Free Public Transport

By Dave Riley

'Tis possible to munt such a campaign here in Australia? Indications are indeed that there is traction. The has been running with it big time and the Socialist Alliance here has it on its banner.

And in Manchester, Mac Uaid reports:

On 25th September 2008, 40 people attended the launch meeting of the Greater Manchester Campaign for Free Public Transport. Amongst those present where members of the Campaign Against Climate Change, Friends of the Earth, the Labour Party, Green Party, Socialist Workers’ Party, the Socialist Party, Respect, and the Community Action Party. Alongside them were bus and rail workers, cycling and railway activists, and members of the general public.

Roy Wilkes of Respect opened the meeting by declaring that this “…is a campaign whose time has come. Climate change is a serious threat to the future of humanity and our response to it must include moving beyond the domination of the private automobile. In a recent survey, 72% of those interviewed said they would only give up their cars if public transport was free, and therewith,” he said, “lay the solution to the problem”.

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Image:Via Carectomy

8-hour-day melts into air

Ben Courtice writes from Melbourne, after working a 14-hour Friday...
Workers suffer from 12 hour working days! Scandal! Is it some week-on, week-off mine industry roster? Third-world sweatshop conditions? No, it's how long many Australian workers spend on their working day if you count travelling to and from work. So much for "8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours leisure"!

Unions NSW has called for change to the average commuting time for many of the 117,000 workers who live on the Central Coast, at four hours a day. An ABC radio broadcast on March 18 interviewed Unions NSW secretary John Robertson about the call for some of this exorbitant travel time to be paid work time. Workers can take their laptop on the train (or do call centre work with their handsfree mobile in the car?). Why not be paid? Robertson says, "We've for years had this notion of, you can work from home and no-one monitoring whether you're sitting at your computer keyboard every minute of the day. It's about output."

The idea in itself is not a bad one. The ABC's Lisa Miller reported, "According to a report by the Australia Institute, full-time workers a few years ago were spending an average four hours and 10 minutes travelling to and from work. It was worse for people in Sydney - four hours and 43 minutes a week. Next was Melbourne, then Brisbane."

But apart from the possibility of getting workers some more money and perhaps substituting travel for part of their long work day, this has broader implications.

When unions won the 8-hour day in Australia, long commuting times would have been something of an oddity for most. Those who couldn't walk to work probably caught a short tram trip. Around Footscray where I live, there used to be several tram lines, independent of the main grid -- only going as far as Yarraville, but no doubt cutting down what would otherwise be a pesky half-hour walk to work from Yarraville up to Footscray. Now there is one tram line, to further-afield Moonee Ponds, but there are also two major train lines converging at Footscray -- going twenty or more kilometres west and south-west respectively. Commuting to Werribee in the south-west takes at least a half-hour, and a lot more if you count time taken to get to the station and waiting for the train. Even public transport can only do so much over long distances!

Cars are no better. When I worked at Hoppers Crossing, near Werribee, it was only a 20-minute drive to get there (in the opposite direction to the main city-bound traffic flow). But as Winfried Wolf points out in Car Mania, you need to factor in a lot more than travel time with cars. How many hours a week do you work just to pay for the car, and then parking, petrol, maintenance, insurance? How long do you work to pay for the 15 square metre or so area of land you have allocated to car parking at home? And that doesn't count the social cost of car accidents, asthma, acid rain, and global warming, but it's a start.

In this neoliberal labour market, workers take the jobs they can get whether they are down the road or on the other side of town. Before working in Hoppers Crossing, I had been doing a similar job 30km in the opposite direction, in Moorabbin (my then travelling time per week: about 10 hours -- about 15 if I had travelled by train). At the Hoppers job, one of my workmates commuted every day from Mentone, just the other side of Moorabbin! If only we had known we could have swapped jobs!

The call from Unions NSW is a good sign that unions are beginning to recognise the irrational assault on working conditions by addressing the length of the working day. Other unions like the Victorian building and manufacturing unions have in recent years made a concerted push (with considerable success) for a 36-hour work week, or nine-day fortnight in practice. More money is important in times of skyrocketing house prices, but is unlikely to keep up so that low income earners are conceivably going to be able to afford their own house any time soon in the existing economic order. On the other hand, reducing the appalling length of work and commuting time could have enormous benefits across the board: less transport pollution, less personal and family stress, less stress-related health problems, and on the other side... what are workers going to do with all their spare time? There's always the pokies and the Playstation, for others there will be more fishing trips or gardening... and the potential for more participation in society in any way, including political action.

It's time to go back to demanding the 8-hour day!

Transport: the 40:40:20 rule

by Dave Riley

I've been trying to seed our transport advocacy with some nuance as the challenge of transport --while one of the easiest in way of carbon tech fixes -- can serve as a template for all the other climate driving stuff we have to redo.

