Posted by: sustainadelic
on 19 Mar, 2012
The Daily Telegraph has been campaigning recently about Sydney's gridlock. But is the solution to urban gridlock really to build more roads? Or even railway lines?
The North West Rail Link? OK, that's a must. You can't have a huge chunk of a modern city without any public transport.
A fast rail from Sydney to Canberra and Melbourne? Maybe. It would link the national capital to the country's two largest cities and allow Canberra to be developed as Sydney's second airport (while reducing demand for air travel: Sydney-Melbourne is one of the world's busiest air routes).
Light rail in the CBD? Definitely. Private cars just aren't a viable way to move huge numbers of people small distances in city centres. Light rail is relatively cheap and easy to "retrofit", as it uses existing roads.
But as for the rest - new freeways, fast rail to Newcastle and so on - forget it. They're all hugely expensive and involve bulldozing people's homes or tunnelling through Sydney's crumbly sandstone.
That's not to say you shouldn't upgrade existing roads and rail. Some of Sydney's trains run slower than fifty years ago.
But solving traffic problems by building roads, in particular, is doomed to fail. Ask any urban planner. Better roads only move bottlenecks to wherever the road ends, and by encouraging people to drive, it ultimately makes congestion worse.
The way to reduce traffic is to remove the need for people to travel in the first place.
How?
Posted by:
on 19 Jan, 2009
At least some countries seem to be taking climate change seriously. Spain, whose target of 30 per cent renewable energy by 2010 puts Australia's ambitions to shame, is also investing in a new high-speed rail network that competes with domestic plane travel, slashing greenhouse gas emissions.
Posted by:
on 15 Aug, 2008
Unfortunately, every transport proposal in Sydney now has to prove that it can serve low-density (full of single block detached dwellings) suburban areas that are wedded to cars. But no urban rail system in the world has shown that it can successfully operate in such a context, as highlighted in Jim Steer's recent Sydney Transport Review for the State Government (which the Government subsequently chose to ignore. Only buses get close to where people live and work in low density areas but as long as they continue to share road space with cars they will always be the subservient mode.
