Most railway historians immediately associate Sir John Monash with being the engineer in charge of the Outer Circle railway in his early days, and possibly his involvement in arbitration of settling disputes over payment of contracts between firms engaged to build railways and the various State railway systems at the start of the 20th century.

On Sir John Monash’s return triumphantly to Australia, heralded throughout as a war hero, he was approached by innumerable requests to enter State and Federal politics (which was mainly dissuaded by an antipathy to Billy Hughes which was derived from the two falling out over aspects of repatriating AIF troops, amongst other things), to take up many bureaucratic roles such as a planned review on taxation that fell through, or to be the director of a large volume of companies and many associations.

One offer, which was made from the Victorian State Government through Sir James Barrett, Vice-Chancellor of Melbourne University (which he retained strong links with throughout his life) was to be the Chairman of Commissioners of the Victorian Railways in April 1919.

Sir John Monash refused the role on two grounds.

Firstly at the time he did not wish to accept a State Government appointment at the time, citing “…[the position would mean he would] surrender [his] individual freedoms…”. This is strange when you look at his later acceptance of the Chief Commissioner of the State Electricity Commission a year later, a role which he held for eleven years until his death in 1931. As well, he never felt encumbered by the bureaucracy when he wished to get his own way with the Cabinet; Sir Robert Menzies recalled that, as a junior member of the Nationalist McPherson State cabinet in 1928 and 1929 that when a proposal was rejected by the ministry, he would walk unannounced straight into the Cabinet room mid-meeting and, on finding out that his proposal was rejected would simply say that “[the proposal's rejection]…can only be because they’ve [the cabinet] have utterly failed to understand it”, and on convincing the Cabinet of the error of their ways, would produce a pre-prepared Order-In-Council which was duly signed by the now cowed Ministers or Premier.

Having said that, it is recorded that he had some rather major battles over the LaTrobe Valley brown coal generation scheme, enduring one searching enquiry and a lot of pressure from rural areas wanting massive subsidies and local councils wanting to retain lucrative electric supply companies.
Even so, the first reason of not wishing to subjugate his independence to a State Government seems somewhat spurious given this example and the many times when he would push his plans and ideas against both wartime and peacetime establishments.

Secondly, and probably more telling is that, when a journalist asked for comment on it, he was quoted as saying: “No! it’s tempting, but I won’t accept it… There’s nothing further to be done with railways. They’re at their last ditch”. As for the reasons for Monash holding that opinion, it could be thought that his experiences on the Outer Circle may have had a bearing on it; at a lecture he presented in August 1890 to the Engineering Students’ Society at Melbourne University, he describes ‘the critical government inspector whose ‘especial delight’ is to point out that some bridge or culvert is being built upside down’. It is not recorded what effect the failure of the Outer Circle railway had on his opinions of railways, however his engineering standards, demonstrated in the use of the Fairfield railway bridge for road traffic 120 years later, cannot be disputed.

The Victorian Railways also were not a big adopter of reinforced concrete at the turn of the century, the pipes that he was manufacturing in conjunction with David Mitchell were described as being viewed by the VR as ‘thoroughly prejudiced’; did Monash also develop such prejudices himself?

It is recorded that almost exactly a year later, in April 1920, Harold Winthrop Clapp, whose father had obtained a great degree of financial success running Melbourne’s cable tramway system, applied for and was appointed as the Chief Commissioner of the Victorian Railways.

His achievements such as providing a market for freight traffic through marketing, the adoption of American passenger train styling for the Spirit of Progress and, through the lionising by people like Patsy Adam-Smith, his rapport with the employees of the Victorian Railways, and later his work with the Land Transport Board and paving the way for re-gauging the south-eastern railways of Victoria are testament to his works.

Having said that, his legacy was not all brilliant; a large number of unprofitable branch lines (such as the white elephants of Red Hill, Alvie, Stony Crossing and Sea Lake-Kulwin), and did very little for metropolitan Mebourne, despite plans being presented in 1938 which were not acted upon. He was also regarded as merely a showman (so much so he was also known as ‘Clever Mary’) – someone who would do something for publicity rather than making substantive changes to the railway system which was desperately needed at the time, with a network that was tipped to be too inflexible and antiquated to handle a major upsurge in traffic; something that was proved right in World War 2.

But what differences would have been made if Monash had have accepted the post of Chief Commissioner of the VR rather than the SEC a year later?

We know that he travelled overseas in 1910 between March and November to both England, continental Europe (where his family had arrived from a generation prior) and the United States as the head of his successful enterprise building reinforced concrete structures. He was very interested in the transportation systems in use; from the Swiss railways to the London underground to Penn Station and the road traffic in Chicago.

Had he taken the appointment as Chief Commissioner, it would have been fortuitous that Merz’s programme of suburban electrification was in full swing; his opinions of steam traction was that it was “effete” and was disdainful of the nuisances caused by the smoke of the steam locomotives. Given his interest in electricity in his SEC involvement also supports this claim. Certainly it can be assumed that his low regard for steam may well have meant an interest possibly in a greater level of electrification of railways than the limited amount given to commuter passenger train working; it may have resulted in such electrification that was seen emerging in Europe and later the US on such systems as the Milwaulkee Road – certainly the grades of the Bendigo, Ballarat and North-Eastern lines would have been tempting.

We know that he also he was enamoured by the Underground systems of London, Paris and Berlin – given the Ashworth Report on Melbourne’s suburban system recommendations of introducing two underground railways from Flinders St to North Fitzroy (under his alma mater at Melbourne University) and to North Melbourne – he may have been much more inclined to introduce these to Melbourne, or an expanded version.

As well, he was no fan of the rural lobby and was not interested in subsidising the rural areas’ electricity costs in favour of the profitability of the SEC, which was, like the VR, not in great shape financially at the time (although the SEC started turning a profit). What would have been his reactions for proposals for loss-making railways to such places as Wensleydale or Lette or past Nowingi? I doubt that the various Railway Leagues, although he had offered his professional services to the Fitzroy Railway League at the turn of the 20th century, would have brooked a great deal of opposition. We may have seen the closure of several extremely unprofitable railways rather than their lingering terminal declines whcih we still witness north of Sea Lake and Swan Hill.

It is a good possibility that he would have earned the equal respect of the employees that Clapp commanded; it is telling that during the darkest periods of the 1930’s Depression, he was openly talked about as being the nation’s leader; something which he declined as well.

Given that he was quoted as having given ’scornful comments on our backwardness’ in regard to transportation on at least several of the interviews and lectures he gave, it is not surprising that he declined the position. It is interesting that 100 years later, the same opinions are now expressed broadly at the railway systems in Australia; was Monash more perspicacious in seeing the decline of the railways since the 1880’s boom?

What we can assume is that as far as the overall health of the railways stands now; we most likely would be, especially in urban Melbourne, a much better position if Monash had have accepted the job, or even if it had have been offered in 1920. How much though, remains something we may not be able to determine, but it certainly reflects the task ahead for someone wanting to progress heavy railed transport into the future.

The start of a new year turns our thoughts toward the year ahead, while the end of the first decade of the 21st Century in one year’s time gives us further pause for reflection and thought.

There’s been some points about the rail industry ripe for debate that have been rolling around in my mind for a while that I think are worth sharing. In no particular order, they are as follows:

1. Australian railways are world leaders in the bulk haulage of minerals across long distances from pit to port. However, the mining industry and the minerals they extract will be among the first to suffer in any sort of any scheme to price greenhouse gas emissions. Does this mean that our world leading heavy-haul railways are fast becoming dinosaurs?

