Hobart, it’s time for a reality check

GREG BARNS: We know multi-billion dollar bypasses and tunnels aren’t the answer, so why shell out for studies.

NOT THERE YET: Hobart is a long way from downtown Los Angeles.

LAST week Premier Will Hodgman announced that $1 million of your money would be spent by the Government on looking at tunnels and bypass roads.

This bonanza for consultants is in response to complaints about traffic woes in Hobart.

But is there really a traffic crisis in this small city of just over 200,000 and if there is, why the obsession with road-spending as a solution?

And who is going to pay for the multi-billion dollar expenditure that turning building tunnels and bypass roads into reality will cost?

Some would-be politicians campaigning in the Nelson Legislative Council election are telling us the roads are clogged.

Here is one example from the former Labor state MP Madeleine Ogilvie. Writing on these pages on March 11 she complained that, “We are swamped with traffic and people are furious. It is time to stop fiddling around the edges.”

According to Ms Ogilvie, “Our beautiful workable city where we could get three primary school kids dropped off, run some errands, get to work, then do the whole thing again in reverse in the afternoon, no longer exists.”

She “[seems] to spend hours jammed in traffic between school, after-school sports, work and the supermarket.”

The Armageddon-type rhetoric didn’t stop there.

“Davey Street, Lynton Avenue, Churchill Avenue, Regent Street, Sandy Bay Road and the Southern Outlet are a disaster for anyone trying to do the school run or get to work on time.” If one knew nothing of Hobart, one would imagine a Los Angeles-type scenario where lines of traffic sit idling for hours on end daily.

Her solution, uncosted, “is a major infrastructure project to build bypass tunnels and fully upgrade our roads.”

Let’s reflect on some of these statements. While it is true to say there has been an increase in traffic in Hobart in recent years to suggest that one spends hours — which assumes two or more — in a vehicle between school, after-school sports, work and the supermarket is palpable nonsense in the context of people who live in suburbs such as Sandy Bay and Kingston.

The reality remains that time spent in a vehicle in Hobart for most people is far less than it is for those who live in major centres like Sydney and Melbourne. Ask those who move here from such places. They often comment on how easy it is to commute in Hobart.

The Australian Automobile Association released a report last year that ranked Hobart at fourth behind Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide for traffic congestion.

So yes, there is an issue concerning congestion and traffic flow, in this most car-dependent of cities, but to describe it in apocalyptic terms and propose expensive and unrealistic solutions, as Ms Ogilvie has done, is nothing more than populist vote-chasing.

Ms Ogilvie’s solutions were shot down by someone who knows transport better than most of us, John Livermore.

Mr Livermore, a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport Australia, noted on March 13 on these pages that the cost of building tunnels and bypass roads in Hobart is prohibitively expensive and the volume of traffic would see these roads and tunnels turn into white elephants.

How would the community pay for tunnels and bypass roads that would be designed to relieve the pressure on the two main CBD thoroughfares Davey St and Macquarie St?

A report published last year by the federal Department of Transport, Infrastructure and Regional Economics found that “average road project costs were around $5.1 million per lane kilometre in 2017.”

The report noted “costs of urban and rural freeways/highways were around $5.4 million per lane kilometre.”

Leaked documents released in 2017 showed the cost of a proposed Sydney tunnel road to be $1 billion a kilometre.

In Auckland, estimates of a proposed tunnel under consideration are about $500 million per kilometre.

In other words the sorts of radical solutions being peddled are prohibitively expensive, even if traffic flows justified their construction.

If tolls were imposed, as is commonly the case in Melbourne and Sydney, this would perhaps offset the cost. But, as Mr Livermore points out, tolls tend to deter motorists.

Realism and sober analysis is what we should expect from those who seek public office. Not sweeping statements and grand visions which are fiscal madness or would require the imposition of the users-pays principle.

When it comes to Hobart’s traffic, we do not need to spend $1 million of taxpayer funds on looking at tunnels and bypass roads. We know that the numbers do not stack up.

Hobart barrister Greg Barns has been an adviser to state and federal Liberal governments.