Last Saturday I went to the Citizens Against the Tunnels (CATT) rally against the North South Bypass Tunnel (NSBT) outside the project visitors' centre at 189 Eliabeth Street City.
About 50 people attended and TV channels 7, 9 and 10, Quest Community Newspapers, 4ZZZ FM and 4KQ were there also.
Tristan Peach from CATT spoke briefly, highlighting that the tunnel would not reduce congestion and that Peak Oil would reduce demand for the tunnel, probably even before it was opened.
It was timely therefore that Ross Gittins had an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald last Wednseday in which he said (in part)
'...if you accept that the world price of oil is likely to stay high and go higher over the coming years, there's a third respect in which we need to adjust rather than duck.
It concerns the way our state governments have persistently neglected public transport while desperately seeking to accommodate our desire to drive everywhere. Whatever the truth of the claim that in their obsession with reducing debt, the states have allowed public infrastructure to run down, it can't be said of their continuing direct and indirect investment in expressways.
But it isn't working. No matter how many improvements they make, the reduction in congestion is always temporary. Why? Because congestion is the only thing restraining our deep-seated preference for driving.
So, when conditions improve, driving increases until the degree of congestion returns to about its former level. The fact that public transport keeps getting worse doesn't help, either, of course.
The point is that this pointless struggle to accommodate motoring won't be able to continue. It fits neither with our need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions nor with the likely inexorable rise in the cost of private motoring.
But when finally our state governments get the message that they need to switch their investment from expressways to public transport - when they're encouraging us off the roads rather than onto them - there'll be a bonus for you and me.'
Economist Professor Frank Stilwell (Univ of Sydney) also reiterated Gittins points at the Griffith Univ symposium on Vulnerability in the Australian City in Brisbane last Friday and made particular comment on the futility and wastefulness of the NSBT.
Despite broad agreement that the NSBT will only make Brisbane more vulnerable to oil shocks and more dependent on greenhouse gas producing cars, Council seems determined to continue on this ecologically unsustainable course no matter what the evidence is that this is not in the public interest