Are the extensive investments by government (particularly in NSW and Queensland) to upgrade the rail element of the coal supply chain and the heavy private sector investment in the Pilbara iron ore railways an example of poor decision making by rail operators and infrastructure owners? While the miners of the Pilbara could be excused for trying to maximise their profits and get as much out of the ground before an ETS starts ‘taxing’ their off-shored profits, are ARTC and QR gambling on a losing horse by expending a big chunk of the finite budget for rail infrastructure on mineral heavy haulage? Could that pot of money have been ‘gambled’ on rail technology that had better long-term prospects, such as upgrading the interstate mainlines for intermodal freight or improving urban public transport?

2. Over on ‘the ‘Page’, there’s a spirited debate about electrification of the interstate rail network. While most of the commentary is pure pie in the sky, an important question is raised about how the power will be produced for mainline electrification (and also for any future high-speed rail corridors). Again, one of the fundamental issues is the reliance on black and brown coal for baseload electricity generation in Australia, largely due to plentiful supplies and the relatively low cost and short lead times for building new coal-fired power stations.

Again, the introduction of some sort of ETS or other pricing regime for carbon emissions could place other sources of baseload generation on a more competitive footing with coal. This would mean that the nuclear option for baseload energy generation comes back on the table for rail electrification, along with other, renewable sources of energy generation, as outlined in this report from the Parliamentary Library. This prompts me to ask the question, does supporting mainline electrification and high-speed rail in Australia necessarily mean supporting nuclear power in Australia? It does seem to be presented as a mutually exclusive argument that you can’t have one without the other. On the other hand, do new models of distributed generation of baseload power using renewables at a number of dispersed sites (based on solar thermal concentration and geothermal technology) for traction power supply and augmented by solar photovoltaics and hydro-electricity provide a better way to electrify the interstate mainlines and future high-speed corridors than a cluster of nuclear reactors along the Great Dividing Range of the eastern states?

Personally, I’m still undecided on nuclear power in Australia and if there were an alternative to coal and nuclear generation of baseload power, I’m all for it.

3. What to do with the spiderwebs of rural branchlines that are the legacy of the high-water mark of railway construction in the 19th and 20th Century. Do we declare them as assets of importance and try to keep them going, even with the ‘last resort’ traffic of seasonal grain? Do national and state governments pass legislation to compel the carriage of dangerous goods (fuel, chemicals) by rail to provide some additional non-seasonal traffic for these lines and fund an upgrade to the lines serving the major country fuel depots so that derailments don’t shift the danger of dangerous goods from road to rail? Are there other options for revitalising and upgrading these rural branchlines?

Or is the decision made to abandon the rural branchlines and many of the settlements they once served (and now only pass through) to better consolidate settlement in rural and regional Australia into the larger centres? There would perhaps be a new role for these branchlines in supplying the great retreat of European settlement in Australia and the remediation of the landscape to provide a buffer zone between the consolidated settlement and the desertification, salination and erosion that climate change is sure to bring.

4. Climate systems are not behaving as many people would believe them to. Instead of global warming meaning that average temperatures everywhere are rising, average temperatures are swinging to extremes. In Britain, extremely heavy snowfalls over December and January have brought transport networks to a standstill, including the Eurostar services under the English Channel, while in Australia, extreme weather has seen wholesale cancellations on Melbourne’s suburban network and shut down the Adelaide-Darwin railway line. Other weather extremes such as strong winds and heavy rain test the resiliance of transport networks across Australia and around the world. While governments make promises about measures to improve the resiliance of public transport networks and oppositions criticise them for not doing enough, others argue that the costs of preparing transport networks for extreme weather events that may occur relatively rarely (at least 1-in-20 year events) is not a good use of public money.

Yet, strategies to mitigate events that occur more regularly as the climate begins to ‘flicker’ between extreme highs and lows (such as heat related failures) probably are worth investing in. How then do we harden urban public transport networks against extreme weather events and how do we build in resilience in people and infrastructure to keep the network running? And how do we achieve this hardening and resiliance building without robbing urban public transport of funds for more immediate and pressing matters like addressing long-term maintenance backlogs, ordering new vehicles and extensions to the network?

So there you have it. Four thoughts to ponder in the New Year. I hope this provokes some good responses (I’m sure that it will).

As we enter the second decade of the C21th we are now 100 years from the flowering of this movement in Australia and its finest moment – the competition for the design of a federal capital. As history records, the capital, eventually named Canberra, was designed by Walter Burley Griffin though the Canberra we see today is a significant departure from that design.

Given the book is devoted to an architecture topic outside the scope of this forum, I’ll confine my notes to the ramifications of the original and subsequent design work on the federal capital to the transport/urban planning interface – which Freestone hardly mentions but will be of interest to readers of this forum.

I’ll start by mentioning that Griffin’s design was 1 of over 100 submitted to the competition; that the original design was only expected to cover a township of 25000 (though clearly a stencil for future growth); that bureaucrats in the Department of Public Works already had their own bottom draw designs and were working on these even during the period Griffin was appointed to oversea development of his design.

Much of the criticism of Griffin, as pointed out by Freestone, related to his personal management style and was also in large part self-serving, rather than directed at fundamental weaknesses in the design. It was said to ‘lack detail’ – I’m not sure how realistic it was in 1912 for an architect entering a competition at his own expense (only compensated if he won) to provide much more than inspiration and some lovely artwork.

I’ll also jump in at this point to state my respect for his original design – I’ll come back to some of the specific transport issues shortly. And my respect is not to denigrate some of the alternatives. which Freestone comments on. The year 1912 happened to be right on the cusp of the outbreak of modernism, the penumbra of the classical and it is no surprise that the competition entries straddled the divide. To paraphrase Frank Lloyd Wright, the “Roman”[classical] period was complete and did not need to be added to.

Alternative plans mimicked Washington DC closely; the same park setting but classically dressed public monuments and free standing government buildings rather than the modernism which defines Canberra today.

Griffin’s Canberra was not really built, except for a limited precinct around the Civic/Capitol/War Memorial axis. The Canberra we see today is a the 1950s vision, and quite a different rendering of the bush capital. In some ways, more Australian though I don’t mean to flatter by that remark.

Urban Planning

It is clear from the early drawings that Griffin’s federal capital, though considerably smaller at approximately 75,000 people (3 times the design requirement) was also a denser city. It would be polynuclear in the sense of separate land uses (administration, retail, housing, municipal and so on) but mononuclear in the sense that each of these land uses need only be provided once within the stencil.

It was certainly a city you could walk around. You would be able to walk around the precincts that involved your daily business (eg if you were a public servant, the government district was compact enough to walk, if you were a shopper, the retail district would be similarly walkable)

As stated above, Griffin was not providing the detail – but I would imagine that his assumption of housing density would be as prevailed in the early C20th – and he would not have been averse to walk-up multistorey developments if this suited the economics of the city.

Transport

In addition to the motor car, which at this point was still a luxury to most, Griffin assumed a tramway would be built, and an underground railway easement is marked. The mainline railway is shown as having a terminal and yard in North Canberra – which is no doubt consistent with a line from Yass (or a diversion of the Sydney-Melbourne railway). It has been my understanding that the Queanbeyan-Canberra railway was touted as a ‘construction railway only’ and temporary, as with much of Canberra.

While one is tempted to be cynical about the claim of ‘temporary’ – I suspect it is true in so many ways. And that transport and urban planning was sabotaged in Canberra as much as was every other aspect of Griffin’s plan by the usual suspects. The Parliament building was not completed until 1927 (temporary) and much of the federal bureaucracy was yet to move to Canberra even in the 1960s.

And what are the usual suspects?
The Department of Public Works and the parsimonious bureaucrats could be the symptom, the tip of the iceberg, but then what is the iceberg?

I put it down to the fundamental factors that really delayed and marred the development of a national capital.

First, the lack of real support for a federal capital in the first place. Freestone mentions this as a recurring theme, particularly in the context of the lack of support for public monument building. In one sense, Canberra was one big public monument, and therefore suffered in toto.

