Is it time we let go of suburban life?
Source: News Limited
MEGA-commutes that eat up our time and patience, they could also be
driving us into an early grave. So is it a sad fact of life that they’re
here to stay?
On a good day Claire Struthers leaves home at 6.20am and gets to
work at 8.30am but on a bad day the commute once extended to five hours
because of a broken down freight train.
An editor, Ms Struthers
lives in Tumbi Umbi on the NSW Central Coast and travels to Wynyard in
the Sydney CBD for work. Her journey takes a minimum of four hours a day
and involves her driving to a train station, a journey of 20-40
minutes, and then sitting on a train for more than an hour. It doesn’t
leave her much time to spend with her 15-year-old daughter.
“It’s not ideal, if the trains are late or I’m busy at work, I only get to spend an hour with her,” Ms Struthers told
news.com.au.
“It’s a 12 hour day for me, which is a big chunk of time.”
MORE: Petrol excise will hit outer suburban commuters
MORE: Families moving to the regions to escape suburbia
While
spending four hours a day commuting to work might seem extreme to some,
there are many more like Ms Struthers, who spend the equivalent of half
their working day sitting in cars, trains and buses on top of sitting
in front of a computer for another eight hours.
And it’s not just
family life that is impacted by this lengthy journey to work. Medical
experts are now lobbying for action as the effects of a sedentary
lifestyle and its links to obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease
become clearer.
Mega-commute: Claire Struthers travels more than four hours a day for work.
Source: Supplied
A community campaign to tackle the issue was launched in
western Sydney on Friday by Professor Michael Peek, director of Sydney
University’s
Charles Perkins Centre Nepean.
Prof
Peek said people in areas like western Sydney bore the brunt of the
obesity epidemic, routinely spending “an hour or three” sitting in a
car, bus or train.
“If you spend a lot of time in a car for
example, that’s less time you’ve got to be active because it’s very
sedentary,” Prof Peek told
news.com.au.
“There is data that
shows the more sedentary you are, the more at risk of developing
obesity and obesity-related medical problems.”
The campaign hopes
to bring together schools, businesses and local councils to develop
strategies for combating obesity, including whether better urban
planning could help.
“This is not simply a medical problem that
you can give someone a tablet and fix it, it’s very complex and in the
end it’s not just the health professionals who will fix it.
“It also includes architects and town planners ... to make cities more exercise and lifestyle friendly.”
He said that lifestyle factors should be considered, especially when building major new projects like Badgerys Creek airport.
Unhealthy: Gridlock on the Eastern freeway in Melbourne. Picture: Nicole Garmston
Source: News Corp Australia
Melbourne architectural experts have also explored the legacy
of Australia’s love for car-centric development in a new report, which
suggests there is potential to redevelop areas so that work and
entertainment is located within 20 minutes of where people live.
Creating 20-minute cities would also provide the opportunity for significant reductions in carbon emissions.
But
one of the greatest barriers to achieving this is community resistance
to changes to something that many Australians value — suburban life. So
is it time for us to swap suburbia for shorter commutes, healthier
lifestyles and a better carbon future?
OUR CAR-CENTRIC CITIES
In
Melbourne, if you drive a car it is possible to travel 10 times further
than someone taking the train or tram would travel in the same amount
of time. At night, the difference becomes even bigger, when road
congestion eases and public transport becomes less frequent. It is a
situation replicated across Australia.
So no wonder Australians love their cars.
But Professor Kim Dovey, one of the authors of the report
Intensifying Melbourne: Transit-Oriented Urban Design for Resilient Urban Futures, said building more freeways was not going to solve the gridlock problem.
“You
need to provide opportunities for people to go where they need to go,
you need to connect workplaces better and get people out of their cars
and onto public transport,” Prof Dovey said.
“At the moment we are a car dependent city — if you don’t have a car, you don’t have huge access to amenities you need.”
One
of the starkest examples of the legacy of car-centric planning is that
of Australia’s biggest shopping centre. The Chadstone Shopping Centre in
southeast Melbourne is located within a kilometre of two train stations
and several tramlines but is designed so that is almost impossible to
safely walk from any of these stations to the shops.
Shoppers are instead encouraged to hop on a bus from the stations to travel that last kilometre, which is a 25-30 minute walk.
Chadstone Shopping Centre is almost impossible to get to on foot.
Source: News Limited
The Catch-22 situation that most Australian cities have become caught in, is described in
Intensifying Melbourne.
It notes that city development was not always geared towards suburbia.
Before World War II, urban planning was linked mostly to walking,
cycling and public transport. Our car-dependent cities emerged after the
war when cars became more popular and we became influenced by modernist
planning. It has continued under the pressure of powerful developers
who own land on the outskirts of major cities.
“Developers own
most of the urban fringe land and comprise a powerful lobby for more
low-density suburbs,” the report from Melbourne and Monash University
researchers explains. “As new fringe suburbs develop with minimal public
transit they stimulate the market for more freeways.
“The freeways in turn consume the vast bulk of transport funding and stimulate demand for more fringe development.”
It
is a cycle that is “utterly inconsistent with a low-carbon future” and
locks people into long car-centric commutes. The challenge now is to
transition to a new model in the face of climate change, increasing oil
prices and population growth.
DO YOU WANT TO LIVE IN A 20 MINUTE CITY?
Prof
Dovey is an expert in architecture and urban design at the University
of Melbourne and said the important thing was to build services closer
together, so people could work, shop and access entertainment without
depending on cars.
