Public transport policy in Australia: Time for a re-think
by Paul Mees
Melbourne’s second university is celebrating its 50th anniversary. Since the passage of its enabling legislation in 1958, Monash University has educated over 200,000 students at its campus in suburban Clayton, granting degrees in disciplines ranging from medicine to literature. But regardless of their academic discipline, most Monash students over the half-century have been educated in one unofficial common subject. This subject could be called Public Transport 101, and it has been offered continuously since the Clayton campus opened on 11th March 1961.
To take Public Transport 101, one rides a suburban train to Huntingdale Station, some 17 kilometres from the city centre. From there, the campus is just over two kilometres away by privately-operated bus.
The most popular train reaches Huntingdale at 8:40 am, which should leave plenty of time to reach campus for the first lectures at 9. Around two hundred alight from the train, and queue to leave the station, as the single exit is a narrow ramp, leading to a cramped subway. Passengers emerge into the station car park, which must be crossed in the open. It’s raining, so they cop the full force of the weather.
Past the car park is a busy road. On the other side are two bus stops, one for each route that travels to Monash. Each stop is in a different street, with a blind corner in between, so if a passenger waits at one and the first bus comes to the other, they will miss the bus. There is no such problem today: the 8:35 am bus is still waiting, as a long queue of passengers from the previous train boards, one by one, each required to insert a ticket into a validating machine. Eventually the bus departs, ten minutes late and packed to the gunwales, leaving dozens of passengers behind. They are joined by those from the 8:40 train. As the shelter at the stop only holds five people, everyone else waits in the rain; some take refuge among cars parked in the undercroft of a nearby factory. The 8:46 bus arrives and eventually leaves, full, at 9. The last passengers from the 8:40 train reach Monash University at half past nine.
At quieter times, the problem is the opposite of overcrowding. Some students stay back at night as the campus libraries are open late, while students living on campus often go out at night and come home through Huntingdale. Because the bus and train timetables are not co-ordinated, waits can be up to half an hour. The main bus stop is in a laneway between the blank concrete wall of a road overpass and the blank brick wall of a factory. Students are understandably afraid to wait there after dark.
A visiting Canadian academic colleague returned from a trip to Monash fuming. The squalid facilities, the long walk in the open and the lack of timetable coordination astonished her. The visitor was from York University in Toronto, which is of similar age and size to Monash, and also a few kilometres from the nearest station. Dedicated ‘university rocket’ express shuttles leave every two minutes all day from the top of the escalators serving the station platform. There are no delays from ticket checking as the bus terminal is inside the station fare gates. The Toronto Transit Commission is currently planning to extend the rail line to York University.
My colleague could not understand why things were so much worse at a place that in other respects was so similar. ‘How long has this been going on?’ she asked me. The answer is: since Monash opened in 1961.
So what have 200,000 graduates learned in Public Transport 101? Before the end of first semester, the crowding problems at Huntingdale ease as students begin to desert public transport and drive cars. By graduation, nearly all of them are driving to campus. These same students are among the most environmentally aware section of the community, concerned about issues like pollution and global warming. Some of the more curious ask why their city and campus are not better prepared for the future. Why has public transport to campus been so hopeless for so many years, and why is nothing being done about it?
The answer students at Monash and other Australian universities most commonly receive is that their parents’ housing preferences are to blame. Urban density is the major cause of automobile dependence, so public transport problems can’t be fixed until Australians abandon their separate houses and backyards, and begin living in apartments like Europeans.
Nobody in Sternenberg lives in an apartment. The 349 residents of the highest and remotest municipality in the Canton, or State, of Zurich live on farms or in tiny hamlets of three or four dwellings scattered across nine square kilometres. The village centre is a few houses grouped around the picturesque 1706 church. Farming is still important, but so is tourism, particularly summer hiking.
The majority of workers are still employed locally, mainly in rural industries, but nearly half now travel to jobs outside the municipality. This reflects a pattern seen across the Canton of Zurich and indeed across Europe: the City of Zurich, which houses a third of the canton’s 1.3 million residents, has been losing people, while suburban and rural populations are booming.
The church at Sternenberg is 42 kilometres from the centre of Zurich, but because of the mountainous terrain, the route by road or rail is longer. It takes an hour by train to reach the village of Bauma from Zurich’s main railway station, and then another 15 minutes by bus up the hairpin bends of the Sternenberg-Strasse.
