As has been pointed out many times when roads are proposed instead of public transport.....Where will people park once they get where they are going.....Large venues need massive parking lots and the cost to motorists is staggering in most cases....Then when the event is over nobody can move for hours.....Public transport moves more people more efficiently and saves on public land that is used as car parks that sit idle for a great deal of the time....Abbott has no idea???

When I no longer need to carry equipment on my ute, or deliver  produce I am going to become a whinging whining leftie complaining about too much road funding.

Everybody needs stuff, everybody may need an ambulance.

I can just see the Ambos using public transport instead of driving.

By all means have public transport, but whiney whingey lefties don't want to pay for it.

Tony Abbott has shown he does not mind changing his mind. Few commentators have written pieces arguing for the Coalition to pass carbon price legislation; incoming prime minister ''Axe the Tax'' Abbott has.

He has swivelled on paid parental leave and school funding changes. His sister says his views on gay marriage are ''shifting''.

Here is another position Abbott will hopefully discard as retrograde and redundant - his insistence that the federal government should pay for motorways only and not for public transport.

For a party that professes allegiance to free-market principles, the Liberals are curiously insensitive to market demand for transport.

The ''market'' - in this instance, moving people around - is clear. Commuters are trying to avoid using a car if they can help it. Saturday's Herald report documented a steep rise in public transport use in Sydney, along with a slump in the rate of growth of car use. In the past decade, car use in Sydney rose by half the rate of population growth. Trips by train increased by twice the rate of population growth.

The trend is more pronounced among younger people. Inner west residents in their 20s are twice as likely to catch a train on an average weekday than was the case a decade ago. So, too, are twentysomethings living in St George or Sutherland or Fairfield or Liverpool. The trend is not confined to the inner city.

A week before the election, I interviewed Wentworth Liberal MP Malcolm Turnbull, in an attempt to add to the subgenre of political stories like "Turnbull disagrees with Abbott on issue X."

Turnbull is a public transport enthusiast. He tweets on the bus; he compliments NSW Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian when the trains run on time.

So, what did he think about Abbott's position that urban public transport funding was not in the federal government's "knitting"?

''I'm a great believer in mass transit,'' Turnbull said. ''I think that as our cities become larger and denser we are going to make more and more investments in mass transit.''

But Turnbull would not be drawn on whether or not he disagreed with Abbott. Instead, he laid out the intellectual justification for keeping Canberra out of public transport funding (though he did not say if he agreed with this justification).

''The argument against the Commonwealth government getting involved is one related to governance,'' Turnbull said.

The thinking goes like this: public transport systems have large and unwieldy bureaucracies.

If the federal government starts paying for railway lines and bus networks, states would lose the incentive to try to make these bureaucracies more efficient and just keeping asking Canberra for handouts, the argument goes. This is the intellectual rationale for Abbott's refusal to spend money on railways or buses, and why his government is scrapping about $700 million slated for train lines in Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth in favour of fast-tracked spending on motorways, such as $1.5 billion for WestConnex.

Is it a good rationale? Well, if it is a good argument for not investing in public transport, it is probably also a good one for cancelling federal funding for schools and hospitals, and Abbott is not promising to do that.

There is no doubt Sydney needs better roads, but no government can transform the city's public transport system into one like Paris' or Zurich's.

However, the kind of muscular individualism that suggests road funding is good and public transport funding is an indulgence just does not fit with the type of city Sydney is becoming.

Anecdotally, and in NSW Bureau of Transport Statistics' surveys, the reasons Sydney commuters cite for shifting to public transport tend to relate to the spatial difficulties of driving, parking and maintaining a car.

Cars are great but they can be a headache, too. In a city that does not have a lot of room left, it is a lot easier to slip a bus ticket into your wallet than find a parking place.

People are not making these decisions on environmental grounds; they are making them because they are trying to save themselves time and hassle.
It is to Labor's discredit that the debate about federal funding for public transport is largely academic at present.

Anthony Albanese, who is contesting the federal Labor leadership on a "nation-building" platform, never managed to successfully fund a public transport project in Sydney in his six years as transport minister, despite pitching a last-minute promise of a Parramatta to Epping train service before the 2010 election.

However, just because Labor did not fare well in public transport policy does not mean the incoming federal government should rule out public transport funding.
If it is ruled out, Abbott's "roads of the 21st century" will inevitably become clogged without better alternative transport, and those of us who have used exemplary public transport systems overseas will continue to return home thinking, demanding and lamenting: why can't we have that?

Jacob Saulwick is the Herald's transport reporter.


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/the-data-that-proves-tony-abbott-should-change-his...

miketrees wrote on Apr 2^nd, 2014 at 10:25pm:



Weird representation of the left position. Its usually the right who as a whole refuse to want to pay for public transport.