Planet Erland

In a way, it’s all transport. From the movement of ions across cell membranes and the painting of toenails, to the trucking of freesias into global cities and the chucking of chimps into orbit, it’s all moving stuff from one place to another. A to B and back again, as Andy Warhol so neatly had it.
In Australia, especially, because we do so much of this, you’d think we’d be really good at it. You’d think we’d have this transport thing right down, finer than angels’ wings.
But quantity, sadly, is not quality. For most of us, transport is glaze-over territory, hyper-technical, the last bastion of the expert. Yet we walk away at our peril, for it’s this abdication that has produced a transport system - if system’s not too strong a word - that is far from our finest moment.
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Lance Hockridge’s excellent speech to the National Press Club last week highlighted a few of the stupidities, most glaringly the fact that, while cars and trucks will be exempt from the carbon tax, trains will not.
Over a year, noted Hockridge, one commuter train is the carbon-reduction equivalent of 320 hectares of freshly planted trees. One Melbourne-Sydney goods train equals 600 hectares, or “the same as a household going without electricity for 46 years”.
Rail emits 40 per cent less carbon per passenger kilometre than road, yet if you expect a carbon tax to encourage such eco-mindedness, think again. This is populism at its most base. If there are no mums and dads screaming for it, the government doesn’t give a damn.
But it’s even worse than that, for the carbon tax doesn’t just not incentivise rail, it actively penalises it. This is on top of the $1.9 billion subsidy Sydney’s road network received from the state alone in 2008-09. Triple whammy.
And we watch and shrug, as if it’s perfectly standard for governments to act against their own rhetoric. As if hypocrisy is precisely what we elect them for. As if all that matters to us is the price at the pump.
I know, you’re hanging out for the techno-fix, the hydrogen-powered car that, notwithstanding the first law of thermodynamics, will let us have our cake and eat it. But even that magic bullet will clog roads, devour fertile land and generate the brash centrifugal dispersion of car-based culture. It’ll still kill.
Hockridge, a former BHP executive and now chief executive of Queensland Rail who chairs the Australasian Railway Association, quoted a recent Deloitte/Access Economics report that puts the cost of the 30,000 annual road injuries at $35 billion.
On this basis, a single passenger train reduces accident costs by an amount that would fund 505 hospital beds, even as it reduces demand for those beds.
And there’s the small issue of fuel. Trains, like cars and trucks, can run on electricity, which can be renewably generated. On the whole, however, they don’t, and it’s not. Only one-sixth of our rail energy is electric. The rest is diesel, as are roughly a third of all Australia’s road transport calories.
True, diesel is the surprise darling of the thinking classes, which is why all the latest small eurocars that used to sound like sewing machines now grumble along like so many disconsolate troglodytes.
Even filtered, however, diesel is still pretty dodgy on the particulate front, and the ”new diesel” chic has been blamed for the mass extinction of the London sparrow, while if it’s biodiesel (which is meant to burn more cleanly) it probably comes from palm oil and kills orang-utans as well. So no, diesel is no panacea.
And so to cycling. Cadel Evans might have returned to rapturous applause but out there at the coalface of Sydney’s roads, it’s still war.
Be as polite as you like, hug the bike lanes, brave the car doors, but motorists still try and run you off the road, buses still blast you with their horns, pedestrians still try to push you off into oncoming traffic and - as happened to me recently - security goons still leave filthy notes for locking your bike outside their six-green-star building.
It’s amazing how cross motorists get sitting behind a bike for a minute or two, when they’ll sit behind other cars - which clog the road much more effectively - for uncomplaining hours. Congestion costs Australia $15 billion a year.
Cycling, though, reduces not only congestion, but also the vast health costs of diabesity and depression. The government could probably buy every one of us a Trek Yoshotimo Nara, instead of subsidising petrol, and still be ahead.
You’d think it could stretch to bike share. Barclays Bicycle Hire in London - aka Boris’s Bikes - is now a year old. With 6 million journeys in that time, only 200 of the 6000 bikes have fallen to vandalism and there have been no serious injuries, or none reported.
Again, it’s an easy and intelligent system. I’ve done it - a card in the slot and away you go. Sure, Sydney would need to tweak its helmet laws and the bikes lose money - £10 million last year. But that’s called subsidy. Along with hypocrisy, it’s what we have government for.
There’s also the demand side of transport and the inescapable fact that global transport use is breathtakingly, and increasingly, wasteful. You can buy New Zealand butter in London more cheaply than the local stuff; America routinely exports 330,000 tonnes of potatoes, and imports 370,000 tonnes. And so on.
This constant global cross-gartering of pointless travel is, in the cliche, low-hanging fruit. But given that Sydney’s been trying to get an oyster card for 20 years, and failed, I’m not expecting it for eating any time soon.