Transported 2007 Architects for Peace by Anthony McInneny

Architectsforpeace is a humanitarian, not for

profit incorporated organisation, under the Associations Incorporation Act 1981 Section 7. Architects for Peace (arch-peace) aims to provide an alternative forum for debating political, environmental and social issues in the professional urban context.

www.architectsforpeace.org

All the activities produced by Architects for Peace, including the website, are organised, implemented, created and maintained by volunteers. Architects for Peace is also a member of ARC•PEACE International (Architects Designers Planners for Social Responsibility), NGO in consultative status (category II) with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. The purpose of ARC•PEACE is to be the global network of architects, design and planners committed to building in a socially responsible way a peaceful, just and an environmentally sustainable future. Other Activities of architectsforpeace include:

Collective Transport Sustainable Cities

Words@Building 50 is a monthly lecture/presentation/discussion about the built environment. Topics have ranged from disaster reconstruction, architecture in the developing world, environmental design and urban design to art in public spaces.

Words@bld50:is the held on the first Thursday of the month in the studio and workshop of Site RMIT Public Art, who generously supports arch-peace. By avoiding all unnecessary glitter, we make these events possible at a minimum cost. The value is in the content and commitment of our presenters and the team of volunteers, who donate their time. Cost: a gold coin contribution or more if you can afford it. Coordinated by Eleanor Chapman

2007 Architects for Peace Forum A collaborative partnership between Architects for Peace, VicHealth, RMIT Public Art, Village Well and UNESCO Observatory

Pro Bono Service Architects for Peace pro-bono service acts as a bridge between community groups, non-profit agencies and charitable organisations that need architectural services but cannot afford to pay for them (the ‘Clients’) and professionals of the built environment who are prepared to work with these groups free of charge (the ‘Service Providers’). architectsforpeace probono services

The pro bono services provide options to those who could not otherwise afford them. At the same time, this process facilitates the promotion and discussion of architecture and planning in relation to its impact on people, their health and their city. We hope that these services can promote education, participation and assist in finding solutions to our damaged environment. Coordinated by Lucinda Hartley

Studio and Space

A virtual gallery to share your own original projects, particularly those that may or may not make it to the glossy magazines but that make it to people: community, council projects, urban art, research, pro-bono, student’s projects and ideas. We are interested in work from all fields of the built environment - engineering, architectural, planning, urban design, landscape, urban art, environment. Coordinated by Eleanor Chapman

Newsletter

A monthly newsletter for our members that includes a feature article from our editorial team and the most recent and relevant news from around the world. Coordinated by Beatriz Maturana and Sarah Bridges

Become a member, visit our website. www.architectsforpeace.org Program layout and design by Shelley Freeman Transported logo design by Eva Rodriguez Riestra Photos by Anthony McInneny

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 1st 2007 RMIT building 94 Cardigan St, Carlton

Architectsforpeace is a forum for architects, urban design-

VicHealth

Health promotion is a powerful, cost-effective and efficient way to maintain a healthier community. It enables people to increase control over and improve their health. Rather than focusing on people at risk for specific diseases, health promotion involves the population as a whole in the context of their everyday lives. Activities are geared toward promoting health and preventing ill-health.

ers, engineers, planners, landscape architects and environmentalists, seeking urban development based on social justice, solidarity, respect and peace. Architects for Peace was formed in 2003 in response the absence of comment or criticism from the bodies representing the professions of the built environment about Australia’s involvement in the unjustified war on Iraq.

Architects for Peace Annual Forum is an opportunity to focus on a particular area of the built environment to create debate and to inform our members, professionals of the built environment and the general public.

VicHealth is The Victorian Health Promotion Foundation, and is the peak body for health promotion in Victoria.

In 2007 the topic is collective transport and sustainable cities. We hope to use this forum to create discussion and to inform a position paper.

Visit www.vichealth.vic.gov.au

We aim to open the debate of possible alternatives the a car dependent city and develop an information exchange of the ideas presented at the forum via our website.

Acknowledgement We are in the country of the Wurundjeri

people and pay respect to their tribal elders, celebrate their continuing culture, and acknowledge the memory of their ancestors. We acknowledge the generous support of our principle sponsor VicHealth and the in-kind support of RMIT Public Art, Village Well and UNESCO Observatory. Transported would not be possible without the tireless efforts of our voluntary Architects for Peace members and the Transported project team. We also acknowledge each of our guest speakers who have given freely of their time, energy and support in generating public debate and discussion about this central issue.

Transported has the duel theme of collective transport and

sustainable cities. It provides the context to explore the relationship between mobility and the environment and to consider these issues separately from current models of delivery. The notion of collective transport as distinct from public transport permits a conversation about how we travel, not how it is provided, and allows an investigation of the differences between individual car transport and collectively owned, used or shared transportation vehicles. Is transport a right provided collectively through a redistribution of resources or a privilege earned through economic autonomy and independence? If the answer is choice, can we choose collective transport if it is inconvenient, expensive or effectively privileged through location? What are the true costs (social, economic and environmental) of these transport alternatives? Sustainable cities could be argued to be a contradiction in terms. The global trend to urban habitation places this contradiction in a more complex setting that challenges how we socially organize our cities in relation to employment, participation and social equity and the impact this organisation has on the environment. It is often argued that Australian cities do not have the density, the social organisation, culture, urban design or planning to provide a viable alternative to car dependency. A quick glance at comparable Anglo-capital cities will quickly dispel this myth. Other capital cities provide inspiring responses. But all of this really misses the point. Can we afford not to have efficient, affordable and accessible transport system? Transported explores this question and offers a forum in which to construct a proposition that may hold the answer.

Beatriz C. Maturana

RMIT Public Art public art

The Art in Public Space programs are amongst the first of their kind in the world and address issues of art in public space which are an important feature of current international cultural debate. The program in Art in Public Space offers a broad theoretical and historical understanding of the discourses on, and practice of, art in public space. It provides training in dealing with the practical and theoretical problems arising from the situation of art in public space and examines current definitions of ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ public space. The program is open to graduates or those with a strong industry background employed as, for example, local government cultural officers, artists, architects and landscape architects, who have not previously had access to a specialised program in art in public space. Assessment is project based on a practical application of the issues raised in the program. Interdisciplinary and collaborative projects are also invited. Visit www.rmit.edu.au

Village Well

Village Well is a progressive communication and cultural development organization . We have been leaders in creating vibrant and sustainable communities and businesses since 1992. We offer the vision and practical tools to strengthen the economic hub of communities by revitalizing social, cultural and environmental capital. We work with clients who are broad minded: recognizing the value of an integrated approach that engages all stakeholders Visit www.villagewell.org

Unesco Obeservatory

The UNESCO Observatory brings together people with shared interests in the arts and encourages activities that cross disciplinary divisions, drawing on the combined expertise of national and internationally recognised researchers. The Observatory’s focus crosses over the areas of architecture; the physical, natural, social and health sciences; well-being, culture, heritage, arts practice, education in the arts, community arts practice, research methodology, philosophy, ethics and program evaluation across pure, strategic, applied and action research. The multi-disciplinary groupings associated with UNESCO and the Observatory operating team’s current research projects, plus all the numerous research projects of the collaborating partner groups, will assist the University in meeting its longer term aims of supporting cross-disciplinary collaborative partnerships and research with government and industry bodies, and further developing our contribution to public life within Australia and across the Asian and Pacific regions Visit www.abp.unimelb.edu.au/unesco/

President Architects for Peace 2007 Cultural Transports Collective

Beatriz C. Maturana Beatriz C. Maturana is an architect, urban design and the founder of Architects for Peace.

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 1st 5:30-7:30pm meet O’Grady Place, Carlton (Mel 2BF11) No matter the weather, grab your bike, lights and jacket to join an adventure with a swarm of cyclists served a 3-course meal over the duration of an evening inner-city ride. The Cultural Transports Collective hosts this mobile event pedalling friendship, fine food and surprising moving merriment from pedal powered vehicles. The dinner is vegetarian, offered on a ‘donate as you feel’ basis.

Transported Event Coordinator Anthony McInneny Artist, Educator, Creative Producer. Anthony

McInneny is the Coordinator of Cultural Planning and Development at Knox City Council, a practicing artist, Chair of the City of Melbourne Public Art Advisory Committee and a studio leader at RMIT University Public Art (a multi-disciplinary practice). Anthony’s work centres on the relationship between the artist and public space with a particular emphasis on the Australian built environment and the suburbs of metropolitan Melbourne. Anthony aims to influence urban development by engaging artists in latent public spaces and unlikely infrastructure projects such as skate-parks, suburban shopping centres, freeway undercrofts and malls. In the 1990’s Anthony spent two years as a cultural development worker in post-revolutionary Nicaragua.

Transported Team The event would not be possible without Su Mellersh Lucas, Edith Wong, Alif Nadya Inniar Rosa, Diena Renatta Meiantie, Eleanor Chapman, Sarah Bridges, Ceridwen Owen, Matthew Bond, Shelley Freeman, Mary Anne Jackson, Matias Maturana, Ceri Hann, Tom Gray, Vicky Grillakis, Lucinda Hartley, Kalli Vakras, Jo Joyce, Eva Rodriguez Riestra, Beatriz Maturana, Anthony McInneny.

Born in Santiago, Chile she has lived in Australia for 20 years. Her studies in architecture were curtailed in the early 1980’s due to the political situation in Chile and she completed her degree at RMIT University and a Masters of Urban Design at the University of Melbourne where she is currently a PhD candidate researching Architectural Education and the Public Interest. She teaches at RMIT University and tutors at the University of Melbourne. Beatriz has worked with the Overseas Project Corporation of Victoria, Australian Volunteers International (AVI), the Ministry of Housing (Victoria) and the City of Darebin. In Nicaragua, she lectured in architecture at the National University of Engineering and assessed Habitat for Humanity projects. As part of a multidisciplinary team, she visited Baucau, Timor Leste to assist in the establishment of a planning framework. Her architectural work includes childcare centres, maternal and child health, sport pavilions, residential and urban design projects.

‘oikonomos’ (economy from the Greek word oikonomos, “one who manages a household,” derived from oikos, “house,” and nemein, “to manage.” ) Performance by tashidawa featuring jamine loueslati Tashidawa is an performance and visual artist of immense talent and dedication. She has studied both at RMIT Public Art and the Victorian College of the Arts and has spent a large amount of her creative time and energy over a number of years with indigenous communities in Arnhem land in the Northern Territory of Australia. Tashi created a work for the Architects for Peace 2005 forum Underconstruction.

Keynote Speaker Professor Nicholas Low

Greg Barber

Associate Professor Nicholas Low received his Master

Greg Barber was one of the first three members of The Greens

of Science in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Strathclyde, Scotland, in 1971, where he won the year prize of the Royal Town Planning Institute. He has taught planning theory, urban studies and environmental ethics in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning since 1974. He has published many international journal articles and books including Planning, Politics and the State (Unwin-Hyman, 1991). In 1997 he organised the University of Melbourne Conference on Environmental Justice. His book (with Dr Brendan Gleeson) Justice, Society and Nature (Routledge, 1998) won the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award of the International Studies Association of the USA for the year’s best book on ecological politics. His book (also with Gleeson) Australian Urban Planning (Allen and Unwin, 2000) was launched by the Victorian Minister for Planning in 2000. Associate Professor Low’s interests include urban planning, politics and state theory, environmental justice, participation, decision-making and problem solving, and land markets. He is currently working on a book on the world-wide unsustainability of transport infrastructure, and a more publicly accessible text on environmental justice

elected to enter Parliament of Victoria’s Legislative Council in November 2006.

Following completion of his Masters in Business Administration and Bachelor of Science, Greg Barber was media manager for Cities for Climate Protection, and Bicycle Victoria. Greg has campaigned for the Tenants’ Union, the creation of Plenty Gorge Park, Environment Victoria, the Medical Association for the Prevention of War, and the Wilderness Society. In 2002, after one year as a councillor on Yarra City Council, Greg became Australia’s first Green Mayor and was instrumental in restoring public confidence in the council. As Council Chair of Finance, Greg successfully worked to reverse the financial hardship of the Council, cutting administration, and restructuring management. Greg Barber’s years on local government provided him with detailed knowledge of community needs, such as health, housing, childcare and transport. His current portfolio includes Energy & Resources, Major Projects, Planning and Public Transport.

TRANSPORT, URBAN DESIGN AND THE AUSTRALIAN GREENS Abstract In this presentation I first pin down what I mean by ‘sus-

tainable’. Except in a trivial dictionary sense, ‘sustainability’, I argue, always and only refers to the scale of impact of an economic system on the global environment. The ‘economy’ is what we call the principal mode of interaction of humans with the natural world. The urban transport system is a subset of ‘the economy’. The fact of global warming caused by burning fossil fuel tells us that our economy is unsustainable. Climate change is the greatest threat to humanity that we face today. How can transport systems be changed to reduce their climate impact? I argue for a ‘portfolio’ approach to reducing greenhouse emissions from transport. We need quantitative targets and new data to be collected to tell us whether we are on track to reducing emissions. Part of the transport portfolio consists of a much stronger role for collective and active transport for many routine city trips. Australian cities have poor infrastructure for walking and cycling and a poorly managed and incoherent bus, train and tram service. Nothing much in the collective transport system connects well to anything else. I argue for a unified network approach to transport management including buses and trams, trains with cycling and walking, planned and managed by a single multi-stakeholder authority. I offer the example of Zürich, Switzerland as a best practice international benchmark.

Abstract Half the world’s population now lives in cities and with that proportion set to grow, we must make cities work.

I think cities arise because intense nodes of exchange are essential to our economic, cultural and other human development. Cities expand the range of choices. Others see cities as inherently degrading or “evil” and also ‘unsustainable’. Cities are organic, they develop according to not-so-visible rules - economic, social and environmental forces. However we also make choices about how cities are to work. Politicians, architects and planners all interpret the community’s values in making those choices on their behalf. Very few people are deeply engaged in making these choices and most city residents only get to vote on those choices with their feet, by moving within the city to use it in the best way they can. I will share some perspectives on my view of how those choices get made, based on my background as an urban environmentalist, a city councillor and mayor and now a state member of parliament.

