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January 24, 2006
The increasing cost of petrol means that the sales of the big touring cars are down in Australia as consumers increasingly make the switch to smaller, more economical cars. Australians still love their cars.
Mike Thompson
In Australia it is the rising cost of summer airconditioning that hits the family budget, not the winter heating bill. Airconditioning is necessary but expensive. Very necessary in city apartments. As I'm finding out. You live in an airconditioned shoe box and reduce the use of the car is the deal.
The switch to smaller cars does nothing to ease the traffic jams that make urban life so difficult. In Sydney it often takes 1-2 hours to travel to and from work. That's up to 4 hours a day in the car, some of it spent in a crawl. The current solution to traffic congestion crises is to build more e freeways ---Sydney leads the way on this. These tolled freeways defer the crisis but they don't solve the problem: they actually increase the traffic on inner-city roads.
Sydney ploughs on. It is as if traffic congestion is an inevitable by-product of vibrant, successful city. It indicates that Sydney is a car culture—as is most of suburban Australia. Congestion is the inevitable result. Congeston, a dysfunctional transport network, and a city enveloped in fossil fuel emissions is something to live with, despite the social cost. All that you can do, says the Labor state government, is build more freeways that allow people to move more quickly from A-B.
A better solution is to reduce the traffic on the inner city roads. What is not being considered is increasing the proportion of road surface to light rail. The latter reduces car traffic but also increases people flow in a clean, low-noise way. Most Australian cities (Melbourne is the exception) tore up their extensive light rail system in the middle of the 20th century. Few are willing to acknowledge that mistake--least of all Sydney. None are considering returning to light rail.
Sydney has the monorail though. It is little more than a tourist gimmick.
Update: 25 January
There is some good comment on this issue by Andrew West over a the Sydney Morning Herald. He argues that the NSW Labor Government hates public transport. Public transport is for losers. The big car is the sign of winners. Another indication of the refusal to ackowledge the need for cities to become sustainable.
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I drive a Chevrolet Corvette. It gets 30mpg on the highway. I noticed BMW and Honda recently advertising that their cars (BMW 3-series and Honda SUV)) get the same amount on the highway. Lollerskates.
Road infrastructure is more than just letting people ride/drive cars. It connects regional economies too. Sydney has always been a mess. The best example of that is where the M4 dumps you at the Great Western Highway. It looks like that is changing as the suburbs become the centre of wealth and the road infrastructure matches the lifetyle, commercial and retail realites in the city's west.