In cities like Copenhagen that have good infrastructure for cycling it’s an established commuting option alongside road and rail.
Heb/Wikimedia Commons
A breakdown in the road or rail systems often causes commuter chaos in Australia. Some overseas cities are more resilient because they have other options – and our bicycle network could give us that.
In Victoria, the Andrews government’s level crossing removal project has lifted property prices by up to 28% around sites where work has been completed.
Tracey Nearmy/AAP
Value capture depends on infrastructure increasing the value of affected areas in the first place. Victoria’s level crossing removal project shows the impact on property values can be significant.
Peak-time drivers to the CBDs of Sydney and Melbourne typically earn much more than the average worker.
Taras Vyshnya/Shutterstock
Commuters who drive to and from the CBD typically earn much more than most. Concerns about the fairness of charging drivers who use these busy roads at peak times are overblown.
If more of us were free to work from home, fewer of us would be stuck in traffic.
Daria Chichkareva, fkigali/Shutterstock
Two-thirds of surveyed workers work from home one day a week on average, but could do at least half their work out of the workplace. If they commuted less often, congestion could be greatly reduced.
Sydney has the longest average daily commuting time of 71 minutes, closely followed by Brisbane and Melbourne.
Dan Himbrechts/AAP
Runing Ye, The University of Melbourne and Liang Ma, RMIT University
Average commuting times for Australians have increased by 23% in 15 years. And those with long commutes are less satisfied with their work, working hours, work-life balance and even pay.
Car parking occupies a large proportion of urban areas, and cities cannot keep sacrificing so much space to meet demand.
Neil Sipe
The global trend is to free up valuable city space by reducing parking and promoting other forms of transport that don’t clog roads and pollute the air. Australian cities are still putting cars first.
Car parking is such a pervasive feature of our cities that we have become blind to how much space it takes up.
Shuang Li/Shutterstock
Australian cities have a glut of parking, even as politicians move to protect parking spaces or promise even more. There are better ways to keep congestion manageable and our cities liveable.
When political leaders swap suits for hi-viz vests the costs of the promises they make are high, and often not well justified.
Lukas Coch/AAP
The major parties are promising tens of billions of dollars in transport spending, but only a handful of projects are on Infrastructure Australia’s national priority list with approved business cases.
Walking accounts for about 90% of all travel in Melbourne city centre, yet pedestrians are allocated only 24% of street space.
Adam Calaitzis/Shutterstock
A newly released ten-year plan for Melbourne aims for fewer cars, safer streets and more shared spaces. A significant amount of parking and road space would be reallocated to walking and cycling.
Pedestrians walking along Bridge Street to Erskineville station in Sydney could take advantage of an extra southern entrance, as could many people now choosing not to catch the train.
Chris Standen, used with permission
In Sydney, 44 of 178 train stations have a single side entrance. It adds up to 12 minutes of daily travel time for people walking the long way to their platform. It’s enough to make some drive instead.
Marginal seat, major transport announcement: it must be election time.
James Ross/AAP
The Coalition’s infrastructure budgets over this term of government have been around the midpoint of government investment over the past decade. But how projects are chosen leaves a lot to be desired.
With more than a million Australians using public transport to get to work each day, demand for car parking at the station is virtually insatiable.
Philip Mallis/flickr
The Commuter Car Park Fund announced in the budget sounds big, but is likely to create only around 30,000 extra spaces – a marginal benefit for Australia’s 1.2 million daily public transport users.
Lime is working on ways to overcome the problem of ‘helmet churn’ on its e-scooters.
Marvin Fox Photography
Every day, e-scooters and helmets are put out together, but some people ride without helmets and at the end of each day helmets are missing. So what can be done to ensure safe riding behaviour?
The exploding popularity of e-scooters could reshape mobility in our cities. Regulators need to adapt their approaches to handle the innovation rather than ban it altogether.
Ivan Marc/Shutterstock
The exploding popularity of e-scooters has the potential to reshape transport in our cities. Regulators need to adapt their approaches to handle the new mobility service rather than ban it altogether.
In England, one in fifty children cycle to school. But if English children cycled at the same rates as Dutch children, this could rise to two in five.
Commuters at Epping train station board replacement buses during work on the line for the Sydney Metro, the biggest of all the promised projects.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
The major parties are promising projects costing tens of billions of dollars, with a surprisingly large overlap between them. Yet only two have been endorsed by infrastructure authorities.
Vancouver used traffic congestion as a ‘stick’ and the SkyTrain as a ‘carrot’ in a strategy to discourage car use and make the city a better place to live.
Oleg Mayorov/Shutterstock
Instead of spending ever more on roads, we can learn from Vancouver’s use of congestion as a ‘friend’ in managing the development of transport networks and of the city itself.
The early popularity of shared e-scooters suggests they can be a valuable part of the mix of transport options in Brisbane.
Albert Perez/AAP
Researchers looking at Australia’s first trial of e-scooter sharing find the Brisbane public has embraced this mode of transport. They make five recommendations to deal with issues that have emerged.
CRRC’s version of the optically guided bus, now operating in Zhuzhou, is more like light rail than its predecessors.
CRRC
The autonomous rail rapid transit (ART) system developed in China might make buses sexy, but the technology alone won’t resolve the issues of road space and right of way in Australia.
Urgent and radical change in urban transport policies and practices will benefit the planet and future generations.
blurAZ/Shutterstock
To cut emissions within the 12 years or so we have left to avoid disastrous global warming, we will need to change our old transport habits, using a combination of strategies to achieve this.