Cafe Society: RACT chief Harvey Lennon explains why we need to walk to work more

He’s the chief of Tasmania’s peak motoring body, but RACT chief Harvey Lennon wants commuters in Hobart walk to work more.

Outgoing RACT group chief executive Harvey Lennon. Picture: RICHARD JUPE

WHEN it comes to traffic decongestion in central Hobart, RACT chief executive Harvey Lennon walks the walk, going to and from his Murray St workplace and his South Hobart home on foot most days.

The rivulet walk offers good thinking time, he says. It’s good for his heart and waistline in the island of obesity, and it only takes five minutes longer than it would by car — that’s how bad the peak-time traffic blockages are on his road route.

“Though I love driving, I don’t like that bloody driving you do between the city and South Hobart,” he says over coffee at The WhiteWall Kitchen at RACT House. “Crawling along stuck in traffic, waiting for two or three light changes to move forward, that’s not fun.”

How did it come to this, though, Harvey? Don’t we have governments and councils to do a bit of crystal ball-gazing and deal with this stuff?

Not when they are fixated on short-term election cycles, he says.

We mull briefly over the likely benefits of stable joint council decision-making to foster a robust, values-aligned vision for state growth.

It was the apparent absence of such that drove Harvey to lead the RACT to produce the Greater Hobart Mobility Vision report.

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Released earlier this year, the report harnesses a stack of stats and community feedback to deliver a detailed action plan staged across 30 years, all in the service of a growing, flowing Hobart that is less reliant on car travel (check it out at hobartvision.ract.com.au).

“We had a feeling there wasn’t a driver in our community for this, and that we needed to lead and take a long-term view,” says Harvey.

“Up until about five years ago, traffic wasn’t such an issue. It’s really sort of crept up on us.”

While the report outlines a coordinated strategy, including seamless park and ride services from satellite centres and a multi-stop ferry service, Harvey is ambivalent about major infrastructure solutions such as cross-city tunnels or flyover bypasses.

A free or low-cost Metro service, though, would be a brilliant incentive to get more people on to public transport.

Harvey says incentivising incremental behavioural change can get Hobart out of its current fix, with small percentage differences having a huge impact.

Currently, about 9 per cent of Hobart residents walk or cycle to work, with a vast majority travelling by car.

“If we get 2-3 per cent more people to walk or cycle [on safer cycleways] and 2-3 per cent more to use public transport, we’d be back to where we were five years ago with traffic, and we would not have a problem,” he says.

A lifestyle rather than concrete response is not only more achievable, Harvey reckons it’s a feel-good fit for laid-back, heritage-loving Tassie.

As he prepares to hand over to incoming chief executive Mark Mugnaioni, Harvey is calling for all of us to regularly reassess our transport needs.

Until three years ago, for instance, Harvey was still doing school runs, and walking to work wouldn’t have worked for him. Now it does, and he loves listening to birdsong and the gurgling rivulet waters as he goes.

On that nature-loving front, Harvey says Tasmania needs to guard its assets ever more diligently.

Lauded for his collaborative approach during the redevelopment of the RACT Freycinet Lodge, which sits within Freycinet National Park, he cautions other tourism operators from trying to proceed without a social licence. “The challenge we faced when we wanted to expand was resistance from local interest and environment groups.

“We could have just ignored that, but in Tasmania you ignore that sort of thing at your peril.

“That is something we need to accept. Tasmanians have a huge sense of ownership over the unique places we have here. We listened, adapted our plans and came up with something better, and that didn’t expand further in the national park.”

As for other commercial developments in national parks, he urges extreme restraint, saying only the lightest of footprints is acceptable.

Last but not least, Harvey says allocating the $576 million funding to replace the Bridgewater Bridge through the $1.43 billion Hobart City Deal channel is disappointing.

Though he has long advocated for a replacement bridge, he says including it in the City Deal is an unacceptable cost.

“My disappointment is that Bridgewater Bridge was included in the City Deal, rather than separate priority funding for Tasmania as a whole, which would have left more funding in the City Deal for congestion-busting initiatives.

“The City Deal provided a great opportunity to address infrastructure issues for Hobart, working from the CBD out, an opportunity for the four [greater Hobart] councils to work together on [developing] public and active transport, and an opportunity to deliver a world-leading integrated transport system. Perhaps an opportunity lost?”