Stuck in our cars on the highway to hell

Sunday Age
Sunday 30/3/2008 Page: 19

CLIMATE change, peak oil, mounting traffic congestion and planning inertia have given Melbourne a transport headache. For half a century, we have hitched our hopes to an impossible dream - the dream of automobility. The freedom to drive when, where and as often as we like has become almost a sacred right. Now our dream has become a nightmare.

As petrol prices rise and the environmental costs of maintaining a car based city hit home, we may wonder how we got ourselves into this jam. And whether we can get out of it. Australians have always been in love with mobility. A century ago, steam trains and cable trams helped to make Melbourne one of the most suburbanised cities in the world. We were even more likely to travel to work by train or tram than Londoners or New Yorkers.

The city might have continued to develop along these lines. In the early 1920s, rail and tramway officials planned to double the network, electrify the system and encircle the CBD with an underground rail loop. But these plans were stillborn. The Great Depression and the Second World War curbed public transport investment. In the late 1940s, patronage on Melbourne's over-strained public transport reached an all-time high. But the city of strap-hangers was growing tired of public transport.

In 1948, Labor PM Ben Chifley greeted the first Holden, Australia's Own Car, as it rolled off the assembly line at Fishermen's Bend. A year later, Liberal leader Robert Menzies won power with the promise of finally ending wartime petrol rationing. Melbourne had glimpsed a different future, a future based on the car. To its admirers, the car was a freedom machine. It symbolised the self-directed, mobile, status-conscious society emerging in the suburbs. Cars promised to liberate people from the tyranny of the timetable, and the crush and sweat of the crowd.

In those days, Labor championed public transport. Six of premier John Cain snr's cabinet were former transport unionists. Socialists believed there was something egalitarian and fraternal in a form of transport shared by the people as well as owned by them. A little of that ideal lingers in the outlook of present-day public transport advocates.

Melbourne embraced the car with astonishing speed. In 1951, only one Melbournian in 10 drove to work, but by 1974 two-thirds did so. In the late 1960s, the Bolte government hatched the Melbourne Transportation Plan, a blueprint that guided the city's transport development for the following three decades. It included only one major public transport project, the long-delayed underground rail loop. Its centrepiece was a 500-kilometre network of freeways extending along the Yarra and its tributaries, and criss-crossing the inner city from north to south.

Protests by inner-city activists killed off most of the north-south connections, leaving the radial connections along the creek and river valleys, such as the Monash and Eastern freeways. The outcome made political sense but left a truncated system that duplicated the radial pattern of the existing CBD-centred public transport system while doing little to accommodate the rapidly growing volume of cross-city movement.

The big transport projects of the Kennett era, such as Citylink, reinforced this pattern. Labor has improved rolling stock and tinkered with the ticketing system but has done little to extend public transport to the suburbs that lacked it. The further the metropolis has extended, the vaster have become the wedges of car-dependent suburbs between the thin ribbons of rail and tram.

Melbourne is now so dependent on the car that there may seem to be no way out. Yet if it took only 20 years for us to get hooked on the car, perhaps it's not too short a time to cure our addiction. Two fallacies bedevil thinking about our transport future. One is the belief that automobility, like the free market, is an irresistible force - that we must simply keep driving and hope that someone soon comes up with a petrol-less car.

Given the choice, most Melbournians would probably vote for an automobilised future. It's what our mobile society seems to require. Automobility, however, is not an end in itself, just one good among many. Not everything about it may even be good. In promoting individual freedom, for example, it may erode community ties.

The other fallacy is the nostalgic belief that the future lies in a return to the past. But the shortest distance between the present and a desirable future seldom detours through the past. The costs of retro-fitting a 21st century city with a 1920s-style fixed rail public transport system is likely to be prohibitive.

Too much recent debate has centred on bib ticket solutions to ease congestion in the inner city, through road tunnels or underground railways; too little on developing lower-cost public transport solutions for the car dependent outer suburbs. It's no longer good enough to release new residential land without a transport plan. And it's time someone looked again at our ossified suburban bus system. After all, it's in the outer suburbs that the poorest people now live and, as Ross Garnaut observed last week, that's where the high cost of our addiction to automobility is likely to be felt most acutely.

Graeme Davison is the author of Car Wars: How the Car Won our Hearts and Conquered our Cities, published by Allen and Unwin.