By Peter Boyle
Australia is committed, by the Toronto agreement it signed in 1988, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 20% of the 1988 rate by the year 2005. There seems no way this target could be achieved without a major shift from private cars to public transport. PETER BOYLE looks at recent studies of what has been done in other countries and what remains to be done here.
Since the signing of the Toronto agreement, federal and state governments have spent millions of dollars on highly publicised commissions and inquiries which have been long on general pronouncements but short on action. Yet at the same time the governments of the two most populous states, Victoria and NSW, have been cutting back spending on public transport, thereby ensuring an even greater contribution to greenhouse gas emissions from cars.
Cars are second only to power stations as producers of greenhouse gases, says Alan Parker of the Town and Country Planning Association. They produce 14% of carbon dioxide and 20% of CFCs. Greenhouse emissions from car manufacture, petrol consumption, oil exploration and processing make up 12.5% of Australia's contribution to global warming.
The heavy reliance on the private car for transport today is the result of deliberate policies by governments and planners — urged on by the car industry — to reduce the usage of public transport.
According to a recently released report by the Public Transport Users Association, public transport usage in Melbourne has declined from 40% in 1961 (then one of the highest in the world) to a mere 8% today. This is a direct result of public policy to promote road transport and in particular the private car, admitted Victorian minister for transport Peter Spycker in a recent ABC radio interview.
The quality, reliability and comprehensiveness of public transport have been steadily whittled away, reducing its role to that of transportation of last resort. It is now used mainly by those who have no choice: city workers who don't have access to parking, the young, the old and the poor. Public transport accounts for only 15% of travel to work and a mere 5% of other travel in Melbourne.
Two spirals
Since the postwar boom in car ownership, public transport has been demotivated while the car has been invested with almost mythic qualities through unrelenting advertising. Cars are promoted as
symbols of power, status, sexual prowess and freedom. Tram and rail lines were pulled up or closed down.
Public transport was sent into a downward spiral of fewer passengers, less revenue, lower investment, lower standard of service and thus even fewer passengers. Meanwhile, the car has been on an upward spiral: more traffic has led to more investment in bigger roads, to more road space, which led to even more traffic.
Transport planning and investment have been justified as simply "meeting demand" and have thus reinforced the trend. This sort of planning cannot bring about a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, says the PTUA report. Trend planning is not planning at all, because it has no vision.
The argument that public transport is declining because people prefer to use the car is exploded by a comparison of transport systems in two cities — Melbourne and Toronto in Canada.
Toronto is demographically similar to Melbourne. Twenty years ago its transport system was in the same crisis Melbourne's is in today. But Toronto authorities rejected the conventional wisdom of the time; they planned for an increase in public transport and achieved it. Meanwhile Melbourne transport planners aimed for a decline in public transport — and achieved it!
Between 1965 and 1990, Toronto's public transport service per capita increased by 75% while Melbourne's decreased 30%. Public transport usage increased in Toronto by 20% while Melbourne's decreased by 50%. Public transport in Toronto accounts for 22% of all travel but in Melbourne only 8%.
Potential
Ironically, Melbourne started off with a much better public transport network — for much of this century, it was one of the best serviced cities of its size in the world. Melbourne had 19 rail lines by 1900. Today it has only 15, but this still puts it ahead of many other cities. Sydney has 13 and Washington, DC, and Barcelona have six each.
Furthermore, because the development of rail and tram lines in Melbourne preceded commercial development of the city, most major retail and business centres are accessible to public transport. The city is not the formless sprawl of many US cities, built to suit the car.
Even Toronto, which compares so favourably with Melbourne in terms of public transport, has only a fraction of Melbourne's rail network. "Melbourne is a city built for public transport", Paul Mees of the PTUA told Green Left. But despite this, the Victorian Labor government is continuing to erode the
public transport system even while pretending to applaud the PTUA report. The opposition promises no better. Tram and train services are becoming less frequent, in outer suburbs service barely exists, and all public transport cuts out at midnight.
