LA in a sense is decentralized. But still horrid traffic. The PT is so embarrasingly behind the times, but some subway stations are amazing though. (aesthetically)
I go to Singapore a lot for my work. It’s often touted as an exemplar for transport and urban planning. it has:
a brilliant (and growing) integrated PT network that is cheap and reliable (trains every 3.5minutes in peak times, every 6minutes off-peak, and in nominal terms fares are about 1/5 what they are in melbourne);
a huge taxi fleet that is also cheap and (fairly) reliable;
a (recently expanded) congestion tax zone around the cbd;
crazy expensive city parking;
high fuel prices;
a very expensive permit system for car ownership (you have to have a permit called a “Certificate of Entitlement” to buy a car, the permits themselves cost tens of thousands of dollars);
a national fleet of relatively new, relatively small cars;
yet car ownership there is on the rise and traffic is becoming unbearably congested. why? because they have a culture of car love as well - even a modest car is an expensive status symbol that everybody wants to have. I asked a local friend recently why people don’t leave their cars at home and she told me it was because they are SO expensive and such a huge investment that “the people want to get their money’s worth and to do that they drive them more”
even where there are excellent alternatives, car love rules.
This, but done properly. I grew up in the suburbs of Canberra, a pretty decentralised “city”. That place does not really work unless you have a car. The main centres are up to 15 kms apart and the only PT available is a pretty ordinary, heavily subsidised, bus service that becomes less than useful after dark. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great place to ride. But when I was younger, before I grew legs and living way down south. I had to catch a couple of hours of busses each day to get to and from school. Not really acceptable for a city of only 300,000.
And then there was the peak hour commutes to Uni, 20-30kms accross town along the Tuggeranong Parkway. At that time of day it was a carpark.
Moving to a big centralised city was the best thing I ever did
i really don’t understand car love.
admittedly i’ve never owned one or had a licence but they seem like such a costly hassle. also i live inner city, am single, and live close to work and everything else…
Cars are cool. But our reliance on them for mass transport and the implications they’re having on us as a society and the environment means that an alternative is long overdue.
+onemillion
you can’t compare singapore with melbourne with canberra.
you can’t call for decentralising melbourne without acknowledging our density doesn’t allow for such a system to work.
too much space, not enough people. without changing that then there’s very little that can be done.
Yeah, because then all you’ve got to worry about is the fucking big red buses.
You can’t compare apples to oranges. In Canberra all they’ve done is spread the CBD about which is making the city less efficient.
As we stand Australia has 6 big capitals with relatively not a lot inbetween. We’ve outgrown our cities and yet we have little in the way of infrastructure to spread wider. Our rail and transport links are not working, our shipping is dreadfully slow and expensive and we’ve come to rely on cars and trucks for most every facet of daily life, with some people commuting by car as much as an 90 minutes or even 120 minutes as a single passenger in a car.
The effect is that our cities are choked with traffic to a degree that the car has dictated how our cities look, feel and operate. Anything that brings cities back to the people and foot traffic is an important cultural shift. For too long Australia has relied on zombies hoodwinked into wasting hours a day moving back and forth. That’s a massive compromise … both inhuman and unsustainable.
i most definitely disagree with that
we need to stop growing out. regardless of anything.
going out = more area.
more area = more roads.
more roads = more cars.
COMPRESSION is the answer. And not “growth boundaries” that get moved.
Very much in agreement there. Especially paragraph two. We’ve all driven the Hume hwy and beyond and asked ourself what the hell is going on here.
Canberra is an example of how to screw up a non-centralised city. It could have been good if Griffin had his way. Alas, he was fucked over.
I didn’t.
The point of the story was car love
Perhaps I should clarify that by saying wider … I meant more smaller regional cities, instead of expanding our existing overgrown capitals. Combined with shrinking our capitals with higher density housing, limiting traffic into the CBD’s and improving public transport within them.