BY KATHRYN READ
Growing up in Sydney's suburbs, I walked to school along what was, to a 10-year-old's eyes, a big road — destined during my school years to become a much bigger highway.
The road widening dragged on for years, with the bulldozers seeing me graduate through several sets of school shoes and times tables before they rolled their way down the mighty sea of asphalt to pave another part of the country.
I was sternly told to keep my patience with the interminable process — after all, the ever-changing shape of my piece of pavement and the carving of my green space was being sacrificed with the noblest aim of assisting Mr and Mrs Suburban with the daily struggle of getting the kids off to school and themselves off to their jobs in the city.
"No more traffic snarls". the good folk cried. "This is progress!"
Goodbye to the boredom of traffic jams!
Ten years later, the doubled road capacity has resulted in more cars in the same traffic jams — bewilderment which is mirrored across Sydney daily. After all. we were promised congestion-free roads on which we would glide into work with the grace and liberty of those vehicles in television advertisements. Pity the work water fountain — that fly on the wall of human discontent — hearing Sydney's daily "being stuck in traffic" moan. Someone should suggest to these individuals that there are not too few roads — but too many cars.
Land in a city is not infinite (unless we want hundred-kilometre-long cities) and the more we use for roadway, the less that remains for green space, meeting spaces, homes and businesses. We need to look at sustainable options instead of paving this beautiful city in mindless attempts to make getting from A to B faster — because current methods (as the water fountain would agree) just aren't working.
Transport is not the most fashionable of environmental issues. It lacks the "cute" factor of native fauna concerns and the majestic persuasiveness of our old growth forests. Yet with 85% of Australians living in cities, transport has an enormous effect on our lives. The most controversial effect is pollution, but transport also affects how effectively we use land and resources and how we create a city that can truly be called "livable". It influences the communities that we form and the access of individuals in those communities to services, goods and links to society which they need.
Vehicles, particularly when driven in congested conditions, emit pollutants that are damaging to human health, general environment quality, buildings and historical monuments.
Pollution
In the Sydney basin, ringed by the Blue Mountains, these pollutants concentrate predominantly in the west of Sydney, where they hang as an angry combination of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, particulates and nitrous oxides.
The promise of the road lobby is we'll soon see electronic "pollution free" cars on our roads. However, while pushing the pollution out of our cities, the coal burning required to charge up the batteries of these cars will produce more particulates and sulphuric oxides than petrol. Aside from the moral concerns of opting for "out of sight, out of mind", the resulting acid rain will travel across extensive areas causing enormous damage to forests, buildings and again, human health.
In terms of amenity in our cities, roadway usurps a great deal of land additional to actual designated road space, and neighbouring spaces become noisy, polluted and visually about as pleasurable to be around as industrial wasteland.
Worldwide, as one contemporary novelist put it, "cars have led to the eclipse of cathedrals". Examples of beauty threatened or somehow obscured by the omnipresence of the motor vehicle abound. In Paris, the Champs Elysees' ubiquitous traffic jams make it less pleasurable to stroll along, and the degradation of ancient Athenian monuments through air pollution is well documented.
In modern Sydney, architecturally more in flux than the ancient cities of Europe, the impact is probably even more grave, as the private vehicle has been instrumental in "writing off" enormous amounts of urban area. Areas where the car is king — such as Parramatta Road — have abdicated any character as a "people" place to a "car" space. How much more viable the businesses along this stretch of road would be if people were out and about on the pavements on their way to buses or light rail rather than ensconced in their cars.
The Cahill Expressway, impairing one of the world's most beautiful habours, is more testimony to Sydney's slavery to the beat of the private vehicle. Our city is rapidly becoming somewhere to drive through rather than to be.
Congestion
Congestion? The ease of human mobility has been a concern for as long as we have had reason to move around our towns and cities — Julius Caesar and Marcus Aurelius banned the use of carts within Rome during daylight hours, proving that urban congestion is not an ill specific to modern society!
In Sydney not only are more people moving between A and B (each day an extra 120 cars hit Sydney's roads) but our VKT (vehicle kilometres travelled) is rising sharly rising as we become more addicted to our cars and our city's planning and infrastructure makes it less convenient to opt for public transport. While the population only grew by 9% between 1981 and 1991, car use jumped by 20%. Compared with 10 years ago, an extra 100,000 vehicles a day make their way through the CBD.
During peak hour, the private car, that symbol of freedom and speed, does 10kmh along Military Road and an even more dismal 8kmh on Grand Parade near Botany Bay. Based on current trends, peak hour congestion on Sydney roads will rise by 600% by 2016.
Aside from being frustrating for the individual, congestion is expensive. An Australian Road Research Board study costed Sydney's congestion at $2.2 billion a year in wasted time, fuel, air pollution and stress (with all its health implications). The RTA's answer is ring roads and tunnels, along the same lines as Los Angeles (this is the same city which, having dumped its buses in the local waterway in the 1950s and passionately following the freeway building approach, now has an average of speed 15 kmh on its freeways).
The problem with the Road and Traffic Authority's solution is that traffic engineers have been aware for the last 20 years that road building generates traffic. Just three months after the harbour tunnel opened, it had generated an additional 15,000 vehicle movements a day in the harbour corridor as people chose the greater ease of driving rather than using mass transit. The increase can be served by the tunnel in the short term, but the tunnel does not operate in a vacuum — obviously the feeder roads and the roads at the end of the tunnel receive the newly generated traffic. The "clog" has just moved down the artery (at which stage the RTA luckily has a new road in mind, thereby keeping itself in business indefinitely).
Given that urban land is enormously valuable, how is it that an astonishing 50% of many core areas of US cities is given over to the car in the form of streets and parking lots, and why are we heading down the same path?
Between 1980 and 1992 Australia lost more than one million hectares of land to its cities, a figure that would be considerably lower if not for the sprawl-facilitating power of the private vehicle. Because planning for the car generally results in low density, inefficient land use, such planning uses space in a way that then forces people to use their cars.
Already Australia provides 3-4 times more road space per capita than Europe and 7-9 times more than that of Asia. That all this land dedicated to road building does not solve, but generates traffic seems a particularly tragic waste of our city space.
Solutions
What to do? At government level, it has to be accepted that transport infrastructure is rightfully financed in the public domain — because the benefits of public transport (energy conservation, fewer accidents, less pollution, wider access to employment opportunities, lower consumption of scarce land and construction materials, and the reduction of traffic congestion) accrue to the general population not only to the users of the system.
Improvements in mass transit infrastructure and performance are essential to increase the mere 25.2% of commuters opting for public transport to travel to work. Tax breaks on company cars need to be reviewed. Charging truer fees for parking in precious city space is being introduced and will help to push people out of their cars and into more sustainable mass transit options.
Our planners have to recognise that by planning for the car they encourage its dominance. Travel time in the West Pennant Hills area was halved by the opening of the M2 motorway — an immediate invitation for people to invest in real estate in a location with negligible public transport services. More pollution, and more traffic jams once the cars approach their destinations.
Most importantly, individuals in this city need to take more responsibility for how their choices affect us all (I'm not holding out heaps of faith in governments!). Get out of your car. If your area doesn't have adequate public transport infrastructure then express the need for greater choice to your local politicians and media. No longer is it enough to moan around the water fountain — our city's future depends on us all.
From Green Left Weekly, November 28, 2001.
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