POLITICAL PERSUASIONS Senator Lyn Allison Senator Lyn Allison is the Leader of the Australian Democrats. She is the party’s national spokesperson on Health and Ageing, Education (excluding Higher Education), Resources, Energy and Infrastructure, Treasury and Commonwealth - State Relations Elected to the Federal Parliament in 1996 and again in 2001, Senator Allison became leader of the Australian Democrats in 2004. She is an outspoken campaigner on health, education, environment, nuclear and women’s issues. Senator Allison was Chair of the Democrats-initiated Senate Mental Health Inquiry which handed down its reports in early 2006. She also initiated the debate on RU486 and was one of the four women who co-sponsored the ground breaking, cross-party supported bill that removed the Health Minister’s veto and transferred approval to the Therapeutic Goods Administration in February 2006. Senator Allison, as chair of the powerful Senate Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts References Committee, presided over 10 major environment inquiries including those on greenhouse and water management and made hundreds of recommendations. Other notable achievements include negotiating almost $1 billion of ‘Measures for a Better Environment’ programs in 1999, hundreds of amendments to Federal environment and heritage laws and initiating the National Safe Schools Framework to tackle abuse and bullying in schools. Senator Allison – the first Federal parliamentarian to drive a hybrid electric car – also negotiated national fuel and vehicle emission standards, to tackle air pollution. Senator Allison is proud to be the product of the public school system and has a Bachelor of Education from Melbourne University. Her Parliamentary career has been influenced by her experience in Melbourne as a teacher, then as a councillor on the Port Melbourne Council.

Moderator Kylie Legge, Director of Projects, Village Well Kylie Legge is a project manager and communications expert

in the design and construction fields. Currently completing her Masters in Planning at RMIT Kylie has experience in large-scale Place Making projects, community engagement strategies, concept master plans and land use planning exercises for both government and corporate clients. Before joining Village Well, Kylie was the director of March Communications, a Sydney based communications consultancy specialising in the built environment. In 2004 she was engaged as the National Project Manager for the Year of the Built Environment providing overall concept development, event and activity management, budget & sponsorship management and media liaison for all national activities. Other projects include the development, creation and overall management of the touring exhibition alts + adds, the launch and media management of the national Your Building project and communications consultancy for the Sydney Opera House FM Exemplar project for the Cooperative Research Centre for Construction

ENVIRONMENT, TRANSPORT AND CULTURE Leigh Glover GAMUT

Jeanette Lambert

Australasian Centre for the Governance and Management of Urban Transport (GAMUT) Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

Jeanette joined the Village Well team as Junior Place Maker in

Leigh Glover is a Research Fellow and Associate Director at the

2006. She has completed a Bachelor of Arts (Architecture) Hons and is currently a part-time Masters of Architecture (by research) Candidate at Deakin University in the area of suburban development.

Australasian Centre for the Governance and Management of Urban Transport (GAMUT), University of Melbourne, Australia, working on a sustainable transport initiative supported by the Volvo Foundation.

During her time at Village Well, Jeanette has developed her Place Making skills through a variety of projects particularly in the areas of community engagement, research and project support.

Prior to this position he was a Policy Fellow and Assistant Professor at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy, University of Delaware, where he was engaged in research, research supervision, graduate teaching, and graduate student advising.

Her recent achievements include publication and presentation of a conference paper at the Australian and New Zealand Architectural Science Conference in Adelaide in November 2006. Titled “Public Transport and Pedestrian Access, the Impact on Adolescents”, this paper was co-written with her supervisor Dr. John Rollo.

His research interests include urban and transport sustainability, global environmental politics, environmental policy and planning, environmental and political theory, and issues of science, technology and society, in which he has researched, published, and lectured. He holds a Ph.D. in Energy & Environmental Policy. Before becoming an academic, he worked in state and federal government in Australia, undertaking policy formulation and research in the areas of climate change, water resources, and public land planning.

SUSTAINABLE URBAN MOBILITY POLICIES: IDEAS FOR MELBOURNE

VILLAGE WELL AND TRANSPORT PROJECTS

Abstract In response to the request to provide an overview of

Abstract Neighbourhoods where people walk, ride and use

transport sustainability in Melbourne, this presentation identifies three key issues where current practices have created significant failures in urban sustainable transport, nominates three often-discussed policy responses as offering few short-term benefits and should accordingly not be considered as priorities for policy responses, and suggests three policy responses that offer the prospect of immediate progress towards the goal of a sustainable urban transport system.

public transport have an improved perception of safety. However, the rapid sprawl of metropolitan Melbourne has resulted in a lack of adequate public transport services for many suburban areas. An increase in the use of public transport has been linked to a wide range of social benefits for communities. Public transport not only reduces dependence on cars, but has also been shown to benefit community health and wellbeing. For those without a car, public transport also provides access to services and connection to wider community. Village Well, Australia’s leading Place Making consultancy, has been involved in a number of transport related projects including community consultation and research exploring the connection between train stations and community wellbeing.

Ralph Green

Mick Douglas RMIT

Ralph Green is the Director of Visionary Design Development. He

Mick is a public artist, senior lecturer at RMIT University School of

EQUITY OF ACCESS TO TRANSPORT THE UNIVERSAL MOBILITY INDEX

TRANSPORT AS A CULTURAL EXPERIENCE

Abstract Contrary to the myth of the abled/disabled dichotomy

Abstract The slogans of different Victorian State Governments

holds undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications in Optometry and has worked in clinical practice, academia, hospital settings and in developing world aid projects. Throughout 1998 – 2002 he served as an advisor to transport ministers in the Kennett and Bracks’ governments, chaired the Victorian Motorcycle Council and was the motorcycle representative on the Road Safety Reference Group. In 2006 he was the first optometrist to be appointed to the ophthalmology department of the Alfred Hospital. He served as a director of the Australian Latin American Business Council in 2006/7 and this year accepted a position as Community Education Projects Manager with the Optometrists Association of Australia. Also this year he was awarded a Masters of Social Science (International Development) from RMIT University after completing a thesis in the field of disability studies.

everyone is likely to experience a period of disability as part of the normal life cycle. Transport modes provide the vital link across the built environment yet design and construction continue to present barriers. While access audits provide some insight to improving equity of access, reports are limited in scope by the brief, multiple levels of responsible authorities and not directly reflective of the wishes of people with disabilities. To address these deficits a new composite human development indicator – the Universal Mobility Index (UMI) – is introduced. Projected on the theoretical foundations of literature reviews within three theoretical fields: 1) Human Development / Quality of Life and indicators, 2) Models of Disability and 3) Built Environment Access Provision and Policy Making, the UMI accords with the World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Functioning Illness and Health. The Index quantitatively measures, comparatively rates and longitudinally tracks, equity of access. It is the first and only tool that measures the lived experience of physical access across all parts of the built environment; illuminating how barriers to mobility discriminately constrain the autonomy of people with disabilities to exercise their full human capabilities through denying or restricting participation in community, educational, occupational and many other activities. This research provided the first theoretical and methodological framework for measuring equity of access across all parts of the built environment.

Architecture & Design and founder of arts groups Tramtactic and Cultural Transports Collective. Tramtactic and Cultural Transports Unit undertake collaborative, cross-cultural and transportative art projects based on modes of transport. For the cultural festival of the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games, Mick collaborated with Pakistani vehicle decorators to make ‘W-11 Tram: an art of journeys’ - a project that transformed the experience of a journey by tram which recently completed a second season over last summer. Recent experimental projects include ‘Ride-on-Dinner’ - a participatory performance project involving host artists serving up a 3-course slow-food meal to a swarm of cyclists over the duration of evening cycle rides. A book documenting his ten-year collaborative project ‘tramjatra: imagining Melbourne and Kolkata by tramways’ was recently published in South Asia and Australia.

that have adorned vehicle registration plates in the last decade point to the uncertainties of transportation. Firstly we had ‘Victoria – on the move’, followed by ‘Victoria – the place to be’. With a foot on the clutch, we can consider transport as perhaps not a matter of either moving through or being in a place. Matters of transport have us at a volatile intersection of forces about place, community, collective culture and individual autonomy. Different modes of transport clearly have their own logic, rhythm and momentum that shape the experience of movement, the social activities and cultural implications around them. Yet different cultures can practice very distinctly different approaches toward travelling in what seems to be a common technology of transport. When my train of thought is interrupted by the sight of a large woman I’ve seen tens of times walking past my window, each time carrying a weight-reduced form of herself, I’m reminded there is much more we ought to give carriage to within the game of transport.

MOBILE CITITES AND SOCIAL EQUITY Professor Frank Fisher

Dr Janet Stanley

Professor Frank Fisher is the retired (2006) Director of the

Janet Stanley is the Senior Manager, Research and Policy at

THE TAO OF CITY CYCLING: EVERYDAY TRANSCENDENCE

SOCIAL EQUITY AND MOBILITY

Abstract For some years, with my neurologist colleague John

Abstract Significant numbers of Australians have limited choices

Monash Uni. Graduate School of Environmental Science. Currently he is the Director, The Understandascope, Monash U. & Convenor, Graduate Sustainability Programs, Swinburne UT. For 10 years Professor Fisher was an electrical power engineer with European transnational engineering companies. As a health consumer advocate he is on, at any time, over a dozen committees nationally related to health. His primary interests are 1) the social construction of reality and how recognising it can prompt more thoughtful and effective lives. 2) applying such thinking to energy and health issues. His recent book “Response Ability: Environment, Health & Everyday Transcendence”, was published by Vista in 2006.

Merory, I have been teaching a short course on the Tao of City Cycling. The aim is to introduce commuter cyclists to consciously cycle inside the social dynamics of the road. This means recognising that society “constructs” its commuting environment (like everything else!) and that once its social dynamics are recognised and built into one’s travel behaviour, commuting options can be radically improved in terms of safety and general enjoyment of the exercise. On arriving at a red-lit pedestrian crossing, a cyclist can transform herself into a pedestrian, walk through it and resume cycling on the other side. As a living example of this process my bicycle will be “deconstructed” for some of the ways I fit it into commuting dynamics in Melbourne. By this means I will be able to park it in the lecture theatre - thereby providing another illustration of the use of the social constructions that give us our everyday expectations and acceptances of life.

the Brotherhood of St Laurence, Australia, a large non-government agency, Senior Research Fellow, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University and Honorary Research Fellow at the National Research Centre for the Prevention of Child Abuse, Monash University. Janet undertakes social policy research in a range of fields including equity in response to climate change, transport, child welfare, community arts and neighbourhood renewal. Forthcoming book (September 2007): Currie, G., Stanley, J., Stanley, J., (eds) No Way to Go: Transport and Social Disadvantage in Australian Communities, Monash Press. Previous book: Stanley, J.R. & Goddard, C.R. (2002) In the Firing Line: Violence and Power in Child Protection Work. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester.

as to how, and if, they can travel. Poor mobility options place people at risk of being excluded from important aspects of society and thus adversely impact on personal and societal well-being. Many young people, older people, people with a disability, those on low incomes and Indigenous Australians experience transport disadvantage. The consequences of transport disadvantage can include reduced educational achievement, poorer job opportunities, less social engagement, less involvement in recreational and leisure pursuits, greater difficulty in obtaining medical services when required, as well as many similar impacts. Minimum public transport service levels, in terms of frequency, coverage, ease of use and safety, provide a safety net in terms of minimising likely transport disadvantage. Looming over the issue of transport disadvantage for the future is the issue of climate change. Transport is the third largest and second fastest source of greenhouse gas emissions in Australia. Responses to climate change in transport (e.g.carbon pricing) are likely to contribute to greater patronage on public transport. These responses are also likely to increase the costs of car use in urban fringe, regional and rural areas. This will compound problems for disadvantaged groups who currently rely on car use for mobility. As a consequence, enhanced provision of alternative transport options to the car, such as public/community transport, walking and cycling, becomes both more important and more justified, on both social

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

Beatriz C. Maturana

Transported – Collective Transport Sustainable Cities Introduction Transported has the duel theme of collective transport and sustainable cities. It provides the context to explore the relationship between mobility and the environment and to consider these issues separately from current models of delivery. The notion of collective transport as distinct from public transport permits a conversation about how we travel, not how it is provided, and allows an investigation of the differences between individual car transport and collectively owned, used or shared transportation vehicles. Is transport a right provided collectively through a redistribution of resources or a privilege earned through economic autonomy and independence? If the answer is choice, can we choose collective transport if it is inconvenient, expensive or effectively privileged through location? What are the true costs (social, economic and environmental) of these transport alternatives? Sustainable cities could be argued to be a contradiction in terms. The global trend to urban habitation places this contradiction in a more complex setting that challenges how we socially organize our cities in relation to employment, participation and social equity and the impact this organisation has on the environment. It is often argued that Australian cities do not have the density, the social organisation, culture, urban design or planning to provide a viable alternative to car dependency. A quick glance at comparable Anglo-capital cities will quickly dispel this myth. Other capital cities provide inspiring responses. But all of this really misses the point. Can we afford not to have an efficient, affordable and accessible transport system? Transported explores this question and offers a forum in which to construct a proposition that may hold the answer.

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

Beatriz C. Maturana Beatriz C. Maturana is an architect, urban design and the President and founder of Architects for Peace. Born in Santiago, Chile she has lived in Australia for 20 years. Her studies in architecture were curtailed in the early 1980’s due to the political situation in Chile and she completed her degree at RMIT University and a Masters of Urban Design at the University of Melbourne where she is currently a PhD candidate researching Architectural Education and the Public Interest. She teaches at RMIT University and tutors at the University of Melbourne. Beatriz has worked with the Overseas Project Corporation of Victoria, Australian Volunteers International (AVI), the Ministry of Housing (Victoria) and the City of Darebin. In Nicaragua, she lectured in architecture at the National University of Engineering and assessed Habitat for Humanity projects. As part of a multi-disciplinary team, she visited Baucau, Timor Leste to assist in the establishment of a planning framework. Her architectural work includes childcare centres, maternal and child health, sport pavilions, residential and urban design projects.

