40 years of unnecessary wastage must end at a stroke

As I have noted, there is little public confidence about using Victoria’s ecologically critical public transport network.

Today, my mother confirmed that a mere thirteen percent of the state’s residents are confident about using public transport due to the risk of COVID spread. My mother says that when COVID ebbs this will improve, but I am neither:

1. certain of this
1. COVID-19 is so much more severe than previous pandemics that people will not forget it even when and if improved treatments are developed.
2. More likely the public will come to fear public transport as an incubator for viruses on a permanent basis
3. Victorians in the future will be thus even more willing to accept road traffic congestion and its ecologically deadly consequences
2. accepting of the situation, give Australia’s execrable environmental performance outlined for may years by the New Climate Institute in its annual Climate Change Performance Index
3. accepting that there is no better alternative to a car-based transport system and drastic cuts to already inadequate services

Both the Public Transport Users’ Association and the Democratic Socialist Party conclusively demonstrated in the 1990s that a public transport system providing equal mobility to Melbourne’s current car- and freeway-based transport system would cost about ⅒ as much as freeway projects planned and built since 1990.

Earth’s ecology has been demanding from Australia a rigid zero roads budget policy throughout forty years of uncalled-for wastage on freeways that benefit only the car companies, the oil companies, and businesses supplying them with raw materials and components.

If all money earmarked for unbuilt proposed roads were transferred to the critical issue of making ecologically essential public transport perfectly safe through all pandemics, there would no doubt – although I have not made calculations – exist ample money to sanitise every public transport vehicle and to ensure all passengers are given hand sanitiser, masks and gloves. Such a transfer of funding would have the following advantages:

1. prevention of huge losses for Victoria’s public transport system
2. prevention of drastic cuts to services after the COVID-19 pandemic ends
3. prevention of massive increases in traffic congestion – which more roads exacerbates – as more cars are on the road
4. reduction Australia’s lamentable level of greenhouse gas emissions and reducing the impacts on the global climate
5. preparing for a complete transfer of all public and private transport funding to rail and buses – forty or more years overdue as I write this
6. following from (5), major public savings from not subsidising the car and fossil fuel industries who benefit from public and private wasting of money on ecologically damaging transport systems