Green Left Weekly 's Dave Riley interviewed public transport activists and commentators. Answering his questions are Paul Mees, a teacher in transport planning at Melbourne University and a former president of the Public Transport Users Association; Tony Morton, secretary of the Public Transport Users Association in Victoria; and Peter Perkins, a rank-and-file trade union activist in Sydney working for RailCorp.
Why, in your view, is public transport so important?
Mees: Firstly, for social equity reasons. People who can't, or choose not to, drive cars should not be "second class citizens".
Secondly, because automobile dependence imposes unacceptable environmental costs on the community.
Morton: Cities with good public transport systems have less car use, lower transport energy intensity, less pollution and better social networks as compared with cities having poor public transport. Other factors such as population density have an effect on the viability of non-car transport, but public transport of sufficient quality can be viable even in Australian cities which are less dense than European cities but more dense than American cities. According to experience in other world cities, Melbourne could have as many as one-third of trips undertaken by public transport tomorrow just by making better use of its current infrastructure. With some obvious gaps in the rail system filled, it could do even better.
Perkins: Costs must be balanced against other forms of transport by taking into consideration not just monetary values, but environmental responsibility. That includes clean air and water, road deaths and their impact on society as a whole, including the common wealth, the community costs of building roadways and freeways which cut off communities rather than bringing them together and so on.
Should public transport be publicly or privately owned?
Mees: Privatisation doesn't work, as has been amply demonstrated by experience across the world, most recently, and perhaps most spectacularly, in Melbourne. Urban public transport is a "natural monopoly" because only a single, public operator can knit different services and modes together into an integrated network, with multi-modal fares.
Morton: Public ownership helps to ensure, as with roads, that the emphasis is on service provision rather than on financial return. Multimodal public transport systems also work most effectively when there is central coordination than when individual modes are forced to compete with one another.
Perkins: Public transport should not be made to run or attempted to be run at a profit. Transport is just as important as health and education and is an essential part of the social capital necessary for a fully functional civil society.
What, in your experience, have been the major trends in public transport over the past decade?
Mees: Over the past decade, there has been more "spin" than ever about the importance of public transport, but no effective planning or funding to improve it — with the notable exception of Perth, where the rail system is booming.
Morton: In Victoria we have seen public transport privatised by the Kennett government and then reprivatised by the Bracks government. Important social components such as frontline staff have been marginalised; tram conductors have been abolished, most railway stations are unstaffed and the remaining "customer service" staff are thinly veiled ticket inspectors. Public transport is a much less friendly system now than 10 years ago. Management focusses less on public service and more on financial imperatives and cost-cutting. Meanwhile, patronage continues to decline in relative terms.
Perkins: Reduction in number and frequency of services rather than extension and greater frequency of services — for example, the cutting of CountryLink services in NSW and a 30% reduction in metropolitan services out of peak hours.
Unreliability of rail services due to poor maintenance and failure of infrastructure and staffing shortages. In NSW this has gone hand in hand with an over 50% reduction in the workforce. Staff shortages are common and have led to train delays in Sydney due to lack of train crews. Its also been the result of constant restructuring of the workforce over the last 10 years for no net gain in efficiency.
More money has been allocated to roadways at the expense of public transport, for example, a recent allocation announcement of $12 billion for improvement of the highway between Brisbane and Melbourne. If only this type of money were available for rail...
What is the current future for public transport?
Morton: Contracts with the private operators have just been renewed [in Victoria] for another five years. Beyond that is anyone's guess, depending on the financial circumstances of Connex and Yarra Trams and on the prevailing political climate.
Perkins: Unless it is made more convenient for people to use public transport people will keep using cars. Less than 5% of commuters in the Sydney metropolitan area use public transport on a regular basis. Within the next 10 years privatisation of transport is likely to increase. Corporatisation of the authorities, removing them from public accountability in the political sphere, and "user pays" philosophies all point to the long-term goals of our politicians.
How can we get better public transport?
Mees: Central planning that creates a multi-modal network with integrated routes, timetables and fares is the main requirement. The timetables should offer frequent services with common minimum standards across the whole city, and fares should allow for free transfers. But all this will only happen when public policy moves away from the "balanced transport" myth that pretends that we can have our cake, in the form of better public transport, and eat it too, by continuing to build freeways and other major roads.
Morton: The key ingredient is high frequency, as the major deterrent to public transport use now is the prospect of long waiting times and long connection times. The other important ingredient is hours of operation: most bus services cease at sunset and offer very limited weekend service, even when they run in the same suburb as trams that run until midnight seven days a week.
Perkins: To entice people from their cars public transport fares on all government services should be abolished. The cost of forgoing revenues generated by ticket sales could outweigh the costs of collecting revenue. There would be no expenses for the printing of tickets, selling, checking, auditing etc. It is ridiculous, for instance, that multinational companies owning and operate ticket vending machines and ticket validation barriers get 15% of the revenue generated by RailCorp as part of their contract with the NSW government. No jobs should be lost, as staff previously involved collecting revenue would be needed for the expected rise in the number of commuters.
This is contingent on a number of other factors including the ability of the system to be able to cope with the extra crowds. As it stands at the moment high fares are a form of public transport rationing. No public transport system however should be expected to run for profit. Taxing speculation and other land use that impacts on the environment could generate further operating revenues.
How can these changes be achieved?
Mees: Obviously, the major challenge is a political one. We won't change anything until we break the power of the road lobby. Unfortunately, too many "transport activists" are avoiding this challenge and concentrating on peripheral issues, thus unwittingly playing into the road lobby's hands. A good example of this is the "travelsmart" program being run by virtually all Australian governments now. It's a propaganda campaign to convince people that public transport really isn't as bad as they think and that they should use it more — a wonderful way of diverting attention from the fact that little or nothing is being done to actually fix the problems. Amazingly, many transport activists are cooperating with this blatant exercise in government "spin".
Perkins: Unions have traditionally been the protectors of the people's ethics and values, as well as the guardians of social capital and infrastructure which nourishes civil society.
This is no longer the case in many "industries", including public transport. Unions are not the democratic institutions they used to be, as they are populated by opportunists of every colour with a sprinkling of crooks and cheats thrown in. This situation can only be overturned if power is instituted from below. The industrial struggle is one that left parties must win before they can move forward. Unions must once again be able to inspire and enhance the dreams of the majority of working people instead of leading them up a blind alley that serves the status quo.
[The Public Transport Users Association website is at: <http://www.ptua.org.au/>]
From Green Left Weekly, July 14, 2004.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.