Sorry for the hoary cliché but I really do think it’s time for a new way of thinking about public transport.
Much of the debate on transport in cities is too simplistic. All too frequently it’s reduced to a simple nostrum: “replace all car travel with public transport”. I think it’s more complex than that and, to use another cliché, requires a more nuanced approach.
Let me be clear from the outset that there are compelling reasons why we need to invest more in public transport — for example, to provide mobility for those without access to a car. Another reason is to provide an alternative to roads that are becoming increasingly congested.
But I’m not convinced that the reason most commonly advanced — to overcome the environmental disadvantages of cars — is all that persuasive. Here’s why.
There is considerable scope to make driving “greener”. Petrol is like water. It’s so cheap that too many of us use it profligately, but given the right behavioural incentives we could use considerably less without materially lowering our standard of living.
There’s also room to increase the fuel efficiency of existing internal combustion engine technology and to reduce the weight and speed of cars. Then there’re alternative fuels such as compressed gas and ethanol and whole new technologies such as cars powered by electricity and hydrogen.
There are issues here — electricity in Australia is dirty, there are environmental issues around batteries, ethanol potentially competes with food for agricultural land and it could take considerable time to turn over the national car fleet.
But as I’ve argued before the attractiveness of the car and the value of the existing infrastructure should not be underestimated as forces of change. The major car companies are now the world’s biggest R&D spenders.
Another consideration is that public transport is not as green as it is commonly assumed. It is only fuel-efficient and emissions-efficient if it has high load factors like it does at peak hours, but the requirement to run in off-peak times, especially at night and on weekends, dilutes this advantage substantially.
As Victoria’s Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability observed, modes that rely on coal-fired electricity, such as Victoria’s trams and trains, “have GHG full fuel cycle intensity levels on an average per person-kilometre basis that are comparable to motor vehicles”. As this report prepared for the 2008 Victorian Climate Change Summit shows, the GHG intensity of buses in Victoria is in fact worse than that of cars.
This would not be a problem if the vast bulk of all future trips were made by public transport. But in Melbourne the government’s target is for public transport to capture 20% of motorised travel by 2020 and in Sydney the target set by the Independent Inquiry is 28% of motorised travel by 2036.
That’s not all though — the lion’s share of these ambitious increases would almost certainly be in peak periods rather than the off peak.
The environmental justification for public transport is captured in the commonly accepted assumption that it must be provided on a scale and of a quality that provides a viable alternative to the car i.e. it has to offer a level of service that is superior to the car. This leads to serious proposals like having a system that provides “every 10 minutes to everywhere” so that residents, theoretically, never need to even own a car.
I can’t see that 10-minute frequencies would be attractive enough, other than in areas such as the CBD, to make many car owners leave their vehicles in the garage, but of course it would be wonderful to have. However, the key issue is that these sorts of aspirational goals need to be set in the context of the enormous financial task involved not just in providing better public transport but in providing it on a scale and of a quality that can out-compete cars.
My view is that policy on public transport investment should stop trying to out-compete the car. This is a near impossible task in most parts of the metropolitan area and is very probably unnecessary on environmental grounds. There should instead be two key focuses.
The first should be on the highly concentrated parts of metropolitan areas such as the city centre, where congestion is increasingly rendering the car uncompetitive. These are the locations where high standards of service are justified and where public transport really does out-compete the car.
But that’s still a relatively small part of our cities — in Melbourne’s case, the area within five kilometres of Melbourne Town Hall accommodates less than 10% of the metropolitan population and less than 30% of jobs. And jobs in turn only account for about 30% of all travel within the metropolitan area. If cars are “green” then a large part of the warrant for public transport in non-concentrated areas is removed.
The second focus should be on providing mobility for those without access to a car. I concede I don’t know what a minimum acceptable level of public transport service is for this group — that’s an interesting question in itself. But I’m pretty confident it would cost a lot less than what would be required to make travellers who aren’t going to the city centre abandon their cars and switch to public transport.
Providing sustainable and workable transport within our major cities is going to be a long and difficult task. I think it makes more sense to recognise that we actually need the car to keep our relatively low density cities (at least by European standards) functioning for many decades to come. Yes, even green cars have negatives, but we should focus on ways of civilising the beast.
Investment in public transport needs to be strategic and targeted, not sprayed across-the-board. There are other socially worthy uses for scarce funds. The “green” argument is the weakest rationale for more public transport.
