The Age yesterday ran a report on the PTUA’s submission to the Garnaut inquiry on climate change, with the headline being “Ban new freeways: transport group” — above another rather good article about cars not being on average any more efficient than 40 years ago.

It didn’t take long for the rev heads to spot the report, and as you might expect, they launched (within their own little forum) a tirade of abuse: everything from tree hugging, whale saving, dread locked morons to mungbean chewers and tree huggers. It was pretty clear none of them had read the Age article or the original press release, let alone the study itself.

Green groups (real greenies, that is, not just us sustainable transport advocates) also spotted the Age report, and a version of the story got a run in the West Australian. And there was a chat between yours truly and John Barron this morning on ABC News Radio. (MP3, 9Mb, 4 min 53 sec)

Perhaps to some people it sounds counter-intuitive: that building motorways doesn’t solve traffic congestion, but makes it worse. But not if you think about it. When each new road opens, people consider their travel options, and if it’s markedly easier to drive, many of them do. They drive longer, and in greater numbers, because they can, and the new road fills up. The end result is we have more space dedicated to roads, more cars on the road for longer, and more congestion and pollution.

Maybe we should turn it around: What proof is there that building motorways does help congestion? The quick answer is that there’s nowhere in the world (except perhaps Houston, where they spend billions on it every year, and oh, look at their greenhouse emissions!) where this has turned out to be the case.

The French have worked all this out, and last October President Nicolas Sarkozy pledged to stop building motorways and put the money into railways instead, to improve freight and passenger rail.

Anyway, this is only a small part of the report. What the rest of it is pointing out is that while transport isn’t the majority of greenhouse emissions, it is growing fast (up 30% in the last 15 years) and as part of an overall push to reduce emissions, action needs to be taken on transport. Hybrid cars will only help to a certain extent (and actually rely on stop-start congestion to be efficient), oil is running out, and other fuels are unproven (with biofuels in particular causing emissions during production, and resulting in food shortages).

Good to have sparked some debate about it, anyway.

Yesterday there were demonstrators outside the SX building in Exhibition Street, with brochures, a big banner calling for a Royal Commission. Into what? I’m not sure to be honest; it wasn’t obvious. I didn’t look too closely and I didn’t take a brochure as I had other things on my mind.

The Premier John Brumby and his staff walked out of the building, followed a couple of minutes later by all the journalists I’d been waiting for. Brumby had been making an announcement about train timetables.

Not one of the protestors moved. They didn’t budge. They didn’t call out. They didn’t try and have a word with Brumby or the journos, or even thrust a brochure in their direction.

Did they even notice the Premier was there?

I still don’t know what their cause was. Bay dredging? The desalination plant? The water pipeline? Werribee loop trains?

Don’t know. But I do know that if they’d been a tad quicker on their feet, they might have got a word with someone who in all probability may be able to influence whatever it was they were campaigning for — or got some media attention.

You have to pay attention. They missed an opportunity.

And the train announcement? Thumbs up. It’s exactly what we need. The trains are crowded, so we need more, but under the current timetables, almost everything’s squashed into the loop, and conflicting movements slow everything down. So changing the operating plan so some trains bypass the loop, or run through it in a different direction, allows more trains onto the tracks, and means when the 18 extras start arriving next year, they’ll be able to be deployed in peak hours, where they’re needed most.

So some people will have to change trains, or have a slightly longer trip. But others will have shorter trips, and more train services will mean less crowding, and shorter waiting times. Everybody wins.

It’s precisely what I was talking about last week: making better use of the infrastructure.

Update Saturday morning: Why the PTUA is supporting the changes to metropolitan train timetables

Many people like to whinge about the price of fuel, but Steve Fielding’s idea of cutting fuel taxes is a very bad idea — it would inevitably lead to more usage, and cutting prices is the last way you want to try and fight oil shortages.

This opinion piece for ABC Online goes into more detail.

Petrol tax cuts the road to ruin
By Daniel Bowen

Who can forget the Great Petrol Rip-Off of the late 1990s?

Outraged motoring groups pointed out that fully half of the pump price of petrol was made up of government taxes. It was a scandal and an abomination. Governments were punishing the motorist by making their petrol expensive - at a whopping 90 cents a litre.

Read the rest.

If you thought $494 million was a lot to pay for the new “Myki” smartcard public transport ticketing system, hold onto your hats… today it was revealed the actual cost is more than double that — $1 billion dollars, no less. Somehow the government are now claiming they needed to add the operating costs, which they didn’t mention before now, and certainly not when they announced the deal.

Zowee. And I thought it was expensive before. Now it’s exhorbitant.

And all so we don’t have to physically insert our tickets into slots. (That’s the major, tangible benefit to users.)

Seriously, you could spend a tenth of that upgrading Metcard (including providing the contactless cards it was originally meant to have), pay for staff to come back onto the system at every station and on every tram, spend a bunch more on service upgrades (maybe even a major new rail line) and still have money left over.

Oh thank goodness — they didn’t use that horrible old picture in the print edition of the Herald Sun article today. Though perhaps the one they did use (which from memory was taken in late-2006 in Swanston Street) wasn’t much better.

