A Very Public Solution: Transport in the Dispersed City.

Stilwell, Frank

Paul Mees, A Very Public Solution: Transport in the Dispersed City, Carlton, Melbourne University Press, 2000.

Paul Mees has written a thoughtful and challenging book about whether it is possible to serve our cities more effectively with public transport. The case for trying to do so is obvious enough. More effective public transport is needed as a response to the requirement of environmental sustainability, as a means of serving otherwise transportdisadvantaged minorities (who may, in the aggregate, be the majority) and in order to combat relentless urban congestion.

The problem, according to the public transport sceptics, is that it is very difficult to serve large dispersed suburbanised cities with mass transit: allegedly there is just not enough population `mass' in any one locality to make the expansion of public transport viable. Trip patterns are too criss-cross: they tend to be, as one analyst quoted in the book puts it, `like a box of matches thrown almost randomly on to a table'. The inflexibility of fixed-route transit systems, it is further contended, cannot cope with the increasingly complex travel needs and multi-purpose trips more easily undertaken by car. The private car, others simply assert, is the inherently `superior economic good': its increased dominance vis-a-vis public transport is an inevitable consequence of increased affluence. We have to learn to accommodate it in our urban planning processes, to live with it, if not love it.

How governments position themselves in this ongoing debate is of crucial significance. Transport, both private and public, consumes a massive proportion of our society's resources, less than housing but rivalling health. Transport infrastructure -- whether for new motorways, railways or trams -- is prodigiously expensive, making claims on public revenues in competition with other public needs such as schools, hospitals and social services. It is, however, pertinent to note that if transport spending alleviated the problems of environmental decay, social inequity and economic efficiency, it would indeed pay off handsomely, reducing at least some of the environmental, social and economic problems that currently require amelioration through other public expenditures.

Mees calls for a change of direction in public policy to deal with transport problems in Australian cities. He shows that there has been a major switch from public to private transport, but argues that this is not inexorable: indeed, an examination of the international evidence shows considerable diversity among cities both within and between nations. In his own words `if someone claims something is impossible, the easiest way of disproving the claim is to establish that the supposedly impossible thing is actually happening somewhere'. The pertinent somewhere in this instance is the Swiss city of Zurich. The level of public transport use there has been maintained for over 40 years, indeed with strong increases in the 1980s. Quality of service is the key. This quality, according to a review of European public transport, `has been achieved not by the building of a few fast lines (like an underground) but by providing a service network which is dense in both time and space ... There is a close network of tram and bus routes throughout the city [and] high frequency services are operated throughout the day'. In Mees' words, it is a success story `created through fixed, integrated, high quality routes, rather than through the "creative chaos" of the market' which is now sometimes advocated by planners (or, rather, anti-planners) with an eye on Third World cities like Bangkok and Manila.

The other major positive example analysed by Mees is the Canadian city of Toronto, commonly cited by writers on transport policy because it has gone against the general trend in North American cities towards a reduced share of public transport in total trips undertaken. Four of the nine chapters in the book present a comparison of Toronto with Melbourne. Public transport trips per capita in 1950 and 1960 were higher in Melbourne than Toronto; but whereas Toronto has since maintained relative stability in its public transport patronage, Melbourne has collapsed to a level now less than half that in Toronto. Why? According to Mees, it is not because of significant overall differences in urban form, densities or land-use policies, although there is not uniformity in such aspects. Indeed both cities are fairly `dispersed' by European standards. However, while public transport patronage falls away with distance from the CBD in both cases it does so much more sharply in Melbourne where there is a marked reduction of service density and quality. As Mees concludes, it is `the superior service produced through comprehensive service planning [which] is the principal reason for Toronto's success relative to Melbourne'.

This is a persuasive analysis, backed by carefully sifted evidence. It is also important, of course, to ask why public authorities have varied in their commitments to public service provision in transport. Here, as elsewhere, the influence of `economic rationalism' is inescapable. Mees devotes one chapter, which he labels `the Bangkok model' (although it contains little directly about Bangkok), to a consideration of the pervasive influence of ideas about the self-regulating character of free enterprise systems. Even in Toronto, where the Toronto Transportation Commission has been engaged in comprehensive transport planning ever since 1921, the pressures for public service reductions evidently grew in the 1990's as a result of reduced operating grants from the Provincial Government. But the Melbourne case, particularly during the Kennett years, stands as the more striking example of economic rationalism in traction.

Political choices take place, of course, in contexts shaped by economic interests. In the analysis of transportation, one might have expected more explicit consideration of the significance of the `roads lobby' -- that constellation of oil companies, car manufacturers, component makers and other corporate interests, supported by `motorists' organisations' with a stake in prioritising the car. Perhaps it is because Mees is concerned to emphasise the progressive political possibilities in transport policy that there is a corresponding lack of emphasis on the constraints imposed by this `roads lobby'. He carefully considers but tends to play down, for example, the allegations made by US lawyer Bradford Snell about the notoriously conspiratorial process by which such corporate interests destroyed public transport in American cities, giving equal weight to the importance of consumer preferences in explaining the decline of public transport. However, Mees is also at pains to emphasise that `car dominance did not simply happen: it was promoted by vested interests and public policy'. Indeed, this is the principal message of the book -- that the transport options (and, by extension, the overall public-private mix) are the product, not of some alleged technological or historical imperative, but of political choice.

A Very Public Solution quotes an Australian academic who is sceptical about public policy because he finds it `difficult to believe how any combination of bureaucrats, politicians, bus operators and community interest groups could arrive at a good solution to the [public transport] problem through mutual negotiations'. The Toronto case study shows that this is exactly what works. The Zurich case study is an even more striking illustration that affluence (Zurich is among the highest per capita income cities in the world) does not preclude a public transport orientation. Mees writes about these cases with authority, clarity and insight. It is a book which challenges the conventional wisdom in this policy field; and, as such, deserves a wide readership.

Frank Stilwell Univeristy of Sydney