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

Anthony McInenny

Transported Event Coordination In coordinating the program and the day’s events, Architects for Peace has combined our usual flair for creative works, collective participation, informative presentations and informed discussion. Our events rely on the goodwill and time of a range of experts from the fields of urban and social planning and the creative arts and design. The events are low cost, accessible and are designed to engage with the general public as well as the professions of the built environment. The program for Transported is divided into three panels: Environment Transport and Culture, Mobile Cities and Social Equity and Political Persuasions. The enclosed transcripts cover the first two panels. We acknowledge the ongoing partnership with RMIT Public Art and the specific support for this event from VicHealth to make this event possible. Anthony McInneny Anthony McInneny is an Artist, educator and creative producer. He is the Coordinator of Cultural Planning and Development at the City of Knox (an outer suburban municipality of Melbourne) Chair of the Public Art Advisory Committee, City of Melbourne and Studio Leader at RMIT University, Public Art. Anthony’s work centres on the artist and public space with a particular emphasis on the suburbs of metropolitan Melbourne. Anthony aims to influence the processes of urban development by engaging artist in latent public spaces and unlikely infrastructure developments such as skate parks, suburban shopping centres, freeway under crofts and malls. He has been the co-coordinator, creative producer and production manager for Architects for Peace public events including IntentCity (2004), Underconstruction (2005) and the Launch of Architects for Peace Pro Bono Services (2006)

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

Nicholas Low

Sustainable Collective Transport Key note address Bio Australasian Centre for the Governance and Management of Urban Transport (GAMUT) Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Associate Professor Nicholas Low received his Master of Science in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Strathclyde, Scotland, in 1971, where he won the year prize of the Royal Town Planning Institute. He has taught planning theory, urban studies and environmental ethics in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning since 1974. He has published many international journal articles and books including Planning, Politics and the State (Unwin-Hyman, 1991). In 1997 he organised the University of Melbourne Conference on Environmental Justice. His book (with Dr Brendan Gleeson) Justice, Society and Nature (Routledge, 1998) won the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award of the International Studies Association of the USA for the year’s best book on ecological politics. His book (also with Gleeson) Australian Urban Planning (Allen and Unwin, 2000) was launched by the Victorian Minister for Planning in 2000. Associate Professor Low's interests include urban planning, politics and state theory, environmental justice, participation, decision-making and problem solving, and land markets. He is currently working on a book on the world-wide unsustainability of transport infrastructure, and a more publicly accessible text on environmental justice

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

Abstract In this presentation I first pin down what I mean by ‘sustainable’. Except in a trivial dictionary sense, ‘sustainability’, I argue, always and only refers to the scale of impact of an economic system on the global environment. The ‘economy’ is what we call the principal mode of interaction of humans with the natural world. The urban transport system is a subset of ‘the economy’. The fact of global warming caused by burning fossil fuel tells us that our economy is unsustainable. Climate change is the greatest threat to humanity that we face today. How can transport systems be changed to reduce their climate impact? I argue for a ‘portfolio’ approach to reducing greenhouse emissions from transport. We need quantitative targets and new data to be collected to tell us whether we are on track to reducing emissions. Part of the transport portfolio consists of a much stronger role for collective and active transport for many routine city trips. Australian cities have poor infrastructure for walking and cycling and a poorly managed and incoherent bus, train and tram service. Nothing much in the collective transport system connects well to anything else. I argue for a unified network approach to transport management including buses and trams, trains with cycling and walking, planned and managed by a single multi-stakeholder authority. I offer the example of Zürich, Switzerland as a best practice international benchmark.

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

Edited Transcript. Sustainable Collective Transport. Nicholas Low I will make six points about sustainability, first in rather an abstract sense. First of all, the triple bottom line doesn’t really get you anywhere. Triple bottom line is a strange fantasy that has lost touch with reality and is largely meaningless. Unfortunately they can all too easily suggest that we have to sustain the economy and society in its present form, whereas this can actually be transformed in order to sustain the environment. Thirdly they tend to conceal the fundamental conflicts among environmental, social and economic objectives: conflicts which we can only resolve if they are recognised. A bottom line is to abolish the conflict and contend that they don’t really exist. Fourthly sustainability, in my argument, is always only about three things – the environment, the economy and their relationship. The economy is how humanity typically does business with nature - that really is the definition for the economy. Unfortunately we sort of forget that our principal interaction with nature is the economy and of course we exploit nature, as we have to really, and we do it unsustainably. So a sustainable economy is one which allows the exploitation of nature without depleting natural capital or whatever you choose to call everything that is important in nature to us intrinsically and instrumentally. I don’t want to dwell on terms like natural capital. Some people object to the word capital on principal but it doesn’t really matter. It refers to what is important to us in nature and what is of use to us. I use the logic of Herman Daly. He tells us that there are three economic functions, one of which is usually talked about and that is allocation. Another of which has kind of been brushed aside is distribution and one of which is constantly talked about but we don’t really understand is scale. So allocation, distribution and scale are economic terms. We talk about an optimal allocation as efficiency and economics being sometimes about nothing but efficiency. I might add there are two “e”s for efficiency – the efficient use of resources and the efficient allocation of capital – they are different. Social justice is usually called “just” or “fair”, a fair go, and the optimal scale of the economy is a sustaining scale and a sustaining scale is essentially about the conservation of nature. And the

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key question we face today is this, “Can economic development be reconciled with social justice and ecological sustainability?” and here I am using the term sustainability to mean something important and not to cover up the conflict which the triple bottom line tends to conceal. I remind you of the statement by Morris Strong, the first director of the United Nations Environmental Program, that sustainable development has involved a process of a deep and profound change in the political and socio-economic and technologies of the world including the re-definition of relations between developer and developing countries. Climate change. Well, climate change is the greatest threat we face today and there is a tendency to think of climate change in terms of a 50 year time horizon. Climate change goes on a lot longer than beyond 50 years into the indefinite future and its not just a market failure, as Mick Stern remarked, but a government failure. The threat is not just about global warming, not just about a warming climate which we may or may not like or may or may not be good for certain places in the world (it is probably bad for Australia), but it is about destabilising the climate so that it ticks into a deep period of mega warming as is known to have occurred in geological time before humans evolved. Now geologists and even climate sceptics admit this but what they omit to mention is that the last time we had a period of mega warming we didn’t have humans on the planet. Now we have 6-10 billion, all of whom are going to be affected. This is a threat of humanity, and so a human crisis, even more profound than an environmental crisis, so perhaps we can sort of fix it. But developing countries, in fairness and justice, have to increase their emissions in order to allow their economies to grow because that’s the way economies do grow, by using fossil fuels. We can’t even do without our fossil fuels here in Australia, which is one of the richest countries in the world, so we can’t really preach to developing countries or nations to reduce theirs because we’re not in a position to make that sort of argument. So, we have to reduce our emissions by a much greater than average global level and I am going to argue that an 80% or 90% reduction is possibly actually not too difficult. The logic I use is that of Pacla and Socolow in the Science in 2003, who have a very simple logic. You draw the line of business as usually emissions, which

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

goes up and up, and then worked out your desired level of emissions over time and then you have to think of what do we have to do to actually bend that upper line down to the desired level and you think of a number of actions which might do it. They call it portfolio thinking and I think it’s a nice idea and there are two points to make about portfolio thinking. First of all they actually focussed on technology on a very broad scale and I think it has to be brought down to a sectoral scale. So we need to bring the focus down to a sector level and broaden it to include, I think, behaviour change because I think they (Pacla and Socolow) had a rather technological fix attitude. The logic is good but you can’t do everything with technology. There will also be inter-sectoral issues as between transport and energy which is critically important which they don’t necessarily deal with. An important point which they have, I think, is that we focussed on social actions that don’t actually demand radical new inventions or major lifestyle changes. The point they are making is that “Yes” we do have to change but it’s surprisingly easy to make changes, make the changes in major emission levels without actually radically changing lifestyle, by making relatively little changes to lifestyle. Also we should consider not only actions but also barriers to action. What is actually stopping us? So what should be in our transport portfolio? What I suggest is a sort of 30% to the power of five approach. At the top is travelling business as usual. There are five elements which I think are possible candidates for wedges. The first is travel demand management. If we apply a 30% reduction to this it would not be too difficult. Travel demand management simply means we have to travel less. Second, travel carbon efficiency shift by 30% to those of our journeys we can do by walking and cycling which doesn’t emit carbon dioxide. We can do that in about a 30% shift in our travel carbon efficiency. Thirdly to get higher vehicle occupancy we need to cram more people on the transport we do use and we do that best on by public transport. You may think that train travel is crowded but in actual fact if you look at the system as a whole it isn’t really well travelled. We don’t use the whole system very well and we can get a much higher vehicle occupancy. Again, a 30% increase perhaps there. Vehicle fuel efficiency. A lot of people drive

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

big cars and we could just cut the fuel we use by 30% by driving smaller cars. You can still get around by car. Still not small enough perhaps but the Prius is the sort of technology that means we don’t all have to drive Toorak tractors. And finally, fuel greenhouse performance. There is certainly potential for some use of fuel which doesn’t have so much of an impact on climate change. And if we do all these things by making reduction by 30% improvement we get an 83% overall reduction in greenhouse emissions. None of that is really terribly difficult.

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

Cities 2001

Daily Trips

Daily

%of daily

% of daily

per

mechanised trips on

trips by

inhabitant

trips per

foot and by private

public

inhabitant

bicycle

transport

motorized modes

Melbourne

3.72

3.09

Amsterdam

2.9

2.15

51.4

33.9

14.7

Brussels

2.82

2.08

27.5

58.9

13.6

Copenhagen 3

2.44

48.9

12.1

Helsinki

3.1

2.41

London

2.65

1.86

31.1

50.2

18.8

Munich

3.2

2.3

37.5

40.6

21.9

Stockholm

2.77

2.07

31.4

47.1

21.6

Source: UITP Mobility in Cities Database 2001 I put this up so you can get a comparison between Melbourne and a range of European cities and the point here really is that some very good changes are being made, simply by making Melbourne a bit more like these European cities. The figure in the right hand column is the percentage of daily use of public transport. We can double that. We should be able to double that. The percentage of daily trips on foot or by bike, actually I think that is an optimistic figure, it is probably less. We calculated the journey to work (on foot or by bike) at about 2%. That’s (the figure in the table for trips on foot or by bike) all the trips including recreation trips. And you can probably get the age group if you want to put out a report which suggests that we actually need a bicycle infrastructure plan for Melbourne. We scarcely have one at the moment. If people had a better bike infrastructure, people would use bikes. Under that you can see that in comparison it is not too hard to convert Melbourne to a city which cuts its emissions by about 80%+. Its all about collective transport and that is really the point of my talk. A 30% improvement in public transport use and I think we would have an efficient transport systems and high level of public use.

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

We need multi model network plans for efficient electric transport in dispersed cities. Paul Mees has been developing some for a long time and this is correct. We can have excellent public transport for dispersed cities and there are good examples. So what does this actually mean? The design of a city. We need easy to use highly visible modal interchanges. The example from Zurich is perhaps a bit too much to ask, not all of the examples are as good as this but you can see a train on one platform and the bus serving the local area on the other. That is a really easy interchange. Not all of this is quite accurate but I am just putting the slide up to show what is best practice. You know, you go to any interchange station where the trams or buses interchange with trains in Melbourne and you are so far from that it is just laughable. Another example from a modal interchange in Gottenberg Sweden- central station at the back, you just walk onto the central station and you get onto a tram immediately and there are small barriers here but it is very easy to mix walking with trams. Another example from Perth - here are the buses going up to the top, there’s the railway station you go up in the lift and you get a bus into the local area. This is network planning. In the map of the route in Zurich, there are light blue lines for buss line, interconnecting with the black which are the trains. What you need are very simple routes. You don’t want your bus lines wandering all over the places as they do in Melbourne and it takes you a long time to get anywhere. They have to connect, be simple and legible routes to connect bus lines with train lines. You also need simple timetables to connect buses to trains. Here (on the Zurich timetable) you can see that Monday to Friday you’ve got buses at roughly 15 minute intervals with the basic hourly interval as the norm. Hourly intervals between 6.00 in the morning and 11.00 at night, (with buses every 15 minutes) seven days a week and you know exactly when the bus is coming. It always comes at the same time on the hour and that timetable is seven days a week. Very simple to work out and that is the way to handle transport in a dispersed city. Why simplicity and legibility? Neilson is a Norwegian transport planner who was here and his points were these: you need simplicity and legibility because many public transport users will actually be new or occasional users. You can’t design a system on the basis that everybody is using it already. You have to design a system so that it appeals to the new users. So it has to be

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

simple and actually you should not have to consult the internet to get around the system which you do at the moment (in Melbourne). There is a wonderful internet site brought out by Met link. It’s very, very good but it just shows you how complicated it is to get around Melbourne’s public transport system. Trams separated from cars mixed with pedestrians - trams are very predictable creatures, they run on tracks, you can’t really miss them. The only people who would perhaps (miss them) are blind people but even there you can handle that. Very few people get into tangles with trams and the one thing that we have learnt from trams, pretty well all over the world, is that they don’t cause accidents with pedestrians. I am not sure that I can remember an incident involving trams and pedestrians in Melbourne but I would perhaps be told of one. You also need links to foot and bike paths connecting with the public transport route. And pedestrian routes are extremely important. You have got to have pleasant walking routes if people are going to walk for one or two blocks which they are generally quite happy to do if there are routes that are pleasant and safe. In Zurich there is very good bike storage so you can ride your bike to the station through the excellent bike infrastructure and shared paths and park it under cover. Bike, trams and pedestrians can mix safely. The problem is the car which is unpredictable and sometimes violent but there is really no problem in mixing bikes, trams and pedestrians as we know from Amsterdam. It allows cars but the cars are tame on the whole. And finally, “How much does this cost?” Zurich is world’s best practice. It serves an area about the same as metropolitan Melbourne, its population is about one third of Melbourne 1 to 1.2 million, there are 3,500 bus, trains and tram routes, passenger kilometres travelled are about 2 billion. Of course every public transport system in the world for a major city is subsidized with the possible exception of Tokyo which decided that everything should be private, but I don’t have the figures for Tokyo. The public transport system in Zurich is about 28 million Australia dollars which boils down to a cost per passenger kilometre travelled of about 11 cents – that is 11 cents per passengers kilometre travelled. That is the public subsidy out of the budget to keep Zurich

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

running. And of course Melbourne too has a public subsidy but if we compare Melbourne’s public transport system with Zurich we find that the public subsidy is about 17 cents compared with Zurich about 11 cents per passenger kilometre travelled. Contrary to reports in the press by the Department of Infrastructure that Melbourne’s public transport system is good value for money, I would suggest to you that it is bad value for money compared to world’s best practice. So why aren’t we doing it? It’s not very difficult, not rocket science. We know how. We have the best practice examples. You don’t have to look very far; you can find it on the internet so let’s get on with it. Thanks.

