More cities and parks are a good thing, right, but how good could they really be?
Nothing screams “I am a nasty traitorous moron” louder than a MAGA cap.
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What may now seem like a gratuitous put-down will, in time (it is hoped), be nothing more than a pithy summary of America’s embarrassing plunge into self-absorbed pre-enlightenment barbarism.
MAGA has eviscerated more of the power, wealth and esteem of America in two years than sworn enemies accomplished over decades.
Obvious if dressed in mid-century fascist attire, MAGA’s despicability apparently evades perception when clad in silly red caps and draped in the national flag, a bit like the way HIV dodges detection by residing in the body’s immune cells.
However, we are not here to dissect the turd of American democratic incompetence but to reflect on the peculiar phenomenon of policy blindness to the obvious.
The odd invisibility of trunk roads in city building
Australia’s failure to address a number of recent policy challenges – think housing crisis, gambling reform, climate change – are failures of willpower, not actual blindness.
However, we seem to treat many of our urban roads as though they are invisible.
What we see in the title image of a Brisbane park is telling.
We notice the interesting juxtaposition of greenery and children’s play furniture and think “oh, how cute”, imagining toddlers on trikes play-learning real world urban navigation.
Only then do we realise that the public park is just background; a setting to teach tykes the utter primacy of traffic.
Three recent announcements further illustrate policy blindness to roads.
Firstly, we have already noted how the proposed Town Hall Square design is distorted to accommodate undesirable surface through-traffic.
Secondly, and all possible puns are intended, Wentworth Park will no longer go to the dogs.
The City of Sydney will develop it further as a public park for the enjoyment of residents in the adjacent high-density suburbs.
There is one obvious problem; how are these residents supposed to access the park?
Wattle Street, which bounds the park on the east, is a multilane through route, which isolates Pyrmont and Ultimo, the suburbs most in need of the park.
Thirdly, the regeneration of Glebe Island will now be the subject of an international design competition.
This announcement is remarkable for what it ignores.
A “traffic sewer” emerging from WestConnex will bound the southern edge of this redevelopment, separating it from Blackwattle Bay and occupying some of the most expensive real estate in Australia all the way to the Anzac Bridge.
The obvious question posed by all these examples is, why are these trunk roads above ground at all?
Urban development increases pressure to better utilise scarce land
Our current urban patterns are expressions of another age that valued individual independence on quarter acre lots, an ever-expanding atomised urbanity smeared over the countryside, linked by copious road networks to decentralised jobs.
Writing in these pages, Ahmad Yazdanian reviews this growth. He attributes road building projects in Australian cities to a long-term convergence of property developer, vehicle manufacturing and planning policy interests with the enthusiasms of transport policy practitioners, all focused on the delivery of dispersed suburban development and corresponding road systems.
These patronage structures are profoundly resistant to change. Road building is intimately embedded within our urban policymaking and delivery institutions, despite profound changes in urban productivity patterns.
Though we still have near limitless land, the task of linking new housing to new jobs renders land scarcer due to the time it now takes to travel between the two.
If transport efficiency determines urban land utilisation, roads are now the least efficient mode and suburbs the least efficient form.
Inner city trunk roads are inefficient legacy transport systems.
The trick is how to manage any transition to more productive and efficient modes.
It is suggested here that the first step is to make the land consumed by trunk roads evident by quantifying the cost of their above ground persistence.
If trunk roads must exist, put them below ground – cars don’t need sunshine.
Trunk roads?
What do we mean by “trunk roads” in this discussion?
As urban transport systems, motor vehicles are Janus faced – they confer urban benefits up to a point but then become toxic to the city they serve. The threshold tipping point is very low.
With too few vehicles, such as in malls, streets can feel unsafe due to the lack of eyes on the street when pedestrian visitation drops – think Rundle Mall in Adelaide.
Streets that are packed with slow moving traffic can feel lively – think King Street, Newtown or Rundle Street, Adelaide (just east of Rundle Mall).
However, more traffic is alienating – think Cleveland Street, Sydney, just around the corner from King Street or Grenfell Street in Adelaide, just parallel to Rundle Street or the mall.
Here, the difference between a lively street and a toxic through route is just one additional lane each way, here referred to as “trunk roads” – roads that primarily serve the conduct of large through volumes of traffic.
The analogy is comparing a neighbour with a compost bin with another neighbour hosting a block-wide rubbish dump.
Rhetorical legerdemain and narratives of inevitability
Business cases for road capacity expansion share a common feature; they are carefully constructed narratives of inevitability, the elements of which include a focus only on narrow and immediate before-and-after conditions, avoidance of non-traffic effects (externalities), and project scopes largely confined to the bounds of overarching ministerial responsibilities.
As an example, consider the WestConnex project.
Along with many others, this author witnessed the announcement that the originally laudable incorporation of urban improvement and traffic planning under a single “WestConnex” banner was to be divided between two separate agencies.
