Our transportation system

Every day many millions of Australians get ready to go to work, leave their front door, and then sit in traffic for over an hour, sometimes even two. Our roads are ridiculously congested. When people are crawling along in traffic every single day, this is a pure waste. Wasted fuel, greenhouse gas emissions, wasted lives, and of course vast amounts of wasted time for everyone. This wasted time contributes to a poor family life, increased stress, loss of income and overall productivity losses for our economy as it’s common for the average driver to spend hours each day in traffic. Every day people drive to work, to pay for the car and fuel that they need to drive to work, so when I see three or four lane highways full of crawling cars I think to myself: "surely we can do better".

The answer to these problems is not more roads, but less cars.

Petrol and diesel are only going to become more expensive in the future, carbon pollution must be addressed and people are already struggling with the costs of our inefficient method of individual private transportation (the average is $260 a week or $13,520 a year). So what our government needs to do is

upscale our public transportation network and stop expanding the roads that we could get more public transport on.

I know what many of you may be thinking, "sure, but people don’t want to catch a stinky bus". I completely agree, our existing public transportation system is a joke. But have you ever caught the trams in Melbourne? In particular, around the city? They're quite nice, you hop on or off whenever a tram stops at a red light and with the number of trams circulating, this means you can jump on easily just to travel 3 or 4 blocks and you won't need to wait 2 minutes. Public transport should be regular, efficient, clean, electrified and should take you everywhere. There is no excuse for not having good public transportation in all Australian capital cities, because we have the capacity to create a system where you are a

ble to simply hop on and go. Passengers should be able to easily get to wherever their destination may be without having to worry about waiting more than 5 minutes. Trams should traverse arterial roads, going back and forth constantly, and roads should be arranged in a north, south style grid, as they are to a large extent in Adelaide. When public transport is frequent in a system like this, users don't need to know which bus connects with which, which route is which, when the next bus is coming. All they need is to know their destination and how to get there like you do in a car. when you need to make a turn at the corner of South Rd and Cross road for example, you would just get off at that corner and wait on the right side of the road for the next tram, which would be in less than 1 minute if everyone was using the trams because they were free, and motor transport was discouraged with

education campaigns and tax increases on fuel and cars.

As a matter of policy implementation for Australia's transition to free

and plentiful public transport, I suggest a sliding scale of ticket subsidisation.

As we expand the capacity of the public transport system, we increase subsidisation of the tickets in accordance until the new capacity is taken up. We continue this process until the end result is a much larger public transport network and ultimately free public transport. A big advertising campaign would need to be rolled out in conjunction to educate and inspire people to give up cars for good. Of course car sales will drop, however there will be increased jobs and economic activity as a result of the transition and overall a much more productive, cleaner and happier society.

Car manufacturing is already going down hill fast as the tide of capital investment flows to the Asian nations, we need to have a plan, not simply buy more cars from overseas and blow our trade surplus. The costs associated with public transport should be met by decreasing road expansions, small income tax increases (however you'd save much more than this each year on car expenses like petrol), slightly increasing taxes on petrol to promote public transport use and increased revenue from a more productive economy, increased consumption resulting from the savings people will make and growth in related industrial production.

Free public transportation for all! You can keep your car if you choose, but you shouldn’t need to buy one just to get around. Our public transport should be regular enough so that you wouldn’t feel the need to have a car, which would become an unnecessary luxury instead of the necessity it is for many now.

Such a progressive plan for our current energy,

infrastructure and transportation needs will not be enacted by our two major parties, unfortunately they do not have the vision, or political will to execute a plan that would produce any significant changes to the status quo.

However oil prices will continue to rise steadily if not sharply, manufacturing will continue to move offshore and international agreements will require carbon emissions to be reduced significantly.

Whether we change our transportation system, plan ahead for the future and build this network in an organised and efficient manner, or if we wait until external pressures force us into action, we will still have to switch from cars to trains, trams and buses. These future factors are inevitable, we can choose to fight them and loose, or we can improve our society in the process of embracing these challenges and come out on top. It’s our choice.