Any good policy starts with a check of the status quo.
We won’t get to where we want if we base our actions on aspirations rather than reality. Creating sustainable and liveable cities is no different to any other policy arena. Proponents are pushing for mode shift – to public and active transportation, resulting in lower emissions and greater energy efficiency, increase in ridesharing and bike lanes. It’s what many smart city advocates call ‘change for the good’, but this overarching aspiration overlooks how we want to travel or have to travel. It ignores the bigger question of how we will afford to live and get to work in a sustainable city that wants to make car use inconvenient by actively taxing parking, increasing travel times and cost of ownership?
The mode shift and techno-utopians have a vision, but what if that doesn’t work out? Instead of optimising what we have got, we have been reaching for an ideal state. We are running out of time. Climate change is real, and it is impacting us now – the rising temperatures in Antarctica, the fires in Canada and the bush fires in our backyard are all signals that we need to act now.
And while we are at it, it is imperative to understand how COVID changed travel and plan for the most significant change to transport – electric vehicles.
Many pro electric vehicles bodies, like the EV Council of Australia, want governments to act now and applaud schemes like the NSW Government’s EV-rebate schemes to accelerate EV adoption. But the support of EV’s represents a fundamental misalignment in the anti-car anti-parking playbook and flies in the face of the 50 per cent of Australians who want an EV as their next car. The unmet demand is already there. We need to accept that cars are staying on the road and will need to park somewhere.
Anti-car virtue signalling is all well and good until you realise driving is what most people want to do. As researcher, economist and strategic thinker, Dr Cameron Gordon sums it up,
“Many academics generally don’t consider the added practicality of on-street parking and the empirical fact that most people still want and need to drive to meet the requirements of daily life, at least under current conditions.”
Gordon argues we need the data and the skills and models to deal with the current and the new world,
“We have to have structure and go back and forth internally and use data to start finding out what’s happening. Data informs cause and effect, but it doesn’t explain it. Correlations and patterns, which came first? How does causality run? What you see in traffic data is patterns, and it’s the first step to understanding what’s happening, then move on to why it’s happening and not running to sloppy policy-making and feed idealogues and entrenched dogma.”
Data can be used, of course, to entrench conventional wisdom, with some researchers highlighting the need to use big data to increase travel times, tolls and parking charges to reduce the convenience of car travel and reduce demand for car travel. A classic trade-off between creating a sustainable city versus a liveable one, where the outer suburban and lower incomes workers face longer commutes due to poor quality public transport options and have little choice but to drive.
COVID-19 shock
The other great reality is COVID, which has driven us back to private car use, so much so it’s impossible to get a good deal on a second-hand car. COVID cars have placed further increased pressure on the kerbsides after lockdowns, especially in the suburbs. The pandemic has promoted more localised suburban driving (21% of traffic staying in the LGA in North Sydney). Some main road traffic volumes and congestion have come back higher than before (on Melbourne’s Hoddle Street). Post lockdown driving and parking show different patterns, including shorter duration parking. Some towns are experiencing a 38% decrease in stay times (most staying approximately 15mins) attributed to driving in and out behaviour.
These patterns need more analysis due to their cross-cutting nature. It is not just about understanding what is happening but also about finding out why traffic is increasing in one street and not another and why some streets are now more congested than before.
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Australian Bureau of Statistics Motor Vehicle Census recently reported 20.1 million registered motor vehicles as of the 31st of January 2021. The national fleet grew year on year, and BITRE reported growth in drivers’ licences even before COVID-19. The simple fact we need to acknowledge is cars are here to stay.
The perils of what comes out of the tailpipe is well documented, and so is the impact of congestion. The only real debate should be how to decrease this pain point right now and clear the way for EV adaption. And for that, we need to look at both sides of the coin.
Increasing travel times will mean increased emissions from internal combustion engines. While EVs, together with rideshare, will keep making congestion and travel times worse if we stay with this siloed thinking that punishes private car use, it worsens transport at a time when we need it the most.
As David Zipper points out in his recent Bloomberg Lab article,
“Bad transportation is a tax on business productivity.”
It restricts freight and blows out trip times, losing hours, increasing emissions, and hurts labour mobility by creating lengthy commutes and funnels workers into lower-paying jobs. With record household debt and casualisation of work, that’s not sustainable in the long term because you can’t afford to live in a ‘sustainable city’ if you can’t afford to pay your way around it.
What does this all mean for sustainable development, cities and urban planning? What have we got to work with right now, and how do we relieve, not increase, the pain point of traffic? Well, we can do plenty if we focus on right now and promote what has virtue. Let’s look at what we have got in the toolkit.
Connected vehicles
Connected vehicles mean we can identify congestion, accidents, emergencies and safety hotspots. Real-time data APIs means we can alert drivers to delays and advise alternate route (especially on the M5), identify intersections with extreme braking above 1G (that’s right, tailgating means you have to brake to a hard stop sometimes).
Waycare, a US traffic data company, reports using their traffic data to lower traffic accidents by 17 per cent and speed up response times by 12 minutes. It can help reduce the number of road crashes that wreck lives and cause chronic pain conditions that people then live with for the rest of their lives.
Smart parking
Smart parking guidance systems are proven in Australia, with drivers reporting they save 2.48 minutes each trip, halving congestion at the destination, lowering GHG emissions and tailpipe pollution.
Road traffic data
Traffic data and insights that provide context to keep the system running more smoothly. Planning future builds, black spot upgrades and infrastructure to increase safety and mitigate travel time issues are developed based on fact. The increased volume of cars on the road are easily identified and drive tactical urbanism goals to increase active travel and repurpose streets.
Data can provide a ‘situation report’ to arm engagement between the government and the community. This sparks a frank conversation about the goal – is it to lower speeds for safety in busy precincts or increase average speeds to ease congestion and encourage free-flow traffic?
Information presented in a way that provides time-poor people with context underpins the ability to discuss the impact of ‘lockdown traffic’ volumes on increasing speeds and near misses and accidents.