This lack of support ranged from Western Australian secessionism through to Melbourne and Sydney supremacy in the economic and political spheres. All the money to pay from Canberra came from taxes, there was no incidental development of a commercial and public city from the outcome of market interactions.

It wasn’t so much that transport modal choices were being deliberately biased; but that Canberra simply lacked the population or development to make much beyond private motoring worthwhile until well after WWII, at which point it was bound to be caught up in the pro-road policies of post war governments.

If Canberra had thrived in the immediate aftermath of the federal capital competition and Griffin’s plan, I expect we would have seen both a tramway network, and a more compact city to support it. It would remain to be seen whether such a tramway would have survived the tram-removal fetish of the 1950s – with wide streets, newish rolling stock and fewer economic booms and busts (such as characterised the lot of the state capitals) it is possible it might have been retained.

Wide streets, no, boulevards may not be unambiguously good for PT. The Griffin template had a network of “St Kilda Roads” with four carriageways, the centre occupied by trams. As Freestone points out, Boulevard in the French mind is many things, an evening stroll, a frontage for cafes and markets, and a grand street for processions and parades. The strolling and cafes probably wouldn’t have flown, Freestone suggests. And while St Kilda Rd does permit continuous tramway traffic to permeate it even today, it is not the quickest way of delivering people to the city – numerous traffic signals slow progress. Those signals reflect the importance of private road transport – which was facilitated by Griffin’s plan.

Cities of boulevards are quite difficult for pedestrians to go about their daily affairs. Buenos Aires has one of the world’s widest, and it makes it quite unpleasant to go from one side to the other. Even in Paris, some boulevards become a matter, for the tourist, of which metro station to alight at, depending on which side of some roundabout or park you want to get to.

Those European cities in the mediaeval mould, on the other hand, can be difficult to get around by car, but wonderful for pedestrians (depending on their approach to managing traffic, and the availability of PT). Freestone also makes the side note that it isn’t just scale, but building frontage that makes the city ped-friendly. The grand monumental public buildings proposed (and delivered) sitting on their own sites tend to frustrate and block the pedestrians. Such buildings are rarely permeable, the parkland looks nice but serves no other purpose, and the result is distances that are difficult to walk.

Would the underground rail network have worked?

Not for 25,000 people I dare say or even 75,000 – the sorts of ridership you would be looking for, say 8000 pax per hour, would be hard pressed to find enough people to actually ride such a system (assuming, for example, 10% of the city’s population are riding the trains at any one time, who’s running the place?) And that is on top of the population otherwise riding the tram, driving, walking, cycling and however other methods might have been found.

If Griffin’s template could have produced a city of millions – Washington style, then of course it is a different matter. Each of his separate precincts, retail, government, municipal and so on, would have almost required an underground railway. So the clerk in the Prime Minister’s Department could have his beer in the retail district pub after work, but then ride to his home in the residential suburb, and maybe take his kids to the public monument district or park districts on weekends.

But Canberra could never be a city of millions while Australia barely had that to its name as a whole. Which comes back to the failure of the Australian promise – the failure to be able to attract settlement (of the desirable kind: white, English-speaking and loyal to the Crown) in sufficient numbers.

Of course you don’t attract millions so that you can build an underground in the nation’s capital (at a time when the state capitals were underserved by underground railways and had many more people).

And the mainline railway?

This comes back to the general gripes with the NSWGR. Though the Commonwealth Railways owned the short Canberra branchline, they were in effect dependent for the whole period on the service of the NSWGR, who operated it as a slightly more prominent branch service off their vast but poorly built statewide network.

It had a through sleeping car – but so did Coonabarabran if my memory serves me. No real attempt was made by the NSW authorities to accord the service the dignity that even Newcastle received with its Flyer, and as if to spite the national capital, places like Goulburn were made the local hubs of activity and terminus for major passenger trains.

The NSWGR was built as an agricultural development railway, but kept as a pork barrel for Country Party voters – with funds for marginal services ensuring those lines of business that might have been worth pursuing – high density urban passenger rail, premium intercity passenger rail and heavy freight (either forwarded general freight, or bulk) were kept undercapitalised enough to give the road competition the head start.

If the focus had been kept on reducing journey times, upping axle loads, payload lengths, loco sizes and operating efficiencies, it would not be difficult to imagine a straight and fast line from Sydney to Goulburn and Canberra, such that an off-the-shelf tilting train today might be doing the run in say 2.5 hours, and competing centre to centre with aviation.

And a sensible heavy railway on the direct route might have a freight yard for local produce, containerised general freight into the city from Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane or beyond.

Such a railway might have also supported a modest interurban rail service out of the area – with settlements such as Yass being confirmed suburbs of the city. Certainly the desirable Southern Highlands towns of Bowral, Mittagong and so on would be as much Canberra’s playground as Sydney’s.

Again, the NSWGR would have been within their rights to say they staged development of a Canberra railway around the Fed’s progress with actually building the city.

By the 1950s when a real prospect of a federal capital was in reach, the feast had moved on, with road and air links being more important. Canberra has certainly never suffered a lack of domestic aviation into its airfield, definitely ahead of cities that were already larger such as Newcastle or Townsville.

[As an aside, I never thought a bog-standard NSWGR trestle across the Molonglo, or potentially across the ornamental lake, did justice to Griffin’s plan. .They might as well put the whole thing out of its misery and sell the Kingston site if they need the money. Any future fixed rail in the ACT depends on urban passenger traffic, including potentially to Queanbeyan, and a high speed train would be better coming from the north.]

It is also not just the failing of the original Australian promise of settlement and growth, but also the lack of economic growth and economic development. Add in that the Great Depression probably on the ground hit Australia harder than most developed economies, that WWII, while not physically disruptive, was not the economic enhancement to Australia that it was to much of the developed world.

Just to diverge: The UK Treasury estimated in 1952 that the entire cost of WWII to the UK had been regained in improved productivity from wartime capitalisation, and stopped just short of thanking the Germans for their aerial demolition of London’s redundant port facilities, which were superceded in more productive ports elsewhere in the UK!

But that was not really the case in Australia. So much lost time between 1912 and 1950. Not just within Canberra, but also in the states, whose economies did not really develop much during that time.

Economic development also drives sophistication in political policy and regulation.

Washington was already, in 1912, a significant place for businesses to lobby, for economic policies to be made, for the indulgences of the rich and powerful to be played out in the political sphere. This didn’t matter whether you were cattle baron, speculator, property developer, industrialist or whatever. DC was the place to be.

Australia remained a state-focused place for many years. The levers of political influence remained in the state capitals for decades (as did many of the federal bureaucracies in the event). Basics such as company regulation, infrastructure and industrial standards were state issues. Our cockies and squattocrats looked to their state representatives to protect them, even as Section 92 marched on.

And Australia never had the military procurement culture of the US. Even if Defence had been in Russell in the early years, I suspect we wouldn’t have seen the revolving door of influence in Russell that exists in Washington.

The Constitution was a shopping list of minutiae – with the Feds getting the post office, the lighthouses, meteorology and other trivia.

Even where constitutional law was screaming out the possibility of centralisation, such as through the corporations power, the Interstate Commission (that never was) or centralised wage fixing – it was a long time coming. One can imagine the Engineers Case of 1920 as a bridge across the Rubicon of States’ rights that was never crossed – well not until the recent Workchoices case. We did not, in that sense, use the scope that the US Congress was afforded under their constitution to expand the power of Washington over the economy.

So one wonders, even if the population had been there – what would there have been there to do in Canberra, such as would merit a large capital.

Maybe Griffin was right – and a constitutionally modest Canberra, administering a limited range of national functions (and the lighthouses), would have been best kept within say a 5km radius of Capitol Hill, with a small tramway network and a nice big railway station in its northern quarter.

