The 'people plan' - a green transport plan for Melbourne
Blog Post
Tuesday 7th October 2008, 2:02pm
by TimHollo in
It's not hard to imagine what life in one of Australia's big cities in 2020 would be like if we keep going with the roads obsession of successive governments. With peak oil and carbon pricing driving petrol costs through the roof, battling worse air pollution and worse congestion, there would still be no real alternative for those who want to get off the oil addiction and get out of their cars.
But, just for a minute, imagine if the State, Federal and local governments decided to change direction.
Picture living in a thriving community, a clean city, with regular, fast, safe trams, buses and trains running around a well-constructed network, planned around community needs and desires. A city of 5 million people or more running smoothly, cleanly and happily!
The Victorian Greens have done us all a huge favour by setting out not only what this future would look like for Melbourne, but also how to get there! By 2020,
everybody in Melbourne would have access to a fast, convenient and publicly-owned network of trams, buses and trains if a plan launched yesterday by Greg Barber MLC and Greens Lord Mayoral candidate, Adam Bandt, were adopted and delivered.
The people plan, as opposed to John Brumby's 'profit plan' of more road tunnels, looks at how to double capacity in 8 years and triple the number of trips made by public transport by 2020.The plan focussed on upgrading networks and services, planning around where and when the need is greatest, and spending the kind of money usually earmarked for more roads.
As well as a detailed discussion paper for the policy wonks amongst us, the website has a really funky interactive map of Melbourne where you can click on your municipality and see for yourself where new services would run under this proposal.
Plus there's the very cute tunnelling Brumby Mole to check out and send to your friends ;-)
This is the kind of visionary planning that the Greens can provide, contrasting with the boring, corporate and profit-focussed guff the Rudd Government is still spruiking. Here's hoping Infrastructure Australia will deliver something to wake up the Government. And hoping even more that the Government will not sideline or shelve their suggestions as they have done with the National Framework on Energy Efficiency.
Cross-posted to Rooted
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A Green Transport Plan for Melbourne
There are number of major issues with this plan, which would make it impractical without FORCING people to use public transport by banning motor vehicles in the Central Business District (I would suspect politically dangerous in one sense but may be the answer in another). Although now retired, the Corporation I worked for had to organise for staff parking in the CBD (paid for by subsidised salary sacrifice) else technical staff resigned, causing major issues.
About a year or so back, the state government conducted comprehensive surveys of transport used by people going to and from work. Over 70% use private vehicles of one mode or an other, and of these people, over 70% stated that they would not use public transport, even if available.
Melbourne is an expanding city, with over 1k new citizens every week (according to Gov figures), mostly moving to the fringe suburbs where they can afford to live. High volume public transport can be located for many of these suburbs, but can never transport the volumes required to the CBD. The main reason for this is (using the South Eastern suburbs for example) that rail lines go through many cuttings as they move to central Melbourne, and as the Government found out, additional lines would require larger cuttings, destroying many heritage homes. Another problem encountered by the State Government is, rail passengers are delayed by the dozens of road crossings on each line, which will cost huge sums, and major delays to rail / road passengers if changes are made. Again private enterprise would be needed for construction work, and rail / road users charged to meet the costs.
Alternatives do exist, and one may be the running of lines above the major arterial roads, however, the State Government, and probably Federal Government would not have the money to build, so private enterprise would be required, with costs included in new fare structures (a sort of toll for train passengers). This would be required in inner Melbourne (say within 25km of the CBD) where no unused rail/transport corridors exist.
To me the only possible alternative is to move as many businesses as possible out of the CBD to satellite centers in the out lying suburbs. Fortunately / unfortunately, this would probably be the death of the CBD as we know it today, but would solve the need for large and costly (to the public) transport networks, probably just upgrading the bus networks.
We need to remember that Victorians will use what ever transport mode they feel comfortable / safe using, and any Government who tried to FORCE them to change would finish up with the prospects of looking for new jobs. You only need to look at the Victorian Governments handling of possible water shortages, and outright hostility developing against them for not building new dams in Gippsland (where there are regular floods) to supply Melbourne.
There would be no need to
There would be no need to force people if public transport was (a) competitive on price; (b) reliable; (c) comfortable and safe; (d) easy to understand ticketing and (e) have sensible timetabling which makes it competitive on time.
I think you'll find that people will just naturally tend to it under these conditions. Issues a thru e are entirely the public sector's responsibility. (except perhaps c, the behaviour of the public has some role to play here).
Interim plan
Many critics point at the plan for inadequate reasoning, statistics etc but fail to realise it's an interim plan. Without some proper (incumbent) plans, no public transport plan should be implemented. Further to that, the Vancouver Model will allow for greater public say in what is planned and what isn't.
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