Of the 171 municipalities making up Canton Zurich, Sternenberg has the worst public transport service – because it’s the only one without an urbanised population of 300, the minimum required under Cantonal law for regular-interval, all-day public transport. Bauma, with just over 1000 residents, has two trains an hour every day of the year, from 6 am to midnight, with hourly all-night bus service on Fridays and Saturdays.
There are seven buses to Sternenberg each weekday, five on normal weekends and seven on summer Sundays and holidays. Each Sunday bus leaves from outside Bauma station at 24 minutes past the hour, connecting with trains arriving at 20 past the hour. The bus calls at the church, dropping off hikers, then does a circuit of the main hamlets collecting locals before returning to Bauma to connect with an outward train. Once they board the bus, residents of Sternenberg don’t need to worry about timetables. Each bus meets the train at Bauma, which in turn connects at the regional hub of Winterthur with another train to Zurich, as well as departures to Zurich Airport and major centres across the canton.
Sternenberg is about as car-dependent as it gets in Canton Zurich. Only 19 per cent of workers used public transport on census day in 2000; 10 per cent more walked or cycled. These figures are, however, much higher than the shares of 13 and 3 per cent respectively recorded for Melbourne at the following year’s Australian census. Zurich is the only Swiss canton in which public transport’s share of travel is growing, and the increase is occurring mainly in suburban and rural areas. Only 14 per cent of Sternenbergers took public transport to work in 1990. The shift away from the car that Zurich City achieved in the 1980s is now being repeated, admittedly on a more modest scale, in the rest of the canton.
Nobody in Sternenberg thinks the population density is too low to justify an integrated, albeit basic, public transport service designed to make travel by car a choice instead of a necessity. But the dominant view in the much larger, denser cities of Australia is that suburban densities cannot support viable public transport. It’s a truism that transport policies that work in European cities could not possibly hold lessons for us.
Sternenberg and Canton Zurich show that density is not destiny. Transport policy itself has a bigger impact on transport patterns than urban planners have realised, and suburbs don’t have to be totally reliant on the car. Planners who insist that car dominance can only be addressed by impossibly large increases in density may actually be entrenching the problem they are trying to solve.
There is an alternative, and Zurich is not the only example of it. In parts of Europe, Canada and some other places, the high-quality public transport previously found only in dense city centres is being extended to suburbs and even rural areas. Public transport networks which once catered only for peak-hour commuters have been reconfigured to serve cross-city, off-peak and – as with the hikers of Sternenberg – recreational trips. By providing a complete substitute for the car, high quality public transport networks also promote increased walking and, in some cases, cycling. A model of successful public transport network planning for low-density urban areas is emerging, with evidence of effectiveness to back it. This is a genuine success story which should be welcomed by urban planners and environmentalists.
But the story remains a secret. Planners can’t see the gains achieved because there’s no accompanying development in the desirable high-density form. Some environmentalists are so certain that cycling is the answer to the urban transport problem that they’re not interested in hearing about public transport. And for some critics, fixing public transport may be unattractive precisely because it is easier than demolishing suburbia: for these people, hating the suburbs has become a kind of moral crusade.
The most important reason why these success stories are being ignored, however, is that they run counter to the doctrines of neo-liberalism. Zurich’s politicians support the free market, but not for public transport. A single, regional public agency controls all public transport in the Canton, under strict regulations specifying service standards and subsidy levels. Rather than privatising or ‘corporatising’ public transport, Zurich, Toronto and the other successful cities have re-invented their public agencies, extending the high-quality ‘go anywhere, anytime’ services traditionally confined to central cities to suburban and even rural areas. And this has been achieved with lower subsidies and capital investment than in Australian cities.
It seems to good to be true, but only because Australians have become used to second-rate public transport operated by private monopolies or public agencies that have been forced to ape them. If we are to make serious inroads into problems like global warming, oil dependence and the health effects of sedentary lifestyles, Australian cities will need to stop accepting second-best.
Paul Mees teaches in the Environment and Planning program at RMIT. His book Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age will be released by Earthscan in December.
References:
Paul Mees (2009),Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age, Earthscan, London.
http://www.zvv.ch/en (Zurich’s Cantonal public transport authority)
http://www.ptua.org.au (Victoria’s Public Transport Users Association)
Source: Australian Options, Issue 58, Spring 2009, pp. 5-7.