Originally published as an editorial under a joint by-line with Tim Westcott and Gilda Di Vincenzo in Planning News 34, no. 9 (October 2008): 4.
Coming out and calling for the government to spend up big on public transport can seem a little naïve. “More trains! More trams!” Such calls are seen as the business of lobbyists, not professional planners, who must face up to infrastructure costs and political realities. Two contributions to Planning News in the last 12 months, for example, have made valid criticisms of pie-in-the-sky transport advocacy. In the December 2007 issue, Gavin Alford wrote of the difficulties planners face in avoiding simply delivering wish-lists of proposals that are unlikely to be delivered. A related thought was expressed by Peter Jewell in March 2008, when he reminded planners that “public transport is not a panacea,” and questioned how much public transport improvements could realistically be expected to achieve. These comments pinpoint a real difficulty in talking about public transport. Demanding better infrastructure can become a cop-out: unless we’re the Premier or Transport Minister, it’s somebody else’s problem. At the level of day-to-day practice, Alford and Jewell are right to warn us off such an approach.
The danger, though, is that such thinking also stunts planners’ advocacy, and then feeds into policy development: planners stop calling for dramatically improved public transport and surrender to infrastructure defeatism. This has, in fact, occurred: we have become habituated to a particular level of funding for public transport, one which sees only faltering and incremental additions to the network. Yet we take for granted the breathtaking sweep of the last four decades of road projects, with the Eastern and Monash Freeways, Westgate and Bolte bridges, CityLink’s tunnels, the Western Ring Road, EastLink, and countless smaller contributions. Governments have treated big, expensive roads as a virtual necessity, with public transport a sparingly indulged luxury item.
Would correspondingly lavish public transport investment be a cure-all? Of course not. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves that our other planning tools are as effective as timely provision of infrastructure. Melbourne’s pre-war growth was characterised by development of shopping strips around train stations and along tram lines; these remain some of the city’s most-loved places. Decades of activity centre policies (and countless smaller efforts in structure planning and place-making) have failed to replicate the widespread success of those early transport-oriented neighbourhoods. As the Melbourne 2030 auditors noted, even where Councils and the development industry have all the right ideas, “lack of State funding – particularly in terms of public transport – has led to criticism of the suburbs they are creating.”1 It doesn’t matter how many maps or nice drawings we produce showing dense and vibrant activity centres in our new suburbs, the market won’t deliver them if the infrastructure isn’t there.
Perhaps our de-centred post-war suburbs were inevitable in an era of cheap oil. Yet we now see Melbournians crushing onto public transport as petrol prices shift deeply ingrained commuting habits. This seems to have surprised the government: in an interview with The Age in July, the Premier argued that nobody could have predicted recent petrol price rises, or the corresponding patronage growth. Even putting aside the fact that the peaking of global oil production was not exactly a secret, even greater patronage growth is the government’s stated objective. Melbourne 2030 set a target of 20 per cent of all motorised trips being undertaken by public transport by 2020 – twelve years from now. Can the government really recast progress towards that goal as an unforeseeable crisis?
This is where we come back to the theme of naivety. Nobody ever really believed that trip target would be achieved, or that the government would make serious attempts to meet it; it seems almost foolish to chide them for failing to do so. However, the last two years have seen the debate rapidly reframed. Climate change deniers are now rightly sidelined as the flat-earthers of the new millennium, with greenhouse issues now central to the political discussion. While voters will probably continue to choose self-interest over environmental altruism for the foreseeable future, the hip-pocket effect of petrol prices is going to see those once-competing interests increasingly intertwined. And in this landscape, our thinking about what kind of infrastructure expenditure is economically and politically realistic is going to change dramatically.
Large road projects, after all, have a lengthy operating life, and need to be designed with a view to the next fifty years or more. Looking at what petrol prices have done to the transport landscape in two years, what will happen over that period of time? What does that mean for a project such as the Eddington road tunnel? As the Victorian Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability, Dr Ian McPhail, noted with refreshing independence in July, “a recent CSIRO forecast shows that the peaking of global oil supplies could drive petrol to $8 a litre by 2018 (about the time that Sir Rod Eddington’s road tunnel might be finished).”2 If petrol is plausibly to be priced at that level on day one, what are the prospects for the tunnel over its operating life?
The real benefit of the Eddington report might not lie in its specific proposals. Instead, its ultimate contribution has been in putting truly stupendous infrastructure spending ($15 billion in total) on the table. If the government can seriously contemplate spending $7.1 billion on road projects that the study’s own supporting documents concluded had a negative cost-benefit ratio,3 then surely it can’t be foolish to suggest that money of that order should be invested in public transport infrastructure instead?
The game has changed. Roads are a dud investment. The great challenge for metropolitan planning between now and 2030 will be reconfiguring Melbourne for oil scarcity. That means real investment to reduce capacity constraints in the existing public transport system; substantial new infrastructure for the established post-war suburbs; and avoiding future retrofitting by rolling out new communities and public transport simultaneously. Much more, in other words, than the usual incremental rail and tram upgrades, bus initiatives, car-pooling promotion, and general platitudes.
Unfortunately, the early leaks about the upcoming transport strategy suggest the road tunnel retains its strange fascination, while the public transport initiatives proposed by Eddington are being greatly scaled back. Only recently this would have seemed like the natural order of things. Now, though, it seems… naïve. The government needs to recognise the new global realities if it is to ensure that this transport strategy has a shelf-life longer than its ill-fated predecessors.
1. Melbourne 2030 Audit Expert Group Report, page 45; available at http://tinyurl.com/3vvn7a.
2. Public Transport’s Role in Reducing Greenhouse Emissions: A Position Paper, page 6; available at http://tinyurl.com/3rs7y7.
3. East West Needs Assessment Economic Benefits and Costs Analysis – Technical Report, page 34; available at http://tinyurl.com/4dq8nv.