November 16, 2006
IN THE MAIL, AN INTERESTING BOOK ON TRAFFIC: Ted Balaker and Sam Staley’s The Road More Traveled: Why the Congestion Crisis Matters More Than You Think, and What We Can Do About It. They argue that traffic congestion does much more harm than is generally appreciated, and that municipalities’ programs aimed at making traffic worse in order to encourage people to use mass transit are deeply mistaken. They also argue that fixing traffic problems is easier and cheaper than is popularly thought. I’ve read the first several chapters and it’s very interesting; I hope it gets a broad readership. Interesting tidbit: If you exclude New York, America has more telecommuters than mass-transit commuters.

I’ve had some related thoughts on this topic myself, here.

On a quick reading, the paper doesn’t acknowledge the existence of sunk costs, so it’s pretty much worthless in terms of assessing the viability of the existing suburban rail networks.

If nothing else I use urban rail almost daily, as one of those (low) middle class professionals, and I would hate to drive to work. I think Ken’s last paragraph, shorn of its final sentence, is quite sensible.

All that said and agreed with, I think peak oil is one of the most preposterous chimeras masquerading as an economic theory that I have ever heard of.

As much as I love urban rail, and as much as I have thought for 10 years now that Melbourne needed an ‘outer loop’, planning must accomodate cars, because cars are king.

Have a look at the cost of replacement trains. Further, the electricity they run on doesn’t appear magically – just because it is spewed out as greenhouse gases in the Hunter Valley doesn’t mean it doesn’t appear. I find the whole “centralised emissions” argument specious in that it doesn’t address the inflexibility of the long (decades) replacement timetable of their expensive, outdated and increasingly inefficient motors. They are 18th century anachronisms kept alive by misty eyed historical revisionists on the right and illogical greenies on the left. The massive improvements in diesel technology in the last 10 years has been astonishing, both in it’s progress and (sadly) lack of adoption.

The corridors we already have are massively underutilised, and poor planning has ensured that no new corridors have ever been allocated. We can and should do better with our public transport and smaller, more flexible units of transport that could cope with missing corridors but thrive on the existing ones are part of that puzzle.

However, I think Australia’s biggest city is the greatest disaster of the age – the efficiency it should have produced in terms of concentration of resources is actually shouldered by the poor bastards who are forced to live there. There are plenty of regional centres in Australia who would be more than willing to spread the concentration of population across a wider, more sustainable area, with less aggregate pollution. We would be far better served with larger numbers of smaller cities that are easier to get around.

Moran also reckons it would be a great idea if urban development was completely deregulated and developers were allowed to build subdivisions without paved roads or curbing or guttering or footpaths, like they did back in the 1950s when land was cheap and everyone was much happier and nicer. Is this a good idea too?

Demographia/IPA also appear to assume that all cities are the same. But Sydney, which is the large city I know best, is hemmed in by the Blue Mountains to the west, and built on mostly hilly terrain interspersed with steeply sloping jagged estuaries that make development costs unavoidably higher than flatter places like Melbourne (or Houston). Moreover, if anyone really thinks that Sydney isn’t already suffering from major urban sprawl, you haven’t been looking very closely. Leaving aside the shrinking green belt national parks round Port Hacking and the Hawkesbury, what we see is pretty well unbroken urban development from ocean to mountains for a distance of way over 300 kilometres, from Kiama in the south to past Newcastle in the north. Try driving it one day and see if you reckon even more urban sprawl is a great idea.

There are a couple of directions the sprawl could be extended, though – to the north-west past Wiseman’s Ferry or the south-west past Picton towards Bowral. Architect and planner Elizabeth Farrelly makes a convincing case in today’s SMH that this would be a particularly stupid idea:

The north-west growth centre runs from Mulgrave to Bidwill, with a major urban centre at Rouse Hill; the south-west growth centre runs from Kemps Creek to Harrington Park, centred on Leppington. Between them, they will receive 160,000 new dwellings and 180,000 new jobs. Fair enough, you might think. Sydney is expecting maybe a million blow-ins over coming decades (though figures are revised downwards all the time) and they have to live somewhere. But here? In Sydney’s vegie basket?

Sydney agriculture generates $1 billion annually; one-eighth of the state’s vegies from just one-hundredth of the land area. This food production provides much needed jobs in rural fringe areas, often sustaining sizeable immigrant populations and, perhaps more importantly, fresh coriander and strawberries for our delectation. And yet government and council policies, across the Hawkesbury-Nepean basin, will plough hundreds of farms under brick and asphalt. …

But might isn’t necessarily right. It isn’t necessarily bright, either. As Phil Dunesky, of the Pitt Town Residents Group, says, “Without agriculture, there’d be no rural in rural living.” Plus there’s the sheer ugliness, moral and visual, of turning the Hawkesbury into one big housing estate. Not only will the new estates be unavoidably car-based. If we exile our market gardens to the rain shadow beyond the mountains, we’ll have to truck back anything that grows there, or fly it in from south-east Queensland, while those pretty embroidered fields blossom grotesquely with Kellyville max.

Moran and the Demographia mob are dickheads of the worst sort, substituting blind reliance on statistics for observation and commonsense. What we need are more and better rail networks, with “hubs” and “spokes” so that commuters can use the train to get to work right around urban areas not just in the CBD. That’s the real major reason why rail only attracts the more prosperous passenger demographic – most rail lines have been built radially out from the CBD, so it’s effectively impossible to use it unless you’re a middle class office worker commuting to and from the CBD. Most current urban rail networks are useless to factory and suburban retail workers and customers. Some of these needed lateral links could be light rail, some could even be electric or hydrogen-fuelled buses. But to argue for completely rejecting rail transport while promoting unrestricted urban sprawl is almost criminally stupid IMO in a world afflicted by global warming and rapidly depleting oil resources.

Perhaps Sydney should ditch the train system and install busways through those corridors (and allow emergency services through them with the buses) but exclude private cars. I think everybody would appreciate a system that had a bus every minute vs. a train every twenty. Put those big bendy buses in there and power them off natural gas to offset the diesel particulates and you’ve got a winner. Even better, the off-hours services that benefit the disabled and disadvantaged would be cheaper to provide than an enormous, inefficient, empty train.

Buses are also cheaper to replace than the expensive system of building new train systems. It’s much easier to phase in a new range of buses than build new trains.

Mind you, when I lived in Sydney I hated CityRail, so this suggestion may just be revenge speaking.