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

Leigh Glover

Sustainable Urban Mobility Policies: Ideas for Melbourne Environment Transport and Culture Bio Australasian Centre for the Governance and Management of Urban Transport (GAMUT) Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Leigh Glover is a Research Fellow and Associate Director at the Australasian Centre for the Governance and Management of Urban Transport (GAMUT), University of Melbourne, Australia, working on a sustainable transport initiative supported by the Volvo Foundation. Prior to this position he was a Policy Fellow and Assistant Professor at the Centre for Energy and Environmental Policy, University of Delaware, where he was engaged in research, research supervision, graduate teaching, and graduate student advising. His research interests include urban and transport sustainability, global environmental politics, environmental policy and planning, environmental and political theory, and issues of science, technology and society, in which he has researched, published, and lectured. He holds a Ph.D. in Energy & Environmental Policy. Before becoming an academic, he worked in state and federal government in Australia, undertaking policy formulation and research in the areas of climate change, water resources, and public land planning.

Abstract In response to the request to provide an overview of transport sustainability in Melbourne, this presentation identifies three key issues where current practices have created significant failures in

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

urban sustainable transport, nominates three often-discussed policy responses as offering few short-term benefits and should accordingly not be considered as priorities for policy responses, and suggests three policy responses that offer the prospect of immediate progress towards the goal of a sustainable urban transport system. Edited Transcript. Sustainable Urban Mobility Policies: Ideas for Melbourne Leigh Glover I have been asked to give a description of Melbourne’s transport problems and some potential solutions and do that in about 20 minutes. No real problem there I don’t think! It is symptomatic in the sense that the transport problem in Melbourne is a very big problem and really there is some urgency to it as Nick Lowe described to you. So my cunning plan is to pick three not so desirable solutions that are offered in the public transport discourse and then look at three solutions that I suggest to be a higher priority. Three big problems are these (from the screen); 

Car dependency



Mobility inequity



Inadequate governance

And they are in fact strongly related. Melbourne is a car dependent city. We measure care dependency frequently by the journey to work. Mode

Journeys

Car

1,031,177

76.4

Taxi/motorbike/truck

26,613

2.0

Public Transport

170,6698

12.6

Walked only

37,488

2.8

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

Bicycle

12,6837

0.9

Other modes

10,924

0.8

Worked at home

660,870

4.5

(Source: ABS, 2001 Census Table 1:) Car Dependency & Peak Oil. Journeys to Work in Melbourne 2001 Here is the journey to work figures from 2001 and we can see that three quarters are taken by car, therefore we are a car dependent travelling society and, as Nick’s data shown to you in the previous presentation demonstrates, if we look at the overall journey’s, public transport use actually drops to a lower figure (than 12.6% shown on the screen). As we all know, the vehicle fleet runs on oil and diesel. The transport sector is dependent upon these fossil fuels. Dependency is 93% according to government figures of 2004. That’s not a problem. We are an oil producing nation. We have our own oil production. Unfortunately we are heading towards that peak oil proposition, we’re about at the level of peak oil production and we currently have self sufficiency of around 70%. So that defines that our level of oil imports will increase. So we already have a linkage between our car dependency and reliance on fossil fuel and reliance on a depleting level of oil here. That’s not a problem if we keep on importing for ever, presumably, but there is a flaw in that logic. And the flaw in that logic is that the same characteristics of non renewable resource that apply to Australia also apply to the rest of the world’s oil reserves. The Association of the Study of Peak Oil are the leading promoter of the peak oil concept, although it comes from geologists of the 1950’s, and suggests that oil production follows a bell curve and under the numbers it suggests that we are also globally at or about our level of peak production. These figures are disputed; they are disputed in either direction of course. However, the figures on the world’s largest oil reserves in the Middle East are in fact accurate.

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

It is also argued that there are a number of oil saves, other expensive oil reserves, but they too follow the same production curve. Let’s look to the question of gas emissions. As we combust these fossil fuels we produce gas emissions, mainly CO2 from oil. How are we going? Well, nationally our transport sector between 1990 and 2004, according to the national greenhouse gas inventory 2004, increased output by 43%. I want to turn quickly now to the issue of passenger transport. And, I want to draw our attention to two features of these data, firstly of course is just how well performing we are in terms of production of greenhouse gases from our transport sector. We are doing terrifically well there and far better than our competing European cities. So from the first point we’ve got a highly energy inefficient, greenhouse emissions efficient, transport system. If we are looking at high performing European cities, which are a valid comparison in many ways, we can see that those cities performing better have a higher use of the public transport and I think that that’s a clear link and you find that throughout the study. So if you want to reduce our gas emissions then you have to look at promoting public transport. Nick has already described to you the “business as usual” curve for these emissions so, what is our base case? This is from the BTRE in Canberra report from 05 and this is the “business as usual” case and if we don’t do anything this is where transport emissions are going to go. Basically up and up. Now just a quick side view. Any of those sold on your fuel efficiency in the car sector might be a little bit disappointed to know that today’s figures have the same emissions as the early 1960’s. How are we going in Victoria? Similar kind of picture. The graph there shows the increase of transport emissions and we’ve got a similar trend to the rest of the nation, not surprising. There are greenhouse gas emission targets as you have already heard. Victoria nominated itself with a 60% target with a 2000 level by 2050. There is also the KYOTO protocol which we have not yet

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

signed (September 2007). There are proposals for further cuts. There are equity proposals for greenhouse gas productions which is our per capita level use compared to a global average. In actual fact, it doesn’t matter which of these particular objectives you look at, we don’t make any of them. We are going to see later on about the question of equity mobility, but there is an indication of a socio economic distribution across Melbourne form the Melbourne Social Atlas. Put very simply, a problem we can see is that the outer suburbs suffer a certain disadvantage. There is also a transport disadvantage. This is the access to public transport against the travel to work figures but we can generally see what car dependency really means. Those living inner city have access to public transport, the rest are dependent on the car to get to work. And you can see where this is heading. Our colleagues in Sydney have pur together an index of equity in mobility. The index for Melbourne looked at mortgages, inflation and petrol prices and produced the following diagram which clearly shows that those suburbs most distanced from the city centre without access to public transport are highly vulnerable to increasing mortgages and increase of the petrol prices. I suggested earlier that petrol prices can only go in one direction. Thirdly, a couple of words about the question of governance. We talk about Melbourne having a transport system as a convenient phrase but it does rather imply that there is a system out there ie. that it is a coherent unit. This is a bit of a stretch. We have probably got a few transport systems that provide mobility. Obviously we have a government in Melbourne. We have a local government and state government but we don’t have a Melbourne government in itself. The other governance issues here are that we divide collective and road transport, in an institutional sense, we most certainly divide it in a planning sense and we divide it in a funding sense. There is much more funding for the road transport and much less for collective transport and we plan this separately. So we can respond to these issues with a variety of policy approaches, some of which I think are more suitable for our circumstances and others which we should be continued to be pursued but at a lower priority.

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

Some of the not so promising solutions are these. I’m afraid one is the green favourite the hydrogen vehicle. Increasing car occupancy and congestion relief and increasing road capacity. Behind the fuel cell is a mature technology. Basically its design dates to the time of the battery. Its application to cars proved problematic in the last hundred plus years. It’s largely a question of energy density here. It’s really hard to store hydrogen that will give the same energy distance compared to conventional internal combustion engines. And it may be that we’ve pursued the wrong direction here and it should have been used for heavy vehicles. However the real problem is not only how we get a hydrogen car going further from a couple of blocks away from the Academy Awards to the front steps, but the more difficult problem that we simply don’t have a hydrogen distribution system. Again, here the energy density question comes into play and by way of a quick comparison it will take about 17 petrol trucks to carry the hydrogen for one. Therefore, I would suggest to you that the hydrogen car is not actually inevitable at this point and I am not entirely keen on the other alternative fuels either, including, I’m afraid, biofuel. There is difficulty in lightening the burden of energy. Most of these fuels, including bio fuel, take an awful lot of energy to produce. Australian agriculture runs on fossil fuel, they are going to use tractors to plant crops and for their harvest. To then put this in trucks to carry it to the factories to process and then distribute it to the one currently run biofuel station is questionable. The sort of things you are looking at there, in brief, is a question of supply. What are the overall environmental costs of these things? What is the cost of production, what are the greenhouse gas emissions, again in total, and where will the energy be available? The pursuit of the hybrid vehicle for alternative fuel should be looked at by those five points. It should be a long term target, quite possibly, but not a medium one. Car occupancy. It is suggested that the current levels of car occupancy is about 1.4. I have talked to my colleagues about that figure. I think it might be a tad optimistic. More likely to be lower. Car pooling is a favourite option but it has never produced much of an impact in terms of the changing mass mobility. It probably could be in relation to company sponsored efforts, to where you could apply it to a common destination. As Paddy Moriarty pointed out, there is no point pushing up

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

vehicle occupancy because once you start going to multiple destinations the vehicle simply becomes a taxi and you’re actually not making much of a saving there. Vehicles used in this way are starting to compete with collective transport and to the detriment of environmental debts and those journeys done by public transport. Congestion relief through road capacity. It’s interesting to get a global perspective, to look at the urban history of Melbourne itself and to read that the 1960’s are meant to be the era of rapid freeway building when the road lobby was in its great ascendancy. I would put it to you that we may now be living in the era of Melbourne’s greatest freeway expansion and certainly through its expenditure it is possibly true. The rationale behind freeway essentially hasn’t change in the post war era. It’s been largely about providing access and increasing road capacity with the agenda of reducing congestions. That’s an interesting proposition but one which has been largely undone by both the evidence and, if you like, the empirical results of being a motorist. Essentially increasing road capacity induces demand. Traffic grows to fill available freeway space. And so, city planners and public authorities have turned to various means to try to control congestion, especially increasing road capacity. In reducing user demand is the idea of congestion charging. The London efforts, which are quite well known, have been successful in both reducing congestion and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from that area. However, Singapore has also had a road pricing system for perhaps the longest period, for the entire city state and this is used to make motoring quite expensive and has some of the highest per capita distance driven in the world on that tiny island simply because road transport is the preserve of those who are better off. And yet, in China you have road pricing that means that the roads are empty. It means then that the notion of road pricing and distance charging is not a universal fix. It is not entirely clear what the factors behind its success are. I think one of these is clearly related to scale. In terms of London, the City of London is actually a tiny enclave in a rather large metropolis and that nearly all the journeys in Greater London avoid the City of London and the congestion charging does not apply to one of the major north/south and the other major east/west borough area.

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So, the idea of building your way out of congestions and the fact that this may resolve the aforementioned problems of Melbourne, I think, is clearly naive. I think there are three high priority solutions and I base this on a simple rationale, some would say crude. Greenhouse gas reduction in the short term. We are looking to address mobility for the disadvantaged in society, we are looking to emulate “best practice” and I am sure some of you want to reach for a revolver when you hear the phrase “best practice” but as we have been dealing with “worst practice” it might come to a choice of words. I am offering some of these solutions as they are practical and meaningful. But they might not be that well known. We are going to look at instigating what might be called an integrated transport system offering three separate things: 

A freedom of scale can apply to this, there’s the notion of modal integration train, tram, bus, bicycle etc.



The idea of the transport system such as roads and collective transport, and



The idea of the transport and land use in planning putting a premium on transport theory.

International experience suggests, I think, that only a rapid mode shift to public transport and collective transport can reduce green house gas emissions quickly. There are other demands and options that have worked and the universal finding is that the mode shift is the short cut. The past suggests that rapid change through economic collapse is a less attractive option. Secondly, as one of the earlier graphics suggested, the public transport systems with the highest use tend to be those that are the best integrated. This is in terms of the modal integration. So how are we doing in Melbourne on the modal integration thing? I’ve done a bit of a score chart here for you. Combined ticketing, unified fare, and unified system for ticketed fare takings? Yes, we have all those things and it ought to be commended. And they certainly help in creating a multi modal system.