The palpable rage that swept the room was vindicated when the urban improvement initiative eventually withered while the tunnelling project forged ahead and was profitably transferred to a private operator.
A second more recent example entails proposed bridge widening works at Epping Road, Sydney.
Right next to Epping Station at a cost of some $220 million (probably double that given recent experience of large capital works projects) over a period of five years and the closure of the main rail line 14 times during that period, a new bridge will add just two extra traffic lanes to this “notorious bottleneck”.
Had we developed more integrated urban transport policies, this announcement might instead have proposed, for example, the expenditure of $220 million for the construction of a new car park above Epping Station, tolling of all non commercial vehicles crossing the existing bridge and urban improvement works for a new high density residential and commercial centre, now unburdened by proximity to a trunk road.
Commuters – significant contributors to current congestion – would be encouraged thereby to park their cars and take the train.
Transport land costs are largely concealed
Of course, objectors would point to the very high cost of burying trunk roads.
However, they overlook two significant features.
Firstly, the land occupied by inner city trunk roads is largely uncosted, originally acquired by governments for much less intense purposes.
The national government’s call for “well located land close to jobs” now means that the availability and value of inner city land is critically important, particularly for high value property like that on Glebe Island.
Secondly, the negative externalities of trunk roads are largely uncosted and unpaid for.
Large trunk roads are feasible essentially because the negative consequence of their growth is not borne by road builders but private owners of adjacent properties.
To illustrate with Glebe Island, a quick Google Maps calculation shows about 1200 metres of road decks extend between The Crescent, Balmain, and the Anzac Bridge north pylon. At an average width of 40 m, this amounts to almost 5 hectares of highly developable land.
The traffic noise effects will extend wider. The reduced amenity of adjacent land could easily double that area.
Yet, aerial road decks continue from the other end of Anzac Bridge for some 3 kilometres to the Sydney Harbour Bridge and beyond onto Sydney’s North Shore.
However, these areas of “lost” development potential are dwarfed by the land consumed by the South Australian “T2D” trunk road: that part of South Road closest to the Adelaide CBD.
With only 60 per cent of the almost 11 km corridor in tunnels, landscaping of the remaining corridor alone – not counting the direct road consumption – will occupy 26 hectares; all of which is “well located” land, in national government parlance.
Yet, we all are ultimately complicit in this absurdity because we don’t seem to notice it.
It’s time to make this mess “visible”
Contesting transport corridor land value is not uncommon.
The extension of a heavy rail line into the new city of Bradfield (next to the new western Sydney airport) is being opposed by the local developer on the grounds that the above ground corridor will consume costly development land.
Recalling the adage, “money doesn’t talk, it swears”, one way to increase the visibility of existing trunk roads is to price both the land they consume directly and the adjacent negative externalities, and – crucially – then allocating that price as a debit in the budgets of responsible transport agencies.
If expressed as an annual rental equivalent and included in feasibility studies exploring tunnelling, business cases would improve substantially by virtue of cost mitigation.
Road agencies would thereby be motivated to reduce these debits, as well as capturing the value of this upzoned land for residential or commercial uses; an outcome that would incidentally return increased rates to councils.
There is a further cost of trunk roads that remains opaque.
Even when buried, trunk roads are a costly low density urban transport solution.
A recent report by Matt Sullivan included a graphic illustrating that three high density metro rail lines would fit within each three-lane road tunnel.
This amounts to at least a 9 fold increase in boring and lining costs for a road tunnel compared to the cost of a rail tunnel (acknowledging that fitout costs for road and rail differ).
This feature alone should expose even buried roads to much closer government vetting.
Problem visibility is key, but just the start
Though more Americans are becoming aware of MAGA’s devastating financial and reputational cost – and its conceptual idiocy – the nation is still a long way from eradicating it.
That process is likely to get very messy; as Michael Robotham’s adage puts it, “you can’t pick up a turd by the clean end”.
Also writing in these pages, Chris Johnson summarises how new planning policy settings aim to address the housing crisis and accommodate our growing population.
“The key takeaway from the latest Sydney Plan … (is that it) essentially signifies that Sydney will become a more urban city with a swing to apartment living around transport nodes and centres … (a) transition from a primarily suburban character to an urban character around multiple centres”.
Johnson gently reminds us that the character of our cities will – must – change significantly if we are to accommodate our population in ways that provide access to new jobs.
The path to cities of delightful repose – antipodean Copenhagen – will also be long and messy, for which planning amendments are just the very first step.
We will fail if we also cannot make decent decisions (the ICAC enquiry into developer influence on political parties), build properly (the Building Commissioner’s unfinished work), govern it well (think still-fractious strata arrangements), organise our transport networks properly, and obtain sufficient land.
As Bagshaw, Hatch and Busby recently reported, we are only now starting to address the problems arising from our stubborn infatuation with low density urbanism, yet the consequences of this failure are now ricocheting through our polity.
The growing preference for One Nation should more properly be understood as a no confidence vote in how the main parties mismanaged urban growth over decades.
