Fuel excise rises should remove cars and build great public transport systems

Rises to fuel excise charges are a good idea, but!

Increases to the fuel excise should be
 such that they remove motor vehicles
from our roads and then pay for a
modern and sophisticated public
transport system.

Just as smokers have been discouraged from inhaling nicotine through increased prices, we should be driving motorists off our roads through increased costs, and fuel excise rises will help with that.

And this is where the “but” comes into play for if we make it more expensive for motorists to drive their privately owned cars on publicly funded roads we need to provide an alternative.

The alternative is a public transport system that is efficient, clean, modern, comprehensive and sufficiently structured to make sure everyone can get quickly and easily everywhere they want to go, at a reasonable cost.

Sound impossible? Unquestionably, but to go back two centuries and suggest we aim for what we have now, there would have brought howls of utopian madness.

The collision of world circumstances, led by our misunderstanding of what impact our carbon-intensive lifestyles would have on human habitation, along with that of many other species, clearly indicates that public “everything” demands precedence over privatization.

We already have, and understand, what it is we need to do to produce electricity in a genuinely sustainable way and so that could be used to power an intricate, efficient and timely public transit system.

Presently, the public spends lavishly to build and provide an infrastructure from which private enterprises profit handsomely and although the public get some momentary benefit, the resultant riches go primarily to a privileged few.

The equation looks pretty straight forward – make motoring the preserve of the enthusiast and wealthy; invest heavily in the public transport/transit system and in doing so create many thousands of jobs in the construction, running and maintenance of this wonderfully people orientated way of sharing our resources.

Along with building, operating and maintaining our new public transport/transit system we could set about dismantling the centralized and dirty fossil fuel power sources and employ vastly more people creating, building and maintaining our democratic renewable energy sources, including solar, wind, hydro, bioenergy and in limited way the one fossil fuel, gas.

The idea of dismantling the privatized road transport system and replacing it with a sophisticated and cutting-edge public system is loaded with complexities and difficulties, but so was, and is, what we have now and if we had known before what was ahead, including the untended consequences, we would never have set out on the journey.

Ideological liberals who preach a smaller and less intrusive government have had two centuries, at least, of market-driven  and privatized opportunity to legitimize their claims, but the fallacy of their argument, now illustrated by the increasing world-wide economic chaos and brutal inequality, demands they step aside and allow “public everything” to predominate.

The gulf between public needs and private wants warrants discussion

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.

Stark contrast between private roads and public transport

The contrast is stark.

Victoria’s aging public transport system is rather dilapidated, pretty much ignored and still rooted largely to its 19^th century infrastructure.



A logo  identifying Victoria's
public transport system.

Meanwhile our road system - a publicly paid for, and owned, infrastructure that enriches the privately-owned motor industry and its spin-off periphery businesses – seems to get better every day.

A recent return trip to Melbourne on our patch-work-quilt-like public transport system came on the same day as an announcement about the completion and opening of a multi-million dollar section of Victorian freeway.

The contrast between the rather sad publicly owned train network and the slick, shiny and brand new publicly paid for freeway that obviously benefits you and me, but primarily private enterprise, was blatant.

A recent visit to Shepparton by State Minister for Public Transport and Roads, Terry Mulder, was followed by an “upgrade” to train services between Shepparton and Melbourne.

Many pleaded with Mr Mulder during that visit for a train service that would arrive in Melbourne before 9:00am on work days.

Mr Mulder subsequently acted and the train that had left about 7am and arrived in Melbourne about 9:30am, now leaves Shepparton at 6:31am and arrives at Melbourne’s Southern Cross Station at a scheduled 9:10am – that’s half-an-hour earlier in departure for a 20 minute arrival gain and yet still 10 minutes after most work days have started.

Personally the so-called “upgrade” seems to have been pointless – we are all forced to rise earlier and it benefits no one except the State Government which can legitimately claim it listened and responded to public pressure.

The changes, however, were cosmetic and of no practical use.

Mr Mulder needs to be informed by experience - all went fine on that recent Melbourne-bound journey, beyond the 30 minute earlier departure, until the train stopped at Tallarook for what is normally a one-minute stop.

However, that one-minute stop became five to be followed by an announcement that because of Metro train problems, our stop could be 20 minutes.

We crawled on, hesitated a few times, stopped again and finally arrived at Melbourne’s Southern Cross Station at nearly ten o’clock – nearly 50 minutes late and about three and a half hours after leaving Shepparton.

A friend recently returned from Japan praising the country’s train stations, saying they were clean, had wonderful facilities, food and drink and serviced by trains that arrived within seconds of their scheduled times.

Victoria’s public transport system, despite the deluded imaginations of our politicians, is mere shadow of what happens in other parts of the world.

Road transport is no longer an effective or efficient way of moving people or goods about and rather than further expanding a problematic and wasteful road network, we should be spending on a sophisticated public transport system.