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Integrated journey planning? Yes, via the internet. It rather assumes you have the internet with you and it rather assumes that you converse in the English language and presents a number of other barriers that are probably quite real: barriers to those lower socio-economic groups. Interchange facilities? Arguable but I don’t think we really have them in Melbourne. We might have some coincidence of bus stations and train stops but they are hardly interchange facilities. Timetable and service coordination so when you get off the bus a train might be there be there? We absolutely don’t have that. Network planning? No. We don’t have that. Links with cycling? I guess some might argue but I don’t think it has been planned in any way so I think there is a “no” on that. The other two levels are more abstract if you like, and I’ll say less about those but we do need to think about the question of planning of the transport system- putting the two parts together and thinking about the transport system as a whole and I think that goes along with re-balancing the transport funding arrangements as at the moment. We are also concerned with the difficult question of the ongoing question of transport and land use planning - the idea of integrated urban planning, or as some people would say urban planning in its true sense. Part of this problem in Melbourne is what would be called an implementation gap. A number of the policies in Melbourne 2030 were hastily designed. We have had a lot of trouble getting those expressed in development practice. I certainly endorse the remarks that the strong use of urban design, especially in terms of meeting local mobility needs at a local level is needed. We have to basically eliminate unnecessary trips and shorten the trip distance. Both those things have an affect because they influence our modal choice. Most cars used are predominantly used for a journey less than 8km. They are very close to walking and cycling distances if you can get them down. The way to address that generally is going to be through urban and land use planning.

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

I would strongly suggest that collective transport and public transport in the outer suburbs should get higher priority. We have strong grounds for that on the basis of equity and we also have strong grounds in terms of trying to shift car dependency. These are the most car dependent areas. We are obviously talking here in the first instance in terms of reorganising our bus system, because we need a density of service and we need more route directness, the tram network needs to be extended and return to the notion of an expanding train network. The arguments about why we shouldn’t service high demand centres such as the airport and Doncaster is beyond me. Thirdly and finally we need a system of transports governance. International experience clearly shows that institutions make a great difference. Great leadership is fine, political vision is fine but without the sort of institutions to lock those helpful visions and forge the future into place it is very hard to achieve them. It does seem to suggest that some kind of centralisation function in planning and certainly that is necessary in integrated planning and management. This could also be the venue to rebalance transport funding and that place for urban planning in its true sense. We should have greater public engagement in the question of transport. I think that we need greater public sector accountability in these institutions.

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

Mick Douglas

Transport as cultural experience Environment Transport and Culture Bio Mick Douglas is a public artist, senior lecturer at RMIT University School of Architecture & Design and founder of arts groups Tramtactic and Cultural Transports Collective. Tramtactic and Cultural Transports Unit undertake collaborative, cross-cultural and transportative art projects based on modes of transport. For the cultural festival of the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games, Mick collaborated with Pakistani vehicle decorators to make ’W-11 Tram: an art of journeys’ – a project that transformed the experience of a journey by tram which recently completed a second season over last summer. Recent experimental projects include ‘Ride-on-Dinner’ – a participatory performance project involving host artists serving up a 3-course slow-food meal to a swarm of cyclists over the duration of evening cycle rides. A book documenting his ten-year collaborative project ‘tramjatra: imagining Melbourne and Kolkata by tramways was recently published in South Asia and Australia. Abstract The slogans of different Victorian State Governments that have adorned vehicle registration plates in the last decade point to the uncertainties of transportation. Firstly we had ‘Victoria – on the move’, followed by ‘Victoria – the place to be’. With a foot on the clutch, we can consider transport as perhaps not a matter of either moving through or being in a place. Matters of transport have us at a volatile intersection of forces about place, community, collective culture and individual autonomy. Different modes of transport clearly have their own logic, rhythm and momentum that shape the experience of movement, the social activities and cultural implications around them. Yet different cultures can practice very distinctly different approaches toward travelling in what seems to be a common technology of transport. When my train of thought is interrupted by the sight of a large woman I’ve seen tens of times walking past my window, each time carrying a weightreduced form of herself, I’m reminded there is much more we ought to give carriage to within the game of transport.

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

Edited Transcript. Transport as cultural experience. Mick Douglas I am interested in the verb of transport so, if you up for a ride, I would like to see if we can go for a ride. What makes us move? I was at another transport forum last week at the Melbourne Town Hall which talked about the lack of political will from the leadership and that it will never move. I’m not sure. I use to ride my bike from Nth Fitzroy to the Southbank tram depot with about 15 to 20kg of tickets and electronic gear to run the WII tram for the second season over Melbourne’s last weeks of summer on Friday nights. On about week 13 out of a 20 week season, I arrived at the depot and parked my bike to see Yarra Trams other decorated tram. Unlike the W11 (Tramjatra) which had a “Love is Life” on the side of it - which is actually a copy from popular poetry which is emblazoned on the side of trucks and buses throughout Karachi and Pakistan- the new Yarra Trams decorated tram had large images of the same people in two types of clothing. One in plain clothes and the other in police uniform saying “Yarra Trams and Victoria Police proudly working together!” I think there is a subtitle there somewhere - “making public transport safe for you”. Would that move you to catch the trams and trains, hang around the train station a little more often, a little more regularly? I think you know where my allegiances lie. As a young man of 16 growing up in Perth, WA in a lower middle class outer suburban edge, I was well aware, even though I didn’t then have suicidal tendencies either, I was well aware in my own imagination that a way to top yourself was to park your car in the garage, leave it running, shut the garage door and wait. That was in my imagination as a 16 year old. I have worked with a post graduate student who has developed scenarios for a public bicycle system in Melbourne and he looked at the public bicycle system as a system of providing bicycles owned by collectives for use by the public, supplied at, as you might expect, interchange points.

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

One of the big barriers in Australia to do such a specific public bicycle system is helmets. We are the capital of the helmet law. I have been working with the tramways for 12 years or something now, particularly it started with a project working in Calcutta in India. A project called Tramjatra which is a hybrid word between English and Bengali, roughly translating as travel by tram. This project has been about imagining Melbourne and Calcutta through tramways, through the way in which tramways give us a take, an orientation and an experience of a city. We know that if you are from Melbourne, I’m an import, trams are very significant in the consciousness of Melbournians - even Australians have got that iconic thing (about trams), how we celebrate that iconic thing. As would be my way, I was just riding along on my bike, with my helmet on and at a very low speed 9.00am on a Sunday morning, and as I thought, in the wet weather, I could cross the tram tracks at the little angle that I did, obviously not remembering, and my wheel got stuck in the tram tracks and I thought I could just ride it out and, at the very low speed, I think I was about stationary and then I just plopped. It was quite ludicrous. As an 18 year old my sister was travelling in outback Western Australia with her new lover, driving back to Perth on a weekend and she went through the windscreen without a helmet on, through the windscreen, a hard bit of rock on the ground and we go the knock from the police 12 hours later. So, what makes us move and what makes the popular cultural imagination move to invest in more civic ways of transporting ourselves? (From the audience) Colour. Colour is a good one (From the audience) Public ownership Yes. What else could make us move? (From the audience) Rhythm. Rhythm. Yeah.

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

It’s true. I was actually presenting at the launch of Ulstom, which is one of the manufactures of two types of tram we have in Melbourne, I was presenting at their launch of their competition for design students to develop the face of a Melbourne tram. They were posturing for the release of a new tender for the Department of Infrastructure for the supply of trams to this city. And actually on this occasion, it was about 3 weeks prior to the Commonwealth Games; I made the jest to a group of design students there, trying to inspire them to think about how they might take on the task, the imagery of something significant to the trams. One of the things that I provoked them with was to imagine trying to dance on a trams. I hadn’t imagined dancing on a tram during the Commonwealth Games (where) we found out that people wanted to dance, people wanted to use their bodies in a civic space like a tram. And, interestingly the tram enabled this expression unlike other modes of transport and I hadn’t imagined that would happen. It was a discovery, by chance. But it is my suspicion that people are moved by story, that people are perhaps moved by experience. What they experienced. So, when I sit on my tram, or a tram - I don’t really have a tram, despite my wishes, despite my appearances, there are a couple of tickets that I wouldn’t mind validating. One is that I think that a ticket that allows funding for art and cultural development activities to be integrated with transportation planning and implementation. At State Government level, at provider level, at whatever multi-level of dis-coordination we currently have or more coordinated forms that we may have, I would have thought that we need people who are engaged in the way that people experience, their lives, their cities and their social relations with others to be working on that task. Second ticket is that I would like artists to be in that mix. Artists who are working for the feel of collective transportation and artists who work with the meter of experiencing space and time with a metropolis, that public transport and all modes of transport provided to us. That art of engaging in that meter in creative ways.

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

My third ticket I would validate, is that I think that on collective modes of transport it would be advantageous if there was somebody there to take the role of being a host, to be welcoming, take some pride in the space, to take some pride in the spatial relations between us and to share some of the ways in which we might work through the pleasures and the discomforts of the relations that we find ourselves in civic environments. We have lost the capacity, it seems, to value those social roles that actually provide the linkages between us and that in transportation. The fourth ticket that I would validate – only if the validating machine was working – would be slightly controversial. Actually, I don’t think there would be anything wrong in going to the extreme of privatisation of public, civic transportation delivery services and vehicles. When you have someone who takes pride in a space, when you have someone who takes pride in the hospitality that they are providing, they provide that little bit more. There’s something that they might normally expect, what they can already imagine but then perhaps they’ll have some pride and faith in their capacity to know something new, for them to discover something new, something unknown in the experience with others and to reach out, step outwards Thank you.

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

Frank Fisher

The Tao of City Cycling: Everyday Transcendence Environment Transport and Culture Bio Frank Fisher is the retired (2006) Director of the Monash Uni. Graduate School of Environmental Science. Currently, Director, the Understandascope, Monash U. & Convenor, Graduate Sustainability Programs, Swinburne UT. 10 years as an electrical power engineer with European transnational engineering companies. Father, two sons in their late 20s, partner a green farmer. Chronically ill for 45 years (Crohn's and consequences: 24 operations; 40 pills/day) and therefore health consumer advocate on, at any time, over a dozen committees nationally. Primary interests: 1) the social construction of reality and how recognising it can prompt more thoughtful and effective lives. 2) applying such thinking to energy and health issues. Recent book (2006) "Response Ability: Environment, Health & Everyday Transcendence", Vista. Abstract For some years, with my neurologist colleague John Merory, I have been teaching a short course on the Tao of City Cycling. The aim is to introduce commuter cyclists to consciously cycle inside the social dynamics of the road. This means recognising that society "constructs" its commuting environment (like everything else!) and that once its social dynamics are recognised and built into one's travel behaviour, commuting options can be radically improved in terms of safety and general enjoyment of the exercise. On arriving at a red lit pedestrian crossing, a cyclist can transform herself into a pedestrian, walk through it and resume cycling on the other side. As a living example of this process my bicycle will be "deconstructed" for some of the ways i fit it into commuting dynamics in Melbourne. By this means i will be able to

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

park it in the lecture theatre – thereby providing another illustration of the use of the social constructions that give us our everyday expectations and acceptances of life. Edited Transcript The Tao of City Cycling: Everyday Transcendence. Frank Fisher Before I deconstruct this (bicycle) for you I would like to make a few general comments about the things that you have been listening to. Firstly I am terribly saddened, and I don’t mean this facetiously, by where we are sitting (in a lecture theatre). This is what the feminists have been calling for 30 years a patriarchal arrangement. It is detestable. We are looking at the backs of each other’s heads. I would much prefer to be sitting in the rear and not be privileged by this podium or that sort of thing. And that goes very much for being transported as we have just now been. It is a very lovely thing to see transport in the way that Mick has been thinking of it. Really beautiful. It’s given me something to take and I have been a user, not so much of transport, but to transport of 40 years. I have been using bike riding for that long. That is essentially what I would like to pull apart for you today. As you have heard my interest is in the social construction of reality so the core course of our program at Swinburne is a thing called principles for sustainability and “the” prescribed textbook for it is “Metaphors to live by” so that’s a book by Lakoff and Johnson. Some of you may know Lakoff’s recent book. It’s called “Don’t Think of the Elephant” - politics of the way the thing presents themselves in a political, with a capital “P”, environment because we are all in politics right now sitting next to each other but that’s small people politics and the beauties of benign anonymity are something that I will come to perhaps later – that’s a topic for another day. But that is what we enjoy with trams and trains, benign anonymity, and I see my friend John Merory sitting right up the back, my collaborator in the course of the Tao of City Cycling. He, unfortunately, as some of us can imagine, has once been afflicted by the not so benign anonymity. He had his nose broken. The person who did that was probably off the planet and we would not want to restrict that sort of thing. It would give us a sort of draconian society that none of us would want to tolerate so, we just have to accept that sort of thing happens in the public domain.

