Why Light Rail creates Tunnel Vision - A Critique of the Non-Critique of "Transport for Canberra"

For years public transport campaigners have enthused about light rail for Canberra, typically from Gungahlin to Civic. And now even the ALP has signed up to it! We´ve made it! Truly transformational change is in the offing!
... Or is it?
In all the enthusiasm for light rail too few have looked critically at the transport policy platform which underpins the design and implementation of light rail. This platform is contained in the ACT government´s 2012 document "Transport for Canberra." I will argue that the general conception outlined in TfC of the role and design of public transport militates against achieving the objectives of sustainable transport and social equity which have led many in Canberra to pin their hopes on light rail. The improvements to public transport which TfC sees as realised by 2031 are so modest that they constitute no qualitative shift towards more sustainable and more socially equitable transport. In other words, no challenge is seriously envisaged to car dominance - this with or without light rail. Moreover, the general assumption underlying TfC is that one can only hope for a truly transformational challenge to car dominance if one radically changes Canberra´s urban form. At this point, TfC ties the introduction of an improved, effectively functioning public transport system to policies of urban consolidation. I will argue that we can achieve much more ambitious outcomes for sustainability and social equity without radical changes to Canberra´s urban form. I will do so by appeal to empirical evidence gathered by Paul Mees to show that for some 10 years at least one city in Australia managed to achieve more ambitious outcomes in a shorter time with less public subsidy, no significant change to urban form and with no new technologies-until a short-sighted desire to save money conspired with an age-old obsession with preventing congestion to undo the system which had produced these better results. I will conclude with (a) a general critique of the claim that sustainable, equitable and acceptably cost-effective public transport requires a significantly different, much denser urban form than Canberra currently possesses; and (b) an ideology-critical explanation of why this claim has so unjustifiably achieved such canonical status. I will also make some critical remarks about an understanding of political symbolism which insists that by running tram lines down Northbourne one will induce a "Saul-to-Paul" transformation in Canberran patterns of people movement. There are, after all, quite a few cities around the world characterised both by car dominance and by a snazzy light rail.
Nota bene: this is not a paper against light rail but rather for better consideration of when, where and why we need it.

Date & time

Fri 26 Oct 2012, 10:00am to 12:00pm

Location

Room 101 (Old Library) of the Forestry Building (No. 48), the Fenner School of Environment and Society

Contacts

Bruin Christensen, School of Philosophy, ANU

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