Editorial: Transport madness
Transport madness
In Sydney last week, haze from bushfires hung over the city, mixing with "normal" pollutants to produce a pollution index reading more than double the "acceptable" limit. Coincidentally, the Sydney Morning Herald began the week with a feature on the city's transport problems.
Sydney's traffic peak hours now total eight hours a day, the paper reported. Motor transport on many "thoroughfares" moves so slowly that you could get where you're going more quickly by jogging (but don't try it: you'd have to breathe the air).
Nearly everyone acknowledges that private vehicles poison the atmosphere and are an increasingly inefficient way of getting from one place to another. Yet, according to a study by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, private car use in Sydney has risen 10% and public transport use fallen 13% since 1991.
Meanwhile, with public transport fares about to be raised again, delivery of the state government's "integrated public transport strategy" has been put off until the end of the year. This is the 13th recipe for fixing Sydney transport in the last 25 years. None have been carried through.
The only thing, aside from fare increases, that doesn't get put off is the building of new roads and expressways — especially privately owned tollways. The effect is to encourage more private cars and hence more "demand" for further roads, to discourage extension of public transport into expanding residential areas and to allow the further running down of public transport.
This sort of madness is anything but unique to Sydney; indeed, it is almost a standard pattern in Australian cities. Its determination to push through more expressways despite the objections of residents contributed greatly to the eventual downfall of the Goss Labor government in Queensland. In Melbourne, which is competing with Sydney to become the first Los Angeles in Australia, the acting secretary of the Public Transport Corporation said publicly several years ago that the city's trams were a "luxury" that the people and government couldn't afford.
There is method in this widespread madness. First, it is directly profitable for many big companies: petrol companies, car makers, tyre manufacturers, tollway developers. Secondly, it allows governments to escape the cost of providing adequate public transport.
From an overall social standpoint, a public transport system that attracted people out of private cars would represent a huge economic saving. More importantly, it would improve the health and quality of life of millions of people.
Such a system would have to be quick, convenient and cheap — probably free — to use. That means it would have to be paid for by fairly stiff taxation of those who have the money — the big corporations and the individual multimillionaires. No current government in Australia is willing to impose that sort of taxation, because all of them are controlled by the wealthy.
Until we create a different sort of government, our cities will continue to choke on the exhaust fumes of frustrated commuters travelling at ever decreasing speeds. And, in an Alice in Wonderland twist, the name of the ideology which says that this lunatic situation is as good as it can get is "economic rationalism".