Traffic congestion, roads and poor policy ruining neighbourhoods

PETER BOYER targets the main problem with our capital city — cars.

The kinds of cities we yearn for do not need private cars. Picture: MATT THOMPSON

WHAT distinguishes ordinary cities from extraordinary ones, liveable cities from urban wastelands? What things make a healthy city?

These questions are as relevant now as in 1961, when young New Yorker Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities about how bad road planning was ruining neighbourhoods and sucking the life out of metropolitan America.

The same questions are informing the City of Hobart’s new transport strategy, which asks, among other things, how do we shape our city to make it a better place, easier to get about, more stimulating, attractive, peaceful and secure?

Thinking about transport, most people home in on ease of movement, in particular cars on roads and how we keep them moving. But as the strategy makes clear, it simply isn’t feasible to consider any sort of transport in isolation.

For most of the 10,000-year story of cities nearly everyone walked, with a few sitting on beasts of burden and then in carts and carriages. It was a natural part of interpersonal contact, which was what city life was all about. It still is.

Private car use encourages separation and territorial rights. Interpersonal contact between car users is rare, except in road rage.

The kinds of cities we yearn for — people meeting for business, pleasure and stimulation — do not need private cars.

Cars are the least space-efficient transport, as Elliot Fishman of Melbourne’s Institute for Sensible Transport told a Climate Tasmania seminar in Hobart this month. In growing cities, more roads mean more cars. They just make it worse.

Motor transport is the state’s biggest source of greenhouse emissions. Per person-kilometre, based on average occupancy, a car releases over 13 times as much carbon dioxide as a bus, and infinitely more than walking.

The strategy informs us Hobart is Tasmania’s biggest work destination, with more than half of greater Hobart’s jobs and 40 per cent of southern Tasmania’s. Most commuters head for the city, so a new bypass road would make little difference to peak hour.

In 2011 a state government survey of workers in the city found 79 per cent travelled to and from work in cars (68 per cent as driver, 11 per cent passenger). Of people living in the city proper, 61 per cent travelled in cars — 25 per cent of commuters living in the city boundary walked to work, the highest proportion of walking commuters in all our capitals.

Less welcome is the data on cycling (just 2 per cent of commuters from greater Hobart) and users of buses, a measly 8 per cent. Electric bikes lift the cycling figure, but as a bus user I’m not confident Metro use would be much higher today. That’s a concern, because as the draft strategy makes clear, buses and bikes are the main alternatives to cars in a metropolitan area as stretched out as Hobart, and on an island where cutting transport emissions should be the top climate policy priority.

Work and school journeys, tailor-made for public transport, are responsible for most travel into or through the city. So public transport, mainly bus but also potentially light rail and ferries, is the key.

Reducing cars in Hobart is not simple. I enjoy the company of people I don’t know on buses, but I accept not everyone does.

Making non-car city transit more appealing is beyond local government’s means. Advertisers spend billions equating freedom and happiness with shiny new cars on shiny new roads. Little wonder MPs see road-building as a path to electoral success.

Imagine if higher levels of government gave funding priority for city transit infrastructure, not to new bypass roads, but to public transport priority lanes and pedestrian and cycle paths.

Imagine public transport hubs in Hobart suburbs, where people using bus, light rail or ferry could drive their car to a free all-day parking station.

A city flourishes not because of property booms, but because citizens find it easy to live there.

The Hobart transport strategy is up for public discussion at city venues this week. Google City of Hobart transport strategy 2018-30.

Peter Boyer began his journalism career at the Mercury. He specialises in the science and politics of climate change.