Friday, May 9, 2008
Labor abandons the inner city
Is Brumby Labor abandoning the inner city? The tunnel and the clearway plans suggest they are thinking of people who drive cars and live in the suburbs above everyone else. The inner city is just in the way of people who need to dive through (or over the top of) it. Labor seats such as Coburg and Richmond already have a large Green vote -- will the next election be Carlo Carli’s last?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Hi Matt
The seat is called Brunswick not Coburg. But I think we (sustainable transport advocates) will win on the road tunnel. It will collapse as an idea due to lack of utility and we as a Government will have to deal with the issue of rail capacity and the massive costs of re-investment.
I also think the clearway issue should be dealt with as an issue of amenity and road re-design. Clearways in London are about public transport and sustainable transport not cars. Why not do that on Sydney Road?
Thanks, Carlo. I hope you're right about the tunnel. Stupid mistake with the seat name ... should have checked ... I was beiing deliberately provocative. But you can see where I'm coming from ... the pro-car stuff seems to be aimed squarely at outer metropolitan people ... and I concede that there's not much of a transport alternative for many or even most of them at the moment ... have you read the stuff about the collapse of local government revenue in the suburbs of Chicago? These were communities with low business tax regimes established after WWII as "family-friendly" communities, where "white" families fled urban blight ... families are now fleeing these communities for the south-west and other "safer" and "cleaner" and "less-congested" places. Their tax bases collapse, and they can no longer afford to provide schools and health care -- so those who can afford it move to private options. So the urban blight spreads like a cancer from the inner city to the suburbs, hollowing cities out. The clearway scheme looks like an obvious piece of short-sighted planning with unintended long-term consequences, i.e. making traffic move more quickly through the inner city will just increase the diameter of the congestion zone ultimately, as people move further and further out. Destroying the amenity of the inner suburbs will drive many middle-class people back to the suburbs, which will only increase the pressure on property prices and transport options for the further out suburbs ... it's a self-defeating strategy, and it makes you think the senior levels of the government have given up on sustainable and sensible transport planning, comforted by the apparent unelectability of the Liberals ...
Post a Comment