Shouts from the desert

The Herald is reporting that Peter Newman, of Murdoch University in Perth, has labelled NSW government spending on new motorways, including the Lane Cove Tunnel and the proposed M4 East link, as a short term political move that will not solve Sydney's transportation problems. He says that the money would be better spent on sustainable measures like public transport and bicycle networks.

This is clearly correct. When you improve the roads, all you do is encourage more people to use them until they get to the point where the congestion is as bad as it was before. Building better roads makes private automobiles a more attractive form of transport, and so shifts load from public transport to the roads.

On the other hand, Mr Newman is also wrong (at least as quoted - he is also quoted hinting at the right solution). He suggests putting the funds into railway networks, but this 200 year old solution is also not helpful. The problem with current public transport solutions is that they are based around assuming that people all want to go in roughly the same direction - or at least one of a few preselected directions - at roughly the same time, in really big vehicles, with a walk of a kilometre or so at each end, sometimes in the rain. This doesn't reflect natural travel patterns. It is inconvenient for the user, and it is often far more expensive than it needs to be.

During peak hours, you have commuters crammed into high-speed tin cans like sardines. Off peak you have huge metal bohemoths hurtling down the rail network mostly empty - you're wasting a lot of energy transporting the vehicle rather than the passengers. At any particular time in the day public transport systems tend to operate with either insufficient capacity, or with massive excess capacity, and almost never with precisely tuned capacity.

For public transport to do the job, it needs to be more attractive to people than driving their own car. People have to want to use it. This means it needs to be:

1. Available when you want to travel;
2. Faster than a car between any two points;
3. Private, at least in terms of lack of strangers (people prefer not to travel among strangers);
4. Conveniently located (no further away than the end of the street);
5. Ubiquitous - there shouldn't be unserved or poorly served districts in the city public transport system.

While this might sound like a pipe dream, the technology to support such a system is available today, but unfortunately is significantly underfunded. The technology is Personal Rapid Transit, and there are many candidate systems available now if they could get adequate funding.

Personal Rapid Transit systems are cheaper to construct than even suburban roads, cheaper to operate, much faster, safer (no drivers, so no driver error, no drunk drivers, no speeding, no pedestrian conflict), and when ubiquitous, far more convenient than private cars. A trip from Epping to North Sydney in peak hour could take approximately 12 minutes, compared to 45-60 minutes by car now, or 75 minutes (including walking time at the end points) by train.

The time for spending money on antiquated transport systems like roads, busses and trains is over. We should be looking at 21^st century solutions that will truly make these environmental disasters obsolete.