FW: Sat.4.8.18 daily digest
  Roderick Smith

-----Original Message-----
From: Roderick Smith [mailto:rodsmith@werple.net.au]
Sent: Saturday, 4 August 2018 10:54 PM
To: 'transportdownunder@yahoogroups.com'
Subject: Sat.4.8.18 daily digest

Attached.

180715Su Melbourne 'Herald Sun' - Canberra, Old Bus Depot Markets.

180804Sa Metro Twitter - Dandenong sausages.

180804Sa Melbourne 'Herald Sun' - transport-planning editorial.

Roderick.

Sat.4.8.18 Metro Twitter
10.32 Our mates from Clayton Rotary Club are throwing a few snags on the
barbie at Dandenong this afternoon.
18.48 Frankston line: Delays clearing after an earlier [unannounced]
operational incident near Carrum.

Australia's lack of people planning is a road to nowhere 4 August 2018.
52 comments.
Cruising to Melbourne's Tullamarine airport the other day proved an unusual
experience.
The recently-widened freeway was free of traffic jams. The long months of
clogged lanes and elevated heartbeat at the thought of missing a plane
seemed to evaporate.
It won't last.
video: Why is Melbourne's peak hour so bad?
The ABS stats are in, revealing what's behind congestion in 'the world's
most liveable city'.
Aristotle warned in 350 BC that nature abhors a vacuum. In a nation that
congregates its car-addicted citizens into ever-larger cities, empty roads
will always fill.
The Age recently reported that Melbourne Airport's own masterplan was
predicting "motorists on the Tullamarine Freeway will face significant
delays within a decade despite the road's recent $1.3 billion widening".
Here's a bet: the chance that any major arterial road in Melbourne will
remain free of significant traffic jams for the next 10 years is poppycock.
With a population growing each year by around 140,000 - more than all the
people in Bendigo, Colac and Sale combined - gridlock is Melbourne's future.
The daily reality for many residents of the world's most liveable city.
Photo: Pat Scala Projections are that Melbourne - current population 4.8
million - will somehow accommodate 8 million people by 2050.
If you wish to imagine what a city of that size looks like, think of
Britain's biggest city, Greater London (8.7 million) or the biggest city in
the US, New York City (8.5 million).
It might, of course, be nice to imagine Australia having a London or a New
York.
But here's the rub: Britain has a population of 66.5 million, but it has
only one very large city. After London, the only city in the UK with a
population of more than 1 million is Birmingham.
In other words, the British have managed to spread three times the
equivalent of Australia's population over a land mass that would fit 32
times into Australia's, without building many particularly large cities.
Even in the US, with its population of 327 million, there are only 10 cities
boasting more than a million residents.
And Australia?
With just 25 million people, Australia has five cities with populations more
than 1 million - Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.
Together, they house around 15 million of Australia's people.
The result is that while billions are spent on widening city freeways like
the Tulla that will soon enough be crammed again, and spending even greater
sums on tunnels and skyrails, you need only drive a few hours into regional
and rural areas to discover the roads are falling apart.
The focus on cities has left country Australia to cry in the wilderness.
Even taking into account the immense amount of near-uninhabitable land in
Australia's interior, Australia has clearly messed up its population
planning.
But don't imagine that a decent population policy is impossible because so
much of Australia is not suited to human settlement.
The 10 per cent of Australia that is fertile, relatively well-watered and
suited to human population is equivalent to the size of Britain and France
combined.
Consider, say, the tiny Netherlands, a country that could comfortably occupy
a narrow strip of land from Melbourne to Swan Hill. Its people - who prefer
bicycles to cars - enjoy a lifestyle envied by the world. Yet it has 17
million people, and bicycles are popular partly because the Netherlands has
not one city with a population of 1 million or more.
Way back in 1994, a trailblazing parliamentary inquiry into Australia's
"Carrying Capacity", chaired by one of Australia's greatest living thinkers,
Barry Jones, begged for the question of Australia's future population to be
elevated to the highest political level.
Recommendation 2 of the inquiry exhorted: "The Australian government should
adopt a population policy which explicitly sets out options for long-term
population change, in preference to the existing situation where a de facto
population policy emerges as a consequence of year-by-year Related Article
In the balance: Australia's population squeeze.
decisions on immigration intake taken in an ad hoc fashion, such decisions
being largely determined by the state of the economy in the particular year
and with little consideration of the long-term effects."
All these years later, nothing of great consequence has changed, apart from
a spectacular growth in the level of immigration to meet the business
lobbies' demands.
Decisions are still taken in an ad hoc fashion, with little serious
consideration of consequences for the environment or society.
If you think that's dispiriting, consider that forecasts concerning our
fast-growing population are always wrong, and vastly underestimated.
In 2003, the Australian Bureau of Statistics suggested there would be 26.4
million people living in Australia by 2050. In the past couple of weeks,
Australia has clocked up a population of 25 million, 30 years earlier than
forecast.
By 2006 the ABS outlook for 2050 had risen to 28.1 million. In 2008, the
guesstimate had increased to 34 million. Treasury's Intergenerational report
of 2010 figured the 2050 population would be 35.9 million.
No one has a clue, because the main assumption - the immigration level -
can, and does, change at the whim of politicians.
Kevin Rudd wanted a big Australia, Julia Gillard wanted the brakes applied
(and didn't), Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull oversaw continuing annual net
immigration figures of up to a record 240,000 ... and now the political
argument, headed by Peter Dutton and backed by Abbott, has swung in favour
of reducing the numbers on the basis that cities are overcrowded,
infrastructure is clogged and housing prices have been forced too high.
For the lack of a coherent, predictable population policy, the freeway ahead
is just about impossible to see.
<www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/australia-s-lack-of-people-planning-is-a
-road-to-nowhere-20180801-p4zut4.html>

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