Talking Point: Arterial bypass to the west of Hobart’s CBD critical to fix traffic

BOB COTGROVE: Cars are here to stay, so let’s design our state capital appropriately.

URBAN designer Nick Booth’s vision of a piazza in Hobart on Murray St in front of the treasury building between Macquarie and Davey streets is excellent (“Capital design at the crossroads,” Sunday Tasmanian, July 10).

But why limit the vision to such a small part of the urban area where its potential benefits will be suffocated by surrounding traffic flows?

Why not extend the idea to include Franklin Square and the new Parliament Square complex, and go through to the waterfront?

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A pedestrianised, limited motor vehicle access area stretching from Salamanca Place to Hunter St and from Murray St to Campbell St, incorporating Morrison, Davey, Macquarie, Collins and Liverpool streets would give Hobart one of the world’s most attractive central urban landscapes. It would restore Macquarie and Davey streets to the grand boulevards they were intended to be in the colonial era, reconnect the CBD to the waterfront, and keep the core of the CBD relatively traffic-free.

The only stumbling block to this exciting vision is what to do with the huge traffic volumes that have turned Macquarie and Davey streets into conduits for motorists trying to get into the city and get through it to destinations in Kingborough, Clarence, Sorell, Glenorchy and Brighton.

All three major arterials, the Brooker Avenue to the north, the Tasman Highway to the east and the Southern Expressway to the south, funnel traffic onto Macquarie and Davey streets.

Traffic between suburbs in Hobart suburbs from Sandy Bay to Lenah Valley, also uses Macquarie and Davey streets via the cross arterials that connect them.

Planners, architects and engineers have been lecturing the public for 60 years that the answer to congestion is to abandon cars and revert back to public transport.

Such advice flies in the face of credible evidence about changing activity patterns. Worse, it ignores underlying reasons for travel behaviour.

Evidence from the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics in Canberra shows the mode-split between motor vehicles and public transport for all our capital cities has remained constant for 40 years.

The ratio between cars and buses in Hobart, an urban area of less than 250,000 residents, is greater than in other, much larger, Australian capital.

Cars and public transport serve separate markets.

Times have changed since public mass transport was developed in the industrial age to meet the needs of a predominantly male manufacturing workforce.

Today’s workforce consists of men and women engaged in predominantly professional occupations where mobility to connect dispersed origins and destinations within the strict constraints of limited time budgets is essential.

Motor vehicle use is the lubricant enabling modern post-industrial cities to function efficiently. Whereas public transport, necessarily constrained by fixed routes and timetables, remains convenient for “there and back” journeys, only cars can serve complex multiple-purpose trips characteristic of modern lifestyles.

Car ownership has given upward mobility to low-income families, allowing them the advantages of owning larger houses and spacious gardens. It has given women, particularly those with dependant children, the opportunity to participate in the workforce and to achieve financial independence.

People who use cars live more active lives, physically and socially, than those who are dependent on bus travel.

Trips to play sport and recreation, trips to cultural events, and trips to engage with friends and relatives have increased rapidly due to the mobility of car use. Work trips now make up only 15 per cent of total urban travel.

Car travel is here to stay and it is time for politicians, at all levels, to plan a future for Hobart based on realistic assessments of future traffic volumes rather than on the failed ideology that car travel will somehow disappear.

A long list of developments earmarked for Hobart will generate more traffic by workers, customers, suppliers, service personnel and tourists.

Continuing population growth in outlying suburbs of Kingborough, Clarence and Sorell will increase traffic trying to bypass the city. Traffic into and through the city will increase.

No amount of tinkering will solve longer term issues of congestion for a road system that has remained unchanged since Jarman’s famous 1858 Map of Hobart Town.

The solution to Hobart congestion is an arterial bypass connecting the Brooker Avenue, Tasman Highway and Southern Expressway around the western side of the CBD. Unless that is done, the vision of a civilised, uncluttered Hobart city centre will not be realised.

Bob Cotgrove is a Tasmanian urban geographer and transport economist with special interests in post-industrial land use and activity patterns.