By Tracy Sorensen
The 20th century's dangerous liaison with the car is still going strong. There are more cars now than ever before. A new one comes into the world every few seconds. They are still objects of envy, desire, status and theft. While most city drivers spend much of their time behind the wheel cursing traffic snarls and congestion, the car still symbolises the ability to "get away from it all" by accelerating into the distance.
People eat, sleep and make love in cars. They are sometimes born and often die in them. Human personalities have become intertwined with them. Some individuals — mostly men — define themselves and are defined by their cars: "You know Joe Smith? Drives a yellow '84 Cortina?"
They symbolise social groups: The Datsun Humber van with board racks is to the surfie what the little red MG is (or was) to the bull market yuppie.
Personalities change according to whether or not they are behind the wheel. The socially retiring can become daring suburban heroes doing "360s" in the car parks. Normally polite people become, in heavy traffic, crazed beings on a teeth-clenched, horn-blowing campaign against the stream of idiot drivers sent to try them.
For a country as big as Australia, cars and four-wheel-drive off-road vehicles have opened up the land to 20th century inhabitants.
The way millions of Australians spend virtually every day of their lives is inconceivable without the car. Other than the hours spent driving to and from work, there's the weekly drive to the hypermarket to load up the boot and back seat, to the drive-in bottle shop, the corner shop, the video shop for the evening's entertainment — just about everything most of us do involves cars.
Life and death
Invented as a means of transport, cars have become much more than that. They have been a central feature in the socioeconomic, and even emotional, landscape of the 20th century in the West. But how much longer can we go on with cars?
Are they worth dying for?
It's not an extravagant question. To go on producing and using the conventional oil-burning motor car at the current rate is to endanger life on this planet. Motoring journalist Brian Woodward pointed out the car's contribution to the greenhouse effect in an article for Simply Living:
"There are more than 400 million motor vehicles in the world. Each year, they add more than 500 million tonnes of hot carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, unburned hydrocarbons, sulphur and a myriad of other chemicals to the atmosphere. Even the air conditioning systems in cars tip chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere." In just a few decades, cars and other internal combustion engines have ripped through the earth's remaining oil reserves at an alarming rate. According to the California-based environmental consultants Eco Systems, the US has only 16 years' worth of recoverable oil left.
In itself, says the group, this is a major danger to international security: the US has just shown that the threat of major global catastrophe did not hold it back from going to war for oil.
Then there's the smog. One of Sydney's worst smog days occurred on May 6, when the State Pollution Control Commission's Sydney Pollution Index recorded a peak of 218 points. Readings of 50 are considered high.
Still weather, industrial pollution and a burning-off program combined with the fumes from internal combustion engines to produce the thick brown haze which hung low over the city. There was anecdotal evidence of an increase in asthma attacks.
Bad timing for the state Liberal government, which had just announced elections for May 25. In an attempt to be seen doing something, Premier Nick Greiner announced a "smog summit" to be held just after the elections.
Greenpeace spokesperson Karla Bell dismissed the suggestion as a "way of fobbing people off".
"The main culprits for air pollution in Sydney's west are well known: cars and trucks", she said. "Cars and trucks produce much of the nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons (especially benzene) and lead which are polluting our air. Nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons react to form ozone, which is the principle component of photochemical smog.
"Ozone can cause inflammatory reactions, early ageing symptoms and early chronic obstructive disease in the human lung."
Bell pointed out that in traffic-crammed Los Angeles, which suffers the worst photochemical smog in the world, ozone concentrations can exceed .2 ppm and .3 ppm, compared with World Health Organisation standards of .08 ppm. According to SPCC measurements, western Sydney registered LA levels on at least one day in the past summer.
'War' in the streets
Traffic accidents, meanwhile, represent a more immediate threat to life. The number of people who die on the roads each year makes sitting in a moving car one of life's more dangerous experiences.
Somehow, we get used to the sight and sound of ambulances wailing up and down the highways at depressingly regular intervals. We get used to the idea that there is always someone being killed or badly hurt in the cause of getting from A to B in relative convenience and comfort.
The Roads and Traffic Authority of NSW, widely seen as a gung ho proponent of transport by private vehicles, released a document last year estimating that at current rates, 10,000 people will die from road accidents in the state during the next 10 years and 14,000 people will be left with permanent brain damage or will be paraplegics or quadriplegics. "The cost to the community will be about $20 t noted.
The California-based Eco Systems wryly comments: "Congress did not declare war on Vietnam, and 50,000 American soldiers died there. Hundreds of thousands of people came out to protest on the streets of Washington. Since the Vietnam war, there have been over 700,000 traffic fatalities in the USA, and Congress has not declared war on the car. Is this constitutional? Has there been a demonstration of even a thousand people marching on Washington concerning the continuing USA street war?"
In cities, the car has been a major destroyer of quality of life. Many people can't sleep properly at night because of the traffic thundering past their windows. The streets are unsafe for children to play in or near.
More cars, buses and trucks lead to pressure for more and better roads. It is beginning to dawn on some city planners, and is passionately pointed out by the hundreds of residents' action groups mushrooming in major cities, that more roads do not ease traffic congestion. They attract more cars.
But we go on getting more roads.
Roads and freeways often use up the open space or remnants of urban bush land that can provide residents with some measure of relief from the pressures of city living.
"A six-lane freeway has to alter people's daily behaviour patterns, particularly those of children and old people. They have an in-built fear of major roads, and who can blame them?", Peter Warrington, a member of the Wolli Creek Preservation Society, told Green Left. A proposed six-lane freeway along the creek would destroy Sydney's last remaining patches of native bush.
