We in Melbourne regularly convulse ourselves with self pity about our transport problems. Now we have a new report, Investing In Transport compiled by Sir Ron Eddington, who buzzed around our system for a year, riding the rails and the white lines on the highways, all without a salary. If he pedalled around on a bike, he may even be a little fitter.

The whole report is available here, broken into handy but chewy PDFs. .

The title itself is confusing, because it suggests a masterplan for the whole mishmash of Melbourne transport. But in fact it really seems to be called the East-West Link Needs Assessment (EWLNA) which is a better guide to the problems he was asked to address.

You have to imagine a line of highways extending efficiently to other cities, to our dormitory suburbs, or to the various clumps of factories, pleasure palaces and sports complexes. All of these things pour traffic down towards the city centre, where they simply disappear, to just .. kind of.. start up again… on a direct line many kilometres away. On top of that, the one East-West link of any scale is a long, long bridge which attracts fantasies of disaster. What if… a squadron of flying dinosaurs sat on it so the centre collapsed.. etc.

Come here from elsewhere, and it is obvious that the city was invaded by mad vandals who laid highways until the force of public opinion stopped them, so they tend to start and end arbitrarily – but with enough evil logic to vandalise some pleasant assets like the Yarra River, and tempt a river of cars out of their driveways. Almost as if they believe that today, this will be different, and the highway will actually GO SOMEWHERE.

So Sir Rod was asked to work out whether there actually could, one day, be a SOMEWHERE. Yes, he said, it can, but only if you build a nine billion dollar Yellow Brick Road that tunnels for 22km under the city. And spend a similar amount on new trainlines, most of which should be underground. There is a phantom set of proposals conjured by this announcement – he is only talking about the East-West movement, and the North-South axis is just as much of a mess.

Before I make a couple of amateur observations about this, here is a quick trot through some history…

Like many Australian cities, Melbourne grew for around a century on the spider’s web of train and tram routes, condensing around the hubs of local stations and strip shopping. We lived in villages, worked nearby, and caught the red rattler to anywhere else.

After the war, the invention of both the Holden and hire purchase meant that families could contemplate life without public transport. The city spread rapidly to connect the public transport legs together, creating square miles of cream brick housing, to which the sewage system crept in tandem with the new bitumen roads. Go to Caulfield, Preston and St Albans now, and you find the repeated motifs of California bungalow, all neat houses with no trace of the families who may have lived in the garage as Dad and his mates scrounged enough building materials to give Mum a kitchen big enough for white goods.

From that era we have kept the myth of the quarter acre block, though many were actually half that, with back yards and Hills Hoists and tomatoes for the Italians and Greeks. When I first started to work on film projects for the Ministry of Housing in the 1980’s, the planners were tracking the first wave of baby boomers established as home owners in the inner city, and predicting the voluntary creation of high-rise apartments. At the time, newly arrived back from London, I thought this was impossible. We had spent two generations, two world wars and one depression getting out of crowded, miserable row housing of working class Melbourne, and I figured the new amenities had colonised our souls.

Of course, I was wrong. The flats I despised as a child are traded like organs for a transplant case. Mum and Dad are too busy working for a garden, and the one Imperial child will do just fine one floor up and safe from the nasties of imaginary fiends and real traffic.

Because that has been the rub. Just when I thought we were finally coming to our senses about cars, the Koreans forced a whole new wave of competition with the sub $15,000 car, owned until the warranty ran out and passed on to students who will duel for the car park spaces in their turn.

Meanwhile, our technocratic Labor government continues a wonderful Melbourne aesthetic tradition – the metropolitan planning report. One day, some linguist will do a PhD comparing them, their assumptions and their evolving language back at least to 1952. Which brings us back to Sir Ron Eddington.

He is the former head of both Ansett and British Airways, who compiled a similar document for London in 2006, and is therefore seen as v. important.

“At 58, Sir Rod Eddington’s CV is so impressively long that people inevitably ask him how he manages everything. Right now he is at the centre of Australia’s biggest business and political stories. He’s a non-executive director of the subprime-crisis-embattled Allco Finance Group and also of Rio Tinto, which a hostile BHP Billiton has in its sights. He was controversially appointed Kevin Rudd’s business adviser at a time when Labor and business were strangers, and was recently appointed by Rudd to chair Infrastructure Australia. He is on the board of News Corporation and other big companies. He chairs investment bank JPMorgan Australia.”

He is proposing

“an $18 billion, 10-year program of road and rail tunnels, extensions of existing rail lines and a plan to keep heavy vehicles from clogging suburban streets.

The report comes as Victoria’s population is forecast to reach 6.2 million by 2020.

The Victorian capital is expected to take over from Sydney as Australia’s biggest city by 2030.

