Geoff Dawe, Uki
The issue of rail has been divided off from the more holistic debate about public transport.
Everybody knows that a society heading toward sustainability needs to subscribe to public transport and that private car-use and aeroplanes cannot be afforded environmentally. The issue is not primarily the costs of rail, it is the immaturity of a Westernised humanity that childishly wishes to indulge gratuitous need.
In a family sometimes the needs of a particular family member have to be ‘put on the back-burner’ for the well being of the family. Similarly, at a species level, humans are well aware that psychological maturity for a human involves the ability to suspend gratification. In Western society there is growth of a narcissistic belief that the suspension of gratification is actually deprivation. Deprivation in the West is not lack of things.
It‘s belief that my little body can do nothing to prevent the powers that be from running over the top of me.
If someone has a car because public transport is not on the horizon and the rails are rusting, the car can pick up hitchhikers and become public transport. It is the people moving in the direction of public transport that shines the rail again.
Support for use of rail corridors without trains is not movement in that direction. It is people-powerlessness and the reason why oligarchy (rule by the few) has replaced democracy.
I do not know why you ascribe your views to “everybody” Geoff. There are a great variety of views on the subject, many of them quite ill informed. One of the most common is the association of rail with sustainability. Work by public transport academics like Lenzen of University of Sydney show that rail and bus have similar whole of life energy use. Both are comparable with modern cars with just one extra passenger, and single use of the light cars Australians now prefer can approach or even better the level of efficiency of trains (depending on the latter’s occupancy). Planes to Coolangatta and Ballina are similarly efficient with their usual high levels of occupancy. Commuter trains can be very efficient but only when carrying more than 5,000 per hour. The suggestion that commuter rail here would achieve such high numbers of passengers that it would be more energy efficient than cars is ludicrous RailCorp in its submissions to the Legislative Committee inquiry, Arup in its corridor review and the survey on public transport explicitly confirmed what the general literature would suggest: in an area with our population you should not expect rail to attract high levels of patronage and shift people from car use. Another myth is that rail lends itself to renewable power. The ACT will trial run two electric buses off the grid, and it will be as easy for the ACT transport to attribute the power that charges them to its purchases of renewables as it will be for their light rail.
The problem here is not powerlessness Geoff, it is people not exercising their power to lobby for informed and achievable improvements. Instead of reading carefully and in full the analyses of public transport and making a serious effort to understand the transport needs of all of the people of our area and how best to address them, Toots and NRRG supporters prefer to define our area by those who live near the corridor and then engage single issue campaign. In doing so they ignore the large populations who live nowhere near the corridor and pay no heed to the importance of timetabling and routing issues that every survey an analysis tells us are the main reason people do not use public transport. Had the effort been put into an informed campaign to improve our bus services we might have received some of the hundreds of new services in the last budget.
There is in transport an attempt by a few to impose their transport dictates on the majority few. To support their cause Toots dragged out the doyenette of those in the Greens left who strongly resist both the views of the majority of Australians and informed expert advice on transport issues, Lee Rhiannon, who would have us all take up the rail transport she used when she studied under the oligarchy that ran the Soviet Union. There is no transport that is more hierarchical and top down in its planning and running than the railway – why do train drivers where military uniforms as they take us down their narrow path while car drivers wear whatever pleases them as they go where they will? The major parties are prepared to allow the will of the democracy to prevail and provide for the preference of over 90% of voters in our region which is to travel by road, while working to make the car safer and less harmful to the environment, and showing a willingness to improve public transport but in an efficient and rational way, by road. Increasingly too the major parties, and some Greens too, recognise the need to provide for the large minority who also use the most sustainable, accessible and democratic of all transports – the bicycle.
Trains are not synonymous with public transport, nor are they necessarily the best or most efficient form of public transport. Indeed, as has been pointed out in some of the comments on other rail trail letters published here at the echonetdaily website, trains are really only viable as public transport when servicing populations quite a bit bigger than here in the northern rivers region, say like the gold coast, which has a population ten times bigger than here. For a relatively small and widely dispersed population like ours, buses are always going to be the more practical and economically viable public transport solution.