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| Public transport comes in many forms and next to walking and cycling it is clearly the most efficient way to move people about. |
People of the Goulburn Valley need to gather and talk about the
gulf between public needs and private wants.
Both are many, but it is the former to which any reasonable,
decent, thoughtful and community-minded person will acknowledge the most
important.
Sadly, our individualistic and consumerist world has a
slavish devotion to the latter, a perverse privatization that gives rise to
despair and a largely unacknowledged and invisible inequality.
Many argue that we can only deal with society as it is or
with what exists and although that might be an accepted philosophy today, it
wasn’t when we abandoned, almost entirely, our rail network and decided the
future belonged to the combustion engine, effectively the motor car.
The Goulburn Valley of the mid-1940s had a wonderful rail
network, but gradually was dismantled as private wants prevailed over public
needs.
We wrongly chose not to build-on our existing rail infrastructure,
but pursue a privately energised idea, the motor car; a concept that has
evolved to actually become a public disservice and in just 100 years has left a
legacy contrary to human needs.
The purchase of a car is a private decision, but its use and
convenience depends, almost entirely, upon a publicly funded infrastructure.
The era of the car is ending with the oil upon which it
depends becoming prohibitively expensive to extract and deliver to users, as is
the maintenance of the road network and without either the motor car has no
reason.
It is time to gather and discuss how we can get thousands of
road users back onto a tightly networked public transport system that would be
vastly more energy efficient; enrich and strengthen linked communities; trigger
a host of new job opportunities; be safer; and make a significant contribution
to reducing the Goulburn Valley’s carbon dioxide emissions.
The idea of public transport contrasts with the modern market-driven
individualism that has prevailed for decades to become an imagined part of our
wellbeing, both emotionally and physically.
Rather than responding to Australia’s spacious geography, we
should be consolidating our towns and cities; living close to our work; using a
bicycle, or walking; negotiating our towns and cities on a tightly integrated
public transport system of buses with light rail running as frequently as
hourly between Goulburn Valley towns to connect with trains that unite us with
all other destinations.
Establishing an integrated public transport network will be
complex, difficult and expensive, but we must start now for as the world’s oil
becomes increasingly scarce and subsequently expensive, it will be equally
increasingly difficult to build the network upon which the future of the
Goulburn Valley will depend.
That is “what” we need and now we need to gather and figure
our “how” we do it.
