Canberra's Transport Conundrum: Either Way, You Pay!

Dr Michael de Percy, University of Canberra (Photo: ABC News, Matt Roberts).

 

Recently, I spoke with Tom Maddocks from ABC News Canberra about transport policy and the impact of light rail, buses, and road usage in the ACT. Although light rail is yet to make an impact on car usage, I am of the view that any infrastructure is better than no infrastructure, and a mix of transport modes, supported by appropriate pricing and charging mechanisms, is key to transport policy success.

Although I live in Gunning these days, I have had personal experience of public transport in Canberra over the last 20 years. It is great if you live near one of the major routes, but there are many pockets of under-served areas where a trip in one's car can take 10-15 minutes, whereas a bus, assuming the route is served regularly, can take up to one hour to travel as little as 10km.

One of the major problems I see with Canberra's light rail is the decision to recover costs through fares. This meant that light rail replaced what was already a well-served bus route into the city, with buses running every 15 minutes and taking about the same time as the current light rail network. Rather than redeploying the buses to under-served areas, however, the bus routes and timetables were amended, resulting, in many cases, in even longer trips than beforehand.

When writing about my "Canberra transport nightmare" in 2014 after attempting to get to the ANU campus from Palmerston (near Gungahlin), I had hoped that the redeployment of buses would bring more services to Palmerston. Instead, the redesigned bus timetable made my trips to the University of Canberra even longer.

When I first moved to Palmerston, I could catch the bus and arrive at the UC Bruce Campus within 30 minutes. Although there was a period of over one hour where no services ran, I could plan my day around it. Years later, the route was changed to bring the buses into Gungahlin, so each trip I went from Palmerston to Gungahlin then back past Palmerston to get to UC, and then up to a 1km walk to reach my office. It was far from ideal and it was easier to drive my car.

Judging from the many responses to the recent ABC article, the introduction of light rail has not improved things, and in many cases, has made things worse.

Part of the problem is that, much like government-led telecommunications, each mode is treated separately and by different parts of the bureaucracy. To be sure, the next stage of light rail from Civic to Woden will no doubt encourage more people to leave their cars at home, but the policy approach seems focused on light rail as the panacea, rather than just one part of an overall system.

Road user charging and pricing, parking fees, congestion charging, and improved rules and infrastructure for "active travel" and other incentives to change our behaviours in relation to car use is essential to ensure the sustainability benefits of public transport can be realised. But to introduce such policies is fraught with short-term political risk. 

Even the introduction of light rail, decades in the making in the ACT, saw the ACT Liberals attacking a project that had the backing of the Liberal-led federal government through Joe Hockey's under-rated "asset recycling" policy. Imagine the political scare campaign that could be mounted against increased parking fees or congestion charging in the CBD?

Infrastructure policy is a major problem for countries like Australia, Canada, and the United States, where car use has been the norm beginning in the 1920s, and increasing in Australia since the 1950s. These are long-ingrained behaviours that are difficult to change.

Compare Australia's major cities with place like Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, and the difference in the quality and extent of infrastructure is astounding. Of course, politics and private property rights in China are very different to here. My point is though, that infrastructure and road user and congestion charging cna make a big difference in car-use behaviours.

In Australia, we have the worst of both worlds: governments reluctant to tackle the hard work of building infrastructure and seeing it as an investment in productivity (rather than something to be recouped through the ticket box), and a voting public unwilling to pay for road use and increased parking costs.

Which brings me to the need for leadership in building infrastructure, or, better yet, the establishment of an independent body that is one level removed from day-to-day politics - something like the Reserve Bank Board - to enable investment in infrastructure that is not at the whim of short-term political moods.

In the meantime, the most efficient method of dealing with traffic congestion and commuting times is for for people who use public transport to put up with long commuting times, and for drivers to sit in patiently in traffic. Neither choice is ideal, but try to convince people they should pay for road use or that governments should fund transport infrastructure through debt and public-private partnerships and see how that goes down.

A Critique of the NBN

Parabolic antennas on a telecommunications tower on Willans Hill, Wagga Wagga.
Photo: Bidgee/CC BY-SA 2.5 AU

I was quite pleased to participate in a joint publication with a policy practitioner on Australia's telecommunications infrastructure. It is one thing to sit on one's scholarly couch and critique what others do, and quite another to be the "man in the arena" as Theodore Roosevelt (1910) once said.

