Societies and suburban public transport
On 5 November 2007, the Urban Research Program (URP), Griffith University published a report (Roads, railways and regimes: why some societies are able to organise suburban public transport: and why others can’t) which finds that:
- where it is not accepted that the state has the right to act as a land developer, there will be relatively little investment in rail and freeways will tend to be built to a disproportionate degree by default.
- rail is more likely to be developed by transport bureaucracies that know that their income will largely come from land development.
- the tendency, in both New Zealand and Australia, to plan and fund roads from the centre, while treating public transport as ‘local’, also needs to be
overcome.
- privatization and laissez-faire cannot check automotive proliferation. All these problems point toward an era of ‘planning even more’. Such an agenda would include accelerated development of public transport, walking and cyling networks, affordable housing, solar energy collection, support for ‘green’ industries and, inevitably, a greater focus on local public goods than at present. Institutionally, such an agenda also implies a distancing of transport agencies from automotive and road user ‘clients’, in favour of a new governance model that focuses on the part played by all transport modes in achieving substantive land use outcomes; system-building states have a clear advantage in that area.
- the arguments for value capture and pro-active regional planning are rationally cogent and supported by experience. ‘Cluster and connect’ planning
can only succeed if there is a high degree of social consensus concerning the legitimacy of entrepreneurial state land development. This consensus exists in European countries - under governments of both the Right and the Left - but it is absent in English-speaking countries.
Roads, railways and regimes: why some societies are able to organise suburban public transport: and why others can’t
