Tony Morton, president of the Victorian Public Transport Users Association, has penned a piece complaining about the erosion of the public transport network across Victoria, which has experienced multiple failures recently due to inadequate maintenance and insufficient investment. From The Age:
…if one were to pick one word to describe our transport system as it is now, it is “fragile”. V/Line passengers saw the fragility of the system over the past few months – not just from the wheel-wear situation, but also when trains were found to be failing to trigger level crossings in Dandenong, which knocked the Gippsland line out of action.
On the metropolitan rail system, the fragility is seen most acutely by Altona line passengers every other day, when a signal failure causes their trains to be cancelled and they’re stranded on a station platform for 40 minutes or more in peak hour.
But it’s not just public transport: the fragility of our road network is legend. By chasing a US-style model of radical dependence on private car travel, our traffic networks are strained to the point where a single collision or broken-down truck jams up the works.
We continue to entertain the fantasy that a new or wider road will solve the problem, or even just buy us some time. But the result is the same as in every other place it’s been tried: traffic grows to fill the space available, and does so even more quickly than before.
Yet there are many places in the world where the transport systems work. From Vienna to Vancouver, there are cities that sustain mobile populations and liveable reputations without a constant sense of impending crisis…
Unfortunately in Australia we are lurching from one fragile solution to another, rather than learning from the best in the world.
While I agree with Morton about the need for better maintenance and investment in transport systems, his analysis misses some fundamental points.
First, where is the acknowledgement of the monstrous population growth in Melbourne, which has placed massive extra strain (demand) on the transport system?
As revealed recently, Melbourne has experienced the highest population growth in Australia over the past decade, adding an average 83,200 people each and every year:
Worse, the “Plan Melbourne” blueprint, released last year. projected that Melbourne’s population would balloon out to 7.7 million by 2051.
Without massive investment in infrastructure each and every year, system failures and congestion are bound to worsen. But where is the discussion about the demand-side of the transport equation, and whether such high population growth growth (immigration) is necessary or desirable?
Second, I would hardly classify Vancouver Canada as an example that Melbourne should try to emulate.
Vancouver is undoubtedly one of the most expensive housing markets in the world, with an the average Metro Vancouver home price hitting more than $CA1.04 million dollars recently.
In fact, Vancouverites are so fed up with the cost of housing they have banded together as part of the #donthave1million campaign.
Traffic congestion in Vancouver is also hideous, with the TomTom Traffic Index showing that Vancouver has the worst traffic congestion in Canada, the fourth worst congestion in North America (behind Mexico City, Los Angeles and San Francisco), and the 36th worst congestion in the world. This comes despite its relatively small population of only 2.3 million people across the Greater Vancouver Metropolitan Area.
The sad reality is that Melbourne will forever be playing catch-up on infrastructure as long as its population continues to grow at Third World levels. Promoting urban containment, like Vancouver has done, will not fix the situation and will very likely further erode housing affordability.
