecessary.
Second, to artificially make life as unbearable as possible for car drivers by doing nothing about Northbourne through traffic and by raising parking fees.
Third, to ban ACTION from the Gungahlin rail route so profits can be capitalised and losses socialised.
Light rail is the trendy politically correct form of travel, so Canberra must have it. It seems light rail is a solution in search of a problem. It may be the solution for a few vested interests, but it will be a problem for the ratepayers and others who will indirectly pay for it.