Shane Rattenbury and Jo Clay have missed the in their light rail debate

Reading the article by Shane Rattenbury and Jo Clay of the Canberra Greens (January 11, 2023) I'm very much reminded of the Save the Ridge argument. In their article, the authors claim that the proposed light rail network will avoid the need to build more roads, which they say contributes to climate change and congestion. While Rattenbury and Clay reject new roads on the basis that "freeways [were] in vogue in the 1970s", it's hard to avoid the reality that arterial roads in Canberra are still very much in vogue in 2023. Avoiding burning fossil fuels might once have been an argument for light rail, but by the time it will take to build the entire Canberra light rail network (say over the next 20 to 30 years, perhaps longer), most of Canberra's private vehicle fleet (along with its public bus fleet) will almost certainly be electric. As for congestion, there are other factors at play reducing the number of vehicles on the road, including the increasing use of personal mobility devices (such as e-scooters), cycling, and working from home - and all of these point to an uncertain future which could well be at odds with an expensive and unchangeable fixed route rail system.

The essence of the problem with Rattenbury and Clay's position is that they offer no rationale for people to switch to light rail from cars (or from any other transport mode). If past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour, there has been a steady decline in Canberra's public transport use over the last several decades as private car ownership and use have markedly increased; Rattenbury and Clay offer no basis to suggest this will change in the future. If the climate change argument doesn't hold water as the private motor vehicle fleet becomes electrified, the economic argument doesn't work for people who already own a car either: the fixed costs of registration, insurance, and licensing, plus depreciation, mean that it makes more sense to use a car than keep it in the garage to take public transport. This equation is even more marked when it comes to electric vehicles, where the fixed costs are hardly different to an internal combustion engined vehicle but the operational costs are much lower.

Rattenbury and Clay also notably avoid discussing the enormous cost of building the full light rail network, other than claiming that "the longer term cost of doing nothing is significantly greater". On the contrary, if "doing nothing" might mean building a sensible, comprehensive but relatively cheap bus-based public transport system, the very much smaller cost impost on the Canberra community might be one example where "doing nothing" is the far better option.

Public transport is still very much needed in a growing, changing and sprawling city like Canberra; but it needs to be fit for purpose and accessible, reasonably direct and frequent in the suburbs and on the boundaries of town centres; areas that otherwise miss out if almost all the public transport investment is channelled to narrow corridors along areas of higher density housing development.

If the Greens are to be truly green, why commit Canberra to the purchase and operation of an enormously expensive fixed rail system, where we can much more reliably predict that Canberrans will continue to preference other forms of transport, and those other modes are themselves quickly becoming much greener? Should light rail not proceed further south than stage 2a, the opportunity is still available to build a public transport system that is bus-centric, that can be flexible to meet changing demand, can service all suburbs, and can be extended at a steady rate to accommodate Canberra's growth over time. Such a system could indeed be the "great public transport" system that the Greens say they want.