I've just finished reading a wonderful little book by Melissa and Chris Bruntlett called Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives. The Bruntletts are Canadian cycling advocates who moved from their home in Vancouver to the Dutch town of Delft to pursue their cycling dreams. They knew they were moving to the home of commuter cycling, having already written a book about the Dutch cycling revolution, but they were unprepared for just how great it would be.
This book is not so much about how they did it but about the benefits. They list a whole series.
- It makes it a place where children can travel safely and freely to school, to social outings and to visit friends without their parents worrying they'll get run over. Instead of their parents having to ferry them everywhere they can take themselves anywhere they need to go by bike.
- The safety and quiet of the car-free streets means neighbours are more likely to interact, both across and along the street and as they are out in the community on foot or on their bikes - something that wouldn't happen if they were cocooned in their cars. This builds a higher level of social trust and belonging.
- It becomes a place where women, older people and people with disabilities all have more options. These are the people who are often not able to drive, or less safe on car-dominated streets, and the ease of safe active transport (whether by bike, on foot or using mobility aids) makes it easier for them to get out and about and be part of the community.
- It helps people be healthier, with less stress and more opportunities to build physical activity into their daily lives.
- It reduces various forms of pollution. This includes air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions but they focus particularly on noise pollution. They observe that cities are not noisy, cars are noisy and this will not be solved by electric vehicles because while their engines are quiet the largest component of noise pollution is the sound of the tyres. The Bruntletts love the fact that every time they step out of the train station in the centre of Delft after a trip away, the first thing they notice is how quiet the streets are. You can hear people talking, birds singing, the sound of the wind in the trees, without the incessant roar of passing cars and trucks.
- It makes the city more economically prosperous and more resilient in times of crisis. The ease of transport reduces barriers to participation in work and education, and shifts resources from buying and maintaining cars to other productive areas of the economy. The benefits in building social capital and independence have also meant that during the COVID crisis people are more likely to help each other, and having wide, safe paths has meant that during lockdowns people are able to exercise safely while keeping appropriate distance.
Now of course there are some obvious reasons why the Netherlands has become a cycling paradise. It's very flat, so it's easy to get around on a cheap upright bicycle without having to be particularly fit. It has a large population packed into a small area, so the paths don't need to be that long. Much of it was built before cars were invented so large parts of its cities and towns are much more easily adapted for bikes than for cars. And it's a rich, peaceful country that can afford to spend money on quality infrastructure.
On the other hand it rains in the Netherlands ALL THE TIME, and half the year it's bitterly cold outside. Yet people just rug up, put on their waterproof gear and ride in rain hail and shine. Despite their love of their native Canada the Bruntletts couldn't resist the lure, and after two years of temporary residence they are putting down roots, buying themselves a house by a canal and settling in for the long pedal.
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Meanwhile, I live in Brisbane, Australia and am not likely to live anywhere else for the rest of my life. I'm sure there are worse places to be a cyclist but Brisbane is a long way from cycling heaven. Our city is purpose-built for cars, with wide fast streets, sprawling suburbs, narrow footpaths, poor public transport and very few separated bike paths. As a result, cycling is mainly the province of MAMILS (Middle Aged Men in Lycra) like me who are fit and confident to brave the traffic.
To be fair, things are slowly getting better. At least we have SOME safe-ish bike paths now. Our current State transport minister (who is also my local member) is a keen cyclist who loves to turn out to open new bits of bikeway, and our local Council has a bikeways strategy and is proposing new bike and walking bridges. Yet really, there's not much ambition in any of it. They spend tens or occasionally hundreds of millions on bikeways, but billions on roads, along with a 10km train tunnel under the Brisbane River that's costing $5.4b plus cost overruns and grey gifts to the private partners.
The general approach to bikeway design here is that it must not interfere with cars in any way. Need to remove car-parks? Can't be done. Need to cut out a slip-lane so cars have to wait for the lights to turn left? Can't be done. Need to rejig sensor-controlled traffic lights so they change for bikes? Too hard. So what we get are three sorts of things.
First of all, we get some pretty good bikeways along a couple of major arterial roads. There's a great separate bike path that runs for about 20km alongside the South East Freeway to the outskirts of Brisbane. There's a similar one that runs northwards along the Gateway Arterial all the way to Redcliffe. Yet even these have gaps where our two levels of government haven't been able to bring themselves to prioritise bikes over cars. There's a big gap in the northside one where cyclists have to ride along streets because Council couldn't bring itself to remove a dozen street car carking spaces to build a designated bikeway. The southside one has three spots where it just stops and you have to ride along the road or footpath and across streets for a couple of hundred metres before picking up the path again. These will eventually be fixed by bridges but the northern end of this path has been in place for over 20 years and the project is still not complete. These things move at a glacial pace, and the latest southern extensions are only happening because they're being build alongside a gazillion-dollar road widening.
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| Photo from bicycledutch.wordpress.com |
The third thing we have are paths that run through parks. These are usually shared paths for cyclists and walkers, and they're usually not very wide so as a cyclist you are left dinging your bell at people listening to their earbuds or walking their dogs, or both. These tracks are really for recreation not for transport, but often they're the lesser of two evils compared to braving peak hour traffic.
The thing with all these three types of infrastructure, which have been slowly expanding over the years as cycling becomes more popular, is that they could not possibly be described as a network. They are just bits of path. Sooner or later, each of them spits you out onto a road. There's not many journeys anywhere in Brisbane that you can make entirely on bike paths. Sooner or later you have to mix it with the cars.