"A public transport system that shuts down at midnight can never be a viable alternative to car travel", says Mees. "All successful public transport systems provide round-the-clock service."
Budget cuts
Last year, Victoria's public transport budget was reduced from $612 million to $550 million; some 1200 jobs were cut. Since 1983-84, public transport spending has been cut by 38%, according to Australian Railways Union assistant secretary Russell O'Brien. This year a further 20% spending cut is proposed.
Spycker claims that these cuts will not effect service, but the facts belie his claim. According to the unions, understaffing of the tramways has directly resulted in the cancellation of 15% of scheduled peak hour services in the last year.
The link between declining quality, extent and reliability of public transport and declining patronage was firmly established in a study by Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy (Cities and Automobile Dependence, Gower, Sydney 1989). They point out that Australian cities occupy an intermediate position between high-density, public transport-based European cities and the totally decentralised, car-dominated US model.
To get more people using public transport in Australian cities, they argue, public transport will have to be first class and competitive with car travel. In Melbourne a lot could achieved by simply making the already extensive transport network function effectively. Newman and Kenworthy estimate that public transport could double its share of transport through appropriate upgrading of the existing network.
Speed
According to the PTUA report, the greatest deterrent to more people using public transport today is that it is much slower than car travel. (Cost is less of a consideration, and in fact, for most people, running a car is more expensive than using public transport.)
Public transport is slower mainly because of the time spent waiting for a bus, tram or train. Waiting time is determined primarily by service frequency. Passengers can sometimes wait 20, 30 or even 60 minutes between trains. Even a careful use of timetables cannot completely solve this problem for many passengers, because often we
cannot predict exactly when we need to travel — because of unforeseen needs or because the duration of a particular excursion, such as shopping, may not easily be determined in advance.
In Melbourne, the St Kilda Road tramline has a high frequency of service and as a result attracts high patronage. It is even attracting new development along its route. There can be no doubt about cause and effect, says the PTUA report: services came first, development followed.
The flip side of the waiting time problem is reliability. A five-minute service is of no avail if passengers have to wait 20 minutes before all four trams arrive at once.
Reliable and punctual train services should be possible to organise — in fact the Victorian railways achieved 100% reliability in the 1920s. In Melbourne, the railways have 25% more trains than are required to operate current peak-hour services, yet there are many cancellations. The unions say that the greatest cause is understaffing, due to years of spending cuts achieved mainly through job slashing. Higher staffing levels will be needed to improve maintenance and staff morale and to reduce vandalism (now a significant cause of cancellations).
For bus and tram services, conflict with private road traffic is the most serious cause of delays. To eliminate this problem, public transport must be given a greater priority on the roads through:
- effective barriers on wide streets to separate trams from cars;
- traffic signals that respond to trams as they arrive;
- shorter signal cycles on intersections where tram priority is not feasible;
- traffic reorganisation to prevent long queues of traffic forming on narrow streets and to prevent turning cars from obstructing trams.
Between 1975 and 1985, the tram system in Zurich, Switzerland, was turned into the most effective in the world by systematically eliminating every cause of tram delays. As a result, public transport patronage increased from 32% to 42%.
Another incentive to greater public transport usage would be to speed up public transport, especially the faster trains. This would not require massive expenditure on new very fast train services. Melbourne's trains are currently the slowest in Australia. Simply speeding up the existing trains (within the capacity of the system) could cut travel time by as much as 20%, according to the
PTUA report. Greater use of express trains (currently mostly limited to peak hours) could reduce peak period running time by 50%.
As for intercity transport, while a few transnational corporations and local transport tycoons and developers have made much of the Very Fast (and expensive) Train proposal to link Melbourne and Sydney, the rail unions and environmentalists have shown that the existing rail link could be upgraded at a fraction of the cost to cut travel time nearly by half.
Another reason why some people turn away from public transport is concern about safety and comfort. Reports of assaults, dark and deserted stations and vandalised buildings and equipment have created a major crisis in the public transport system in most cities.
