The public transport myth

We can see the same philosophy in the rationing of land (under the guise of zoning) that artificially raises the cost of housing on the periphery and, as a result, throughout the conurbation. In part this policy is motivated by a desire to ensure that cities are more compact and therefore susceptible to public transport. In part it is to bring about a density that is thought to be necessary to foster the positive externalities of the city - patronage to allow for lively restaurants, theatre and cinema.

In some cases this is a nostalgia for a bygone age which may never really have existed. The teeming city that was 19th century Paris, London, Vienna or even New York and Melbourne has passed into history. It has done so because few wanted to live within it given the choice. And transport innovations gave people that choice.

The cities we now think of with affection are highly concentrated shells of leisure and shopping services. In many cases they incorporate a sort of Disneyesque preservation of the more attractive parts of their historic architecture and sometimes this is superimposed on on-going office employment. Nobody would dream of setting up heavy industry or transport-intensive services in these cores.

Attaining and delivering the full suite of services that the concentrated core once delivered is impossible. Attempting to reach that goal will be costly and could throttle the city as a commercial entity. The policy of re-creating a version of the compact city is foundering on the shoals of what people actually want. Given the choice, most people want to live in their own detached home with some land attached to it. They are less enamoured than the elites about living close to the centre. And almost everyone now owns, or has access to, a car - most families have at least two.

(In Palo Alto, the capital of the world’s IT industry, the main shopping centre is not served by transit and there is not even a taxi rank.) Even so, the minority who do not have a car or access to one is paraded as a rationale for the vast reallocation of taxes towards transit and away from improving the carrying capacity and efficiency of the road system.

What is to be done?

The transport task is to seek out needs and adapt the city to them. This remains an anathema to many, just as it was when De Gaulle declared in the 1960s that Paris must adapt to the car.

De Gaulle recognised that for Paris to remain a major commercial, administrative and cultural centre it needed to develop beyond being a mere relic of the past. To some degree this was successful, but Paris, for all its attractions, has become a shell of several hundred thousand people surrounded by apartments and urban developments similar to those found throughout the world.

For Australian cities such as Melbourne, Sydney and the other three major capitals with cores that provide a concentrated location for office work and leisure activities, there will remain a role for transit. Rail and bus services remain efficient means of getting large numbers into the sort of CBD that major Australian capital cities have and should continue to have.

For the main part, however, cities should adapt to the car and the truck. Road systems are far and away more important than fixed track systems, and buses can make good use of them. Given Melbourne’s topography and road systems, trams work well, but their intrinsic high costs and inflexibility are the reasons why Melbourne is one of only a handful of world cities retaining them other than as bit players and for tourism reasons.

The greater task of transport of people and freight alike must be by private cars and trucks. It is therefore vital that the road system be upgraded to keep pace with the demand for car transportation, consistent with the cost effectiveness of this.

At its most fundamental, this conforms to the wishes of the individuals who comprise the community, wishes that are expressed in their transport choices. At its more mundane, it means governments should simply maintain and develop the roads by which prosperity is maintained. What needs to be avoided at all cost is a repetition of policies, like those of the Cain Government, which were deliberately designed to reduce the efficiency of expressways (the South East “Arterial” was so named and designed to appease transport unions who resisted greater patronage by cars).

All this means that inevitable revisions of Melbourne 2030 must progressively wind back the ratio of road to transit expenditure. The most favourable car to transit ratio that can be reasonably expected is about 12:1. Even excluding the operational deficits of transit, the proposals in the Victorian Government’s Plan, Meeting our transport challenges, has transit expenditures threefold those on roads. This is a vast waste of taxes and needs to be brought into line with the underlying demand for transport services.