The problem with building and widening roads is that it’s only a temporary fix. In the short term we can commute more quickly, but better roads encourage more people to live further from work and use cars rather than buses or trains.
So in the medium and long term the congestion becomes worse than before the infrastructure spend. This appears counterintuitive: how on earth can better roads slow traffic? But numerous studies show that in growing cities, it is futile to try to speed up traffic by road-building.
In Australia’s major cities, the car’s colonisation of the surface area shows no sign of abating. People remain committed to the dream of rapid automobility from crowded downtown to tranquil suburb, and this in large part explains our failure to meet global emission targets.
As the planet fries, we’re still mainlining fossil fuels and will continue to do so until most of us start driving electric cars (and running air-conditioners) powered by renewables, which isn’t going to happen any time soon.
Misgivings about road-building generally don’t apply to the regions. When a politician announces a new road to bypass a regional town, most people are usually happy. Who needs to be stuck in a traffic jam driving up the coast for the summer holidays?
Earlier this month the New South Wales government announced a proposal to build a road tunnel in the Blue Mountains between Katoomba and Lithgow, bypassing the towns of Blackheath and Mount Victoria. Media reports suggest locals are supportive: apart from a few shopkeepers who fear the loss of trade, most welcome the tranquillity that diverting traffic away from the town would bring.
But the proposal comes just a few years after the completion of the last major upgrade to the road from Sydney and we should be careful not to assume it’s disconnected from the process of urban growth.
Residents of towns more than 80km from cities often see themselves as living well outside the urban rat race. Few undertake the daily commute. So when governments improve local highways, they do so ostensibly to improve freight and tourist movements.
No limit to urban expansion
It’s important, however, to stop thinking about Australian cities in 20th century terms and recognise that the gravity of CBDs is becoming weaker. The idea that there’s a natural limit to urban expansion, a point beyond which a city will not grow, is challenged by urbanisation patterns elsewhere in the world.
As Australia’s major cities — Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth — expand they come to resemble polycentric conurbations like southern California or Tokyo-Yokohama. Brisbane is already cheek by jowl with the Gold Coast and playing footsie with the Sunshine Coast. Melbourne will soon become Australia’s most populous city and at some stage will join up with Geelong. Traffic is epic in both cities.
Major peri-urban commercial investment and infrastructure projects help to drive sprawl, as is happening with the western Sydney airport, and adjacent “aerotropolis”, driving the growth of adjacent suburban centres like Penrith and Blacktown.
And the rise of hybrid work during the pandemic — some days at home, some at work — has made living at great distance from the office more feasible. More people will see regional towns as viable places to live. They’ll become less economically isolated and more connected to the big four cities. But in turn they risk losing the sense of singularity.
Twenty-five years ago, Western Sydney University students from Camden, on the south-west edge, laughed when I told them they lived in a “suburb”. Today the suggestion barely raises an eyebrow.
Regional towns are rarely immune from the influence of nearby cities. Their populations will grow if governments improve transport links, and even though this may compromise local tranquillity and distinctiveness, it will improve job opportunities for those who would otherwise be too remote.
Roads are less sustainable, however, than rail. Congestion will increase and much more energy will be consumed. It takes nearly as long to travel by train from the upper Blue Mountains to Sydney’s Central station as from Manchester to London, even though it’s only a third of the distance.
Trains travel the 75km from Geelong to Melbourne in an hour and even though planned rail improvements will cut this trip by 10 minutes, that’s much slower than global standards. European or Japanese commuters would cover the same distance in half the time.
To conserve the place-centredness while encouraging regional economic growth in peri-urban areas, our representatives would be much better advised to invest in improving rail than road. In doing so they may even help to save the planet.
George Morgan is associate professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University.
These are eminently sensible comments, however, they miss the elephant in the room, namely the immense inertial power of real estate. For us to move to a genuinely decentralised model of urban development, connected by effective rail links, would inevitably lead to a decrease in metropolitan land values – especially in the sprawling outer suburbs. It is hard to see any of our state governments having the courage, or the electoral wherewithal, to face down the real estate lobby and the investor community.
So basically locked in encaged in bricks n mortar wealth…the word *mortgage* comes to mind..
Even where people are moving to regional towns, there is mortgage stress. Toowoomba for instance is one city with high stress, yet its connection to Brisbane is a Greyhound bus. Its a strange world we live in.
In 1960 there was a rail line that went the entire length of the Gold Coast from Beenleigh to Tweed Heads over the border in New South WalesThis line went into the middle of Southport, past West Burleigh, Currumbin and Tugun, right past where the airport is now at Bilinga, right through the heart of Coolangatta and terminated at Tweed Heads.As this was a normal railway line, heavy freight could also be carried.To their eternal shame, this viable and accessible aset was closed by the National party/Liberal party coalition government of the day.Now the present govrrnment is forced to play catchup, but due to popualtion pressure, this new line is only light rail, a weasel word euphemism for tram.I still remember the Transport minister of the day saying that the days of trains were finished and people much preferred to go by car or bus.i woder how many of the voters on the Gold Coast, who routinely return Conservative members to the Queensland parliament, are aware of this fact.
Absolutely agree with Griselda, A few more elephants in the room are overpopulation, owner driven cars (dinosaurs) and obsession with growth at the expense of the planet. Self driving cars with Uber style service managed by computers is available now to eliminate any more highways. There is absolutely no need to own a car in cities like HK, Shanghai, London, Singapore, Paris and so on.
Decentralization is obviously easy to start. It was done and is still being done with covid.
Melbourne Public Transport Users Group (I think) apportioned growth of motor vehicle use and incentives to do so, firmly at the feet of Australians citizens, e.g. cars in salary packages, lazy people, oldies getting to appts., school runs, increase in logistics etc., neither ‘immigrants’ nor ‘population growth’, they are simply deflections or dog whistles not grounded in credible data or analysis.
Have you ever hear of any MP or leader asking people to leave their cars at home, or even ditching one?
I wish I could Salary Package an e-Bike or Public Transport. Even bike paths that have a purpose seem to be difficult – my workplace is 8km away by road, and is a major centre of employment, but the bikepath would take me almost all the way into the city and back, almost trebling the ride. There is talk of duplicating the road, rather than getting the bikeway going.
I know the great dream is to connect the east coast by high speed rail, but I’m surprised that it hasn’t been implemented on a state level where population density makes it financially viable. Even in Sydney, there’s plenty that could be connected within the city and to nearby cities / towns. Melbourne and Brisbane would no doubt have a similar need and benefit.
No doubt there are plenty of people who would love to live regionally of they could be connected like that. Can imagine there’s a lot of flow on benefits, and hopefully a sanity check to the urban sprawl of the big cities.
Great comment. In some ways the great Melbourne Sydney Brisbane pipe dream allows state governments to evade the challenge of modernising metropolitan-regional rail systems. Of major railway countries only India has spent less on rail infrastructure over the last fifty years.
Add to this the conclusion by Infrastructure Australia some time ago that massive road infrastructure is very rarely value for money.
And the inevitability of EVs and increasing vehicle AI, facilitating denser traffic at higher speeds.
Further, the economics of EVs incentivises subscription ‘ownership’; ie each vehicle will be used more often by more people, decreasing vehicles per person. Now a vehicle spends more than 95% of its time parked, consuming vast tracts of urban land.
Given that new urban road infrastructure never reduces congestion, it is time to reduce spending on roads and greatly increase spending on urban high speed rail. But we have a bloody long way to go on rail to come anywhere near parity with the rest of the world.