Higher Car Ownership and Less Dysfunctionality...

Re: The Age - Ghost trains predicted as study challenges figures

Negative implications? What? So is the transport economist another profession to be earmarked for the salt mines then? Or is Mr Odgers another member of the car lobby?

Apart from M's point about ignorance of peak oil, this is another example of the negative, narrow, passive, lie-back-and-accept-it thinking here that totally misses the point.

Lets say we have lots of cars, as we do. And everybody can afford to use them, as they still can. Do we let them overrun the city and make it dysfunctional? In Sydney and Melbourne the answer is apparently yes. In Prague and Zurich (higher car ownerships than Sydney, 550-600 per thousand) the answer is no. The latter must thank their lucky stars that Mr Odgers doesn't work for their city administrations.

So what do they do? They make public transport as attractive as possible by providing lots of it (especially the fast electric kind) 24 hours a day. They turn the city centre into a pedestrian and tram zone (not even buses allowed there in Prague). They make their ring motorway into Hadrians Wall with Park-and-Ride stations all around it to scoop 'em up before they cross the wall (see http://www.dpp.cz/en/p-r-facilities/). They just keep laying it on so much (and squeezing out driving opportunities within the city) that driving into the city simply becomes deeply unattractive. So in spite of such high car ownership they have the highest levels of PT usage in Europe. And the huge economic and social benefits of that are in areas that wouldn't even enter Mr Odgers' narrow world view.

We have a Hadrians Wall in Sydney incidentally, the orbital motorway system (M1,2,5 and 7). Have park-and-rides been designed into it?

We really need to stop thinking about cars, whether they're there or not, as a determinant of our commitment to PT. IMO they're completely irrelevant to whether we build PT infrastructure. It's in the national interest to build it, just to have cities functioning properly - justification enough. If cars stay around, the city will be more functional because of the PT commitment; if they don't, then thank our lucky stars we built up all that PT. Either way the money is on PT.

No more car talk now please! It's just a distraction.

Cheers!