However, adequate staffing, with well-trained, resourced and motivated personnel can address this problem even if the underlying social problems require broader solutions. Clean, well-serviced and well-lit stations and shelters will also help. More frequent services will reduce overcrowding in peak periods.
Costs and savings
The question many people ask is: where is the money to do all this to come from? As it is, rail systems throughout Australia are estimated to be running at a $4 billion loss each year. Since 1982, losses have totalled $20 billion.
But the PTUA report points out that, contrary to popular conceptions, the experiences of many cities around the world show that high-quality public transport actually requires a smaller subsidy than low-quality, poorly patronised services.
Toronto, for instance, recovers 60% to 70% of its public transport costs through fares, and inner-suburban fares are lower than Melbourne's. San Diego recovers 95% of its operating costs and actually makes a surplus in summer, when patronage is higher. By contrast, Melbourne's Met recovers barely 30% of its operating costs.
This reflects two dynamics: costs do not rise in proportion to the expansion of service, and revenue increases as more passengers are won to public transport. Part and parcel of winning people back will have to be ironing out some of the inequities in the fare system (Melbourne's zoning system, for instance, prejudices travellers to suburban district centres).
The PTUA estimates that public transport in Melbourne could make its contribution to the Toronto agreement by 2005 with modest net expenditure changes:
- no increase in the tram fleet, just better use;
- 15 additional trains;
- one new line, Doncaster-Templestowe;
- a 10% increase in the bus fleet;
- a 15% increase in operating costs, swamped by a 160% increase in revenue;
- a dramatic jump of cost recovery (from 30% to 70%);
- a 48% reduction in the deficit.
Of course, ecological and social considerations could also justify a subsidy to reduce fares (or even eliminate them) all over, as is done in many European cities. In this case, it would be a matter of deciding how society and the government should be spending revenue.
Undoubtedly, if this were really a democratic and informed decision, the decision would certainly not be in favour of carrying on as governments presently are. In effect, the great losses borne by the public transport systems in Australia are an indirect subsidy of the car and oil companies, and they directly finance a process of degrading the public transport services.
The ecological crisis and the failure of car-based systems to provide adequate transport in large cities are forcing the beginnings of a worldwide public transport renaissance — even in the home of the Ford empire. Washington, DC, has just completed a network of fast trains and connecting buses. Los Angeles opened the first stage of a US$43 billion rail network last year.
In Australia, which swallowed part of the great American dream with the help of General Motors, governments are having to consider a change of direction. Sydney may even get its trams back (if the city council is not blocked by Greiner) and Perth, the most car-reliant capital city in Australia, is modestly expanding its rail network.
Better cars?
However, the car industry is fighting a rearguard action, arguing that greenhouse worries can be met by improvements in the fuel efficiency of cars.
But the PTUA report notes that, while fuel efficiency of new cars improved by 20% in the decade to 1988, the average efficiency of all cars improved by only 6% because there are many old cars still in use. The car industry responded with a suggestion that all
old cars be banned (a move which would mean a jump in new car sales!) for the sake of the environment.
In the last decade, any increases in average fuel efficiency have been obliterated by a 30% increase in total fuel consumption due to growth in car travel. Car travel has also become increasingly wasteful, with occupancy in peak time falling from 1.26 people per car in 1976 to 1.15 people in 1986.
The Victorian minister for transport's latest response to the PTUA's agenda-setting report has been to urge people to organise car-pooling — a move that may have merit in itself but in this case also acts as an excuse for continuing to plan transport around the car.
Generally, politicians all around Australia have been reluctant to place a change of direction in transport planning on the agenda. The big debate about improving the national rail freight system is narrowly constrained by the desire of the corporate giants to reduce their transport costs. The interests of the majority of transport users does not get consideration in this discussion.
The recent report by the Industry Commission into rail transport was concerned primarily with further destroying public transport services. It proposed fare increase, the abolition of "non-profitable" services, staff reductions and the phasing out of all concessions.