The latest statistics show that almost all the gains made from reaching an average of 40% renewable energy in electricity generation in Australia have been cancelled out by rising greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from transport.
Andrew Chuter, a veteran public and active transport campaigner, was on the Socialist Alliance ticket in the City of Sydney council elections. He told Green Left that the car-centred transport system is destroying the climate.
“Vast sums have been spent on private motorways that don’t have satisfactory business cases at all. They require massive taxpayer subsidies, in the form of toll rebates, to encourage people to drive on them,” he said.
Chuter also helped lead the campaign against WestConnex private tollways, which now hold Sydney’s transport system in a vice-like grip.
“What funds left over are spent on poorly advised public transport projects, which are more about privatisation and property developer interests.”
He said society has been conditioned for more than a century to the idea that “a car is an absolutely necessary thing for people to get around, and you have to have one”.
He said the mindset was “carefully constructed and socially engineered by big motor companies”.
He said car manufacturing companies’ international fairs always showed cities bustling with cars. Television programs, sponsored by General Motors, manufactured the myth of “America’s love affair with cars”, which the rest of the world was urged to follow.
Chuter argues that the car-centred transport system is killing and maiming large numbers of people. Toxic air pollution and its contribution to global heating are the other costs.
“There are a billion cars in the world and there are a million deaths every year from car crashes. It’s about 1200 deaths a year in Australia.
“One of the factors in the rise in death is the size of cars. The physics of a collision are that a larger vehicle stands a higher chance of survival … so people think ‘if I get a bigger car, I’ll be safer’.
“If it is rational for someone to buy a larger car for their safety, for the safety of the whole of society, it’s dysfunctional.”
Social costs
A car-centred transport system imposes not only a toll in physical injuries, but it has a big psychological and social cost to society, Chuter argues.
He said the normal social interactions you have while walking or cycling are more on a human scale.
“While walking to the neighbourhood store or to work, you pass people and greet them. But, in a car-centred culture, you are forced to travel longer distances to work, or get the necessities of life, and neighbourhood life and culture breaks down,
“Once this is displaced with travelling to more distant shopping malls, schools or workplaces, young people (and older people who don’t drive) lose some of their personal independence.
“Many parents today wouldn’t dream of allowing their children to walk or cycle to do those things. That has a tremendous toll on children’s self-worth and independence, and it contributes to mental health problems in later life.”
If we were to imagine a differently shaped society — where good public and transport systems were prioritised — would we have to step back into a less technologically developed society?
Learn from Japan
Chuter thinks Australia could learn some valuable lessons from Japanese cities.
“Japan is one of the most high-tech countries in regards to transport in the world. After World War II, Japan made huge efforts to build cities with the world’s best public transport network. It’s not just a lot of subways, or a lot of this public transport system, it’s the integration of those services.
“[Japan has] a high-speed rail network, supplemented by suburban commuter services for daily commuter trips. On another level, metro services provide a lot of even shorter trips, in a big spider web-like network, to cover trips to the gym or the shops or other little daily trips that aren’t commuter trips.
“There is also a good cycling and walking pedestrian infrastructure that connects it all.
“[The integrated system] lines up the connections from one service to another, so you can easily connect from one network to another like clockwork. This means that for any kind of trip you need to make, you can do it in the quickest and most environmentally sustainable way.
“Japanese cities largely have no on-street parking. Think about that: 140 million people living in dense cities and there’s nowhere to park on the street! I mean, this seems unimaginable in a city like Sydney.
“In Japan, there are paid car parks for each city block and you’re not allowed to own a car unless you have a place to park it.
“That means that when you need to park, there’s a spot available. But all the cars are corralled into this one paid parking area and the rest of the neighbourhood is free of cars.”
Urbanisation
Australia has one of the most urbanised populations in the world — about 95% of the population lives in cities and large towns — so it should learn from Japan.
“Cities emerged because people needed to be close to resources. Distance is the enemy and so you have to plan your land use very carefully around the port or the river or jobs...
“The populations of the inner parts of our capital cities used to be much denser. The terrace houses [had] many more people living in them and they managed to get around very easily on tram networks.
“Sydney had one of the largest networks: 300 kilometres of tram tracks. The process of removing that tram network and pushing people out to suburbia created the low-density, car-dependent sprawl.”
Will a shift to electric cars solve these problems?
“The Climate Council published a report last year, Shifting gear: The path to cleaner transport, which said that by the year 2030 we’ll need a big shift to electric cars, but we will also need to halve the number of cars or half the total vehicle kilometres travelled," Chuter said.
“I don’t think that that has really sunk into the average person’s thinking.
“If you own a car today, toss a coin to decide whether, in five years, you’ll still have a car. That’s the proportion that will need to be reduced by 2030.
Installing electric vehicle (EV) charging stations on the street has a significant cost, Chuter said. It means putting more infrastructure on footpaths and cables and other things that interfere with pedestrian access.
“Fifty per cent of a car’s lifetime emissions are its manufacture: all the metals and plastics and everything else that goes into building a car in the first place.
“So, the best level of greenhouse reduction you can achieve — even assuming that you charge your EV entirely from renewable energy — is a 50% reduction in the transport emissions.
“But we’ve got to get to zero greenhouse emissions; to get just halfway, by 2030, we've got to have to halve the number of cars ... so the problem is really far too urgent just to rely on a shift to electric cars.”