Making the case for sustainable transport

The growing need for sustainable transport and the ways in which government institutions produce barriers to its development is the focus of two new books resulting from research initiated by Professor Nicholas Low of the Planning Program in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning.

The pair of books, Institutional Barriers to Sustainable Transport and Transforming Urban Transport, the Ethics, Politics and Practices of Sustainable Transport, are the outcome of collaborative inter-university research over 10 years. 

The first stems from an ARC project and is co-authored by Professor Low and Professor Carey Curtis of Curtin University. The second is from a research collaboration led by Professor Low with four Australian and two overseas universities, funded by a $1.5 million grant from the Volvo Research and Education Foundations. 

Professor Low says Volvo wanted them to set up a research centre to look ahead 50 years to contribute to their ‘Future Urban Transport’ program. The centre is the GAMUT Research Centre for Sustainable Transport.

Professors Low and Curtis wanted to explore why it was so difficult to get a meaningful discussion going about sustainable transport.

“The big problem for the future of transport is not traffic congestion but global warming caused by burning fossil fuel,” Professor Low says. 

“Put simply, Earth will not avoid dangerous climate change unless there is a worldwide transformation in methods of mobility and transport. No transport system based on fossil fuel is sustainable. That is an awkward reality.”

The book, Institutional Barriers, frames the whole issue around the concept and theory of path dependence. ‘Path dependence’ in economics describes the production of commodities which does not follow the rational logic of the market in which supply is led by demand. 

“Rather, decisions made at the outset play a pivotal role in deciding which kinds of product are taken up and become dominant in the market over time,” Professor Low writes in Institutional Barriers to Sustainable Transport.

“The same can be true of government policies. They follow the incremental logic of “what worked yesterday is good enough for today and the future”. 

Professors Low and Curtis found evidence path dependence was one of the major barriers to sustainable transport, in the continuing dominance of private vehicles and public roads in our urban transport systems. 

“Case studies in three metropolitan cities show how Australian transport policy has become institutionally fixated on a policy path dominated by private, road-based transport,” Professor Low says.

The second book, Transforming Urban Transport: the Ethics, Politics and Practices of Sustainable Transport focuses on the means of sustainable transport, and the immense dilemma we face in converting transport systems which are 98 per cent dependent on fossil fuel into low or zero carbon transport systems. 

“We have to think in global terms: transport policy tends to be seen as a local pursuit in Victoria – all about trams, trains, traffic jams etc – but we’re trying to get across that it’s a global problem that we are facing”.

Transport policies for our capital cities will fail unless they take account of the global supply of resources for new technologies and global limits imposed by the need to contain and limit climate change.

Though the phrase ‘sustainable transport’ conjures images of high quality public transport infrastructure and service, safe bike paths and walking, Professor Low says it will also encompass electric cars, scooters and bikes.

Electricity will be the key to sustainable mobility in future if the power comes from renewable fuels. “There is terrific potential for electric public transport fuelled by renewables in the future,” he says.

“Public transport is mostly fuelled by electricity made by burning coal now, but it doesn’t have to be.”

Both books address the question of how we can achieve change despite government policy inertia. While government action is needed to provide the infrastructure and policies for sustainable transport, change will ultimately have to be driven by the general public. In many cities there are citizen groups wanting that change. 

“What you really need is citizen voice, active pressure and political power joining together,” Professor Low says.

“Until there is such action, not much is going to change. All cities are different, the politics is different, the way they’re governed is different, they have different environments, but they require the same shift in thinking to create sustainable transport solutions.”

www.abp.unimelb.edu.au