Global warming and urban transport – the challenges

[ UniNews Vol. 15, No. 1  6 - 20 February 2006 ]

By Nicholas Low

Urban transport in Australia’s cities is expensive, unhealthy, and dangerous. Add the reality of global warming and it is clear that we need a total rethink about the way urban transport is delivered.

If we wanted to design the most costly transport system possible we would put people in private vehicles, disperse our urban areas indiscriminately, build vast new urban fringe highways, disintegrate the planning and management of all forms of public transport and spend almost nothing on walking and cycling. That, however, is exactly the sort of transport system we have in Melbourne today. Over the next 50 years it must change, or our city risks economic collapse.

Of course no-one planned our urban transport systems. They just grew up with the private motor vehicle. Kenneth Grahame saw it coming back in 1908: ‘that swan, that sunbeam, that thunderbolt’ says the entranced Mr Toad of the motor car that had just run him down. Today, reading The Wind in the Willows we sympathise with Toad more than with the prim Ratty, but no-one anticipated what would happen if millions of people began running around cities in ‘sunbeams’, ‘swans’ and ‘thunderbolts’.

To calculate the cost of our present urban transport systems, we need to do the following sum: Take the amount it costs each person to own and run a private vehicle, multiply that by the vehicle-owning population of the city; add the government subsidies flowing to vehicle ownership; add the cost of providing high quality roads to reduce congestion; add the cost of congestion generated by traffic attracted by the improved roads. Add the cost of vehicle accidents, the costs to health of poisonous gas and particle emissions, and of obesity resulting from sitting in cars. Add the cost of providing a public transport system to deal with peak traffic flows and provide a basic service for non-car drivers. And finally, add the costs of global warming resulting from greenhouse gas emissions.

This last item is likely to be the biggest of all. The difficulty of working out the cost of climate change with any degree of certainty does not justify leaving it out of the calculation. We have no option but to adapt to the climate conditions imposed by 20th century industry and transport. The UN report Climate Change 2001 points out that whereas with natural systems adaptation to climate change is reactive, with human systems it can also be anticipatory — proactive. Our transport systems have to be part of a process of planned adaptation.

A combination of transport modes in which public transport, cycling and walking play a larger role, will deliver a much less costly outcome than one in which everyone is expected to own a car and drive it for almost all urban journeys. Unfortunately Australian governments never do such planning. Instead they continue to make a number of mistakes:

Money for transport modes (roads, rail, bus etc) is always considered in separate packages rather than for the whole transport system.

Money spent by individuals is considered to be their own business and is never accounted for in the cost of the transport system.

The cost of public health and climate impacts is never entered into the account.

When the social and environmental costs of investment in a major project such as a motorway are considered, it is only after the project has been designed, and after public expectations have been raised – when abandonment of the project is politically unacceptable. Therefore no major road project has ever been abandoned as a result of an environmental impact study.

Those who propose new motorways usually consider travel to be something people desire, rather than a daily burden borne by each individual – as it usually is in cities. Then when a major road project is proposed it is justified by time saved in travel. This is then entered as a benefit of the project – even if the total burden of travel has been increased. Because, ultimately, by dispersing activities new motorways increase the overall need to travel in the city.

We have now left the 20th century behind and we must face the 21st. We cannot solve the problems of future urban transport by worshipping private ­vehicles and pouring money into roads in the mistaken belief in an uncongested future of ‘the open road’. This century heralds two looming economic crises: global warming and peak oil production. As it happens we are lucky. The peak of oil production, forcing petrol prices skywards on a never-ending escalator, may well be the stimulus for action which will also mitigate global warming. But we cannot leave planning for the future only to faith in technology: ways of burning fossil fuel without emitting greenhouse gas, or providing a substitute for fossil fuel.

To meet the challenge of global warming Australia needs to be proactive not reactive about managing urban transport. And this requires sustained research of a kind rarely undertaken anywhere in the world.


Nicholas Low is Associate Professor in the Urban Planning Program of the University of Melbourne, and Director of the Australasian Research Centre for Governance and Management of Urban Transport (see item p30).