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

Anyway, you have heard that I was an electrical engineer and just a few comments on where Mick was before. The efficiency of cars is unimaginable so low. The reason that we are talking about the Tao of City Cycling and the bike runs is because our current public transport, or the way the public transports itself, is an appalling indictment of our ignorance. The cars are less than 1% efficient. So that means that we transport ourselves in this way and we are actually talking about doing it with food. We are talking about using food, biofuel, to transport ourselves. We are going to piss 99 parts of that food up against the wall in order to use less than 1% to transport ourselves. And that is obscene but that is what we are doing in the present. How I get to that, just very briefly, is to recognise that in order to have a car, you have to earn the money to pay for it and the energetics behind all that are such that very little of the energy that will actually end embedded in the car transport system goes to moving us. To get a little firmer grip on it, the car engine is about 15% efficient. You can get again a feeling of that by putting your hand on the car engine. You will see where most of the energy goes - in heat. As soon as you turn it on it’s heat. So 85% disappears as heat immediately and then of course a car is about 15 times heavier than you are, isn’t it, so you know where the rest of the engine goes, except a tiny bit that is used to transport you, the driver and the empty space around you. So cars are really an obscenity in that sense when used for urban commuting and that is number one. On the business of socially deconstructing, pulling apart, analysing the way things are done and the way they happen, the ideologies and ideas and so on behind what we are doing, I have recommended over two decades a thing called the public transport levy. The Age (newspaper) very much supports that and gave me a number of years and dollars worth of pagination last year. They spent a month pushing the idea and, I think it was March last year, they had pages and pages on the whole business of free at point of access public transport. Now the government doesn’t like this. The public transport payment today through tickets don’t actually pay for itself. The reason they don’t like it is because they refuse to incorporate into the calculation of those public transport tickets, the cost, or at least the income lost, through having 200 stations excised from the public domain. Those stations are armoured against the invalid

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

people who don’t have tickets. So you can’t use them in the public domain for converse, for community and that is disastrous and very, very expensive. The other thing of course is the alienation from the system that ticketing causes and I won’t go into that because I need to develop what we are talking about. That is also not calculated and included in the calculations of the cost of tickets. So tickets are actually a make shift scheme so why have them? Why not do away with them? Well, yes I am quite happy with the idea of inspectors and all that as a means of employment. It could be something quite pleasant but it’s not. They could be conductors, as we said earlier, instead of these threatening inspectors and that might be a nice thing and their job training could be quite different. So we’ve got some structural problems there in the way we transport ourselves and that is part of the way of comment. Vic Health. It’s lovely to see them support today. Vic Health is responsible for amongst many other things, the walking bus. How many people do not know about this? It’s the idea that instead of going literally by bus to school for instance, you walk to school with a patron or matron walking along with your parent, who goes to the end of the furthest child, of a particular route to school, and picks up children as they walk, one after the other past their houses to school and there are a number of radii of which they start. A very lovely idea. And that way we do away with the four wheel drive parade every morning. Vast creatures in their robust vehicles for a fragile ego. I have talked about efficiency briefly. Let me talk about some social constructs. I call the urban commuter car a dodo. a Driver Only, Driver Owned vehicle. And the second construct is the very interesting one because the reason that we drive is economically illogical. The reason we drive is because we think we have to own the vehicle to have them accessible, of course we don’t. Since I have retired I haven’t had a car for many years and I haven’t used one in the city for 40 years.

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

Driver ownership. That commits us to using them and the biggest expense involved in owning a car is buying it and maintaining it and, quite aside from the energetics, there’s that huge cost and so we are forced to use it. It’s a mad thing but society is full of them, they are called perverse incentive. The beauty that I always mention is this: the way that they reimburse the use of our own vehicle for business, 65 to 70 cents per kilometre if you have a large vehicle, 45 if you’ve got a small vehicle, 25 if you’ve got a motorbike, nothing if you’ve got a pushbike and nothing if you’re on public transport. That’s a whole raft of perverse incentives. Another one is fringe benefits tax and so on and I can tell you funny stories about all of those but I don’t have the time now. I work now in my retirement from Monash in a department which used to be called the Department of Social and Preventative Medicine. Think about that. The prevention we are talking about isn’t just the prevention of disease, it’s the prevention of medical incursion. That’s very radical. Transpose medicine for engineering and you’ve got Social and Preventative Engineering, Social and Preventative Economics – madness – or is it? So, in medicine we have the beginnings of profound social change and here I own my insight of my disease. I am very sick, in and out of hospital, 40 pills a day, injections, blood tests, a huge feat of organisation just to stay on my feet with leggings for protection against the steroids I have been on for 20 years. The warfarin that I am on, the rat sack, is to thin my blood and to stop embolisms and clots all that sort of thing. In medicine we now have such subjects as health, knowledge and society, which a colleague at Monash and I started for a new medical degree, trying to give people the sort of insight that John and I tried to generate in our work with the Tao of City Cycling. What is this social deconstructive stuff? What is it I’m talking about in relation to the bikes? Well here’s one example. As you might have seen, the latest Choice (magazine) talks about bicycle locks and all sorts of fancy high tech things and none of them are any good. They are all rubbish and crackable in minutes. This is not. (Frank holds up a chain). This is made from steel that you can’t touch. You can’t cut it with anything except an oxyacetylene torch and it is worth more than my bicycle. The last time my bicycle was stolen they got through a smallish padlock and fortunately they took the bike which was worth $20 or $30 and left the chain, so I thought thank

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you very much. If you want to look at it later you will see that people have tried to break it. It is dented and cut but they couldn’t get through that. So, the only downside of this chain is that it is very heavy but that just adds to the exercise. The only downside is this. I was cycling along through the park that I used to my route to Monash, Clayton. I live in Clifton Hill and I would cycle through the MCG gardens and one day I was in a hurry and a dog attacked me. So, I thought, I took off the chain and cycled along just like that and then I got out onto Brunton Avenue and on the way through to Richmond station and I noticed all the cars were making a big circle around me and one of my problems is that I’m incontinent and I though, do I smell that bad, and then suddenly of course it dawned on me! (the chain in hand) So you see that is such a construction. That chain by its very looks is alienating. Quite aside from anything else, it has an effect and my bike, this one which was given to me by a woman who ran me over, 12 years ago, she bought me a new bike. Fortunately she didn’t have to by new bones. Where was I? I have forgotten. Perhaps that is because I have had over 25 operations and general anaesthetics and they say that your memory is affected by it. Anyway I will go on with other social construction. One of the things that is interesting about this bike is an idea I brought back to Australia from Sweden 30 something years ago. I had a scholarship to Sweden and Switzerland and lived in Zurich, I was there for four years back in the 60’s which is where my insight began environmentally – anyway, we bought these flags to be made and we could never sell them. Bicycle Victoria is a very limited sort of organisation. The understandings that they have are not mine. So anyway, we brought them back and made 1,000 of them and couldn’t sell them. Slowly, slowly we are now beginning to get over to the public that the consequences of the little flag are that cars, I should say, drivers give you a wider birth. They see you from a long way away, the reflector is red on the backside and they take note. Drivers are not in the business of killing cyclists. They tried to avoid you so they stay further away and I notice immediately if I have forgotten to put it out and when cycling along, drivers immediately come closer. So that’s again a construction. It fits into a whole lot of physiological and social

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

understandings on the driver’s part. So, what we are trying to do with the Tao of City cycling is get over the idea that if you cycle on the road in the constructs that motorists use you cycle that much more safer. I am interested in the social dynamics of the road. The social dynamic of the road is something that primarily is constructed by and for motorists and as a cyclist you are a bloody interloper and so you have to interlope, run into, that environment with an understanding of the motorists view and not the cyclists view and that is very difficult for most cyclists. We are not taught this stuff in school. We are a long way from doing that yet, the social construction of the world. So if you know you cycle in that way, there are a whole lot of things that build with that sort of recognition in mind. This is what we all love, these lights (LEDs). The flashing idea– well I’ll ask you. What does that flashing do to you? What do you think? (From the audience) It makes people see far away. Far away and also noticed through what type of vision? (From the audience) Peripheral. That’s right. So it fits into a physiological understanding of the road as well as doing a whole lot of other beautiful things. One of the things it does, much to my frustration is it gives enormous battery life because its on for a fraction of the time that it’s off and that fits into yet another of these physiologies – the capacity to see the flashlight through a residual vision or image rather than real image, if you can see what I am trying to say. You see a flickering light – sorry – a flash, lightening flash, for instance, even though it is there for a fraction of the time that you actually believe you see it. The result of that is that inside this light, even in my eyes, they are throw-away batteries but they last so long. I don’t use rechargeable. I have had a long flirtation with rechargeables for 25 years or something like that. They are very difficult things to use for a lot of other socially constructed reasons to do with charging, knowing that they are a different voltage to the voltage of throwaway batteries and the whole of which the direct current electricity systems are based. They are all based on one and a half volts and multiples thereof and the whole system is based on that. Rechargeables have only very recently been found with that voltage. So you can

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

see how the social construction liberates on the one hand and holds us on the other. Very problematic. Mick alluded to what the social construction associated with helmets and many women don’t like it because their hair matters to them; their hair at work is important. Another social construction is what I am standing in. These are my clothes - always. I was at a meeting yesterday in Canberra where everyone else was dressed in pinstripes. Well, I used to cycle 40 years ago in pinstripes when I was an engineer. I had a suit and I knew that eventually for various reasons as I got sicker and sicker that sort of clothing just wasn’t viable for me. I have to wear this stuff and I couldn’t be bothered stripping it off all the time so I wear it permanently. This jacket is worth a fortune. So are my wonderful gloves - $150 a pair. I tell you, you look after them. They are waterproof. They grip extremely well. My hands are weak and they bleed easily. Thus my environment is transformed. It is totally different but one very accessible even to someone as sick as I am. This jacket is also worth a fortune. With one hand as I am cycling I can regulate it and so it becomes my climate regulation mechanism and these wonderful coats now enable the cyclists to do the same. They are very easy to manipulate and it needs to be because you have usually only got one hand. Another beautiful one of course, a simple one, is these side reflectors. But more interesting from a social constructive point of view are the tyres and glass on the road. The way that the motorist actually gets all of us in one way or the other – punctures, they never clean up. I got bashed once for trying to suggest to motorists that they clean up after they have a bingle. We were in the middle of the road. (laughter from the audience). Anyway I have been through every iteration imaginable to try and limit the number of punctures that I have as a cyclist and many years I used to have a dozen a year. One morning on my way to Clayton I was afflicted by three in the one morning. I used to carry a repair kit and actually do it as I cycled along and that is not actually cycle friendly to cycle in an environment where you are that threatened by glass. I have had little brushes that sat on the mudguards to clean off glass shards, I have had special inserts which are inside the tyres which are devilishly difficult to get in, but now of course with mountain bikes you have got these great knobbly tyres and very, very recently tyres that are so tough that even without the

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knobbles which decrease your efficiency as a cyclist, a little bit, they make a nice whine of course when you are travelling along. These tyres with high tech and a bit of money of course, pretty expensive, they have done away with the glass threat. So again they are more user friendly. Then some of the more subtle ones about the actual cycling project that is different from the bicycle are interesting. One of the things that I have long advocated is that experienced cyclists like me wobble when they take off. You know how an experienced cyclist doesn’t need to do it; in fact some super smart guys in the city they never actually get off their bike at an intersection. Well, I can’t! You shouldn’t do it because you then create the expectation that the bicycle is like a car – stable – and of course the physics of a bicycle patently are not at all stable. It gets its stability from motion as we have just heard. But with experience you don’t have to wobble. The new cyclists don’t do that, they wobble, and if you don’t wobble and many of us experienced cyclists don’t wobble, motorists get used to the idea that the bicycle is stable. No good – so I advocate all you experienced cyclists here you should wobble when taking off – keep the idea going first but physics matters. Another one – cycling over a hill. Again I advocate cyclists never cycle in the gutter. Cycle in the left hand side but in pretty much the centre of the lane that you are in and you don’t weave between cars and so on. Again, try to be predictable to motorists. When you are coming over a hill you are just in the lee of the hill so to speak and motorists are coming over and apparently there is another bicycle there, you are in danger. Recognise that. You can recognise that situation if you are thinking of the cycling environment that you are. Recognise the social dynamics of the road. In the little course by the way, which is hopefully being run at the Alfred Hospital, they are usually six hours covered of which two are in a room talking about these things just like here, except it is round a table rather than sitting with backs of each other’s heads, and the last session is on the road and again it isn’t just the road, it’s the road and rail. The essence of what we have in that and what I have done for more than 40 years is use the rails for the long distance, cycling to Clayton. I

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still have to go to Clayton and I just go to Richmond and take the train to Huntingdale and cycle from that end and its an end zone ticket so its extremely cheap and cycle that end and go up and down escalators and so on in the city and all of that takes up some understanding to do seamlessly but once you know these things, once you recognise the constructs that you are in, in that case not the social dynamics of the road, the social dynamics of rail also the whole thing becomes seamless, transparent and the city becomes totally traversable at any time of day. So my hospital, as I said is the Royal Melbourne, and I happen to work at the Alfred, it took me in peak period just the other day 15 minutes and please remember I am sick, I am weak, a whole lot of other things, 15 minutes to cycle from essentially Prahran to the Alfred Hospital up to Royal Melbourne Hospital just here. And I think I stopped once. Thank you.

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

Dr Janet Stanley

Social Equity and Mobility Mobile Cities and Social Equity Bio Janet Stanley is the Senior Manager, Research and Policy at the Brotherhood of St Laurence, Australia, a large non-government agency, Senior Research Fellow, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University and Honorary Research Fellow at the National Research Centre for the Prevention of Child Abuse, Monash University. Janet undertakes social policy research in a range of fields including equity in response to climate change, transport, child welfare, community arts and neighbourhood renewal. Forthcoming book (September 2007): Currie, G., Stanley, J., Stanley, J., (eds) No Way to Go: Transport and Social Disadvantage in Australian Communities, Monash Press. Previous book: Stanley, J.R. & Goddard, C.R. (2002) In the Firing-Line: Violence and Power in Child Protection Work. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester.

Abstract Significant numbers of Australians have limited choices as to how, and if, they can travel. Poor mobility options place people at risk of being excluded from important aspects of society and thus adversely impact on personal and societal well-being. Many young people, older people, people with a disability, those on low incomes and Indigenous Australians experience transport disadvantage. The consequences of transport disadvantage can include reduced educational achievement, poorer job opportunities, less social engagement, less involvement in recreational and leisure pursuits, greater difficulty in obtaining medical services when required, as well as many similar impacts. Minimum public transport service levels, in terms of frequency, coverage, ease of use and safety, provide a safety net in terms of minimising likely transport disadvantage. Looming over the issue of transport disadvantage for the future is the issue of climate change. Transport is the third largest and second fastest source of greenhouse gas emissions in Australia. Responses to climate change in transport (e.g.carbon pricing) are likely to contribute to greater patronage on public transport. These responses are also likely to increase the costs of car use in

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urban fringe, regional and rural areas. This will compound problems for disadvantaged groups who currently rely on car use for mobility. As a consequence, enhanced provision of alternative transport options to the car, such as public/community transport, walking and cycling, becomes both more important and more justified, on both social equity and environmental grounds

Edited Transcript. Social Equity and Mobility. Dr Janet Stanley I am going to talk about social equity and mobility. Social equity is an issue that at the Brotherhood of St Laurence, we are interested in across most of the social policies, or all of the social policies areas that we undertake and study. Today I am going to talk to you about equity in relation to transport, what it means and what are we seeking when we are looking for equity. I am going to talk a little bit about the Warrnambool case study that my partner, John Stanley who is also in transport, which we did a couple of years ago looking at the issues quite closely in Warrnambool. I am also just going to touch on the issue of climate change and particularly equity in relation to climate change. I am going to have a look at in the interface of transport also. So it’s probably worth just having a think about what we are actually trying to achieve in relation to sustainable, personal transport and these are just some of the issues that I hope encompasses the topic. 