There was a bit of a typo in the article that appeared during production though. The bit that says:
“Most importantly, it [VicRoads] doesn’t hold back from lobbying the Government for much-needed road projects.”

should have actually said:
“Most importantly, it doesn’t hold back from lobbying the Government for big road projects on the basis of what it regards as the needs of the Victorian public.”

Changes the meaning a bit. But no matter, that was only a tiny bit of the article.

Unfortunately some of the comments on the HS web page appear to have missed the point. It’s not really about the bicycle ban, or crowded trains. It’s about the root causes: why PT management and planning — and thus services — are such a splintered, chaotic mess, and what can be done to fix them.

• Lots more to read about public transport management

In case you hadn’t heard, there’s an election on.

From yesterday’s Sunday Age “Heckler” page:

THE DIRT: Politicians are trying to stack the outspoken Public Transport Users Association. The association is facing elections and there has been a flurry of nominations by Labor and even Liberal political staffers. What happens if Team Brumby takes over the PTUA? First press release might read something like “why Melbourne has the best public transport system in the world”, followed by “Overcrowding, what overcrowding?”

It’s worth pointing out that yesterday after some discussion, four of the Labor people withdrew their nominations (though as of now, only two have been received in writing), when they realised how bad it looked, but there are still at least two running.

Of course, all these people may well have a legitimate interest in public transport issues, but even if it’s not a deliberate stacking attempt, the effect would still be the same if a number from either side got in — a loss of the organisation’s independent voice.

While it’s good for any organisation to get new blood, new ideas and new perspectives from time to time, I’d argue that bashing down the door and booting out other active people is not generally the best way to do it.

It’s going to be an interesting week.

PS. I’ve spoken to Leo McGarry, and I have no trouble believing that the minister’s office has nothing to do with any of this.

Update Friday morning. All those directly party-linked withdrew, and it was a relatively peaceful AGM. Two motions were passed unanimously by the membership to highlight the importance of the organisation being independent, and to ask the committee to look into strengthening that.

For his birthday, Andrew asked for a few bloggers to post something on a topic of his choosing. He asked me for:

The time you had such a bad experience on public transport that you rang the minister or one of his minions, or similar.

I had a think about this, and I don’t think I’ve directly had a whinge to a contact about something that only affected me. But I’ve certainly seen and been annoyed by plenty of things which were more systemic problems that needed fixing, and have passed that feedback on.

For instance, my brother-in-law catches the train from Bentleigh to South Yarra (zone 1) but can’t catch the connecting 703 bus to the station without paying a premium because it only accepts zone 2, even though it connects to two zone 1 stations and a zone 1 tram. I’ve raised that and other cases with the fares people.

On New Year’s Morning last year at about 1am I noticed about 30 people waiting at Footscray for the 82 tram, which unlike most others, wasn’t running all night. I called to the people to say it wasn’t running, but they’d heard all trams were. Maybe after an hour or two of waiting they eventually did believe me. That got fed back to the CEOs at Yarra Trams and Metlink: either run all routes all night, or be very very clear about what is and isn’t running.

The lack of bus services in the evening and Sundays, despite shopping hours at the big centres like Chadstone and Southland hampered me for years. With recent upgrades, this has now been mostly resolved, and although they’re infrequent (mostly hourly) you can at least now go shopping at those places on Friday night or Sunday afternoon and not have to deal with the parking.

A friend drives to Epping Station (and sometimes all the way to the city) because the South Morang rail extension still hasn’t been built, despite being promised in 1999. A lot of local residents are up in arms about that. I had them all in mind when I raised that with the (previous) minister one time I ran into him at a function.

And one Sunday morning last year I was with the kids on the train, and it was a short train, and really crowded. Not the first time I’d seen that and complained about it, but this time, I got my camera out to document it, and gave it to Channel 7 the following week.

I blogged about it here, and have followed-up by raising it in meetings with Connex and the government. Connex don’t have a good excuse for it (eg it really is just cost-cutting), and some bureaucrats are quite appalled that this sort of thing occurs, but can do little about it. It’s actually a really good example of why privatisation in its current form doesn’t work. Will keep pushing.

In what might become a tradition (by my count this makes the fourth time in the last few months) Premier Brumby and Public Transport Minister Kosky took a train ride yesterday to make an announcement, this time at Jolimont, then caught a train to Parliament. (You could tell Brumby doesn’t catch the train much; the TV footage showed him standing on the right hand side of the escalator.)

And this time round, it’s some genuinely good news. eight more trains on order, making a total of eighteen to arrive from 2009. That’s an 11% boost to fleet size, or space for an extra 36,000 people (assuming two trips per train per peak), which will start to make a significant impact on the current overcrowding.

Of course, they’re going to need more each year after that if patronage keeps increasing, which it will (growing city + rising petrol prices = more people on trains).

And there’s a bunch of other things they could and should be doing in the meantime. For instance, spreading the peak over more hours by running more frequent trains (including expresses) throughout the day, and stop mucking about with short overcrowded trains in the evening and weekends. And doing a full review and revision of the timetable to make sure when the new trains arrive that they can be used effectively.

But at last it seems like they’re starting to realise things need fixing, and making it a priority to do so.