Capital’s twin traffic bottlenecks

Bob Cotgrove explains how Hobart became a funnel for cars

HOBART is often described as a linear city due to the steep foothills constraining settlement to relatively narrow strips of land on the western and eastern shores of the milewide River Derwent.

Such a description was accurate up until the end of World War II. As Figure 1 shows, urban settlement southeast of the CBD was confined to Battery Point, Dynnyrne and the old tram track along Sandy Bay Rd, with limited spread along adjacent streets.

The majority of Hobart’s post-war urban population lived in the bowl formed by South, West and North Hobart or along the flat transport corridor between New Town and Glenorchy.

Beyond this high density core, suburban development was sparse, as exemplified by Claremont and Howrah (Figures 2 and 3).

The 1948 pattern markedly contrasts with the current vast spread of settlement in Mt Nelson, Lower Sandy Bay, Taroona and Kingborough in the southern suburbs, Glenorchy, Montrose, Claremont and Austins Ferry in the north and suburbs in Clarence and Sorell on the eastern shore.

The population of metropolitan Hobart has doubled since 1948, but the spread of settlement, facilitated by increasing and widespread ownership and use of cars has multiplied at least tenfold in the same period.

Since World War II car ownership has offered families in all socio-economic brackets freedom to choose where to live independently of where they work. Families have moved from flat low-lying corridors of public transport routes of trams and trains to the urban fringes where land has been cheaper, to quiet bush retreats, to waterfront sites with access to beaches, and particularly to elevated hillsides with views over the city, mountain or river.

The spread of residential settlement is accompanied by outward expansion of retail, manufacturing and office jobs. Hobart is now a multinuclear urban area with regional shopping and office complexes in Glenorchy, Clarence, Sorell and Kingborough.

Due to almost universal car ownership, Hobart’s suburban expansion has exploded the topographical constraints of steep foothills. It is no longer a linear city. Instead it has become a bottleneck city.

Road infrastructure has not kept pace. Inter-regional traffic movements, to and from northern, eastern and southern suburbs funnels through the city on the arterial routes of pre-war times.

These arterials, the oneway pair of Davey and Macquarie streets and the cross-arterials of Antill, Molle, Barrack, Harrington, Murray, Argyle and Campbell streets, also cater for city-bound and locally generated traffic.

Greater Hobart’s population continues to spread. Suburbs in Kingborough and in Clarence and Sorell have absorbed three-quarters of Hobart’s growth since 1976. A quarter of the growth has been in the northern suburbs, almost entirely on foothills away from the old shoreline train route.

Interestingly, given new subdivisions such as Tolmans Hill and the long-term trend of young single adults and older empty-nester retirees moving closer to amenities offered by central apartments, the Hobart local government area population has remained virtually unchanged despite an increase of a third in the population of greater Hobart since 1976.

Smaller household size has disguised this process.

The trend to low-density suburbia is not peculiar to Hobart or Australia. It is a global phenomenon, as car ownership grows.

Hobart is experiencing the perfect storm caused by people trying to get through the city to other places to go to work, visit friends and relatives, travel to and from the airport, access recreational and sporting sites, and engage in a complex array of modern lifestyle activities — forced to interact with city-bound and locally generated traffic using the same arterial streets.

The situation is made worse by Davey and Macquarie streets being the grandest of Hobart’s historic boulevards, the location of the city’s richest heritage, including the City Hall, Customs House, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Town Hall, St David’s Cathedral and many other outstanding buildings.

The one-way arterial pair, because of the traffic load they bear, isolate the city from the splendour of Sullivans Cove, preventing easy pedestrian access to the waterfront.

The situation will worsen with new developments in the city. If it is to be successful the Macquarie Point master plan will generate considerable local traffic as employees, visitors, service vehicles and tourists access the site at all hours of the day. The master plan offers nothing to address the traffic consequences.

The assumption is that this traffic will be accommodated into the existing street pattern, as with other developments planned for the city such as the redevelopment of Parliament Square, the TMAG and Regatta upgrades, the

reconstruction of the Myer site, the university’s 430 student accommodation units between Brisbane and Melville streets, its $75 million Academy of Creative Industries and Performing Arts adjacent to the Theatre Royal, its $45 million Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies redevelopment on Princes Wharf, its renovation of the old uni site on the Domain, its medical science buildings in Liverpool St, the upgrade of the Royal Hobart Hospital, the hotel project at Macquarie Wharf No. 1 shed and the redevelopment of the old Mercury building.

Various solutions such as improving public transport and creating more residential development in the city may have some merit, but they will have no major impact on the overall situation which will only get worse as Hobart’s population grows.

The only practical solution is to separate through traffic from city-bound and local traffic and the only feasible way of doing that is to plan for a western arterial bypass of the city centre to connect the southern Expressway with the Brooker and Tasman Highways following the route of the Northside Freeway as proposed in the 1964 Hobart Area Transportation Study.

I am not an engineer, so will avoid the trap of stipulating where and how the bypass would be constructed. However, it need not be elevated, although it would need to overfly Elizabeth St, and need to connect with cross arterials, Harrington, Murray, Argyle and Campbell streets.

The freeway would join the Brooker near Melville St and both would need to connect to the Tasman Highway, possibly via the Railway Roundabout or by a cut-and-fill tunnel through the Domain.

Given likely future growth of Hobart’s population on the eastern shore a parallel Tasman Bridge should also be on the infrastructure agenda.

For too long Hobart’s transport planning has been dominated by ideological nonsense that the car is a short-term phenomenon and the future requires a return to 19th century industrial culture where paid employment was almost entirely a male prerogative and people were forced to live alongside train and tram tracks.

It’s time our political leaders took a realistic look at current and future urban travel behaviour and plan accordingly. That means investigating as a matter of urgency a western arterial bypass around Hobart CBD. Bob Cotgrove is an urban geographer and transport economist with special interests in post-industrial land use and activity patterns.

The one-way arterial pair, because of the traffic load they bear, isolate the city from the splendour of Sullivans Cove.