Get ready for the worst traffic in Australian history

GET ready to feel like screaming on the way to work this morning. Here’s why your commute is going to suck.

3 min read

January 28, 2016 - 8:56AM

DRIVING around the city in the last month has been dreamlike. There was nobody on the streets and sometimes, in some places, I even got up to the speed limit.

It is a funny feeling to get to your destination 10 minutes early and not be the slightest bit stressed. But school holidays finish today.

Those glorious days of wide open roads are over.

What will start is the worst traffic in Australian history. Here’s why.

When school goes back, there will be more students. In 2016, 43,000 more kids are off to school. Almost none of them will ride a bike and very few walk, so more cars will be on the roads.

But it is not just the school drop-off snarling traffic.

Unemployment is lower than last year — it has fallen from 6.1 per cent to 5.8 per cent. And population is higher. That means a whopping 350,000 more people have jobs.

At about 8.10am, it might seem every single one of those extra people is on the road in front of you. You’re going to feel like screaming.

In theory, this shouldn’t be happening — we should be telecommuting. But Australians bought a record number of new cars last year — 1.2 million — proving we’d still rather drive and the number of cars on the road keeps going up.

These next two graphs show growth the kilometres travelled in Australia’s capital cities. Every city has seen more and more driving. Perth has had the biggest increase with 28 per cent more kilometres driven between 2000-01 and 2013-14. Adelaide has seen the least with 7 per cent more.

Kilometres driven in our smaller capital cities. Source: BITRE 2015

Kilometres driven in our bigger capital cities. Source: BITRE 2015

So what are we doing about it?

WORKING FROM HOME

The government had a plan very briefly in about 2013 to try to get people to work from home. That went nowhere and died a quiet death.

INFRASTRUCTURE

As for infrastructure spending, there’s not enough of it. Australia is still struggling by on a network of road and rail built when our cities were a lot smaller.

Recent problems in global financial markets mean borrowing has never been cheaper. We could borrow billions and billions at less than 3 per cent interest and build big for the century ahead.

Instead our governments are obsessed with balancing the budget one year at a time.

POPULATION

Population policy — if it formally existed — would be set federally. Big spending on roads and public transport, however, falls to state governments and even councils. There’s no clear incentive for the Federal Government to set population targets.

The Federal Government did have a Cities Minister for a while there, but he was the guy who got into strife in the bar in Hong Kong, and since then nobody knows if he will be replaced.

PLANNING

Australian cities are peculiarly spread out. That’s part of the problem because it means so many people live so far away from their jobs. We need to either move the jobs to the people or the people to the jobs.

OTHER TRANSPORT OPTIONS

Self-driving cars are coming down the pipeline but the people who are most excited about them are over-estimating how fast they will arrive. Every new technology has some sticking points during its evolution that you can’t predict. It could be the hand-off problem. Or it could be the way their unpredictable driving causes a lot of accidents, even though they’re not at fault.

So we need to have a plan that doesn’t only rely on everyone using cars, no matter how clever.

Public transport use is growing fast, but peak hour services are already packed. If Australia’s cities are going to keep getting bigger — and they are — they have to improve their public transport options dramatically. This means not just better tubes under the city but much better connections to everyone, even in the suburbs.

If I could get that relaxed, driving-in-summer feeling every time I got on the bus or the train, I’d take it.