A decade ago they did a survey of urban rail systems around the world. Predictably CityRail in Sydney cam last in a list of about 40 cities and Geneva came first. So they sent the best and brightest from the ranks of CityRail to Geneva to study how they made it so good. Upon his arrival the Swiss showed him around and explained to him how they did things. Alarmingly, he countered by telling them how they did things better in Sydney, as if the Swiss would be interested in how the worst rail system in the world did things...
Things actually haven't improved all that much in Sydney since. Yes, they've introduced the Opal card and a few extensions have been added on to the network but neither the immensely complacent ALP government that presided over the mess for over a decade (that would be you, Bob Carr!) and the Coalition government - which is even more beholden to general construction companies and their lobbyists - has barely scratched surface of needs. Of course the latter have come up with the fiasco we will come to know as Wasteconnex, and is pouring billions into it, but that is almost like the potassium benzoate icing on the Frogurt.
You could almost forgive the enthusiasm for more tollways if it was matched with an enthusiasm for building a metro network that actually worked. You could understand the utter disinterest in building a metro network if it was matched with an equally similar, utter disinterest in building tollways. As things stand, successive NSW governments of both parties have happy committed to what amounts to worst of both worlds. Worse still, they always couch the expenditure as an either/or proposition and somehow the bidding always goes the way of building more tollways (and tunnels!).
Now our State and Federal governments are so fixed in their ways and set on their contracts that we are committed to even more roads instead of much in the way of rail. You do wonder when things will begin to improve. That leads me to this article here today:
In numerous studies, international academics have demonstrated that there is a certain amount of time people are willing to spend travelling each day. That is their travel-time budget.
People may exceed their budget in the short-term.
But over a longer period, if they have to spend more than about 80 minutes travelling, they will make changes to their lives to fall back within their travel-time budget.
And if people start going under their travel-time budget – Seventy Minutes Plus or Minus Ten is the name of a recent review of the literature in this area by Asif Ahmed and Peter Stopher of the University of Sydney – they will probably find other trips on which to spend their travel time.
This seems to pass the commonsense test.
If, suddenly, your work commute drops to 10 minutes because you start living near your office, you might then be more likely to drive, cycle or walk to a better set of shops in the evening.
Now when you combine this concept of a travel time budget – we all have a limited number of minutes we are prepared to spend travelling – with the demonstrably worse congestion on our roads, an explanation for the drop in driving kilometres emerges.
"If the budget of travel time is the same and your travel time is mainly going up because of congestion, you are not able to cover longer distances because you don't want to spend much more time in your car," says Michiel Bliemer, Professor in Transport at the University of Sydney.
"That maybe explains this trend: if your vehicle is not getting faster on the road, you cannot cover longer distances," he says.
So what are the implications of this?
One response would be to build more roads.Yes, that's right, more roads. Except there's a mathematical problem with more roads: Roads are inherently in support of a city expanding 2 dimensionally. As the city sprawls across a plane, roads go with it. Occasionally lifting up a level or going underground but essentially supporting a two dimensional schema.
The problem is as urban density grows, it tends to be three dimensional. Not only do people start living in closer quarts, they do this in high-rise blocks going upwards. The demand then becomes moving more people for shorter distances instead of moving fewer people across greater distances. i.e. the demands of an increasingly dense population centre is cubing (^3). Roads can only ever service it in squares (^2). No wonder roads with cars get congested.
The congestion is so bad that there's a garden suburb on the edge of the sprawl where people can't get out of their driveways in the morning. The road is congested on the garden suburb local roads, all the way to the entry on to the M5. The M5 is now a lot wider going both directions but it still has the problem that the heavier traffic comes to a crawl, the closer it gets to Sydney. Again, it's just the maths of it - but the people who make the decision that roads should be built and expanded don't address the fact that all it does is it moves the congestion further out and closer in.
Similarly, the government is under fire for not having built greater pubic transport infrastructure for all the high density dwellings going upon the inner city. It's all very nice to put the high density dwellings closer to the city centre but if it takes them 45minutes to get to work in the city, you haven't exactly helped things at all.
The fact of the matter - and I keep bringing this up - is that the people who make these decisions are in the pockets of the general construction company lobby. So the general construction companies are happy to build the high density apartments, AND the roads that go out with the sprawl, but because they don't stand to make a dime on the railways, those crucial transport infrastructures don't get built.
Worse still, the vast majority of these people live in suburbs where they can commute by car easily, so they don't see the problem as it really stands. And I won't name names because these people are trigger-happy with their defamation suits, but some of these people are people who ought to know better; but I guess business is what it is, and the public good doesn't come into it at all. That's why they're giving us Wasteconnex without giving us a loser look as to what is in it. Some people are going to get very rich out of Wasteconnex, at the expense of the public purse, and nobody's exactly stopping them.
That's how we always end up with more tollways and not enough rail.
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