Today, Mummy and I went on a train ride to pick up the new Peugeot, which had a major fault in its brake control that had to be repaired at a workshop near the bend of Hawthorn Road into Camberwell Road. In earlier years, this area was familiar, but since COVID we have never been there.
On the whole, I enjoyed the return trip with my mother to pick up the car — a 2018 Peugeot 208 which was bought in Balwyn last summer. I was really very reactive to any complaint about the standard of Melbourne’s public transport, which by global standards is exceedingly bad. There remains the problem of loud, one-way “mantras” about the need to end all spending on roads and to transfer it to public transport. Nevertheless, so early as 1990, Environment, Capitalism and Socialism demonstrated the potential benefits to the immense majority of such a policy, while much more recently Richard Smith had demonstrated the urgent necessity of radically reducing car production and banning the manufacture of all but the smallest road vehicles.
Given what Smith reveals about the energy costs of car production, one must never say that cars are a necessary benefit when criticising Australia’s woeful public transport. Cars’ environmental cost is far too great to, even given the standard of public transport in Australia, excuse their use.
The fact is — as known for over three decades — that a rational plan could with 100 percent public transport modal share and resultant vastly reduced greenhouse emissions and pollution nevertheless produce the same (or greater) mobility cars provide, and at far less financial cost than the sum currently wasted on roads. Plainly put, such a plan is in every way except reduction in profit to wealthy corporations much fairer, cheaper and more rational than the present transport system. There should be no tolerance (personally or politically) for any policy other than 100 percent of spending on public transport, and not a solitary cent on roads.
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