Myth: They're not freeways, they're Integrated Transport Corridors

Myth: They're not just freeways, they're Integrated Transport Corridors

Fact: The idea of 'integrated' or 'balanced' transport is often used by the road lobby to try and take the sting out of their freeway plans. But in practice the freeway element swallows up the lion's share of the budget that would otherwise be available for public transport improvements.

When freeway-building began in earnest in the USA and Europe in the 1940s, the road planners made no bones about what they were doing. They produced 'Highway Plans' detailing what roads would be built and where, financed them with 'highway grants' or 'road bonds', and set up Departments of Roads to do the job.

But already by the early 1960s, critics of wholesale road-building had emerged, and it was recognised that neglect of public transport was ruining cities. The road planners responded, not by loosening their grip on government budgets, but by relabelling their plans and inventing the concept of 'balanced transport'.

Accordingly, the 1969 plan for Melbourne on which almost all subsequent freeway plans have been based was called not the Melbourne Road Plan (or Traffic Plan), but the Melbourne Transportation Plan. 'Balanced transport' is the theme running right through it:

Sure enough, the vast bulk of the printed material is devoted to non-car transport, with the freeways confined to a short section at the end. Yet when one adds up the figures in the 1969 plan, one finds that 86 per cent of the projected budget is devoted to roads and parking, and only 14 per cent to other forms of transport. This is what 'balance' means to a road lobbyist. Transport planner J.M. Thompson described it thus:

Today's equivalent of 'balanced transport' is 'integrated transport'. 'Integrated Transport Plans' are everywhere, from the local council to Canberra, drafted by 'strategic transport planners' and funded by 'Land Transport Development' grants. Yet somehow the vast bulk of the money always gets spent on roads.

A case in point is the 'East West Integrated Transport Project' originally floated by Melbourne City Council, and then made the subject of Sir Rod Eddington's Investing in Transport report. In its original form it proposed a massive $10 billion of expenditure - $2000 for every man, woman and child in Victoria - most of it for a freeway tunnel all the way from the city end of the Eastern Freeway to the Western Ring Road in Deer Park. Our bottlenecks page explains why any inward extension of the Eastern Freeway would be a futile exercise.

However, as a distraction from the effect this huge freeway would have in reinforcing car dependence, the MCC's version of the project (like the 1969 plan before it) also included a rail line from the city to Doncaster, and a suite of traffic-calming initiatives in inner Melbourne. These, the road lobby hoped, would neutralise the many critics of freeway building, causing them to react in the manner of the curate in George du Maurier's famous Punch cartoon from 1895:

In a surprise admission that reveals much about what 'integrated' transport planning really means in Melbourne, the consultant who co-authored the report for MCC said he didn't actually think the freeway tunnel should have been in the project, but put it in anyway after the council road engineers told him to!

Of course, whatever the expert's misgivings, the road tunnel has since been made the centrepiece of the Eddington east-west study, today's version of the 1969 transport plan. Eddington shares with that earlier plan the 'balanced transport' greenwash that disguises its pro-road bias.

Another recent example of road lobby business-as-usual under the cover of 'integrated transport' is the so-called Scoresby Integrated Transport Corridor. The road planners knew that if they proposed simply building a freeway and nothing else, the project would fail even the very weak environmental test imposed by Victorian planning law. So they dressed up the freeway as an 'Integrated Transport Corridor' by including some token public transport and cycling infrastructure, of the sort that fails to have any real benefit. (For example, the proposal included bus lanes along the freeway, for buses that run nowhere near any homes or shops and are unlikely to be time-competitive with driving one's own car on the freeway anyway.)

Since even these impractical public transport measures are completely overshadowed by the freeway, any talk of the project being 'integrated' is a sham. Nor is it a 'corridor' in any real planning sense: the far-flung group of suburbs identified as the 'Scoresby Corridor' share little in common other than an old 1950s freeway reservation. We are left with 'transport' - this being the State bureaucracy's code word for 'freeway'.

The true nature of what the road planners mean by 'integrated transport' came out when the PTUA and forty other community groups put forward a public transport alternative to the freeway, to be assessed against the freeway on economic and environmental grounds. The assessment if actually carried out would have seriously challenged the case for the freeway, given that the government's own consultants had found that shifting less than 2 per cent of the car trips in the 'corridor' to public transport would do more to relieve congestion than building the freeway would. However, the government-appointed panel rejected this alternative out of hand, without conducting any assessment, on the grounds that because the alternative did not include a freeway it did not fit the government's definition of 'integrated'!

Of course, now that the freeway is built, no-one tries to even pretend that the Scoresby (now Eastlink) project includes anything of substance other than the freeway. We have witnessed a process whereby a freeway without any significant public transport improvement is 'integrated', while public transport improvements without a freeway are not. The lion's share of investment has once again gone to roads in the interests of 'balance', and less to public transport even than in 1969.

Given the constant public pressure for better public transport, the road lobby is forced to deny the basic fact that roads and public transport exist in direct competition with one another. If public transport's share of all trips goes up, the road share must go down, and vice versa. Road lobby groups like the RACV insist that they do not subscribe to a cars-versus-PT argument and that the modes should complement rather than compete, but they can afford to do so since they have been on the winning side for the past half century. In other words, the RACV doesn't need to attack public transport, because the system already works for their benefit. As with 'balanced transport' more generally, the rhetoric of 'complementary roles' for cars and public transport masks a reality where the car mode dominates, and where policy ensures this dominance continues.

The city of Vancouver, which recently pipped Melbourne as the world's most 'liveable' city, consciously favours public transport over the car in its transport planning, a strategy that has successfully encouraged motorists to use alternative modes. Cities from London to Perth have similar strategies, which are seen as redressing the balance after decades of car-centred transport planning and neglect of alternatives. Melbourne already has more kilometres of road per person than the top 13 other most liveable cities, and does not need to spend large sums of money building even more in the name of 'balance' or 'integration'.

© 2010 Public Transport Users Association Inc. (PTUA), Victoria, Australia. ABN 83 801 487 611.
General copying and distribution on a non-commercial basis is permitted subject to proper acknowlegement.
Authorised by Tony Morton, 247 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, for the PTUA

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