Sir Rod is getting his assumptions from another government report, entitled Melbourne 2030. Although The Age has run several articles now which claim he pays no attention to the greenhouse question, it has a chapter in the report.

“Encouraging much greater use of public transport is a critically important element in reducing GHG emissions from transport. However, even under the most optimistic scenarios of modal shift to public transport, it will not be possible to achieve the magnitude of shift required to make a substantial
impact on emissions over the next 25 to 30 years. Car travel will remain high – making emissions from motor vehicles a primary and urgent target for GHG reduction strategies.”

This is not so much an assumption as a premise, a statement of fact – “not be possible”. Here I can’t help imagining rows and rows of ostritches with their heads firmly planted in the shifting sands of change. Necessity may yet kick them in the bum, one by one.

To my untutored eye, the population figures look pretty rubbery. Not long ago, Victoria was losing population to Queensland, as the baby boomers wandered north for better weather, or cashed out their expensive leafy suburb houses for a flat and some ready money; at the other end of the scale, young people went north for work and increased comfort on the dole. And I imagine that the NSW government might have an opinion about the relative size of these two competing cities. In other words, the numbers are contingent on so many unpredictable factors, I wonder about their degree of certainty.

‘After delivering the report, Investing In Transport, Sir Rod warned that Melbourne faced transport chaos, due largely to its reliance on the West Gate Bridge as the only major east-west route.

“My report clearly shows that there will be a big increase in east-west travel across Melbourne on both public transport and roads, driven by the massive growth in the west and north-west of the city,” Sir Rod said.

“Without new public transport and road infrastructure, overcrowding on our trains and congestion on our roads will become intolerable.”‘

The cost-benefit analysis allows for a $20 billion return for an $18b outlay, but only by valuing reduced travel times at around $11b.

Over the years, on my bicycle or driving in and out of town to a bush house, I have noticed a few things about this transport thing. Just last week, I had to drive across town to an editing room, which was absurdly fast at 2pm, with a quick zip back at 7. Then I came back an hour earlier in the day, and I entered a special vehicular glue, which paralysed me and the line of traffic for most of an hour through the city. Generally speaking, I think it is fair to say that the congestion which does genuinely drive people mad occurs at rush hour, which suggests that most of it is created by people who could be on public transport.

Public transport itself is steadily filling up with frustrated citizens. There are a few bad things about the design, which are being fixed by more intelligent routing. We are committed to trams, which are inherently slow and unable to overtake. But I suggest that the public transport system is now absorbing people pushed out of their cars by parking problems, pressure on household income, and the rising cost of petrol.

I well remember the trafffic flow in the recession of the early 90’s. The Westgate Bridge, our main East-West arterial route, was weirdly empty at morning peak hour at the height of the crisis. People had no money to travel, and often no jobs to go to. The amount of traffic is not an organically increasing entity, a force of nature – it depends hugely on the scale and nature of our financial and production system.

When the recession stopped, the traffic steadily built up again, until it was helpfully fed by the rest of the new highway system. Like all freeways, they have created crises at the point at which they disgorge traffic, which can never really be solved because the flow depends by definition on limited on-off points.

I wonder about this “massive growth in the west and north-west of the city”. At the moment, this is an artefact of brain-wrenching house prices, and the flight of poorer citizens to the city fringe, to huddle strangely together in the drought-pounded paddocks. As we all know, this is a cost passed directly to the government, because these places need infrastructure. And we all know that the real traded commodity in the inner city is access to community owned services, like a subsidised public transport system.

I am stating the obvious, really – that the state of urban transport is very contingent on factors which can change quickly. You only have to imagine swarms of smaller, lighter cars interspersed with scooters to see that the congestion problem is is a matter of vehicular real estate. Or that a vigorous public housing policy could create a lot of inner city blocks that increases population density, which changes the whole equation.

We in Victoria are dead set against public housing, because we didn’t like the nasty tower blocks they were in, or the pesky poor people who lived in them. Build those blocks now, with the benefit of contemporary engineering and security systems, and they would look curiously like a lot of trendy inner city private enterprise suburbs like Docklands. And the residents are more likely to be ageing boomers like me, or younger people locked out of private housing by the spiralling cost… this is almost a digression, but you can see how easily the equation can be changed.

In the usual way of the internet and its crazily looping connections, I found a wonderful piece of Hansard for the House of Lords, in which Lord Berkeley championed the cause of cycling, compared the lamentable state of British cycling compared to the Continent, and admitted that Rod Eddington had proposed a number of useful cycling measures in his report for the government. In describing various constructive European schemes, he makes the simple point that the biggest barrier to cycling is safety. I am having more conversations with friends on this very topic, as they are too frightened to start cycling even though transport in Melbourne is getting harder.