This first appeared on the Melbourne Urbanist blog site.
How right the author is to separate the objectives of public transport. The two (of many) which he has discussed are transport for the YOPS (Young, Old, Poor and Sick) and access to the CBD, especially during peak periods.
The advent of the NBN may cause review around the edges in the former, but could drive a spear through the heart of CBD’s in general and transport to and through them, in particular.
Factories are not CBD’s. Worker transport to and from manufacturing and distribution centres is essential. There is, however, an accellerating trend towards working from home. This is to be encouraged. Hopefully, regional and country employment will also be encouraged by NBN-like opportunities.
It will be interesting to watch the actions of the investors and others who stand to lose as/if the CBD’s lose patronage. Their wish for quiet, unclogged streets may be fulfilled, as has happened dramatically in Newcastle’s CBD which has been abandoned by all and sundry. The law precinct may well be next to go.
These are interesting times.
what about more bike paths? (less traffic congestion, cleaner air, and exercise for all)
Minibuses (along the lines of the ‘dolmus’ model in Turkey – i.e. get on/get off services operating along set routes across suburbs and with relatively low cost fares) would add great flexibility to public transport in our cities. But would no doubt be unpopular with the existing taxi industry – perhaps that is why we don’t have such services?.
Ian,
I suspect that the relatively high wage structure in Australia makes minibuses less attractive than in Turkey. Buses are best operated full, ie at peak times. Try to find a bus at 3am and you will get the picture.
No doubt taxi operators have a point of view, but the decisions might well be driven by the cost of running small Vs large buses in the first place.
I wonder… Has Sydney done anything about its scandalously inefficient mid-afternoon taxi shift changes yet? Staggered shift changes seem to be the way to go, but the evening peaks are so long that drivers appear determined to change just before school comes out, after which the peak goes till mid-evening. Why not have half of them change drivers at 7pm?
The author makes some good points — there are many people for whom cars will always be justifiably preferable to public transport.
But I do question this theory that it’s only worthwhile trying to address congestion by public transport in the inner urban areas. The people clogging up inner-city roads in peak hour with their cars are not inner-city residents. Most have commuted from the places where public transport does not come close to competing with cars for convenience. Many, perhaps a majority, would consider taking public transport instead if it were available. But in most cities congestion is now a problem in numerous places across the urban sprawl, not just the CBD. A solid integrated public transport system must allow passengers get from, to and beyond all such places in reasonable time. The existing radial train, tram and bus systems of Sydney and Melbourne (and other Australian cities of course) are inadequate; new routes must connect the secondary centres, connecting with the existing thoroughfares while relieving rather than impinging on existing choke-points.
Mains electricity powered public transport in Melbourne produces greenhouse gas emissions comparable to those from cars solely because Victoria uses electricity from the most emissions-intensive power stations in the world: Hazelbrook and the other brown coal burners of the La Trobe Valley. Anywhere else, and in Victoria too as soon as these monstrosities are retired, electric transport is substantially less polluting on average than conventional cars.
I question the claim that buses are particularly (environmentally) inefficient compared with cars at low capacities … obviously this is true when there are no passengers aboard, because a bus may weigh 6 times as much as a single small car and have 6 times the emissions per kilometre, but that means it only needs an average of 6 passengers over all its kilometres driven, to compete with cars on fuel consumption. Even at 1am many bus routes achieve better than this; the daily averages are far far better. Buses are getting more fuel-efficient over time just as cars are, but the price signals are not yet powerful enough to drive significant innovation every year.
Efficient road vehicles remain economically unattractive with petrol at today’s prices, but the approaching “peak oil” event will inevitably turn the scales. Long before oil “runs out” and hopefully before the cheap-oil-dependent economy collapses, car and equipment purchasers will have the opportunity to make soul-searching decisions about fuel economy with oil at $200 a barrel or more. There’s a reasonable chance that our economy will skip straight from depending on massive quantities of cheap petroleum to not really depending on oil at all except for air and ocean transport — in modest quantities and at prices which can support its manufacture from non-petroleum sources such as biomass.
Battery technology has made leaps and bounds in the last decade as lithium batteries have come into their own powering consumer electronics, and new battery technologies such as molten-salt are the focus of much R&D. Electric cars have not come into their own just yet, but battery-electric cars are certain to become economically significant as soon as economics dictate it.