By Tracy Sorensen
"As I walked into the ABC studios today, I saw a sign saying, "This is a smoke-free environment", David Engwicht, an urban ecology activist and expert, told a seminar in Sydney recently.
"Now, think back 10 years. How many of you were predicting that massive legislative changes would be introduced that would ban smoking on airplanes, in taxis, on buses and in all kinds of places? How many believed that would ever happen?"
But the change did happen. Let's start thinking about the private motor car in the same way, says Engwicht. "I believe in the next 10 years, we'll see similar signs going up around our cities which will say, 'This is a car-free environment'."
The strength of the international oil economy, car industry and local road lobbies notwithstanding, Engwicht insists his vision is practical, not utopian, involving changes based on the situation as it stands now.
"A lot of planners and residents seem to think you can bulldoze cities and start all over again", Engwicht told the April 23 meeting, organised by the Eco Design Foundation. "The fact is that we are dealing with an existing urban fabric, and we must respect that."
An audio-visual presentation made by CART, the Brisbane anti-freeway group that expanded its brief to become an internationally recognised reservoir of knowledge on urban issues, illustrates Engwicht's point. Futuristic eco-city scapes don't feature; instead, it presents a series of slides showing examples of traffic calming which already exist in many European cities.
One slide sticks in the mind: a wide road planted with trees down both sides, wide lanes for buses and bicycles, and a single narrow, uncomfortable strip for cars. The car, reduced to a bare crawl, had become a tentative guest on the bitumen it once monopolised.
Engwicht's approach has been compared to a "hyperactive zoom lens", as he tackles related problems from the micro level of footpath benches and chess tables to the macro levels of national policy.
At the seminar, he outlined a few ideas for change which had been stimulated through involvement in CART, by international study trips and through collaboration with Western Australian experts Jeff Kenworthy and Peter Newman.
Traffic calming has been defined as slowing traffic flow and moving toward the elimination of all non-essential motorised vehicles (clearly, the definition of "essential" would be the subject of public debate). A massive shift to public transport is envisaged, while streets again become places where people meet and children play.
The narrow version of traffic calming — the definition preferred by the road lobby — has been around for over 20 years: speed f suburban streets, the division of roads into "residential" and "arterial".
"Fine, if the aim is to make nice streets, but if that's the aim, I'd rather see barbecues and play equipment put in the street rather than speed bumps", says Engwicht. But this approach, which Engwicht prefers to call LATM (local area traffic management) rather than traffic calming, will not work in the long term.
LATM, says Engwicht, is expensive and tends simply to move problems from one area to another. The revved-up driver, forced to slow down through an area marked "residential", lets it rip through the "arterials". But the "arterial" roads are usually also residential: they just happen to be inhabited by people with less money and social clout.
"Those with the best resources are the people who can buy in the quietest streets ... There is a strong moral argument to say that there is an injustice being done in that case."
Engwicht gave an example of a "micro" level change that could be initiated by local communities: the walking bus. School children could be walked together to school, stopping off at "bus stops" painted with bright murals. The walking bus "drivers" could be recruited from those in the local community with time and an interest in contact with children — retired people, for example.
An interesting "macro" level suggestion, requiring more fundamental change, would see employers "internalising" the negative social costs of transporting employees to and from work.
Noting the suggestions made by green urban planners and activists for bringing work and living areas closer together, thus removing much need for transport in the first place, Engwicht argued for an approach that created the greatest possible transport efficiency based on the existing set-up.
Taxation reform aimed at ensuring employers recruited as locally as possible, or encouraged their employees to travel to work in the most energy-efficient way possible, could dramatically alter the load of traffic on the roads.
This would reduce cross-commuting (in which a schoolteacher in suburb A travels via freeway to suburb B, while a schoolteacher in suburb B zips back the other way to work in suburb A), which has been estimated to account for half to two-thirds of all peak hour traffic. Freeways and big roads, acclaimed for giving people greater freedom of choice in where to work, simply accelerate inefficiencies within cities, to great social and environmental cost.
"Take the existing urban form, rationalise cross-commuting, and we could reduce our traffic by up to two-thirds", said Engwicht.
Employers would be given the responsibility to bring their employees to work "on the publicly provided infrastructure, and if they abuse the system, they should be the ones to pay for it.
"Or, a commuter surcharge could go on payroll tax or company tax. Each year, every company fills out a survey. Based on how far and by e coming to work, they get a rebate. Those who act responsibly get the money back, those acting irresponsibly don't get any back."