45
Australia, why are you still obsessed with freeways – when they’re driving us away from net zero?
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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People like to conflate two problems together.
Lots of Australia is small and far away from metropolis.
Lots of metropolis could happily exist with wonderful multi modal transport options like trains bus bike and walking.
Between the two, cars grant autonomy outside public planning for individuals to still be individuals to get between families and economy between remote to remote and metro to remote even when there's no feasible public transport.
The devil in the detail is the problem at it always is anything when you look into it.
Yes there's big opportunity to improve mass transit. Yes there's a place for long range individual and small scale transit. Yes there's a place for last mile delivery.
But the average Joe doesn't really and shouldn't really need to know, or care. Why does it take a nation, that is every individual, to understand and vote for what is nuanced and specific? Why can't bold moves be made and results be explained?
Anyway that's enough drunk reply
This is a planning failure. This middle used to be farmland not that long ago.
Cars really ought not be the primary mode of transport in built up areas. They ought to primarily be for moving house, emergency services, disabled people, and people in rural areas.
But so, so, so much of our cities are geared towards cars, and this is because suburbs were built further and further out, instead of densifying our neighbourhoods like we should have.
It's also just generally a problem of capitalism, and privatisation. More modern high rises are far worse quality (in Victoria at least) than ones built before the 90s (for their time). Kennet really fucked us on that one by removing government surveyors (the conflict of interest with privately contracted surveyors is so obvious, and it's lead to terrible quality)
The average Joe has been screwed into long commutes, in cars, because of bad planning.