Access ensuring people’s travel needs are effectively met.

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Equity to ensure that a reasonable level of mobility is available to all irrespective of your personal circumstance, Safety, Environment issues and Efficiency.

These are the sort of goals that I think that we should be aiming for. When we talk about mobility in transport I think it is important to set the scene a little bit. In the past, much of the government policy, social policy has been around what they call mass transit or its commuter – so it’s getting people into the city to work, hence their design. If you think of Melbourne’s public transport system, its spokes and wheel go to the central area.

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In the last few years there has been a lot more interest in what the government calls social transit. So this is transit for people who don’t have a car or need to use transport for other reasons than work. There is some cross over there but its mainly talking about social transit in relation to people who we would call, and I’m not sure if you are familiar with the concept of, socially excluded and this was the basis of an important transport report that came out of the UK a couple of years ago. I am looking at the social exclusion of people. So the people we are talking about are aged, people of low income, children and new migrants and indigenous people. So what is transport disadvantage? When you look at the latest ABS statistics that have come out, 725,000 Australians classify themselves as having some sort of access problem. 3.3% of adult Victorians feel that they can’t get to places they need or often have difficulties in doing so. We are not actually talking about a small problem, we are talking about groups of people whose life is disadvantaged because they don’t have mobility. And when you actually break that down the census shows that poor health is a significant factor, disability, age, unemployment, household income, single parent families – these are the people we are talking about and in the census we don’t ask very much about children and children are one of my areas of interest to and they are left off. Why are these people disadvantaged with mobility? Why is there an inequity there? One in 10 Victorian households doesn’t own a car. So this in the way we organise our society so that it is a disadvantage if you want to be mobile. It’s of interest that a lot of disadvantage in equity isn’t only in one area. People have multiple disadvantages so you may have a disability and that may lead to unemployment which leads to a lower income. So they cluster together. So if you have got a low income you are often multiply disadvantaged in a number of areas. The poverty line – you measure poverty in a number of ways in Australia but the Henderson poverty line which is a commonly used reference - puts $600 as a point for a household of two adults and two children, about that point. If they are below that they are considered impoverished. If you look at households in Melbourne that don’t own a car, that are under $500 a week in their income, there

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are 75,000 households in this category in Melbourne. People who own one car who have a very low income, there is 154,000. And one of my colleagues who we are doing work with, Graeme Curry from Monash University, has looked at the issue of forced car ownership. And normally you are considered transport disadvantaged if you don’t have a car but he is actually looking at the problem of being forced to have a car, being forced to have two cars because you have no choice – you cannot work unless you have a car. So he is looking at the problem where people actually make the decision to go without something else in order to get a car so they can travel. So normally we forget about this group of people but they are actually quite an important cohort and he says that there is forced car ownership in 50,000 households in Melbourne which is people who are in considerable adverse circumstances who have to pay for a car and go without other essentials in order to keep this car. Interestingly, people are thought to be in transport stress if they pay around about 20% of their expenditure on transport. These people who are forced into car ownership are actually paying something like 24% of their expenditure of the running of their car, so they are in trouble. Does this matter? Well I argue it does matter. It matters to the individuals own personal wellbeing and it matters to society. Increasingly we are getting evidence that individuals, if they don’t have mobility, if they don’t have access, they can’t get to employment, health services and education. The cost to the State? There is a famous study in child welfare that was done in America where they looked at if you provided a very good pre-school service for highly disadvantaged children, the value they followed actually 45 years of those children, that’s a unique study, the value is worth at least 17 times the cost to both the individual and society of that initial investment. So what we are doing is we are not measuring the totality of cost investment when we measure the value of transport. We are forgetting the value added in the longer term approach of helping them get to the health services etc. This is a little bit dated but it is still relevant and it’s a comparison and if we look for instance if we get to the importance of mobility in getting to employment, the one on the left shows in Melbourne

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percentage of jobs accessible within 40 minutes travel by car. So, 25% of jobs around Melbourne are and then it gets less as you get out. The one on the right is the percentage of jobs successful within 40 minutes of travel by public transport. You can see there is a bit of a difference there. One of my colleagues at the Brotherhood was doing researching on employment also and he was researching people who have been unemployed for a long time and he asked them what is the problem about the system or the mobility to getting to a job and 4% who lived in inner metro said transport was a problem, 14% in outer metro Melbourne said it was a problem and 28% who lived outside Melbourne in rural Victoria that was a problem. The other point which is quite interesting is that when we think of our ability and accessibility in relation to transport, and this is the way the UK thinks about it, they see it in terms of access to a particular service, so its access to health, access to education. One of the things we are finding is its actually far more than that. It’s not an end point that is predetermined. Mobility is important for quality of life full stop. So mobility is important for developing these functional relationships for just mooching around and being there, to actually feel a part of society and part of life. The freedom to move is actually very important for your wellbeing in addition to actually getting these services. And it is interesting to reflect this study which Daniel found that 56% of the problem about getting a job was feeling alienated so some of the work we are doing is actually looking at transport as a social facilitator. So, we allow transport and mobility, we encourage mobility as a social engineering if you like, as a social facilitator for relationship building, and remember that well over 75% of all jobs people find is networking. So maybe you need that first step for a lot of people in our society to actually be able to get a job, to actually be in a position to get a job. So it’s just a slightly different term of the value of mobility. This sort of viewpoint was reinforced. In Victoria, actually I feel quite positive in a lot of ways about what is being done about transport and I think there is a change in the paradigm and there is a new understanding about the value of transport. This is actually sinking through to government here. If you remember there is a roll out of new bus services and these bus services

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have been designed for social travel. They are not for the commuters they are for the community to actually get around the community, not just in and out of Melbourne. We went out and asked – we talked to people, who in part of one of the new business services one of the newest areas was additional services in Pakenham and we sat on the bus and asked people what are they getting the bus for, this new bus service, and a lot of them were using it for work and health, education but the interesting thing was 50% were using it for leisure and socialising. This sort of view reinforced the fact that this is actually quite a critical function of transport that we have to put more emphasis on this priority. This quote here is from the Warrnambool study I will talk about in a minute but it illustrates the point I will put here. An elderly lady with restricted mobility in that she had a walking frame, had a circular bus trip, getting on and off at her home simply to get out of her house and talk to other passengers and meet the driver. This was in a rural area and the bus driver knew this lady, knew that she regularly made this trip and he actually diverted the bus to her house to pick her up. Unfortunately that is illegal because of insurance and he had to keep that from the powers that be because he would have been reprimanded for doing it, but these are some of the barriers we need to change. Just to talk quickly about this Warrnambool study, Warrnambool is a rural regional centre in Victoria and we looked closely at bus services in particular and transport more broadly there and as you can see Warrnambool has the lowest rated bus services than all the other places and many other places there listed so they were in trouble. Another interesting thing was we spoke to various groups at risk of low mobility and found that there was a comparative trip rate, so if you look at the number of times people go out on a trip during the week they are getting a sense of the in-depth of their mobility and the lowest mobility was the aged living in hostels. The seniors with the car could take us about the average household. Interestingly enough people with a disability did not have the lowest mobility because they never had driven a car. It was a quite interesting illustration so they never became car dependent. They always had to cope and make do and they had many people in urban Warrnambool, it’s a little bit different in the rural outskirts of Warrnambool, had it completely worked out. They did trip linking. So when they went out they made sure that they went to the day centre, they did their

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shopping and they met their friend. So they made one trip and they made great value of that trip and they had people picking them up here and dropping them off there, then they needed someone else so that they could take them and then they walk to that section so actually people with a disability, urban based were actually quite well off. The problems we found for the service are the limited weekend services; short span two hour ticket was a problem. If you were going to the doctor’s surgery you may have to wait and you have got to buy another whole ticket to get back so you don’t go to the doctor. Lack of information and marketing was weak. Community transport – I won’t go into that a lot but that played an important part; it’s playing an increasingly important role with people who are mobility disadvantaged. I don’t go with the mainstream view about community transport and I am not too popular, but it actually, I think, can be quite socially isolating because you get on a bus with disability written on the side and no-one else gets on and you are dropped at a place with other people that have a disability and you are picked up with a bus with people with a disability and dropped back to your house. It can be quite socially exclusive I think. And, also very expensive. There is a study in the US that found the community transport, they call it Para Transport over there is about 3% of trips but it actually costs about 14.5% of the cost of transport services so it tends not to be totally cost effective in a lot of ways. Just going through the recommendations that we made there, we recommended public transport service enhancements, improvements in marketing, regulatory reform and this is particularly around school buses. You’ve got a whole school bus system in rural Australia which only is allowed to take school children. If you have only 4 school children and the rest of the bus empty, it might go from one little rural town to another, you might have 20 people who actually need to go for shopping or work and they can’t be on that bus, so there is a need to actually break down the regulations around how buses are used.

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Importantly, we recommended establishing a regional accessibility planning council and this is where, and its actually going, but its proving hard to actually achieve outcomes but this is where we’ve asked the local government to take the initiative and integrate all modes of transport and all means of transport in a central committee where people do the planning and they integrate and they share the community bus, its not sitting empty in a service centre all day while people are at the day centre all day, and this is where the planning and use and future needs is done from that central point, but it is actually going. We were quite successful in getting new bus services and new marketing systems and a new approach to public transport in Warrnambool and hopefully we will get the chance to go back and just measure the affect of this in the future. Part of the answers, part of the accessibility is getting the community on there – let’s get the community to own the transport to say what they need and be part of the planning process and this has been very important in achieving the success. Just moving to a little bit of the talk about climate change in transport. This is the road at high tide, Lama Island currently in Northern Australia which is Torres Strait Island above Australia. This is what happens when it is high tide. The transport system collapses because the road has become a stream and this is the ferry bus. The ferries down the end of the jetty there. Unfortunately at high tide the jetty is flooded so you have to carry your belongings down the end of the jetty and the bus goes as far as it can. This is the reality of climate change now, it is happening in Northern Australia for some of our citizens up there. One of the pieces of research we have commissioned is the National Institute of Economic Industry Research. One of the responses to climate change that our Prime Minister (Howard) has announced is a cap on trade emissions, trading system. So the idea of that is that you actually put a price on carbon because it becomes more expensive it again forces industry to move out of carbon energy and to move into more sustainable energy so the cap on trade emission system

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actually raises the price. So, it uses market forces to get people out of carbon intensive coal forms of raising energy. Stern recommended that about US$25 would be about the right price. I think the price might have gone up when you put this report out, so we asked the National Institute to actually estimate the cost to households in Australia of a price of $25 and $50 on carbon price. This was fed through all expenditure so its not only direct expenditure on energy – petrol, electricity, its also an embedded cost of energy in the food you buy, in everything you do, so it will roll out through everything you buy – the cost of that carbon. So, at the moment the annual carbon consumption of a poor household is 22 tonnes a year, for a high income earner its nearly 58 tonnes a year but if you actually roll this out and if you actually look at how this is going to impact on energy and households, its effectively going to be 2.5% of the expenditure of the poor household where, although they actually have a less carbon footprint it will end up being less than 1% of expenditure of a high income household. So a carbon tax is very regressive. It impacts on poor people more than it impacts on wealthier people. So looking at what this means, and this result only came out yesterday so I haven’t looked at it very closely yet but we have mapped this on Melbourne to look at where the poor households are that are going to be most adversely impacted by a carbon tax. So the worst is that it’s up the North West suburbs there and they are going to be impacted worse off. Interestingly if you actually look at who is worst, who have got the pattern of the people who are poorer around the fringes of Melbourne who are more reliant on public transport that probably doesn’t exist as well out there so they are going to be hit more by a carbon price and if you look at what the expenditure items are, transport is a major component of how they are going to be hit with petrol prices. So transport is going to impact, the price of carbon is going to raise the cost of mobility and its going to increasingly adversely impact low income people. So not only have we got inequality now, in the future when we get the carbon tax kicking in which won’t be that far away, the inequality is going to increase in short.

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And this is a map, this is Victoria again mapping according to local government area of the various impact of the carbon tax and again you see it’s the people who are more isolated, who don’t have public transport, that are going to be the hardest hit and so a big part of this carbon tax is going to be a conversation around mobility and transport. I think that’s probably all I want to say and just to conclude. Equity around transport is important for personal and societal wellbeing. Greater equity is being achieved in Melbourne I think at the moment. I am not as pessimistic as Nick is about this particularly with new services to help those who are the easiest to move onto public transport but the cohort we are not getting are the more severely disadvantaged people where the new roll out of services is actually, or bus services, is actually helping a lot of people but the next wave to help the equity issues in transport needs to be around things like even footpaths, easy access buses – so that is the next generation of people will need to – that’s a whole new program of things to be addressed. It’s not just enough to get the bus there, you’ve got to enable people to get to the bus and get on board. And the final point is the trend with improving equity will be reversed in my view. I am quite pessimistic about this unless we get built into policy now how to stop the regressive nature of carbon tax because unless we do that the inequity, especially around mobility and transport, is going to increase.