I have argued before the whole ACT was a mistake – the Federal territory should only ever have been excised from NSW around the actual institutions of the Federal Government – to encompass the Parliament, the Executive, the GG, the foreign embassies, the High Court, and perhaps the Defence/Security establishment. Such a territory could have easily been a mere 10sqkm or so. Any extra land required for public servants’ housing, retail and so on, could have been within NSW, within an extended Queanbeyan.

A real Washington DC, with a Maryland and Virginia to house its people.

Federal capitals are always fraught, and as Freestone points out, for grandiose schemes to succeed they need authoritarians behind them. Just as Haussman needed Louis Napoleon, and Speer needed Hitler, so to did Putrajaya need Mahathir in our time. There is no shame in wanting a city to be a national monument. We should never pretend there is an economic payback – but realise that having a capital is the curse of being a nation state.

And having a federal capital is the curse of being a federation.

It is interesting to see how Europe is dealing with this. Brussels was only ever an obscure political compromise of the 1960s and now seems irrelevant and redundant coming into 2010. If anything, the only payoff seems to be to hold the centrifugal forces of Belgian bi-communalism together a few more decades. Brussels is of course “Francophone but not in France” just as Canberra is “in NSW but not of it”.

A real European capital would probably be closer to the geographical centre, more steeped in the angst of pan-European conflicts and culture (perhaps on the Germano-Slavic divide) and potentially a new city, or a “Bonn” built up. I’d wager somewhere near Trieste, Ljubliana and Klagenfurt – the interaction of the Germanic, the Slavic and the Romance.

At least Brussels has a good modern transport system, to bring this post back to the topic.

A modern enclosed shopping centre is arguably the new walkable retail district, in the original mould. Having an enclosed shopping centre in each of the towns means that the original retail commercial centre at Civic can never be much more than the walk-about centre of its mmediate environs.

While you are free to live in which ever suburb you wish (or across the border), in practice the homogenous nature of Canberra housing means there is no particular reason not to live in a suburb of the town you work in. And much of this type of commuting is of course done by car.

And judging by the ABC News Radio traffic broadcasts in the morning, it is rare indeed for Canberra to suffer the all encompassing congestion and slow journey times that keep rail transport in business in the five mainland state capitals.

If Griffin’s electric tramways had been “US Interurban” in flavour, with long sections of rail-style cross-country running on separate corridors, they could have been a template for a modern inter-town electric rail system.

Of course, this idea has also considerable weaknesses. The town centres are not compact in themselves either – so unless multiple stations/stops were provided, it might be hard to use them to get around locally. And by definition the town centres are supposed to be very similar – providing very little reason to leave them. There is no sense leaving Woden Plaza and journey for 30 minutes to …visit another shopping mall in Belconnen?

I would be interested in a US perspective on Canberra’s prospects for fixed-rail transport. The low density, car friendly characteristics have been overcome in several US light rail schemes – but the city is very small.

And ‘commuter rail’ in the smaller cities that have benefited from it have often used it to overcome freeway congestion (more cost-effective than extra lanes) which is absent in Canberra, and the freight rail infrastructure they are using is in better condition than the former NSWGR.

The public debate has moved away from privatisation of government functions, but has not swung back in any big way to a larger state sector.

Canberra may yet grow from accretion, but I doubt it will grow in the Whitlamesque way, with active consideration of new state functions and the staff to support them. Which means no grand plans for transport which can’t be justified by extra population.

Now the ACT is self-governing and has dreams of its own light rail network, I’m not sure there is any constituency for this thinking though. The Federal Government is still the largest employer in town – and they conspicuously recruit Australia wide, permanently turning Canberra into a city of migrants, never quite interested in its fate.

Too many Commonwealth public servants I have met still cast one eye towards the house they hope to buy in Sydney or Melbourne or Noosa, when they have had enough or saved enough. You still experience the mad rush on a Friday night at the airport and the expression “Last one out please turn off the lights” is still widely used. {I suspect the MPs and their vast legions of staff are also largely responsible for this effect, as they conspicuously crowd the airport}. I even recall when the hospital implosion tragedy happened, they said they staged the event to stop people leaving on weekends!

I therefore suspect there are too few people in Canberra with enough roots there to make it want to prosper, even before you have to deal with the other 21 million Australians and their views of the place.

The Ottawa model might be better for Canberra (better for Canberra than Ottawa I suspect). Buses along busways with a bit of fixed infrastructure in the town centres, and dedicated lanes on the intertown highways.

If the towns were able to build up density in their centres, that might at least provide a constituency of people who don’t use private motor transport for their every move—that might be users of PT in a future life.

And we should not forget the enthusiasm for cycling. You can get them out of their cars in the right circumstances.

But Canberra is definitely ‘pro-road’ in extremis, its town planning, modal investment, its size, and operational policies like parking completely unfriendly to PT.

I don’t know if Griffin’s Canberra could ever have lived down the ‘bush capital’ label; but it could conceivably have been a very diffferent place to live. A mini-Washington and a small European new town at the same time. A pleasant university campus of a place, with a little tramway and compact walkable centre. Dreams are free!

Crisis? What crisis?

I would like something more than a cliché filled soup – with all the usual ingredients, a bit of Salt [Bernard], a dash of Birrell and Bolt, a bit of Fairfax on the side. I’m probably not the ideal reviewer for a work like this because, in Jim Schembri style, I bring my ideological baggage with me on the ride. So I’ll word this as a response, not a review.

Gleeson continues a thread of romanticism about suburbs that Fairfax and News promote every day in their different ways, but a narrative which glosses over several pertinent matters – stones in the collective shoe. The glossing over includes quotes from cultural commentators over the years, a few demographic snapshots for ‘reinforcing’. Probably catering to a market of what people want to read. But for me, I wanted something more.

Does the concept ‘suburb’ actually capture anything of note?

A suburb is not just a suburb. It isn’t here, nor is it in the real and supposed comparator countries, the Anglophone cultural source countries.

All cities have suburbs, or districts, or quarters, or whatever. Almost sine qua non. And I’ve yet to see a city that didn’t have dense bits and spread out bits; well-to-do bits and less-well-to-do bits. And most cities would have satellite settlements – bequeathed by history or of more recent, or even deliberate creation.

Some suburbs look mass-produced. Some are poor. Some have people in them who could be fairly categorised as ‘disengaged’ from the cultural movements that have captured media attention. In both senses – some might be disengaged from high-cultural pursuits, others might be disengaged by mass consumption entertainment.

Gleeson mixes the terms ‘urban’ and ‘suburban’ with careless abandon, in so doing, blurs any point he could reasonably make about suburbs. An urban area and a suburban area must by definition be different, and the latter is not shorthand for the former.

Is there a suburb versus ‘city’ distinction in Australia? Australia has no Manhattan Island, no Westminster or “The City” in the London way. No postcode 75 that the Parisians would fetish. And apart from a few core districts around the CBD grids that predate the rail and tram systems, the Surry Hills or Carlton equivalents in each, there are few suburbs that don’t owe their existence to powered transport.

Much of the false ‘attack/defence’ to which Gleeson alludes in his commentaries on suburban life over the years, the unfairly maligned, the Great Defence – relate to issues of class and status rather than suburban life per se.

Mosman and Kew are suburbs too. And no Londoner or New Yorker would disparage, from their supposed high position of attainment, life in such settlements.

The Anglophone source countries have two points of difference that are relevant though. One has worn its class and status differences openly and the other has a well developed entertainment industry that promotes an environment of prosperity and conspicuous consumption. We are far more aware of the lifestyles of the rich, famous or merely propertied of the UK and USA than we are even of our own.

That has generated a ‘vacuum’ which is filled with self-doubt and criticism in Australia.