“All Australian cities have conditions similar
to Melbourne, they’re all relatively low density with high car
dependency,” Prof Dovey said.
It’s one of the reasons that
Australia has one of the highest per capita carbon emissions in the
world. The emissions are nearly twice the OECD average and more than
four times the world average.
Intensifying Melbourne explores
the options for how urban design and public transport could be
developed, with an eye to making people rethink the idea that high
density equals bad outcomes.
It includes a number of design
scenarios for key sites in Melbourne including Reservoir, Sunshine,
Surrey Hills, Batman, Chadstone, Northland and Lygon St, Brunswick.
Possibilities: Chadstone shopping centre scenario from report Intensifying Melbourne.
Source: Supplied
“These designs are aimed at stimulating the imagination for
what might happen,” Prof Dovey said. “They are not solutions but
scenarios that explore sustainable development options within the
existing city.”
The report identifies areas that could be
redeveloped, as well as ways to improve public transport, which at the
moment in Melbourne is constrained by 170 level crossings where trains
block the car, bus, tram and pedestrian networks. It demonstrates that
building grade separations along significant stretches of rail line
could areas up to “intensification”, including the development of
residential and commercial buildings.
Possible redevelopment scenario for Lygon St, Brunswick from Intensifying Melbourne report.
Source: Supplied
Trenched rail option for Sunshine.
Source: Supplied
Prof Dovey said that while the report focused on Melbourne, every
Australian city could benefit from the principles. His colleagues have
also identified areas in other states that could benefit from higher
density development which is connected to public transport.
In
NSW, the introduction of new light rail to the Sydney suburbs of
Randwick, Kensington and Kingsford made these areas a good candidate,
urban planning lecturer Gethin Davison of the University of NSW said.
A new light rail project in Sydney
makes these areas a good candidate for providing extra homes, work and
entertainment. Picture supplied by NSW Government.
Source: Supplied
In Queensland, Associate Professor Kathi Holt-Damant of
Queensland University of Technology suggested that Logan, in the state’s
south east, was an example of a suburb that could benefit.
“It’s
going through serious growth at the moment and would benefit from all
the merits of intensification and connected public transportation,” she
said.
The potential for development was linked to whether it was
possible to integrate the areas into the public transport network and
connect it with other centres and sites.
Prof Dovey said Chadstone
shopping centre, for example, could be turned into a “real town” with
hotels, housing and other uses, instead of just being a mono-functional
venue.
Chadstone could be so much more than a shopping centre.
Source: News Limited
This could be achieved through building a short underground tunnel that would link it to one of Melbourne’s busiest rail lines.
The
centre would benefit from an increase in the number of shoppers and
this would open up the opportunity to convert the many hectares of car
parking — the centre accommodates 9000 car spaces — into new public
facilities, open space as well as residential and commercial towers.
The
areas around rail stations, tram corridors, university campuses and
industrial zones could be opened up to the same opportunities if public
transport access could be improved.
For example, university
campuses often have substantial areas of carpark that could be
redeveloped for residential, shops and commercial functions.
WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES?
The report notes that there are many engineering and economic challenges to expanding Melbourne’s public transport system.
“While
much could be achieved by radically improving bus services, only
rail-based transit (trains, and light rail/trams) can achieve the
quantum leap in capacity required for the necessary transformation,” the
report states.
The challenge was to find new routes for both tram
and train lines that could be integrated with new walkable, mixed-use
neighbourhoods without damaging the enjoyment of current residents.
This
would require expensive underground train stations or elevated rail and
it was unknown whether the costs of building these could be recovered
through land development.
The report also acknowledges there is a
lot of community opposition to ambitious redevelopment plans of this
scale but notes that the most significant problem was how politicised
urban planning had become.
Tired of waiting? Improved rail services are the key to a 20 minute city.
Source: News Corp Australia
“Breaking this cycle is the biggest challenge of all,” the
report states. All major decisions seemed to be geared to “short term
political cycles” creating site-by-site planning, ministerial
interference and ambiguous planning codes.
“The refusal to fund
major public transport infrastructure, despite the clear economic and
environmental advantages over other investments, is because it rarely
produces political capital in the short term.”
However, it noted that with mounting fuel costs and climate change costs applied to transport, priorities would change.
“Patronage
on public transport has already dramatically risen and increased
crowding on trains and trams will add to political pressure for
investment,” it said.
The question is whether changes will ... one on the basis of political priorities or maximising the benefits of intensification.
As
for Claire Struthers, the Central Coast mum says she is planning to
look for work closer to home and was not tempted to move into the city.
“We have dogs and I prefer to life a bit further out and have a larger place,” she said.
Claire Struthers spends over four hours a day commuting to work.
Source: Supplied
But while city living was not attractive for her, she said she thought it did make sense for many other people.
“I think high density has its place, in moderation,” she said.
“I’m
not much of a fan of units anyway but younger people don’t mind them
because they like the shared amenities such as having a gym, tennis
court or pool.”
She thinks the key to getting support for high-density development came down to having nice facilities that were user-friendly.
“I think it makes good sense but I don’t think it will happen. The government won’t build it, they are focused on cars.”
news.com.au 19 Nov 2014
Is this a (deliberate?) failure on behalf of the government to not cater for a growing population?
Once your usefulness (work / tax paying capacity) has been exhausted you can expire?
The corporate government is there to make money from the people, keep them oppressed and submissive.