"At Wolli Creek you have a broad community within a valley. It's a focus for a lot of recreation, and it's a cultural link with the past. The freeway will take what is as closely knit a community as you get in the suburbs of Australia and rip it in half."
Destroying the alternative
But if life in cities is made miserable by the car, for many people life without one is worse. The outer suburbs of all Australian major cities (and all smaller centres) are poorly serviced by public transport. In these areas, life revolves around the car. To be without one is to be virtually housebound or dependent on family and friends.
Libraries, theatres, universities, speciality shops and other facilities tend to be concentrated in city centres. To be without a car is to go without all the things that can give city life its cultural richness.
Women in the home looking after small children are often hard hit: a "family car" is of little use during the day if the husband has used it to go to work.
Even the best public transport in Australia — the services concentrated in the inner cities — is maintained only at a level which assumes that most transport needs will be satisfied by the
Under these conditions, it would be unfair, and entirely impractical, to call on everyone to do what some individuals have done: give up their cars. This is a problem which can't be solved at an individual level.
A sustainable transport policy which would allow people to get out of their cars and still get to work and play would have to reverse the postwar shift from public to private transport.
Peter Warrington points out that until the end of World War II, Sydney's rail and tram systems were "the major components of a well-balanced, efficient transport system. In 1946-47, over 2 million daily trips were undertaken on rail and tram, compared with less than 400,000 by private car.
"With buses included, the proportion of all trips performed by public transport was 87%. By 1981, the situation had been completely reversed. The proportion of all trips performed by public transport had fallen to 13%. The private car had replaced public transport as the dominant mode of transport in Sydney."
Such a shift would require political and economic changes going well beyond the policies on offer from the two major political parties.
Who benefits?
The reason for the unwillingness of both major parties to detach themselves from the powerful road lobby is simple: there is more private profit to be made in cars. Their centrality in the Australian market is illustrated by the fact that new car sales are used as indicators of the health of the economy as a whole. In a country as big as Australia, freight takes on great significance; private freight companies are among Australia's largest and richest corporations.
Despite government acknowledgement of many criticisms of the current system, and a federal government pledge to lower greenhouse emissions by 20% by the year 2000, the road lobby is still winning out over the need to upgrade publicly funded transport.
In fact, part of the economic restructuring of the 1980s, with the search for new areas of profit, privatised the bits of the public system that were potential money-spinners. Unprofitable passenger services have been allowed to deteriorate as governments cut public spending.
In the current NSW election campaign, the Liberals are promising to continue their "better management" policies, which involved, among other things, the cutting of thousands of jobs in state rail.
Opposition leader Bob Carr is going into overdrive attacking the Liberal government for its "wastefulness" and "mismanagement", promising in turn to keep public spending down. As a Sydney Morning Herald editorial noted on May 8, he appears to have no quarrel with the millions spent to get rid of the rail jobs. Shadow transport minister Brian Langton's promises to "get people out of their cars and into the trains" and to look into the possibility of electric buses, and Labor's commitment to a moderate increase in funding for a rail system run down during the Greiner years, have to be seen against this background.
While Labor might, if elected, produce an improvement, neither party is likely to begin the fundamental shift in transport policy that is urgently needed.
People before roads
Both parties stand guilty on the specific "roads versus people" issues which have impassioned hundreds of community groups in Sydney. Before they came to office, the Liberals promised Wolli Creek residents that they would stop plans for the six-lane freeway through the valley. They were elected in the seat of Earlwood largely on the strength of that promise.
After they were elected, the freeway plan re-emerged. The Liberals sliced the seat in half, creating the new seats of Rockdale and Canterbury, to head off the inevitable electoral flak this would cause.
Labor has not promised to stop that freeway. Nor has it come out against a plan to build a tunnel under Park Street in Sydney's traffic-clogged central business district, a plan involving big profits for the consortium Kumagai Gumi, among others. What's to go into that tunnel? Not public transport, but space for car parks!
As the Sydney Greens have pointed out, the major parties are way out of tune with the more enlightened examples of city planning elsewhere in the world: the city of Paris has cancelled 100,000 parking spaces. Even the head of Volvo, Pehr Gyllenhammar, has said that cars have to be kept out of cities.
Transport and urban environment issues are central planks in the Green electoral alternative to the Liberal-Labor transport approach. The Greens' vision involves an element completely lacking in the major parties' policies: grassroots democratic control over the urban environment issues that affect the quality of our lives.
While advocating the shift to public transport for its more efficient use of precious fuel resources, Paul Fitzgerald, who has worked on land transport discussion papers for the Sydney Greens, points out that an "important factor in public transport is that because it is not profit-oriented there is at least a modicum of community control over its performance".
In current conditions, more than 6000 negative responses to the Environmental Impact Statement which gave the go-ahead for the freeway through Wolli Creek were simply not enough to get the project stopped. A green approach to road building would be to make community wishes a starting point rather than, as is the case now, a tiresome obstruction to the road lobby's agenda.
In the long term, a crucial element in green transport strategy, after canvassing alternative energy sources and the shift to the public sector, is to have less of it. A great deal of freight traffic exists nsumer needs but to satisfy the profit criteria of large corporations.
According to Paul Fitzgerald: "In the ideal conserver society we would need a minimum of freight because we would live in largely self-sustained communities with decentralised small-scale industries and local market gardens.
"While not for a moment abandoning that vision as a long-range goal, we have to recognise that the present situation is not going to change overnight and that the need for amelioration of the consequences of the current system is urgent." n