It’s not that we lack a robust middle or working class culture – but that we have not developed an upper or ruling class with their own strong presence. Money has a habit of hiding in Australia – it hides in the rural squattocracies and the huge land banks, it hides among the semi-criminal classes of spivs and small time property developers. Some of it is probably hiding overseas, in Switzerland or China. Those who show it rarely have it, and the reverse is also true. The entertainment and sporting industries would be the rare exceptions.

I then infer the suburbs are only conspicuous in the absence of something else. Something that our own culture would place on a higher pedestal. Because we lack that thing, we are inclined to both rush to import something to fill that space, and to pull the suburbs down a peg, as if they are pretenders to an Australia that isn’t there.

Second, Gleeson romanticises the idea of life in the suburbs. Again, writing for a market I suspect. There is nothing romantic about life in suburbs; nor is there anything romantic about its putative ‘antithesis’ – life in the “City” whatever that means. People can romanticise their own lives, for their own reasons. There will always be people for whom life is hard – perhaps romanticism is their escape, or at least their reconciliation with their own tough pasts.

But others live the life of Riley. There is nothing ‘suburban’ or otherwise about these realities. You can live the life of Riley in a Sydney CBD penthouse, or in a Mosman, or Vaucluse mansion, or in a large ‘ranch-style’ house on a hilltop overlooking the ferals of Macquarie Fields or Campbelltown.

My ideological baggage includes an ‘anti-romanticism’ and a preference to choose economic explanations for behaviour over cultural ones, if the choice is there.

I am surprised he writes from a Melbourne, rather than Sydney, perspective. Suburban life in Sydney is at least genuinely tribal. Some of it is class and status, but not all of it. The different ‘well-off’ zones are known to take pot-shots at each other, and even a tribal North Shore person’s disdain for the Sylvania Waters set in the Shire would come not from the issue of money as such, but how it was obtained. In Melbourne geographic tribalism seems weaker.

And for public transport – what does Australian life actually mean for the public transport question? I would have framed and executed Roger Rabbit years ago. Far from arguing suburbia has been bad for Australian public transport, I would argue it has enabled it, and given it succour.

Of course the onset of the motor vehicle has transformed what sorts of areas could be suburbanised, and the spatial and economic relationships between city centre and suburbs.

Even then, for Australians you could argue we even received an “Indian Summer” of public transport well into the 50s and 60s that was cut short in the USA in the twenties by the earlier success of the motor vehicle there. Perhaps this Indian Summer was long enough for the suburban electric railway, a concept not widely adopted in the USA, to become entrenched.

Perhaps too long though – with electric tramways and suburban electric railways displacing from the urban ecology their natural successors, the light rail system and the heavy rail metro, which are now viable options in the USA.

The suburban railway and tramway created Australian suburbia. Those provincial cities that lacked either (and there aren’t many of those) were themselves too small to be truly cities during the relevant period, and only came of age with the motor car. I’m thinking of Canberra or Darwin.

The car versus train/bus argument has been conflated with the inner versus outer, high versus low arguments out of necessity, a false cultural conflict. I doubt there are many people in either environment who really WANT to take the train. The question is really about our collective choices.

What is economically rational – Soviet style road planning, socialistic rail and bus provision, or third world style non-provision of either mode resulting in gridlock and paralysis? None of them would be my answer. It will not be economic to provide rail to every street corner. Nor will it be economic to not provide rail at all and provide exclusively roads for private motor transport.

It may not be the “Australian way” to promote high density, rail dependence transport, but its alternative, basically the non-provision of transport as our record on roads is pretty bad too. This is the “Philippine way” or the “Thai” way if you’ve ever had to travel in either country before urban rail was instituted. There is something fundamental to the existence of a city; and that is transport.

The poor will always be with us

Much of Gleeson’s rant relates to gated communities, the rich choosing to live away from the poor as if that was not true in ancient Rome (whose Palatine Hill, the Vaucluse of the place, gave us the words Palace and Palatial) or in mediaeval London. Community cohesion is always great fun, except no-one wants to actually do it, least of all the poor.

I get the sense from the Australian polity now, that apart from a few beggars on the street corners hassling for a dollar to “get home” or whatever – the poor don’t actually ask for money. There is no broad base among the poor for income redistribution or socialism more generally. You’ll get the odd reflexive response against a public asset sale or whatever, but my sense is the middle and upper classes are just as socialised to demand subvention as the poor are.

Crisis, what crisis?

A lot of people may find they are unable to afford to buy a house, as they might have in the past. But this constant reference to the language of crisis is fatiguing, though it sells books and newsprint. There are structural changes going on to cities, and the market is sometimes failing (for example, failing to give due credit to the value of mortgages over apartments, while at the same time increasing their cost through overcapitalisation). Gleeson presents a whole set of ‘scenarios’ that require instant judgement from armchair politicians.

Back to the crisis – there is enough evidence that in fact it was quite hard for a 1950s Australian to purchase 15 squares of crudely thrown up weatherboard or blond brick. Now they whinge if they can’t have 35 squares with three bathrooms right now.

The facts also speak – how difficult it was to count a woman’s income to a mortgage, to get a home bigger than you needed, to borrow from any bank other than the one that held your own long term savings account, the lending margins and ratios were worse. And so it goes. This confected crisis suits the Right as much as the Left – the Australian ‘identity’ being compromised by faceless bureaucrats who are restricting the God-given right to buy a house.

But there are real conflicts at play

Societies are in conflict – from the trivial and mundane fight for resources that we call a market economy, to the broad brush political fights that occupy both the election space and the media/cultural space.

Many cultural commentators, Gleeson included, seem to think that a giant group hug will make these conflicts go away. It won’t, and worse, it only serves to entrench and legitimise potentially unjust positions which are the status quo. Whenever someone tells me they want a truce, a breather, from a political conflict, they only mean they want to consolidate their position; take profits; regroup to continue the battle later.

My own thinking has been heavily influenced by William Shawcross’ landmark “Deliver Us from Evil” on peacekeeping and peacemaking in the modern era. He contrasts classic peacekeeping: a neutral army interposed on the front line of two warring armies, specifically to stop skirmishes and the odd-angry shot from reigniting combat; from peacemaking – trying to stop state and non-state entities from fighting. His views are paleo-con but still persuasive: peacekeeping in the mould of the 1970s Sinai deployments or holding armistice lines in Cyprus or Korea can be effective, if the sides are generally state or quasi-state entities, if one or both parties are ‘exhausted’ or have reached a natural point of success or failure in their campaign.

The peacemaking in Bosnia, Kosovo or Congo is less effective, Shawcross argues – if the passions are unresolved, if the defeated party has yet to actually taste their own defeat, and if the victorious party has yet to actually taste victory and its perverse consequences of responsibility or opprobrium.

Of course I’m drawing a long bow to compare warfare with suburban life and the contest for the cultural/media space – but I share Shawcross’ displeasure with placing veneer over real conflicts. Conflicts represent real interests and are not stopped by group hugs.

Some is tribal, but even the tribe can have a commonality of purpose that brings it into real conflict with another tribe. Gleeson suggests the inner urban dwellers (the modern day original sinners against the “Australian way”) come out to the outer suburbs and ‘understand’ the outer types. Not sure how you can ‘understand’ people better.

He doesn’t really suggest a quid pro quo – the outer burbs people trying to ‘understand’ the inner urban crowd. A bit unfair, but a greater sign of how unrealistic he really is. A group hug is not going to make it go away.

If you want a fluffy bunny for Christmas, you should get your letter to the North Pole off pretty quick. I don’t expect fluffy bunnies in my urban planning/transport reading, and Gleeson has done his best attempt of being one.

I’ve been a bit guarded about my line of work but let’s just imagine this post is relevant to it.

