By Steve Painter
What's the social and economic cost of an epidemic of asthma and other respiratory and allergic ailments affecting at least a quarter of children in large areas of Australia's two largest cities? Don't ask the big business lobby; it's too busy campaigning for the federal government to avoid signing an international agreement on reducing greenhouse emissions at the Earth Summit in Brazil in June.
Meanwhile, Australia's urban air pollution problems are severe and getting worse. A recent NSW Roads and Traffic Authority report estimates that Sydney's air will be dangerously polluted within 25 years by emissions from up to six times the present amount of traffic.
The Greiner government tried to keep the report secret by removing it from the but it eventually leaked and was made public by the Nature Conservation Council's Caron Morrison at the NSW government's second "Smog Summit" on February 27.
The RTA's definition of dangerous must be something approaching a full-scale public health disaster, since Sydney's air is already responsible for serious respiratory and allergic complaints among 25% of children in the western suburbs, where most of the city's daily smog load settles when there is no offshore wind (which is most of the time). Melbourne's south-east suburbs are probably in worse shape because of even more unfavourable geographic/climatic conditions.
Big business complains that the cost of reducing greenhouse emissions will further reduce Australia's already marginal international competitiveness. Meanwhile, millions of Australians are paying with their health for decades of neglect of air pollution problems, including massive subsidies to the motor vehicle industry at the expense of public transport. With about 0.3% of the world's population, Australia is one of the highest per capita greenhouse gas producers, pumping out up to 1.6% of the world total.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) makes up about half the world's annual greenhouse gas output, and transportation produces about 25% of Australia's output of CO2. Manufacturing contributes just under 40%. Of the CO2 produced by transportation in Australia, cars produce 54%. In Hobart alone, writes Helen Rosenbaum in the February 1992 Habitat, motor vehicles pump out an estimated 70,000 tonnes of CO2 yearly.
Australia's problems are due to poor clean air standards, in both industry and transportation. Our urban public transport networks continue to stagger under a heavy burden of cost cutting and neglect. Victorian transport minister Ian Spyker recently announced his government's latest attempt to entice travellers back to rail: the installation of video surveillance at stations.
Safety problems have become a major deterrent to evening rail travellers in both Melbourne and Sydney since the rail services cut or eliminated off-peak staffing at most suburban stations. Staffing has little consideration of the long-term costs in lost patronage, uncollected fares, damage to railway property and installing and maintaining these new security measures that cannot be as effective as staff on the spot. Will the cameras make the rail system safer, or will they just make it easier for the police to identify rapists, bashers, muggers, murderers and vandals after the event?
While Sydney and Melbourne choke on some of the world's worst smog problems, Australian urban planning authorities persist with outmoded policies, making the problem worse by carving out new traffic sewers. Sydney is about to add massively to its problems with the Harbour tunnel, which could eventually go close to doubling traffic flow around the inner city and inner North Shore.
Paul Keating's "One Nation" economic statement did little to improve the situation. Alongside a welcome and very belated program to improve interstate rail services were several big-budget projects for additional roads in our biggest cities: a western link road in Melbourne, a Liverpool-Hornsby link in Sydney, a new Glebe Island bridge which will route even more traffic through one of the most polluted parts of Sydney, and a major link road for the port of Brisbane.
While cleaner cars are only a small part of the answer to the overall problem, Australia lags badly even in this area. Benzene has been linked with certain types of leukaemia, yet Australia allows more than twice the US standard for benzene in fuel. Moreover, general emission controls are weak by OECD standards. From 1994-5, the USA and the EC will have emission standards as low as one-ninth of Australian levels.
Against all this, state and local authorities toss in some half measures to reduce marginally the scale of the problem: higher tolls on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, more tollways, lanes exclusively for multi-occupant vehicles on some freeways. According to some estimates, an increase from 1.3 to 1.6 occupants per car would reduce Melbourne's smog problem by 15%. While that might provide temporary relief, in the absence of fundamental changes in approach, it will merely slow the growth of the problem.
Internationally, the situation is only a little more promising. Most solutions so far concentrate on making motorists pay more for the privilege of getting to and from work while doing little to offer alternatives. In many European cities, schemes are under way or under discussion to charge heavily for vehicle entry into central city areas. In some cases, large resources are being devoted to developing technical means of collecting such fees.
The city of Cambridge, for example, is working on a network of electronic beacons surrounding the centre, which would activate metres in each car passing them. Motorists would pay the fees by inserting cards similar to phone cards into the metre. Those caught without a card would run up a debt against their next card providing they didn't stop their motors for more than about 30 seconds, in which case they would be immobilised. While this sounds far-fetched, the fact that it is under serious discussion reflects the expensive mess into which the n "solutions" is pushing planners.
Singapore, probably the world leader in authoritarian capitalist social engineering, has long had a dual licence system under which an expensive special licence is necessary to drive in the central city area. London authorities are considering a similar scheme, under which it could cost up to $12 a day to drive in the centre.
Positive measures such as making cities more energy efficient through urban concentration, and cheap, accessible public transport seem to be running a poor second to the authoritarian "user pays" approach at present. But even if they were not, it is inevitable that cars will become a lot more expensive, and eventually a non-viable urban transport option, if only because known world oil supplies will last no more than 50 years at present rates of consumption.Public transport
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