Fifteen years ago I commenced my PhD thesis on comparing telecommunications outcomes in Canada and Australia. Based on my findings, it was clear that the decisions made in Australia would stifle private sector competition in fixed line broadband services. 

Today, fixed line broadband services remain costly and poor as 5G services bring ever faster speeds at ever cheaper prices. I routinely run my entire household and all its devices off my Samsung S20 5G Ultra phone on 4G and 5G networks (depending on whether I am in Sydney or Gunning) at much faster speeds than either the NBN or ADSL 2+ services available in the respective areas.

Today, my latest work has been published in the Australia Journal of Social Issues alongside an excellent outline of the Australian policy perspective. Australia is fortunate to have such experts in the field and time and again Australia's performance in international policy issues proves the efficacy of  our unique "Washminster" political system. 

I have renewed faith in our system due to recent events and I say without reservation that it is indeed the best in the world.

See my contribution to the article "Telecommunications Infrastructure in Australia" in the latest issue of the Australian Journal of Social Issues.

Reference:

Madsen, A. and de Percy, M.A. (2020). Telecommunications Infrastructure in Australia. Australian Journal of Social Issues, 55(2), pp. 218-238. DOI: 10.1002/ajs4.121.

Overcoming Self-Doubt: Stillness is the Key

"Sisyphus" by Pietro della Vecchia (Public domain).

I am a fan of Ryan Holiday's work. I tell my students in my leadership and politics classes, "Be like Ryan". Read, write, think about your future. Develop a philosophy - rules to live by. Establish your purpose - what a colleague calls one's ikigai.

Ryan Holiday reads books. He is well-read. He writes books. He lives on the land. He is doing in his early thirties what I am still not quite able to do in my fifties. But that's not the point. 

As Theodore Roosevelt warned, "comparison is the thief of joy". I know all about my own circumstances, not somebody else's. Better to judge myself by my own principles and standards. 

I have read many self-improvement books and I take something away from each one I have read. But I am also conscious of the marketing behind such works. I recall accompanying one of my in-laws to an event. It turned out to be Amway. I bought Dale Carnegie's famous book but I was wary of every time a colleague asked me, "I'd like to talk to you about a business opportunity".

I found myself becoming a little wary of Holiday's approach to this book about one third of the way through. I felt it was formulaic and repeating old ground from his earlier works. But I have been following his work from the early days of the simple Reading List email newsletter, so I acknowledged my concerns and pushed on.

I think it is the way the book builds. The end of each paragraph gives a few short sentences of encouragement. I was experiencing the elevation at the end of each chapter much like one does when reading Carnegie. Frowning often while reading, it wasn't until the last few pages that my faith in Holiday was restored.

In "Act Bravely", one of the final chapters, Holiday discusses Albert Camus' The Fall. I am nodding in agreement and I thought, "I know this story, I've read most of Camus". I had to check my blog and there is was, "La Chute".

It struck me again that Holiday is really well-read. My faith restored, I went back and examined what had been going on for me.

To cut a long story short, I suffer from self-doubt in the way of Steven Pressfield. It can be crippling. Writing this right now is part of my preparation to write something else that I wish would just go away. But it won't and I have a job to do.

Holiday discusses the idea of stillness in the context of looking after oneself. I noted that many of the tips and tricks he mentions for maintaining stillness in one's life, I have used since I can remember.

Albert Camus struck me the same way when he discussed suicide. (I am not advocating suicide but I went through the philosophical exercise as the Stoics do without realising it had been done by others. This is a major reason to read according to Harold Bloom and Italo Calvino.) Ryan Holiday introduced me to the Stoics and they had the same view of suicide as a legitimate philosophical option.

Reading Stillness is the Key revealed to me the extent of my self-doubt. Not only about myself and my academic work, but also about the processes I use and how I defend my inner citadel from nonsense, how I do things like writing this blog post as a hobby and how I might prioritise doing so on this long weekend holiday instead of doing other work that is always there and can take up all my time when I let it.

And there it is - Ryan Holiday has done it again. All writing follows a formula, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is formulaic. Indeed, Aristotle's formula was original once! It brings me back to a quote from Jack London's To Build a Fire on my blog post from last Sunday:

The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.

To be formulaic in writing is to lack "the significances". In these, Ryan Holiday lacks nothing.