I caught the end of an exchange in the Herald Sun letters section. The person was chastising another, presumably an employee of Coles or Woolworths, for a remark contributed. The chastiser was pointing out that employees of the supermarkets should not be supporting the self-serve checkouts, lest they deal themselves out of a job.

It follows the old furphy about whether you should deliberately leave a mess at McDonalds, to give their staff something to do; and therefore their bosses a reason to employ them.

It got me to thinking about the public transport system and what level of support there should be from staff for improvements to productivity, some of which might cost jobs, others of which might boost ridership, and therefore save, or even create, jobs.

NSW and Queensland rail operators still have guards on board the trains. NSW still has considerable numbers of staff in ticket boxes selling tickets, in most cases parallel to machines that can also sell tickets.

Releasing this labour could both save costs and also improve service quality, for example, by improving the frequency of trains by diverting guards to the driver pool. Of course this is somewhat simplistic but in the longer term, would boost service quality and therefore ridership and bottom line.

A driverless metro would do even more to ‘multiply’ the productivity of such staff as are employed.

And finally, public transport reform boosts the productivity of the city as a whole – and that provides even more jobs.

The downsides are of course whether people’s existing skills can be transferred or upgraded. And the minutiae of current employment grades and rates. And all the status and kudos that people feel in their current jobs, which reform could undermine.

And the political system lacks the credibility to deliver on these ‘quid-pro-quo’ arrangements. Staff are rightly suspicious of undertakings for better or higher paid employment after a transition.

It takes a special kind of turkey to vote for Christmas.

It’s a tradition in the British Parliament that during the Summer recess, the deeper thinkers in some of the political parties compile a Summer reading list for MPs to read. I must also admit that in writing this post I was inspired by Riccardo’s post on his blog about his wish that the young gunzels would head down to the libraries to round out their railway education with something broader and deeper than what Railpage has to offer.

With the end of the academic year in sight, the last exam taken care of and as with work year starting to run down, the long, glorious sunlit uplands of Christmas, New Year and summer beckons and it’s a good time to dust books off hiding in the unread pile and get ready to read them.

Thus, I’ve set up a summer reading list of transport- and urban planning related reading that may broaden the mind of Transport Textbook readers during the Summer. While I’ve read many of them and own quite a few as well, there’s some I haven’t yet read and some I want to read.

The 20 books I’ve listed are an eclectic mix of new and old, ’straight’ railway history and more nuanced historical studies of railways, not to mention the urban planning stuff which deals with the rest of the world beyond the railway boundary. If you don’t have these books at home, or can’t find them at your local library, there are many places to buy them online second hand at a reasonable price. Of course, comments, amendments and suggestions to the list are always welcome. Read on!

1. Robert Lee, Fruits of federation : the Grafton-Brisbane uniform gauge railway and Clarence River Bridge

2. Matthew Engel, Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain

3. Paul Mees, A Very Public Solution: Transport in the Dispersed City

4. Jeffrey Richards and John MacKenzie The Railway Station: A Social History

5. Ian Manning, The Open Street: public transport, motor cars and politics in Australian cities

6.Hugh Stretton, Ideas for Australian Cities

7. Peter Hall, Cities of tomorrow: an intellectual history of urban planning and design in the 20th Century

8. Mark Bachels, Philip Laird and Peter Newman, Back on track: rethinking transport policy in Australia and New Zealand

9. Eric Harding, Uniform Railway Gauge

10. Bill Hosokawa, Old Man Thunder: Father of the Bullet Train

11. G. H. Fearnside All Stations West: the story of the Sydney-Perth standard gauge railway

12. Wolfgang Schivelbusch The railway journey: the industrialization of time and space in the 19th century

13. Geoffrey Churchman Railway Electrification in Australia and New Zealand

14. John Gunn Along Parallel Lines: a history of the railways of New South Wales

15. David Burke Road through the Wilderness: the story of the transcontinental railway

16. Clive Forster Australian Cities: Continuity and Change

17. Kevin O’Connor, Robert Stimson and Maurie Daly Australia’s changing economic geography: A society divided

18. Brendan Gleeson Australian heartlands: Making space for hope in the suburbs

19. Brendan Gleeson and Nicholas Low Australian urban planning: new challenges, new agendas

20. John Kerr Triumph of narrow gauge : a history of Queensland Railways

The 2010 Australasian Transport Research Forum has put out a call for papers that closes at the end of January 2010. It will be held in Canberra, so it’s a good opportunity to go to a local conference on transport that’s not too expensive.

If you’ve got a piece of research that you’ve done on a transport topic, why not share it with the rest of the transport world? Just finished an honours/masters/PhD? – time to publicise your research. Alternatively, if you’ve just completed a transport project, it’s time to share successes and failures with your peers.

I know there’s a few contributors who already work in the industry who could easily do a paper and there are others who have lots of good ideas, but no ’serious’ forum (beyond TT of course) at which to be heard. Then its time to ‘put the money where the mouth is’ so to speak. A 200-word abstract is not a big investment of one’s time. The hard part will be putting the paper together if it gets accepted.

If anyone is interested in taking the first step into a wider world of transport research and policy, email me and I’d be pleased to lend a hand and give advice. For examples of what an ATRF paper looks like, there’s a great archive of papers from the first conference in 1975 through to 2009 on the PATREC website. There are so many good ideas floating around on TT that it would be a shame if they went no further out into the world of transport.

There were certain cities I found very convenient to get around, and others I found inconvenient. It took me several weeks to work out why: the cities I found inconvenient to get around were those with multiple city stations and an ineffective “glue” to hold them together. By “glue” I mean a simple, convenient way to get from one station to another to make a connection.

New York
New York is always quoted as an example of a Metro which runs at high frequency and long hours. I was looking forward to riding it, even though my travel plans only allowed time for a trip from Penn Station to JFK Airport. I was disappointed, partly because the staff were fairly unhelpful, but mainly because it was a case of “Take the Long Island Railroad to Jamaica station, then transfer to the Airtrain from there”.

There’s a problem right away – why are there three separate companies (Subway, Long Island, Airtrain), each with their own separate ticketing system and with no coordination?

The rule slowly started to gel in my head. Ideally there should be only one city station, served by all trains into the city. It’s an extension of the rule that says there should be “Fewer, larger transport interchanges, preferably at major activity centres”.

Thankfully, there was plenty of time before the flight and I was able to enjoy the Airtrain once I got onto it. Lots to say about Airtrain but that’s a topic for another day.

London
London was a similar case – I was looking forward to seeing if the Tube is everything it’s cracked up to be. I arrived on the Gatwick Airport Express to London Victoria and tried to find my way to a Manchester train. But Manchester trains don’t go from Victoria, they go from Euston. How do I get there? Take the Tube. But the Tube wouldn’t accept our BritRailPass, so it would cost us £8 just to go from one London station to another.

The rule was modified in my head: If it’s not possible to have every train arrive at a single station, the “glue” between them must be free. Think of an airport – would they charge you to travel on the shuttle between the international and domestic terminals? Of course not!

Melbourne – options
I was talking this over after the trip and suddenly realised that Melbourne is (partially) guilty of the same offense. A visitor coming in on Skybus would (at some hours) be presented with a line up of PRIDE screens almost all saying “Take next train to Flinders Street”. Of course we are already following the second half of the rule by having multimode ticketing – whatever train they are taking from Flinders Street, the ticket they need for it will also cover their trip there from Southern Cross. Also if they came in on a V/Line service they have free Zone 1 travel. The problem is Skybus, it doesn’t cover anything but the bus. Perhaps we should look at the possibility of Skybus tickets giving free travel within the City Saver area – although it looks like an even better idea is in the wings (although I don’t know how influential those backers are).

However, we are very close to implementing the first half of the rule – that every train should go through one single station. And that station is Southern Cross.