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Ralph Green

Equity of Access to Transport – The Universal Mobility Index Mobile Cities and Social Equity Bio Ralph is a Director of Visionary Design Development Pty Ltd. Ralph holds undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications in Optometry and has worked in clinical practice, academia, and hospital settings and in developing world aid projects. Throughout 1998 – 2002 he served as an advisor to transport ministers in the Kennett and Bracks governments, chaired the Victorian Motorcycle Council and was the motorcycle representative on the Road Safety Reference Group. In 2006 he was the first optometrist to be appointed to the ophthalmology department of the Alfred Hospital. He served as a director of the Australian Latin American Business Council in 2006/7 and this year accepted a position as Community Education Projects Manager with the Optometrists Association of Australia. Also this year he was awarded a Masters of Social Science (International Development) from RMIT University after completing a thesis in the field of disability studies. This research provided the first theoretical and methodological framework for measuring equity of access across all parts of the built environment. Abstract Contrary to the myth of the abled/disabled dichotomy everyone is likely to experience a period of disability as part of the normal life cycle. Transport modes provide the vital link across the built environment yet design and construction continue to present barriers. While access audits provide some insight to improving equity of access, reports are limited in scope by the brief, multiple levels of responsible authorities and not directly reflective of the wishes of people with disabilities. To address these deficits a new composite human development indicator – the Universal Mobility Index (UMI) – is introduced. Projected on the theoretical foundations of literature reviews within three theoretical fields: 1) Human Development / Quality of Life and indicators, 2) Models of Disability and 3) Built Environment Access Provision and Policy Making, the UMI accords with the World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Functioning Illness and Health. The

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Index quantitatively measures, comparatively rates and longitudinally tracks, equity of access. It is the first and only tool that measures the lived experience of physical access across all parts of the built environment; illuminating how barriers to mobility discriminately constrain the autonomy of people with disabilities to exercise their full human capabilities through denying or restricting participation in community, educational, occupational and many other activities. Edited Transcript. Equity of Access to Transport – The Universal Mobility Index. Ralph Green What I am going to talk about certainly does have a lot to do with transport but it is actually looking at things on just a slightly broader aspect and I think it fits in nicely with what Janet was just saying. We want to talk about moving across the built environment as a journey and how inequitable access is as you consider the different parts of that journey. The reason why we need to concentrate a little bit more than just on public transport is if we make the entry and the exit mode to that public transport part of a typical journey across the built environment, then we may in fact still not have an accessible system because anyone who has a disability may find that these other parts of the environment that they need to cross on the way are not actually going to be accessible. So, even if you actually do really good work at transport you still actually need to look at the environment itself otherwise people who have problems with mobility are going to be excluded. If the public transport system is not accessible then what we are getting to is we are either going to get into this vehicle or car park cycle and this morning we certainly had enough very good information from presenters that is not something that we want to do. But this is the reality of crossing the built environment in terms of it involves not just transport because even if transport is accessible and the private dwellings, or a commercial building they want to go to, or a public space they need to cross to get to the public building is not accessible then they are going to be discouraged and they are going to be trapped in a social disadvantage that Janet Stanley was talking about a moment ago. So how are we going to consider what we are going to do about this? There are such things as access audits but what access audits do is they look at a very small part of just one building or

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shopping complex etc and they give you an intense amount of information about that little part of the environment but generally a whole range of considerations to do with a brief, to do with different responses and entities for different parts of the built environment. Their coverage is going to be quite limited and there is also not very much information, so we are not really getting any sort of good idea of the big picture. So, the research that I have recently completed is actually looking at new ways of trying to quantify equity access across all the different parts of the built environment in a single universal mobility index which aims at coming up with a measure. It is in the form of an index based on human development type of indexes that they have in development studies and also in quality of life research and basically talking about coming up with figures between 0 and 1 which represents the accessibility of the built environment - where 0 represents completely barrier saturation and a rating of 1 would mean that it is totally accessible. So why is access important? We have already touched on that to some extent. There is obviously a legal consideration to do with our international obligations as signatories to various human rights acts including the area of disabilities, and we have numerous schemes and planning schemes proposed and guidelines etc that we enter into but it is also to do with that best practice word that keeps on coming up. But the reason why making the built environment accessible for people of all physical capabilities is that this idea that there is this able/disable dichotomy is a complete farce. Basically people are in denial. A period of disability is a normal part of the human lifecycle. So we are not talking about some little group who are operating on the fringe of mainstream society. What we are talking about is you and me at some stage of our lives and that really needs to be recognised. So in terms of quantifying that, why is actually putting a number to it going to be powerful? First of all we can show how good or bad it is and that it is powerful because it has policy implications. Can you imagine if we were operating in a political environment where we didn’t know what the rate of unemployment was or the rate of inflation or the exchange rate of the Australian dollar and what the policy implications for that would be? But we don’t seem to be able to measure the lived

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experience of travelling across the built environment because nobody seems to have been able to do that before. I think first of all there needs to be a major change in the way that people view disability and I am very grateful to Frank for this morning and his bicycle because I thought that I would have to launch into a long and twisted cognitive dialogue to explain the word social deconstruction and now we have found a bicycle example you have all got your heads across it and I won’t need to use the rabbit ears in place in a post modern formula, so that’s very good. But the way that people with disabilities have traditionally been considered has of course shaped public policy which has related and resulted in the current form of our built environment. So it’s probably worth visiting a little bit of a history because it does give us an insight as to why the built environment is actually fairly accessible. Just before I go to the next slide, we’ve got some copies of this reference by Zollo which is an absolute seminal argument to do with looking at the idea of access for people in an inclusive manner and I’ve got some copies of that today so if anybody would like a copy of that hopefully there will be enough. The institutional model is basically saying that anybody with a disability is a freak and that society has to be protected from them by them being put away in a box somewhere where they are non observable. So there is still a trace of this in modern society. And when reaching its worst it has to do with the idea that disabled people need to be sterilised and I suppose worse again with the extermination of people in Nazi Germany because of having disabilities. The model that we are currently dealing with now in terms of trying to get people who are making decisions that affect the accessibility of the built environment, they are basically still dealing with the medical model of disability. The medical model of disability is something which considers that the disabled person has total responsibility because it is disability itself that is something trapped within their bodies and they are the ones who need to solve that problem. They need to try and make themselves like us because that is the way to solve the problem of accessibility of the built environment and it’s also a power thing. The idea that medical professionals gain a certain degree of power by acting as the gatekeepers and by giving a diagnosis because each diagnosis of course is an

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individual one and all cases are different, then it is not something which allows people with disabilities to have a degree of commonality where they can organise and start to see that they do have a lot of things in common. But what we need to do is we need people to move from that medical model perhaps still with us together with traces of the institutional model, shift their thinking towards the idea of associated living and multiple disability. This is one which is a rights based model and it’s inclusive and it gives people with disabilities the idea that they can empower themselves through being organised and through the idea of equity and justice so that the changes in a social and built environment can actually occur which will improve their quality of life. We will talk a little bit later about how access affects people’s quality of life. But for the people here, it’s that third point which is really the important message to take home. If you don’t think about disability from this more modern perspective and this perspective based on justice and entitlement, what you get can actually be creating disability itself and that’s something which obviously we are to avoid. So where did this idea of measuring the built environment come from? Well it came from a thesis that I originally completed that Anthony mentioned so we won’t dwell on that. This is the idea that human development is a complex thing. One of the things that affect people’s development and their quality of life is there ability to gain access. The way that we are going to look at doing that is that we can’t actually exactly measure the quality of life and human development so we need to look at aspects which are actually closely related to that. Traditionally in development studies we looked at GDP per capita and we looked at how long people live, how many of their kids die before they get to the age of five – various things like that and there are indicators for all of those sorts of things. What an indices is actually a number of indicators put together with a different degree of weighting. The most common one is the human development index which takes GDP per capita, life expectancy and the number of years of education and actually applies slightly different weights to those to come up with this figure between 0 and 1 and if you look at some of the basket case

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countries in Africa you will see very low numbers of course and if you start to question the American system its very close to one. But what an index does, because its provides indicators and applies weights to them, it tries to determine something which is a very complex system and reduce it to a single number so that it can give a degree of understanding to people but to do that validly it has to be very rigorous in the way that it actually does that to give the proper indication. So, we are going to look at how will we look at the different parts of the built environment and decide to classify them in certain ways? Well, we could do it this way, which is the intuitive way rather than a planning way and in fact that is what the research is. It actually asks people with disabilities to consider the built environment, divide it into four parts, it gave them 100 points and said, you put the numbers in the boxes and tell us what parts of the built environment are more important in terms of accessibility than others. This is an exercise also to see whether this made cognitive sense to people with disabilities, because it’s not something that you can assume. I was wondering whether if most of the results would come back 25, 25, 25, 25 it would be an exercise which you could basically then throw in the bin because it wouldn’t be worthwhile. What actually happened was we got no responses which were of that sort. People actually felt that they were able to decide that certain parts of the built environment were more important for accessibility than others. This was a small sample, it is by no means representative but heartening, it was infrastructure and private dwellings that came up the highest, so that sort of justifies me going off on the transport stream a little bit because that is one of the ones that did show up as being most important. So we take our four built environment components. Because infrastructure is a very complex thing it needs to be further disaggregated into these different parts. In transport itself you can see it needs to be disaggregated again. So we end up with all these different components so if we are going to decide how we are going to measure all these different parts and put them together, well there are ways of doing it. What you can do if you look at the local government area, you can use

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a certain number of all these things. For instance, if you are going to look at the bus stops, access to buses, just say the bus stops themselves. If you went through your Local Government Area (LGA) and you have a certain number of bus stops and then statistically if you take a random sample of the right size and analyse that, you can extrapolate those findings. Generally, because we have done statistics the right way, we have done the minimum amount of work, we have got up to this result and we know that this is going to be reflective of all the bus stops inside this local government area. So this in fact is the way this index works in that it actually gets people with different sorts of disabilities, in a local government area, brief them on what the standards are but also says to them we are going to send you out to survey a sample of bus stops, (or public spaces or public buildings) we want you to take into account that there are these standards and these are how these things should be. We would also like you to use your experience of travelling across the built environment and come to an assessment of that particular public building or tram stop and where it is on this scale. If you just allocate from one, for very poor, to five, for very good, then you get some very simple statistics. This is known as the Leichhardt scale in the social science. Many of you may know. So what that means is that you can actually start coming up with numbers and it’s fairly simple to work towards the top, to actually come up with them at the top and its also simple mathematics to then convert that into how far it is between what the minimum would be if everything was very poor and what the maximum would be if everything was very good and you could easily enough set it on the scale between 0 and 1. So that gives you a built environment component rating. And the thing about this is that because it is actually asking people with disabilities to make decisions about how accessible these parts of the built environment is, its empowering and its not top down in a way that so much public policy that affects accessibility is. Also at the top here, before we actually come up with the number for the built environment component between 0 and 1, we can apply those weightings that I talked about before where we surveyed people with disabilities and that can actually be factored into where the index for the built environment comes between 0 and 1 so you are actually asking disabled people to rate a representative sample of all these parts of the built environment and then you are asking them,

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

just before you put together the top of that, to actually incorporate their priorities. So, it is people with disabilities who are making all the decisions about this and I think that is one of the very worthwhile things about the methodology. Now the other part of it is to think about is policy and policy components which are incorporated because we wanted to get an understanding of how the built environment has come about and what the process is for changing it and what the potential is for changing it and what the degree of inclusion is for people with disabilities that are actually having some sort of say in this. Because this is quite a different animal, it is not something that you can actually come up with a Leichhardt scale from very good to very bad. This particular stripped down policy cycle has agenda setting, formulation and evaluation and it has the Disability Advisory Council involved in the agenda setting and evaluation. So, hopefully what we have is a Disability Advisory Council which has got people on there who are appointed, who are representative of people with disabilities in the community so that they would actually be sitting at a table when it comes to agenda setting so that they could actually play a meaningful part in it and they could also come back at the evaluation stage and play a meaningful part about making decisions about whether the policies work. Expert advisors are actually shown outside the Disability Advisory Council although they may in fact be within government and the reason for that is that having sat on a few, and chaired a government advisory board and sat on another board, what tends to happen is if you put lay people who have a certain type of experience on there with people who have academic expertise, you tend to find that the experts will dominate the agenda so that is a good way of getting around it. Anyway, this is all based on policy and I don’t want to get too heavily into that today. So how do we decide whether this is good or bad or whether it is working well? What you can do is you can have a series of questions that you pose and these could be answered in the negative, in the affirmative or you can have a half way and say well “yes and no” and you have got certain values in those. So the first lot of questions will be to do with human rights and whether there is a Disability Discrimination Act and whether or not that has got any teeth and whether, because this

Transported - Collective Transport Sustainable Cities September 1 2007 Transcript of proceedings

is meant to work in developing countries as well, it’s usually whether wealthy corporations can actually escape it. So, you just go down the checklist and you basically answer yes, no or somewhere in-between. The second part of it – these are actually questions which are based on that stripped down policy cycle diagram that was done a moment ago - whether there is a Disability Advisory Council, whether it is representative, whether it is resourced, whether it actually has some political influence. We put two things together so we’ve got the built environment component and we’ve got the policy environment component and basically the questionnaire you’ve got the numbers between 0 and 1 up the top and the policy environment component. Another part of the questionnaire asked people with disabilities and their advocates whether they felt they could rate the relative importance of the built environment component versus the policy environment plan so they could apply this additional part of weighting, just before we came up with the final figure, and they were able to also do that. So that’s basically how it works to give you an overall measurement of how accessible the built environment is and transport is an important part of that but its only one part and if you just improve the transport and none of the other parts then people will be denied access when they are trying to move across the built environment. I have had quite a bit of interest from within Victoria, the local Government area and the Office of Disability wants this developed into a tool which local governments can purchase to come up with their ratings and then they can be compared. We have also done a tour of South America and there are a number of places there where it is possible where we might be able to also run some pilots to test this and do a bit of fine tuning. But just to sum up, the advantage of this tool is that, first of all, it is new. Nobody has tried to measure the overall lived experience of accessing in terms of travelling across the built environment. It places people with disabilities at the centre of decision making. It’s a tool for transport planners, architects and anybody who is involved as a stakeholder in that and it takes a whole of government approach.