TRANSPORT IMPACTS

What has puzzled me since I have started learning about decision making in transport is how economics is thought of as a sturdy metric which we can rely on to sort out all our tricky decisions. While it is a nice idea that if we could put a price on all the benefits and burdens of different decisions and then weigh them up and voila… but life just isn’t that easy.

I am not going to talk about any of the “hot topics” such as how it is impossible to see an equivalence between different things which provide different services that cannot replace each other. Or indeed, not being able to put a price on resources and pollutions which have limits that could lead to disaster (with a lot of uncertainty surrounding these limits to add to the confusion). Instead, I am going to bring up a topic that I don’t think is given enough thought – What are all the things that have happened in the past to make the prices of things what they are today????

I am neither an economist nor a historian, so I am just pretending to be an expert. But as far as I know, it’s really important to look at what has happened in the past to understand where we are at and why the price of things are what they are.

From what I have seen, the automotive industry has been powerful and “progressive” from its conception. From the Ford production line to the highly productive Toyota supply chain management and quality management systems, they have been leading the way in efficient manufacturing. Road construction has also been quite an influential industry with a huge amount of development and then there’s the oil industry!!! Whereas passenger train services and other public transport, cycling and walking services, particularly in Australia and America, have had to take a back step (or have been given a good nudge back by the automotive industry).

So we have a situation where the production and construction of the things to make cars go is streamline, well-researched with refined systems to facilitate the growth of this industry. The past government expenditure on road infrastructure has also helped the private vehicle option become as “viable” as it is today. Competing against this industry in every “cost-benefit analysis” is the much undeveloped industries of alternative transport, where there is a lot of room for improvement in manufacturing, construction and systems efficiency.

How dare we compare the price of these two options so simply? It is like comparing the effort involved in making a rich mud cake (not that I think cars are as good as mud cake) from a packet mix to making basic bread from scratch without a recipe or the right tools. Everything has been researched and set-up to make the cake simple and effortless just as everything is set up to make car manufacturing and distribution simple and perversely cheap. Meanwhile the bread maker or the alternative transport provider has not benefited from such research and development, and is left plodding along in the dark.

So that’s the past, what about the future? Due to this lack of development of the alternative modes of transport, surely there is a lot more room for “cheaper” improvement for these transport options. Of course there are, but these don’t seem to get factored into decision making – neither on an individual level nor a policy making level.

Let’s take for an example, the source of electricity for the Sydney suburban train network. If one was to look at the carbon dioxide emissions from private vehicles compared to a train, the savings from catching the train would not be amazing. However, the effort required to change the electricity production for the train system from coal-fired power stations to renewable energy would add a minimal cost to the service. Alas, to improve car systems to run on renewable (or at least non-emitting) sources of energy requires a HUGE amount of effort.

Nothing is still – everything is moving, everything has come from somewhere in the past and is going somewhere in the future. Why do we spend so long analyzing the price of things in the present?

One other little subject that I’d like to raise is that I believe this extends to the public’s attitude towards transport. For many years, we have been pounded with advertising from car industries. This has all accumulated in our little heads (even if we pretend it hasn’t) to make us desire the life on the road. When the best efforts from the rail industry were the “keep training sydney” campaign, this hardly inspires a surge of enthusiasm for public transport, but sounds like a desperate cry of a dying industry. Luckily, these attitudes aren’t fixed. While there is a lot of “de-marketing” of the car (undoing the manipulation of the car industries) and marketing of alternative transport modes to be done, I feel it is possible to wake up the public from their automotive dreaming.