Currently the only trains in Victoria (including interstate trains and even Skybus which acts as the airport train) that don’t run through SSS are the Sandringham, Blackburn and Alamein services which terminate at Flinders Street. If (as many have proposed) we make those services form Northern Group services, the collection will be complete. No matter where in Victoria you want to go, you can get a train there from Southern Cross – with at most one change of train (clearly announced) where it’s operating as a spur line.

If we accept that, it would also be logical to move driver changeover, recovery time and the various operational procedures that need to be done to terminate a service from Flinders Street to Southern Cross.

There is more room to add infrastructure (specifically platforms) at Southern Cross than Flinders Street. And the central location of Flinders Street (being next to the major shopping areas on Swanston and Elizabeth Streets) is declining in relevance due to the expansion of the Docklands area.

An even weirder idea – gunzel anti-drooling alert!
If we take the airport example further, we can note that the distance between Melbourne’s five city stations (or even eight if you include North Melbourne, Jolimont and Richmond) is not unlike the distance between terminals at a major airport. I have for a long time been of the opinion that public transport should take a leaf out of the airlines’ book – where privatisation and competition have increased the level of service offered by orders of magnitude.

Suppose we called them all “Melbourne station” and distinguished Flagstaff from Flinders Street by giving them terminal numbers? Or if the gunzels and historians won’t let us do that, “Melbourne Station, Flinders Street Terminal”?

That would eliminate the confusion of “This is a Flinders Street train”, “This is a City Loop train”. All trains are Melbourne trains, and at Richmond it is announced “The next station is Melbourne Parliament” or “The next station is Melbourne Flinders Street”.

On the face of it, none of this would make the service any better from the local’s point of view. But something we need to realise is that international students are forming an increasingly significant proportion of the public transport system’s passengers.

It’s easy to say “Oh, of course Flinders Street means Melbourne! People will just have to learn that” when we’ve lived here all our lives and used it for years. But for a foreigner dragging three suitcases and still jet-lagged from the flight, it makes a big difference.

Long term ideas
One day I’d really like to see tram routes go the same way. Within the City Saver area people really don’t care whether their tram is eventually going to Box Hill, North Balwyn or West Preston. And they don’t want to have three trams come within two minutes and then seven minutes until the next one. What we need is a regular high frequency shuttle along each of the city streets. Missed your tram? Look, the next one is just at the top of the hill over there.

Also, to make it easier for people to get from the station to the tram stop, we need the streets to be car-free. Look at Bourke Street Mall – people will happily come out of a shop and pick a tram without any stressful waiting-at-the-pedestrian-lights-oh-dear-am-I-going-to-miss-it-should-I-risk-crossing-against-the-lights like there always is at (say) Melbourne Central. If we had something similar at Flinders Street and Southern Cross, we would be a lot further toward truly integrating the public transport system than we are today.

* Arrival

If coming by Prospector or Indian Pacific, alight at the East Perth terminus, noting the long platform. It’s worth going inside the station building, formerly known as the Westrail Centre, as Perth bus and train timetables and staff newsletters, were freely available when I visited. There’s also refreshments, toilets and information on TransWA country coaches, as this is the main terminal.

Unlike Sydney or Melbourne you’re a bit out of town, so you’ll need to take an electric train into the city proper. Walk towards Perth along the platform, up a long ramp and over a footbridge to get a view of the city. Then down to East Perth station for trains towards Perth/Fremantle or Midland. More information: http://starwon.com.au/~cfrench/Signals/East_Perth.htm

If coming by air, let’s hope you’re flying domestic as the international terminal is some distance away and not served by Transperth. Route 37 buses run from the airport to the City and Kings Park (the signage to the stop isn’t that great but there is a timetable at the stop). Service is every 30 minutes Monday – Saturday and 60 minutes evenings and Sunday (Like many Perth bus routes services finish around 7pm Sundays). Depending on your anticipated travel for the day ask for either a 2 hour or daily ticket.

37 is not the most direct route into town and the trip will take about 40 minutes. You can however alight at Belmont Forum for the 98/99 Circle Route (every 15 min weekdays/30 min weekends) or the Victoria Park Transfer station, where bus connections exist to many southern suburbs. The Belmont area has many low income earners who are heavy bus users. While not many will be waiting with you at the airport, the bus will get quite full past Belmont Forum. This was recognised when the previous Route 37 20 minute weekday service from the airport was replaced with a 15 minute service to Belmont and only every second bus serving the airport. 37 goes near but does not enter Esplanade Station, but if you get off somewhere near William Street it’s a fairly short walk.

* Places to go and see

The first place to go is Perth Station. Enter off Wellington St and visit the Infocentre. Decide if you want to buy a SmartRider, though the staff may be reluctant to sell them to tourists. Or go with cash 2 hour and daily tickets bought from the driver or vending machines. A DayRider costs $8.80 and is good value, allowing unrestricted travel all day after 9am. You can also get bus and train timetables for all routes from here.

Walk around Perth Station, noting the nearby Perth Underground (Clarkson and Mandurah trains leave here) and the Wellington Street Bus Station next door. Then back to Perth Underground and train to Mandurah. This is the newest and longest Perth suburban line, and like its northern predecessor mostly runs via a freeway median. Station spacing is wide and travel speeds easily beat cars.

Before surfacing you’ll notice Esplanade Station. This is near Esplanade Bus Station, which is the second major bus terminal in Perth. To cover off all modes it’s not too far to walk to the ferry at the end of Barrack Street and get it across to South Perth (your ticket will cover this as well). Around here you’ll see little buses – these are CAT buses and run free around the CBD. Take note of the ‘minutes to’ information displays at stops.

But assuming you stayed on the train, you’ll be at Mandurah in no time, after about 10 min of river views after the train surfaces. Look round Mandurah Station, possibly taking the shuttle to Mandurah foreshore. Get train back to Rockingham (although there’s also a bus as well). New stations in Perth aren’t well integrated into the urban fabric. Rockingham is an example, though there is a bus link (every 15 minutes until 9pm) to a nice beach foreshore and cafe strip (Rockingham Beach). If you do go on the shuttle, you’ll go past the sprawling Rockingham City Shopping Centre and near the site of the former shed-like Rockingham Bus Station (now demolished). Rockingham City supplanted Rockingham Beach as the main retail area in the 1980s, but the foreshore has seen a renaissance with new cafes and high-rise residential replacing fibro beach shacks.

Back on the train, looking out for the transit oriented development at Cockburn. Alight there if you want, or stay on until Murdoch Station. This is one of the busier stations and is served by the 98/99 Circle Route to Fremantle, Curtin Uni and other places. Curtin Uni bus interchange is worth a look, so go there somehow. Either via the Circle Route from Murdoch or route 100/101 from Canning Bridge Station (which was a bus interchange before the rail was built). Both these feeder routes are timetable harmonised with the train and run every 15 minutes on weekdays.

Curtin University is an ex-institute of technology 8 kilometres south-east of Perth. It is one of the nation’s finest examples of late ’60s brutalist concrete architecture. Like other campuses (eg Monash Uni Clayton) it was built in a new infill suburb 2-3km from the nearest station and is surrounded by vast car parks.

Public transport improved greatly in the last 15 years or so. Back then Curtin had one main city-based route running every 30 minutes off-peak towards the city, with very limited service in other directions. Now the campus has routes in four directions on 15 minute headways. These service stations in Perth CBD, Oats Street, Canning Bridge and Murdoch.

The first big improvement came in the late 1990s when the 98/99 Circle Route started. This 3-hour long route removed the need to go into the city for many trips and proved an instant success. When you go on it notice how the bus goes via Adie Court through a narrow busway into the next street. Buses never used to do that – previously Adie Court was strictly a cul-de-sac and buses used to waste a lot of time and fuel backtracking through it. This is an example of a low-cost improvement that sped bus travel to a major trip generator and improved operating efficiencies. Other improvements at Curtin were the opening of a bus interchange and improved pedestrian access across Hayman Road – again all happened since the 1990s.

From Curtin you can either get a bus to Cannington Station to explore the Armadale Line (and the Thornlie spur, opened in 2004) or a Circle Route to Oats Street Station (also on the Armadale line but nearer town). The Thornlie spur has just one station, though an extension to Canning Vale would make sense.

On its own Thornlie probably doesn’t stack up but it became necessary to build since the Court Liberal government had promised that Mandurah trains would run via Thornlie, with the new line running between Cannington/Kenwick and Mandurah. A new Labor government scrapped this in favour of a more direct alignment via Murdoch and the Kwinana Freeway to a new station at Espanade. Fortunately this alignment was the one that was built due to its benefits in reduced travel times, improved train capacity and added coverage of the CBD and inner-southern suburbs. Thornlie still got its train and it usefully serves as a stopper, allowing most Armadale trains to run express (even off-peak), reducing travel time on this older line with closely spaced stations.

Even earlier (1980s) there was a proposal to route the Mandurah line via Rockingham and Fremantle, with trains continuing to Perth. The argument that much travel was in that corridor and not to the CBD. The problem with that is poor travel speed and capacity constraints on the Fremantle line (which has close station spacing). To cater for this need Fremantle – Rockingham got the Route 920 bus. This is a high-service bus route (every 15 min weekdays with wide operating spans) and attracts good patronage. The only other major 900-series bus is a Perth-Hamilton Hill service (940). 900-series buses were part of a previous government’s ‘System 21′ proposal for more frequent buses along major corridors. Only two routes ever got the 900-series numbers, though several more were straightened and got service upgrades.

The 880-series bus routes can best be described as direct CBD-based medium-service routes serving some outer suburbs. You’ll see them in some southern and north-eastern suburbs. Other than that route numbers are geographically-based, with the first digit being the rough area (eg 400s is the northern suburbs, 500s is southern suburbs, 2 digits is inner etc).

From Oats St you can either go into town to connect with Clarkson train to explore northern suburbs stations or Armadale/Thornlie train for trip south east. If time is limited I suggest the former. Don’t forget to look out the window for the new Victoria Park Station. This is between the site of the old Victoria Park Station and the former Lathlain Station, which closed several 10 years ago.

The Armadale line from the south-east used to be through-routed to Clarkson trains in the north, but now runs indepenently since Clarkson was connected to the new Mandurah line. Hence you will need to alight at Perth Station and then board at Perth Underground to travel north. Grab some more timetables if you need them on the way past the Info Centre.

Once on the northern line step off at two or three stations (say Clarkson, Joondalup and Warwick). And note that you don’t need to tag off to look around some of the bus interchanges as they’re still inside the fare paid area and SmartRider will deduct less fare than if you did. The passenger information such as maps and bus timetables is worth a look – Perth does multimodal information extremely well.

The northern line is the first of the ‘modern’ lines. You’ll notice the station spacing is wider than on the older lines. Plans dating back to the 1950s proposed some form of northern rail line, but by the time the northern suburbs developed public transport’s role had declined and the freeway got built first. When the government pleged to build a line to Joondalup in the late 1980s the only corridor left was via the freeway median. Because freeways disperse rather than concentrate trip generators and residential development, almost no one works, shops or lives near the stations and most must catch a feeder bus or drive to reach the train.

To watch this in action, visit one of the major commuter stations (eg Warwick or Whitfords) and watch people alight the train, go up the escalators and board waiting buses during the pm peak (or vice versa in the morning). This is classic commuter country; 1970s – 1990s dormitory suburbs with few jobs within.

Urbanists should step off the train at Joondalup and see how a transit-oriented development became a transit-adjacent development that isn’t that well integrated wiht the station. Joondalup is basically a large shopping centre near the station, with the fine-grained ‘main street’ some walk away. The university campus is also sufficiently far for a ‘CAT’ shuttle service to operate.

From Stirling (also on the Clarkson line) it’s possible to get Circle Route bus back to Fremantle. You will go near the Univesity of WA, WA’s first university. Observe student patronage and grab tea at Fremantle. From there it’s easy to get a train back to Perth.

The above has covered more than half the rail network, with the main omissions being parts of the Armadale and Clarkson line, plus all of the Midland line. The next few days can be spent completing this part of the network, and some more bus routes. Armadale and Cannington are examples where the government has tried to develop town centres around the station. Kelmscott is an ingenious example of the bus interchange being built on a station platform, so provides very easy interchange.

The staffed station, as known in Sydney and Melbourne, is almost unknown in Perth. There is however heavy security at stations, especially noted on the Armadale line. Apart from window scratching (which is extremely common, on both trains and buses), notice that vandalism and graffiti is much less visible than in Sydney or Melbourne. Perth appears to have fast clean-up policies, whereas in the larger cities it’s implicitly tolerated trackside, on substations and in the pit.

Tram enthusiasts might get a bus up Beaufort St since it was here that the last tram ran, in 1958. Trams also ran to Victoria Park, Subiaco while a seperate system operated lines east from Fremantle until 1952. Perth was also one of the great trolley bus cities, with services running until as late as 1969.

More than most cities, Perth turned its back on its rail system and, after the Fremantle line was closed in 1979, the network was reduced to just the Midland and Armadale lines. This made buses, especially those running along the (then) new Kwinana and Mitchell freeways, important. A whole series of bus stations were built mostly near major shopping centres such as Innaloo, Karrinyup, Warwick, Kwinana, Rockingham, Mirrabooka and Morley. Sometimes these were open-air (Kwinana) but other times (eg Rockingham) they were grim dark sheds that were not regarded as particularly desirable. From here local suburban buses connected with freeway expresses to the city.

Rail expansion made most obsolete, but a visit to Mirrabooka (planned for redevelopment) and Morley is suggested to get a taste of how public transport in Perth was before the rail renaissance. These areas are notable for another reason; while Perth’s basic weekday frequency on train and major bus routes is now 15 minutes, Morley and Mirrabooka trunk services remain stuck on a less frequent 20 minute headway with limited Sunday service. Morley does however have the Circle Route, and an easy connection from there to the Midland line is possible.

Still in the eastern suburbs are a couple of places of gunzel interest. Whiteman Park has a heritage tram. Hire a car or take a taxi to get there. Better served is Rail Heritage WA, located in Bassendean, on the Midland line. Midland itself has a rail heritage and was formerly the site of railway workshops. It is one of the early settlements and still has other historic buildings (Perth initially grew east-west along a Fremantle – Perth – Midland axis following the river and the railway, and started its big north-south growth spurt after WWII).

Some routes can be quite scenic. Different parts of the river are visible from portions of some routes like the 106 between Perth and Fremantle every 15 minutes. Perth’s most affluent suburb is Dalkeith, and this is reachable via 20-series routes from the city. 381 is an unusual (but infrequent) north-south route up the coast from Fremantle. 400/408 to Scarborough is the most frequent beach service, while 100-series routes run to famous Cottelsoe beach. But for bigger hills one can go on one of the routes out east to Mundaring, Lesmurdie or Kalamunda.

I haven’t said much about the country. Compared to Victoria the frequency of regional services is very limited and you need to plan trips carefully. The larger towns have one to three (mostly coach) services per day but some might be only two or three per week. Places like Bunbury, Albany, Kalgoorlie, Geraldton and Busselton have their own (sometimes limited) town bus services. Tourist attractions at places like Margaret River are invariably remote from the coaches that do run, so car hire would be the best option.

The current theme for the site is not a permanent one, more changes will be forthcoming this evening.
Cheers
Phin

UPDATE

I’ve changed the theme again to one which is much more simple, but there are further options for post layout on the main page. They are listed below: