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Congestion

By Ross Elliott - posted Tuesday, 27 November 2012


 

 

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(Source: Public transport patronage trends in Australasian cities)

(As an aside, the advocates of the "public transport will solve everything" school of thinking frequently resort to punitive public policy approaches such as congestion charging, parking levies, fuel taxes and other means in efforts to punish motorists for their chosen form of transport. The hope is that this will force people out of private transport into public. It won't, it will only punish those in the economy for whom the private car is essential. This form of social engineering through pricing policy is worth another article in its own right, but not today).

Suburbanisation ('sprawl' to the ideologues) is also often blamed for rising congestion, the myth being that 'all those people on the outskirts' will want to commute into the CBD by car. But roughly 9 out of 10 jobs are actually in the suburbs already, so it fails the evidence and logic test to suggest that this can happen. The majority of jobs aren't in the CBD, they're spread throughout the urban and suburban network. Getting to and from most of those jobs requires a car, because public transport is so ineffective in serving cross-city commuters (though it works well for the minority who are CBD workers).

But rising density and a growing population alone aren't the only factors that will increase congestion. Social change has played a huge part too, and trying to change society to solve congestion is something only Stalin might attempt. Consider the change in work in the last 50 years. The number of us working in centralised office 'paper factories' on rigid 9-5 hour shifts has declined. There are more dual income families, often with one part time job in the family. Employment has dispersed into various retail, industrial and service nodes throughout the urban fabric as the economy grew. Shopping for necessities is no longer a fortnightly or weekly trip, with stores open only Thursday night and Saturday morning (as they were). We now shop more frequently, often to or from work. We often have school pick up runs (something which I understand can add 20% to road traffic volumes in school terms), despite the availability of cheap, subsidised public transport for kids (partly because they're spoiled and partly because as parents we're scared of letting them out of our sight).

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Modern life itself has made private transport much more the necessity. We aren't as some suggest having 'a love affair' with our cars: we need them, and frequently more than one, just to operate at an employment and social level. Work, play, shop, live – all aspects of modern life are now more dependent on the private vehicle than they ever were.


Michael Matusik recently posted some interesting figures on this via his 'Missive.' Based on the census, "there are apparently about 7.8 million motor vehicles in Australia. One in ten households does not own a car; two out of five (37%) dwellings hold just one vehicle, whilst a further 54% of our households own two or more cars. When it comes to those living in apartments, these proportions shift considerably: 14% of apartment dwellers don't own a car; 52% only have one car and just a third own two or more cars, with 29% having just two cars."

My take on this is that if overall car ownership is 90% of all households but still 86% of households in apartments own cars (albeit less of them), it isn't really that much different. The form of housing choice is not highly correlated to a lesser level of car dependency. So changing the overall form of housing in society is unlikely to make much difference to our patterns of private vehicle use (and hence congestion). Modern society has more to do with it.


So what can realistically be done about congestion? There is no silver bullet. We will continue to invest in new road transport networks as our city continues to grow, as we should. Likewise, we will continue to invest in more public transport, as we should. But as our city continues to grow and the economy develops, we will only at best be keeping pace. Our ability to invest at the speed required to decrease congestion is beyond our reach, and the potential of different forms of housing to alleviate congestion is limited, if it exists at all.

Increasing congestion will ultimately create opportunities for development in transit friendly locations which promise reduced congestion or travel times for residents and employees. This in itself won't solve the broader issue, but simply allow some to respond to a market craving more convenience. To promise that town planning or public transport hold any genuine promise to substantially alleviate our great annoyance at other people using 'our' roads and slowing 'us' down, is to perpetuate a lie.

There is one way congestion can improve, but maybe it's the cure we don't want. If congestion is a sign of an economy that's alive with people making all manner of trips for work or social reasons, then quiet uncongested roads would surely be a sign of not very much happening at all. Think tumbleweeds blowing down the streets of your town. Empty shops and offices, abandoned factories, an empty CBD and a shrinking population. There are numerous US cities where this has happened to the city cores. There are also plenty of Australian towns and regional cities with a similar problem.

They no longer complain about congestion – they have more serious things to worry about.

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About the Author

Ross Elliott is an industry consultant and business advisor, currently working with property economists Macroplan and engineers Calibre, among others.

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