So to get beyond the slogans here's a snippet of information to ponder where the personal and polical intersect with what is and is not immediately feasible:

In her book Car Sick, Lyn Sloman cites research from around the world that shows that car journeys generally follow the rule of 40/40/20:

• 40% of the car trips made by the average person could have been made by bike, foot or public transport without the need for any changes to existing bus services, cycle tracks or streets.
• 40% of trips are too far to walk, too difficult to cycle, or do not have a bus or train service. These trips could be made without using a car if such options were improved. Meantime, they would need to be made by taxi or hiring a car.
• 20% of journeys have to be made by car: typically for uses such as carrying a heavy load or transporting an elderly relative. Again, taxis or car hire would provide an alternative to owning your own car for such trips. Source

Image: Lyn Sloman addressing Camden Cycling Campaign meeting

Transport 'solutions': training it by bike

OR

OR

Read more: Bike Commute Tips Blog
Images: Bike Commute Tips Blog

Or by bus?

Is this intelligent traffic control?

by Dave Riley

Here's a report from The Copenhagen Bicycle Culture Blog:

So he has now proposed something (Copenhagen) City Hall calls 'Intelligent Traffic Control'.

It involves setting up sensors that measure air pollution in Copenhagen and the levels of pollution they report will regulate the traffic heading into the city.

If the pollution levels are too high on any particular day, all the traffic lights on the main roads into the city will turn red and stay red longer than normal. The time the traffic lights are green will be reduced by 10 percent.

Motorists will be informed by the internet or text messages before they leave for work so they can choose alternative transport forms.

"It will create queues on some of the approach roads, but it certainly our hope that people will think about it. The signal we want to send is that you have to use your car with careful consideration", says Klaus Bondam.

He is aware that cars still pollute when they're stopped at a red light but: "There are fewer people in the areas in question than there is in the densely populated areas. But the whole idea is to get people to leave the car at home", he says.

Won't this make life miserable for motorists?

It sure will. But is that the way to go?

We've blogged before about bike culture here and there but for folk in the Netherlands this graph below tells a stark tale:while the Dutch certainly bike it with abandonment the public transport option may not be all that optional and to be required to leave your car at home presumes that you have an alternate means of transport you are willing to deploy. Without that, it's simply punishment.

So do the Danes have that option when considering a drive into the city of Copenhagen on those mornings that the traffic lights stay red?

Dutch bicycle culture

by Dave Riley

From a press release published here on Derek Wall's blog that deals with bike culture in the Netherlands:

Quick Facts:
In Britain, under 2% of all journeys are made by bicycle. In the Netherlands the equivalent figure is around 30%.

In Britain, most journeys under 2 miles are made by car. In the Netherlands, more journeys under 5 miles are made by bicycle than by any other means.

In the Netherlands, older people are also mobile. Over 10% of cycle journeys are made by over 60s.

Virtually all Dutch school-children cycle to school.

The links below are well worth reviewing as there is a lot of information about the cultural promotion engaged with and some images of the Dutch bicycle infrastructure network:

• English language articles about the Dutch cycling infrastructure
• Dutch cycling facilities.

QUOTE:

If often seems that the English speaking world does not understand how the Dutch have been so successful with their cycle promotion. Why is it that the Netherlands has a cycling rate which is so far ahead of the rest of the world, and growing ?

It is also quite often assumed that Dutch drivers must be far better behaved than those in the UK and other countries in order that cyclists can have such a good degree of safety. Or the reason is put down to the country being relatively flat. However, these things couldn't possibly explain why the Dutch cycle for 20x as many journeys as people in English speaking countries do.

It actually comes down to a single point. Generally when you cycle in the Netherlands you are not sharing space with cars. This makes cycling very pleasant and relaxed. It reduces conflict with motorists and it leads to much greater safety. What isn't necesarily so obvious to outside observers from locations with less advanced cycling infrastructure is that it also leads to cyclists having journeys which are more direct than those of motorists. As a result, cycling is a much more appealing form of transport.

Flatness doesn't necessarily help. It results in very strong headwinds. Also, the Netherlands can be very cold and wet in the winter. However, the convenience of cycling wins out over these problems.

For more about bicycling as an adjunct to public transport visit my bike blog.

I think the infrastructure argument is so very important as it hones in on the key dynamic of promoting 'pedestrian cycling' rather than 'vehicular cycling'.

This factor becomes sharply evident if you take the two mile challenge. (Take it! It's fun!)
You are then offered a prism to locate bicycling with public transport usage in the context of god traffic and its carbon emissions.

For my personal bicycling references: here.

Now heres' a great idea -- from the Netherlands Socialist Party. A party that boasts its own cycling team deployed to promote its politics: