Canberra: an attractive, safe and efficient environment...?

by Sarah Hinde, National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University.

Presented at the Manning Clark House Forum, Making Canberra Sustainable, Canberra, 17-18 October 2005

Short Biography

Sarah Hinde is a PhD Scholar at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health (NCEPH) at the Australian National University however she is currently based at the School of Anthropology, Geography and Environmental Studies (SAGES) at the University of Melbourne whilst completing her fieldwork. Her undergraduate background is in biochemistry and molecular biology, but she made a transition via work in government policy, then science communication and a Graduate Diploma in Population Health, to now using social theory to investigate health inequalities. Sarah’s PhD research is exploring the social, economic and cultural determinants of transport practices in Melbourne, and the relationship between transport practices, health-related practices and health inequalities. Sarah’s research is theoretically informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological approach to practices and ‘lifestyle’; and her data collection relies on qualitative, in-depth interviews with Melbourne residents and secondary statistical, geographic, economic and other social data.

Abstract

Canberra is a unique city in that it has taken to the extreme a trend that is evident in most cities of developed countries: that is, heavy car reliance. Australia has a culture and economy that constantly promotes the use of the car over other forms of transportation; and in Canberra this is especially so. This is not just a relic of the 1960s but an ethic that remains potent today. The vision of the Territory Plan is to promote an ‘attractive, safe and efficient environment’ for its residents. This paper describes how our car culture, complementary discourses of fear and risk, propelled by the commodification of ‘convenience’ and promotion of efficiency, are undermining the extent of public transport use, cycling and walking by adults and children. A greater level of active transport not only requires safe and ‘walkable’ physical environments but a cultural transformation whereby alternative forms of transport are once again valued as a way of getting around, as well as a source of health, freedom and status.

A car-reliant nation

It is widely acknowledged that Australia’s transport systems are dominated by the automobile. Elsewhere, Jane Dixon and I catalogued the extent of Australia’s "car reliance" (Hinde and Dixon 2005). We described how amongst the 20 million people in Australia, 12 million are licensed to drive and there are 12 million registered vehicles that enable them to do so. But it isn’t just about owning cars, Australia also makes it easy to use them: this country offers one of the highest rates of road provision per capita in the world, and–despite recent alarm about rising petrol prices–Australians enjoy some of the cheapest petrol prices in the developed world (Austroads 2000).

Canberra is certainly no exception to this rule. Australian researcher Peter Newman and his colleagues (Laird, Newman et al. 2001) constructed a five-point ranking scale of car dominance and Canberra’s performance was disturbing: Canberra, Adelaide and Perth were placed at the end of the scale for their "extreme automobile dependence". The ranking process found Canberra rubbing shoulders with cities that have long been associated with worship of the motor vehicle such as Detroit, Houston and Los Angeles. The research showed that although Canberra has relatively high rates of walking and cycling to work (6% of workers), and faster than average bus speeds for Australia; the city offers no other forms of public transport, has exceptionally low densities of people and jobs, substantial infrastructure supporting cars, and therefore performs poorly overall in terms of getting people out of cars and into more sustainable, healthy forms of transport. It isn’t surprising that Canberra emerged as the Australian city that consumed the most energy per capita in moving people around (Laird, Newman et al. 2001).

The numerous sustainability concerns relating to our heavy car reliance have been highlighted for decades. More recently, there has been a growing acknowledgement of the detrimental impacts of the automobile on the population’s health. The World Health Organisation (WHO) delivered a comprehensive and accessible review of the various known population health impacts of transport around the globe (Dora and Phillips 2000), and Australian researchers have begun to alert us to these consequences in Australia (Mason 2000; Mason 2000; McMichael 2001; Kjellstrom, van Kerkhoff et al. 2003).

The negative impacts of heavy car reliance include:

• Oil vulnerability. Production of oil will peak, and some research suggests it probably already has. Within our lifetimes, we will begin to feel the impact of running out of oil. This won’t just change the modes and costs of getting around but will shape the very nature of transport, and Australia’s economy and culture which currently depends so heavily upon the motor vehicle.
• Congestion. This is another issue that challenges the sustainability of a car-reliant transport system. Individualised, motorised technology takes up an inordinate amount of room when compared to more space efficient modes such as buses, trams and especially trains. The upshot is that our cities must convert more and more surfaces to asphalt. Peter Newman (2005) provides a stark illustration: "the 20,000 people a day coming into Sydney by train would need 65 freeway lanes and… [the] equivalent to 520 carparks the size of the MCG" if they were to use a car instead.
• Motor vehicle accidents causing disability and death. This as the leading cause of death for males aged 15-24; and traffic crashes account for half of the health impact of injury, being the principal cause of death for people under 45 years (Mathers, Vos et al. 1999).
• Pollution. Small particles, carbon monoxide, ozone, benzene and lead are some of the pollutants arising from the automobile; these have been linked to respiratory disease and other respiratory symptoms including asthma, cardiovascular disease and cancer (Dora and Phillips 2000).
• Major contribution to greenhouse emissions and therefore climate change. The impact of climate change, such as increased frequency of extreme weather events, and changes in the ecology of disease vectors (eg. mosquitoes), may have potentially disastrous health consequences (McMichael 2001).
• Noise disturbance. The noise generated on roads and freeways has been linked to problems such as impaired communication, disturbed sleep, difficulties with performance, annoyance, increased aggression, heart disease and hypertension and hearing impairment (Dora and Phillips 2000).
• Community disruption. Roads and freeways cause major disruption to spaces where people live. The car’s ongoing dominance demands that green spaces and other places where social life occurs, be destroyed and replaced with non-human places like roads and car parks. Roads also divide communities: politically, as the costs and benefits of roads are attributed to different segments of the community; and physically, by imposing structures and causing major impediments to human movement between different parts of the city. Moreover, Australian research Paul Mees (2000) points out how the imperatives of a car-based transport system tend to thwart the development of alternative forms of mobility, leading to increasing inequities in mobility and therefore access to societies resources (Mees 2000).
• Displacing physical activity. All the alternatives to the automobile, including walking, cycling and public transport, are regarded as ‘active transport’ options: e.g. walking to a bus stop is healthier than walking to the driveway! The up-front investment in owning a motor vehicle, plus its habit-forming potential, means the car usually becomes the default or automatic mode of transport, even for short trips when active transport might be feasible, convenient and even preferred (Handy, Weston et al. 2005). This is a problem especially considering physical activity is regarded as the second greatest preventable risk factor contributing to Australia’s burden of ill-health (Stephenson, Bauman et al. 2000). Sedentary lifestyles are known to contribute to obesity, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer and depression (Mathers, Vos et al. 1999). Disturbingly, American research suggests that for every 60 minutes spent in the motor vehicle, the probability of a participant being obese increased by 6% (Frank, Andresen et al. 2004).

Why so car reliant?

Australian historian Graeme Davison (2004) describes:

Is there something intrinsic, natural and human about our high reliance on the motor car? Was it a natural step in the evolution of humankind? I argue absolutely not; instead I agree with Frumkin and colleagues (2004), who remind us that

A large part of this legislation, subsidisation and planning concerned the accommodation, and indeed encouragement, of the uptake and use of the motor vehicle. For example, all three levels of government together spend $23 million Australian dollars per working day on roads (Austroads 2000). Weighing government revenue (eg. tax) against the various costs to the community of the current car-dominated transport system, Australian researchers suggest that the ‘road deficit’ amounted to $19 billion per year prior to the introduction of the new tax system, which was expected to increase the net deficit in 2000-01 (Laird, Newman et al. 2001). This investment by government in turn permits the flourishing of industries such as steel, car manufacture, road building and construction, namely, some of the most powerful industries in the world. And shareholders aren’t the only ones who gain from the automobile’s dominance, for example, 1 out of every 10 jobs in the industrialised world is directly related to the car (Paterson 2000).

The automobile hasn’t just entrenched itself economically, but has also firmly fixed itself into the hearts and minds of Australians. The role of the car and related industries, and indeed the car itself as an object of mass consumption, played integral roles in the development of countries including America and Australia. The automobile came to be regarded as "perhaps the symbol of progress for most of the last century" (Paterson 2000). As such, when car sales hit new bumper levels, Australian Treasurer Peter Costello (Commonwealth Treasurer 2004) describes how this is "good" for everyone: "the manufacturers… the people who are employed in the retail end of the car industry, and best of all it is good for consumers who have bought more cars than have ever been sold in Australia before".

Australia’s high regard and investment in the automobile can sometime limit its collective imagination about what is possible and desirable. Our fixation with the car colours our interpretation of what it means to create a ‘liveable’ city. There is a belief in Canberra that the city is hostage to the legacy of the 1960s obsession with the motor vehicle. However, this obsession continues today, in such forms as an aversion to high intensity and density land usage, and a dubious attitude to alternative transport paradigms such as light rail (Laird, Newman et al. 2001). Indeed, The Sustainable Transport Plan for the ACT (ACT Planning and Land Authority 2004) specifies at the outset its goals are:

This is a rather indirect approach to the alleviating the problems arising from Canberra’s "extremely car dependent" transport system. Instead of tackling the issue using both ‘carrots’ and ‘sticks’, the unsavoury sticks seem to be ruled out up front. Reductions in motor vehicle trips are cast as a by-product of strategies that support the alternatives. But how can these transport alternatives compete with the "significant benefits" currently conferred by automobile transport? Especially when the urban, and political, environment continues to favour the car?

An "attractive, safe and efficient environment" for Canberra…

Plans for Canberra must adhere to Territory Plan which outlines principles for developing the city. As an overall vision, the Territory Plan sets out that Canberra should be "an attractive, safe and efficient environment" in which to live, work and play (National Capital Authority 2002, p3). Under this vision, the National Capital Plan concerns itself explicitly with the development of roads. However, this section will address each of these criteria–attractiveness, safety and efficiency–and highlight complexities in defining these concepts, and in particular, the disparity between lay perceptions and various forms of evidence. As part of this discussion I will point to the ways in which these concepts have been exploited in justifying ongoing use of the motor vehicle. I will then conclude by questioning whether these criteria are helping or hindering Canberra’s transition in becoming a more sustainable city in the future.

Attractiveness

The automobile has fundamentally shaped the way modern cities are designed; and the car has become an unnoticed and almost invisible part of the cityscape. As automobiles became popular in Australia during the middle of the last century, residents were no longer constrained to the rail networks in locating their housing. Roads extended in all directions and houses were built in turn; this phenomenon described as urban sprawl. The car has changed the nature of food and other provisioning by supporting the centralisation and separation of retail into large-scale shopping centres and districts. Car reliance has also facilitated the dispersal of daily activities beyond the local neighbourhood, including schooling, industrial/commercial sites (i.e. workplaces) and leisure. Automobilisation has also introduced car-only environments into our cities such as freeways, tunnels, ‘drive-in’ and ‘drive-thru’ (Beckmann 2001). The car cannot be easily be judged as to whether it improves or detracts from the ‘attractiveness’ of the surroundings, because it is a fundamental constituent of those very surroundings.

Perhaps it is worth attending to those aspects of attractiveness that shape how sustainable the city can be? For example, is it attractive for walking and cycling? Pikora et al (2003) identified that a range of features in the physical environment that affect whether people walk or cycle. The study confirmed that functional, safety, aesthetic and destination aspects of the trip are all important in affecting whether the trip will be walked or cycled or not (Pikora, Giles-Corti et al. 2003). They argued that car-dominated environment is more likely to have poor safety, many crossings, pollution and less visual appeal. Furthermore, a city that is built with the car in mind is more likely to have destinations that are relatively inaccessible to pedestrians. For example, destinations are too far away to walk, can only be reached via a convoluted route, or are impeded or made more dangerous by major roadways. Therefore, from a pedestrian or cyclist perspective, a city that is dominated by the car will be less attractive than one that isn’t.

Safety

Transport safety is often conceived in terms of reducing injury and death on the roads. To this end, Australia has come a long way in improving the road system so that people can hurtle along at speed, with (relatively) less risk to life and limb than in the past. Still, vast numbers of lives are taken–and even more are affected–by people dying or sustaining injury due to traffic crashes. A large focus of this paper has been to highlight the broad range of detrimental health impacts that arise from a transport system that depends on the automobile. I have highlighted such problems as the extent of injury and death, stress and illness arising from noise, the pollutants released into the environment, not the least of which are greenhouse emissions that undermine the health and safety of future generations. All of these issues draw into question the ‘safety’ conferred by a city that relies heavily on the automobile for its mobility.

"The most significant source of risk of serious injury for all road users are motor vehicles" (Roberts, Owen et al. 1996, p52), and yet the active transport modes–cycling, walking–suffer from reputations that cast them as inherently dangerous. Road safety initiatives focus on protecting car occupants whilst cyclists are encouraged to manage their own risks (Roberts, Owen et al. 1996). If cycling must be adopted, a host of safety-oriented paraphernalia shall be donned: helmets, reflective clothing and flags, and even wrist guards and knee guards are recommended for young cyclists. More often, children are kept indoors or in organised activities (to which they are mostly chauffeured in a car) to protect against these threats and also ‘stranger danger’. These risks can be reduced with strategies that facilitate equitable and safe access to the road system: after all, roads are a public resource. Indeed, such measures would probably be safer for all when sustainability and long term health benefits are considered.

Efficiency

In our obesity research, my colleagues and I have explored the issue of how busy Australians feel. Australian obesity experts note that a lack of time, or sense of ‘busy-ness’ has been a major contributor to falling physical activity levels and changing food consumption patterns. On this issue, some of the experts:

Certainly, the automobile is offered as a means for people to achieve their daily demands most efficiently. The automobile represents or symbolises freedom and autonomy. To use their words, the flexibility of the automobile: "make[s] complex, harried patterns of social life... just about possible" (Sheller and Urry 2000, p744).

However, the effect of living our lives at venues that are distributed across great distances is that it increases the pace of life. The demands of getting to and from various destinations become squeezed, and the car eventually becomes the only option for travelling. The freedom and autonomy originally offered by the car is therefore displaced by the necessity of having a car to survive the pace of life. The car is promoted as the most ‘efficient’ or ‘convenient’ option, but in many cases it is actually the only option. Sheller and Urry (2000) assert therefore that the car doesn’t offer freedom and efficiency, but rather the opposite: a form of coercion.

Conclusion

Paterson states that "fate is in our hands" and suggests the solution is to abandon the car, "however, what is perhaps not yet recognized is the depth of global social change implied by such an abandonment" (Paterson 2000, p270). Indeed the first step in moving beyond car reliance is a wholehearted commitment to alleviating the vast and injurious problems that arise from our reliance on the automobile. Plans that continue to favour or esteem the car must be assessed for their environmental, health and social implications; and the spectrum of cultural values that reproduce our obsession with the car interrogated.

References