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We are so used to this situation here in Australia that we're apt to forget that it's not natural or normal. Cars were only invented in the late nineteenth century and remained largely a luxury item until after World War 2. They are still a luxury in much of the world. It was only during the post-war reconstruction and the boom in urban growth that came through the latter half of the 20th century that ordinary people started to own them and we redesigned our cities around car travel. When my family arrived in Brisbane in 1968 there were still trams running down the middle of many of our arterial roads, but by the early 1970s the tracks had been ripped up to make more space for cars. We still rode our bikes around the suburbs as kids in the 1970s but it was becoming increasingly dangerous - I got knocked over by cars a couple of times, although fortunately without serious injury.
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| Photo from the Maryborough Family History Society |
In hindsight, this has been a really poor choice. Over a thousand people die in traffic accidents each year in Australia, with many more sustaining life threatening injuries and winding up with lifelong disabilities. It has other health impacts too, from pollution, noise and stress. And all this for a transport option that is hugely inefficient and resource-wasting. Most of our cars are designed to carry four or five people plus plenty of luggage at speeds of over 150 km/h, yet most car trips involve one or two people with handbags travelling at an average speed of 40km/h or less. The majority of us own cars to get us around but they spend over 95% of their time stationary, either in the garage at home or in the parking lot at our destination. This is a massive waste of resources, both our own in owning and storing an idle asset and public resources in roads wide enough to fit all these almost-empty cars and on or off street parking for them at their destination. All this contributes about 15% of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions, mostly in petrol and diesel exhaust.
Yet despite this huge resource investment about a third of the population get nothing from it. This includes children and teenagers, who have to rely on others to take them everywhere; people with disabilities if their disability prevents them from driving; older people for whom driving is no longer safe; people with addictions who have lost their right to drive; and anyone too poor to afford a car. These people rely on active transport (walking, cycling, scootering or using mobility devices) or public transport.
Yet these forms of transport have been quite literally run over in our rush to adopt cars. Large parts of our cities are unsafe to walk, ride or roll through because of the cars whizzing past and across your path. This danger is greater for many of those who can't use cars - kids whose judgement and attention are undeveloped; older people and people with disabilities who may not be able to move quickly; people who are often under the influence of substances which impair their attention.
Meanwhile, public transport services are poor cousins. Services are often infrequent, unreliable or non-existent, particularly the further you get from the city centre. Buses, our most frequently used option, have to compete on the same crowded roads as cars but go even slower as they stop to pick up passengers - but any politician brave enough to create a dedicated lane for them will be shouted at by angry car users who see their space being taken away. Why don't these car drivers just use the bus, if it's faster? Because sadly it's infrequent, and it doesn't take them to the places they need to go. Meanwhile trains and light rail have to run on rails, which we have to build - but where can we build them? We allocated all our transport corridors to cars and there's none left for anything else. Hence spending billions to bury a short section of track deep underground.
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Things stay the same until they change. Sometimes we decide to change them. Sometimes the change is taken out of our hands. It's much better for us to take change into our own hands and shape it in a way that suits our needs, because if we don't the change that comes despite us can be filled with pain and suffering.
It may seem that it's too late for us to step back from car dominance but this is an illusion. It only took a few decades for cars to take over our cities, and we can just as easily switch them out. We currently have lots of infrastructure devoted to cars but most of it is adaptable. The roads that host cars also host buses and bikes, and could be used for scooters, mobility devices and people walking if there weren't cars roaring along them. With a bit of investment we can even put the rails back and run trains or trams.
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| Photo courtesy of Space4Cycling Brisbane |
But that's just one bridge. What if we shut half our major arterial roads to car traffic and instead ran buses along them at two minute intervals for 18 hours a day? The buses would not need all four or six lanes on these roads so the remaining space could be given over to active transport. People might scream that they can't drive their cars, but with buses this frequent, humming steadily along car-free streets, it wouldn't take long for the protestors to try them out and realise how much better they are. And of course the other half of the streets would still be there for people who really do need to drive their cars - once people cottoned on there would be a lot fewer of them and the initial nightmare traffic jams would soon clear. Soon everyone would be cheering the genius who came up with the plan. Remember where you read it first, people!
Of course this is not going to happen. Our political leaders are too timid. They will continue to pander to car drivers because they fear a backlash and their fears are not unreasonable. You only have to listen to talkback radio or read the comments on any news story about cycling to realise how much road rage is already out there, waiting to boil over at the slightest extra traffic delay. This means most of our current planning is just 'more of the same'. Roads too congested? Build bigger roads! Public transport under-used? Cut back services! Not enough people cycling? There's no point building bikeways because no-one uses them! We end up where we started. If you keep doing the same things you get the same results.
We don't need the same results. We need change. We need to cut that 15% of greenhouse gas emissions to zero within a couple of decades. We need to stop pretending 1000 deaths a year is an acceptable safety record. We need better access to transport for the one third of us who can't drive cars. We need to replace our traffic jams and road rage with more productive use of energy and time.
We need leaders who will think strategically - who will set goals for genuine, large scale shifts in mode share over a 15-20 year period and build strategies that make this happen. Then whenever we invest in transport we weigh up - can we do this through public transport? Can we use this as an opportunity to help more people take up cycling? Is there a way we can solve congestion here that doesn't involve widening the road and sucking in more cars? We need to start shifting our budgets, from less than 2% of State budgets on active transport to 10% or 20%, and then more on public transport. The people will follow the money.
All these things are achievable. Will we do them?
I'd like to think so. There's no shortage of people campaigning for it. Check out the wonderful people at Space 4 Cycling Brisbane for example - they are tireless in taking political leaders for bike rides, commenting on road and bikeway plans, attending Council Transport Committee meetings and raising awareness of safe cycling. There are advocates like them all over the place. We have people like the Bruntletts to inspire us to think bigger. There's no shortage of ideas and solutions. We just need to start doing them!
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