Traffic congestion, roads and poor policy ruining neighbourhoods

Peter Boyer targets the main problem with our capital city — cars

WHAT distinguishes ordinary cities from extraordinary ones, liveable cities from urban wastelands? What things make a healthy city?

These questions are as relevant now as in 1961, when young New Yorker Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities about how bad road planning was ruining neighbourhoods and sucking the life out of metropolitan America.

The same questions are informing the City of Hobart’s new transport strategy, which asks, among other things, how do we shape our city to make it a better place, easier to get about, more stimulating, attractive, peaceful and secure?

Thinking about transport, most people home in on ease of movement, in particular cars on roads and how we keep them moving. But as the strategy makes clear, it simply isn’t feasible to consider any sort of transport in isolation.

For most of the 10,000-year story of cities nearly everyone walked, with a few sitting on beasts of burden and then in carts and carriages. It was a natural part of interpersonal contact, which was what city life was all about. It still is.

Private car use encourages separation and territorial rights. Interpersonal contact between car users is rare, except in road rage.

The kinds of cities we yearn for — people meeting for business, pleasure and stimulation — do not need private cars.

Cars are the least space-efficient transport, as Elliot Fishman of Melbourne’s Institute for Sensible Transport told a Climate Tasmania seminar in Hobart this month. In growing cities, more roads mean more cars. They just make it worse.

Motor transport is the state’s biggest source of greenhouse emissions. Per person-kilometre, based on average occupancy, a car releases over 13 times as much carbon dioxide as a bus, and infinitely more than walking.

The strategy informs us Hobart is Tasmania’s biggest work destination, with more than half of greater Hobart’s jobs and 40 per cent of southern Tasmania’s. Most commuters head for the city, so a new bypass road would make little difference to peak hour.

In 2011 a state government survey of workers in the city found 79 per cent travelled to and from work in cars (68 per cent as driver, 11 per cent passenger). Of people living in the city proper, 61 per cent travelled in cars — 25 per cent of commuters living in the city boundary walked to work, the highest proportion of walking commuters in all our capitals.