Larvatus Prodeo

Bicycles are great. Bicycles are wonderful. More people should ride bicycles to work. Fewer cars on the road would be great. And, in general, making our suburbs more accessible to transport modes other than cars is a Good Thing. But Eliot Fishman, in the midst of a piece in New Matilda singing the praises of federal spending on bicycle infrastructure, seems to me to be conflating “problem”, “symptom” and “cause” to serve his argument:

Fourthly, the Commonwealth, as well as all state governments have expressed deep concern over traffic congestion. Few public policy issues have been handled quite as badly as the one to “solve” our congestion “problem”. The quotation marks are used because it’s not actually a problem and it cannot be solved. As urban planning commentator Jane Jacobs pointed out in the 1960s, congestion is a symptom and automobile dependence is the problem. With some 80 per cent of all trips to work in Australia being done by car, almost always with only one occupant, it is very clearly our over-reliance on motor vehicles that is the real issue. Building roads to reduce congestion is like adding holes to a belt to solve an obesity problem. Failure to acknowledge this reality has resulted in massive road-building exercises that have simply induced traffic, providing no real improvement for anyone.

As Eliot goes on to correctly note, single-occupant vehicles are a very space-inefficient way to transport things around; they might well be viewed as a cause of chronic congestion problems in our cities. But congestion – or, more precisely, the inability to get people to where they want to go on a prompt (and just as importantly, predictable) schedule in comfort and safety – is the problem, not cars per se. Congestion can occur in all modes of transport. Melbourne has been suffering from train congestion for the last couple of years. New York had pedestrian congestion way back in 1916, according to the Times. And, guess what, cities that have recently started to encourage cycling are having cycling traffic jams. When public transport or cycling routes suffer congestion, what’s the response of user groups for both organizations? More space-utilizing and potentially expensive infrastructure – pretty much the same response as the road lobby!

One of the most basic lessons from my own field is that framing problems is hugely important in determining solutions, and the overly narrow focus on increasing traffic flow of organizations like the road bureaucracies has been hugely costly, and environmentally damaging. But such a reverse framing exercise – defining the problem in such a way as to narrow the solution options to his preferred ones – is unnecessary and counterproductive. The case for less car-dependent cities can be made without such logical detours.