Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the automobile age
by Paul Mees
(Earthscan, 2010, 228 pages)
He began as an amateur, leading the Public Transport Users' Association for many years, but then turned his hobby into a job by becoming a professional transport planner and university lecturer. In both his amateur and professional guises, Mees has long been the go-to person for Melbourne's media whenever they wanted a comment on transport issues. lie has always been happy to oblige and, despite his slightly disheveled appearance (rarely out of a T-shirt or woolly jumper), he has media talent. He always delivers punchy lines, often with the sort of hyperbole that the media love. It was this liking for over-the-top language which got him into trouble a couple of years ago.
Normally, those he has attacked, be they politicians, bureaucrats, transport operators or the roads' lobby have just taken criticism in their stride, but when, at a Melbourne University debate in 2007, he made some typically outlandish claims about how the Department of Transport regulated Melbourne's private train and tram operators, the Victorian Government complained to his then employer, the University of Melbourne, in a ham-fisted attempt to silence him.
Given that what he had said at the particular forum was no different to what he had said many times before, the University's decision to charge him with bringing it into disrepute looked like a shocking cave-in to government pressure. Most of what Mees had said was wrong, but trying to take away his right to express his views made it look as if he was right. And to cap off this debacle, he already had secured a new role at the RMIT University and was free to continue his campaigning, armed with a new sense of self-righteousness as a martyr for free speech.
The latest manifestation of his proselytising is this work, his second book, published a decade after his first. It is not really pitched at the general reader (most of whom would be put off by the $80 price tag), more an opportunity to deliver an uninterrupted response to everybody in the transport debate with whom he has had an argument in the past ten years.
Taking as a given that we need to move ''beyond the automobile age'', leaves Mees with two main targets for rhetorical attack; targets strategically placed at different ends of the political spectrum. To the left, are the transport planners and dark greens who insist that the only way to nirvana is to destroy suburbia as we know it, and replace it with a new much denser urban form; while, to the right, are the neo-liberals who have encouraged private sector involvement in public transport.
Mees is very cross with environmentalists who argue that in order to make public transport work, there needs to be an increase in population density throughout the suburbs. In a bid to make these advocates of the ''compact city'' reassesses their views, he points out that, by arguing that urban sprawl precludes mass transit, they are actually endorsing the position of many in the roads' lobby. Mees does not want the task of removing cars made harder by also requiring the end of the quarter acre block. Besides, in his view, it is perfectly possible to deliver high frequency public transport across suburbia wirhout increasing densities.
Over the years, he has pushed a number of cities as the exemplar of how to go about this -- his current favourite is Zurich -- but there has usually been the same prime example of what not to do, his hometown of Melbourne. Of course, for the majority of his career the service he criticised was government-run, but happily he can now lay the blame for the city's allegedly high subsidies and poor service at the feet of evil ''neo-liberals'', who convinced the Kennett Government, in its second term, to privatise, or franchise, the train and tram services.
Not that one ever knew it at the time, and even now he is a little coy about it, but Mees seems to regard the first term of the Kennett Government as something of a mini golden age in public transport in Melbourne. He recognises that there were ''genuine efficiency improvements'' which helped to halve the operating subsidy while ''improving the reliability'' of services and that ''patronage began to recover as services were restored and the economy improved''. However, trouble was brewing as ''in late 1996, the transport minister responsible for the reform program retired, and free-marketeers in the State Treasury made their move''.
Oddly, Mees does not name the minister in question, Alan Brown, but if Brown is the unnamed good guy of Melbourne public transport, the named evil svengali is Jim Betts, a moderately senior member of the Transport Reform Unit, during the period when privatisation took place and, after several promotions, now the Secretary of the Department of Transport. Mees claims that the Berts-led Department provides a ''striking instance of regulatory capture''. It must have been a pretty loose capture, given that when the franchises were re-tendered last year both the train and tram incumbents lost out to new bidders.
Mees correctly identifies that there are risks with the franchising model -- ''low balling'' in bids, operator capture of the regulator etc. -- but his assessment of what has actually happened on the ground in Melbourne is so jaundiced that he loses credibility. Mees is at a loss to explain why Melbourne has experienced a bigger patronage boom than any other Australian city, with patronage almost doubling on the trains and increasing by close to 50 per cent on the trams. He contents himself with saying that ''whatever was driving the increase in rail patronage, it was certainly not improved service''.
At least, he now acknowledges there has been an increase. A couple of years ago he was the lead author of a document which said that over three decades Melbourne had the biggest increase in car use and decline in public transport use. One of the three alleged reasons for Melbourne's performance was ''poor public transport management ... a situation exacerbated by the privatisation of trains and trams in 1999''. However, the document itself actually showed that in the ten years from 1996 to 2006, during which privatisation occurred, Melbourne had been not only not the worst, but the best performing city! And that was before the biggest increase in the years after 2006.
Certainly, there have been plenty of problems with Melbourne's trains in recent years, often the result of trying to cope with growth, but to argue that franchising caused the problems is ridiculous. The worst weeks in the past decade were around the record heat-wave of early 2009 and Mees queries why ''nobody tried to explain why the cancellations had begun a fortnight beforehand''. One reason was that the rail operator, Connex, was the victim of a campaign of industrial action, but felt constrained from publicly pointing the finger until too late, in the mistaken impression that either goodwill would prevail, or the state government would sort out the problem.
To be fair, Mees does acknowledge that governments can be poor deliverers of public transport too and on several issues he has sound views. For instance, he opposes the oft-raised panaceas of free travel or over-reliance on bikes. He also correctly emphasises the importance of integrated ticketing (surely second only to reducing union control on the priority list for Sydney's system), the need for clarity in stopping patterns on transport routes irrespective of mode, and the need for customer-friendly intermodal interchanges.
However, ultimately Mees' aspiration that suburban public transport ''match the anywhere to anywhere of the private car'' is, in a strange way, reflective of the suburbs of a generation or two past. There would have been no need for a car, if there were more frequent buses to take father to the station and then mother to the shops. In the 2010s, working parents now may be dropping children at a couple of different locations, in different directions from home, before they even begin the attempt to get to work in a different suburb across town.
No matter how frequent the service, how integrated the ticketing and how efficient the interchanges, the car will probably still sound like a good bet for those journeys. So, even in cities such as Melbourne, where public transport use is booming, it will be a while before we move beyond the automobile age.
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