One year on, the Turnbull government is touting the economic benefits of an infrastructure agenda that neglects the other important functions of transport projects.
Water use for transport is significant.
Edited from Wikimedia commons
Kim Dovey, The University of Melbourne and Elek Pafka, The University of Melbourne
We’re still in the early days of understanding how cities work. But we do know that creative, healthy and productive cities have certain things in common – and it’s all to do with their ‘urban DMA’.
The car-based logic of Melbourne’s 1969 transport plan has been deeply implanted into Victorians’ collective consciousness.
AAP/David Crosling
To maximize the benefits while minimizing the risks, we need to know how ride-share companies will affect public transportation.
The Gold Coast light rail project provides an opportunity to study the scale of property value gains arising from new transport infrastructure.
AAP/Dave Hunt
The system of apartheid is long gone. But its legacy of poor funding for historically black universities - and of planning that banished black universities to cities’ margins - remains.
The report found that Sydney households face the highest transport costs of any city in Australia both in dollar terms and as a percentage of household income.
AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts
The Australian Automobile Association said that a new report showed that “the average Australian family is spending up to $22,000 every year to get around.” Is that accurate?
Falling revenues and cuts are threatening a crucial lifeline for those living in country areas.
The Western Distributor project announced by the Andrews government will benefit Melbourne’s suburban residents in the west and north, but inner-city elites are mobilising against it.
AAP/Melissa Meehan
It’s a project that creates benefits for Melbourne’s western suburbs and the state as a whole. But the inner-city elite don’t like it and recent experience suggests their opinion holds sway.
Despite Malcolm Turnbull’s enthusiasm for public transport, the Coalition tends to favour road projects over rail.
AAP/Lukas Coch
The Coalition, Labor, and the Greens are making substantial commitments to projects that not only lack proper business cases, but are not even on the Infrastructure Australia priority list at all.
Housing costs are driving poorer families into areas with fewer and fewer opportunities.
Kate Ausburn/flickr
The 2016 articulation of an urban agenda assumes building more highways, railways and trams will produce better, more productive cities that somehow give everyone a job.
By the time people reach their mid-20s, they are just as likely to have a licence now as their counterparts were ten years ago.
AAP/Dave Hunt
Using elements of game play, we can create incentives for people to change how and when they make various transport choices in ways that enable the whole system to work better.
Many things go into making a healthy community, so the earlier services and infrastructure become available, the better.
Cecily Maller
Early residents in new communities are known as ‘pioneers’ – they arrive before many services are in place. A five-year study points to the many benefits of putting in good services early on.
A special tax paid for the Gold Coast light rail. But there is another way.
Bahnfrend/Wikimedia Commons
Much of the infrastructure Australia needs will be funded by “value capture” – raising tax revenue by boosting land values. Some have decried it as a tax hike in all but name, but it isn’t really.
The budget doesn’t provide either the infrastructure investment or financing details needed to flesh out the Smart Cities Plan.
AAP/Mal Fairclough
The budget paints a picture of higher debt, little relief for growing cities crying out for infrastructure investment, and no detail of how City Deals might work to fix this.
What’s in the Turnbull government’s first budget for cities, defence, social services, the ABC and more?
AAP/Lukas Coch
With the failures of past planning now apparent, the unruly threat of a damaged and depleting planet is ushering us toward a fourth era of urban restructuring. What might City v4.0 look like?