So I am left to wonder what would happen if the Victorian government decided to get our cyclists off the roads, and were prepared to pay an impressive amount for it. Five hundred million dollars would go a long way to create a parallel network of back roads, with priority access to traffic lights, carrying facilities for bikes on public transport, and large bike sheds.

Both Fairfax papers carried a travel article this weekend about bike friendly cities in Europe.

“Another city that can match Amsterdam’s level of bike use is Munster in western Germany, where it’s said that 40 per cent of all journeys are made on bikes. That’s little wonder, given the infrastructure. The area surrounding Munster has been called the Munsterland Cycle Park, providing its residents and visitors access to about 4000 kilometres of bicycle paths, all arranged in honeycomb fashion to allow easy loops in and out of the city.

The most famous of the trails through the Munsterland Cycle Park is the flat and mostly sealed 100 Castle Route, looping around the region for 1400 kilometres, passing more than 100 castles and palaces. Route-finding need not be problem because on this and other routes in the park cyclists can hire a pocket PC that uses satellite navigation to direct them and deliver information about attractions en route.

Even inside the city, bikes are king. There are traffic lights solely for bicycles; cyclists can ride in either direction in one-way streets; there’s an underground bike park at the railway station with space for 3300 bikes; and the tree-lined Promenade, which follows the course of the former town walls, is open only to cycles and pedestrians. It is said that on a fine day, more than 1000 bikes can be found on the Promenade at a time.

Fittingly, Munster is at the junction of two of Europe’s long-distance Eurovelo cycling routes: the Capitals Route from Galway to Moscow, and the Pilgrims Route from Trondheim to Santiago de Compostela.”

The headline bits in in this Eddington report are about large infrastructure projects,which is generating a heap of quick publicity. But he is not a shallow man, as his document for the British government demonstrates. The London Telegraph hops into the fact that the four volume behemoth was actually “drafted by 10 economists headed by, er, Sir Nicholas Stern”, and then goes on to say

“… he is describing a Catch 22 situation whereby economic development leads to increased traffic, which jams the existing infrastructure, thus jeopardising economic development.

Historically, this might have been dealt with by a “predict and provide” approach to alleviating the stress on the network by building more infrastructure to cope with increased demand. Today, however, Eddington’s economists argue for a demand-management approach, concluding that the piecemeal management of the existing infrastructure is more cost effective than building new, and warning against being “seduced by grand projects”. Lest there be doubt about what he means, Eddington concludes that, “ambitions and dreams of extensive new networks… should be put on hold… some of the best projects are small-scale, such as walking and cycling”.

So, Sir Rod (supported by his platoon of analysits and writers) is capable of mental flexibility, to a much greater extent than the imaginations of our patronising amateur experts in the Fairfax press can imagine. He is an engineer, which suggest he is alert to the ha-port of tar which can transform the effectiveness of big systems. And his determination to advocate “road pricing” to reduce demand suggests he is not in thrall to the private automobile.

In fact, his proposals about cycling are a bit of a giveaway. He argues for a unified department to deal with cycling, for a practical approach to journeys combining cycling and public transport, and says that

“The Team also notes the importance of ensuring that all new infrastructure projects in Melbourne accommodate walking and cycling access at the very early planning stages. Should the Victorian Government proceed with the major infrastructure recommendations in this report, every effort should be made to ensure that walking and cycling opportunities are enhanced by these projects.

For example, in relation to the recommended rail tunnel, the Team would expect to see good walking and cycling access to the new stations and state-of-the-art cycle facilities at these stations. In relation to the proposed road link, opportunities should be taken to further extend the on- and off-road bicycle network.”

He is proposing $60m worth of bicycle paths and infrastructure support for cycling – a tiny amount compared to $18b, but valuable nonetheless. And the figures for his proposals suggest that my five hundred mill would put bike paths just about everywhere.

I am generally in favour of tunnels, which may not be cost-effective in the short term, but enable us to contribute something to the common weath which supports the generations of the future, just as we our daily lives depend on the work of those who have gone before. I don’t even think the road tunnel is a bad idea; some sort of vehicular traffic will use it, and the city will be a much better place without the rat runs of cars pouring out of the disconnected highway system. Ironically, of course, the changes will help to turn the inner city into a community of prosperity, informally gated by the huge mortgages or rents to secure a toehold.

I want to see a much better system of bike trails, and I reckon that a significant investment could make a huge difference to our public and private transport needs. It is a no brainer, isn’t it? Get the punters out of the trams and onto safe bike paths.

But I remain sceptical about all the assumptions in the report. I reckon climate change is going to influence the contingent factors in ways we don’t understand, and on a scale which we can’t comprehend.

We have to stop producing greenhouse gases. Any of them. Ever. Now.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 1:44 am and is filed under Austrapolitics, ideas and society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.