Following on from Zed’s cost of living spray this morning the Greens’ Amanda Bresnan is asking what he plans to do about transport costs:
“Today Mr Seselja pointed to ABS statistics showing the high costs to Canberrans of fuel and transport,” said Greens Transport spokesperson, Amanda Bresnan MLA.
“This is absolutely true, and it is a real problem. But Mr Seselja and the Government both ignore the real meaning of these statistics and are not pushing for investments that can save Canberrans on transport costs.
“The statistics show that current policies are locking Canberrans into car ownership and car usage because of poor transport planning and a lack of alternative options. This is very expensive and will only become expensive.
“The approximate average time that a resident of Canberra has to work in order to pay for their cars is 550 hours a year, or 1 and ½ hours every day of the year.
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Well, she’s right. Cars are damn expensive, and if the Government doesn’t provide other alternatives to car travel then it hurts people. Also if the city is just based around cars, then what about all those people who can’t drive because they’re elderly or disabled or whatever? No options.
So if ‘transport’ costs don’t include fuel, what are we talking about? Parking, rego, mechanics, insurance?
Does the figure include car repayments, in which case the amount people pay is purely personal choice (One person’s ‘transport’ costs are going to be completely different to another person’s transport costs if one is driving a cheap hatchback and the other is driving a high end European sedan)? And if we’re not, what the heck are people doing to spend on average $275 per week on top of fuel costs?
The term ‘transport cost’ is unclear and generic, and can encompass everything or virtually nothing. Maybe someone can throw some light onto what is involved with ‘transport costs’.
zippyzippy said :
Ironically, making cars cheaper might actually reduce their use because it is the high fixed costs (depreciation, rego, insurance) that act as an incentive to drive more. Let me provide an example from my own car over the past 12 months:
$3227 Depreciation
$589 Insurance
$725 Registration
So that is $4541 per year before it even leaves the garage. The only way to get any value for that money is to drive it as much as possible. In the last 12 months I have travelled 17,800km, so my fixed costs work out at 26 cents per kilometre.
In addition, I used $1466 in fuel, which works out at just 8 cents per kilometre for fuel, giving a total of 34 cents per kilometre.
As my variable costs per kilometre are less than a third of my fixed costs per kilometre, there is a good incentive to drive more because it reduces the total cost per kilometre. The more I drive, the cheaper it gets. If the fixed costs were lower then it wouldn’t cost so much to leave the car in the garage.
In comparison, I also have a bicycle in the garage that costs around $20 per year in depreciation. I barely use it at all.
What cost of living pressures? The ABS stats show that we’re better off than we’ve ever been, that petrol eats up less of the family budget than it did 6 years ago, etc.
Henny penny bullsh1t as per usual from politicians of all stripes.
Ben_Dover said :
Utter bullcrap and typical Greeny fantasy speak. People would still choose to use their cars even if the government laid on a public service of the highest luxury, with a guarantee of no sweaty pleb sharing your seat, which ran to the destination of your choice and dropped you at the door, and which departed every five minutes.
Soooo – she’s suggesting that, along with the costs associated with our cars, we should pay a lot more to provide a better public transport system?
Yeah. That’ll reduce living costs. No problems.
Or is she suggesting that we should build a public transport system that’s so good that we won’t need cars? That sounds like it wouldn’t cost much at all.
Ben_Dover said :
Man alive, that would be brilliant. I would never use a car if that was the case. In the very least I bet heaps of families would feel they no longer need to own more than one car. Heaps of savings there. If you had a brilliant PT system, that saved you costs, people would be using it – just as occurs in other places around the world. Canberrans aren’t stupid.
RedDogInCan said :
What you want is a city that has good enough transport that you can get by with as few cars as possible. Then you save all those costs. The way Canberra’s working at the moment, lots of people have to own two cars so they suffer all those costs you mentioned.
As someone who just rejoined the ranks of the car owners and has no local transport need for one:
1) Shopping at Aldi.
2) Trips to the coast.
3) Rainy days
And as noted once you have a car the cost per km goes down as you drive it more.
Pretty much everyone needs transport!
Some pay for it thought rego, some pay for it though bus fares.
What if we had a tax of ~$400 a year for everyone! So this money went towards paying for buses and reducing rego.
This way people who catch a bus half the time and drive the other half of the time pay once for transport, not twice. Currently if you own a car and catch a bus your paying for wear and tear on a road your car isnt driving on, in addition to a ticket you have to pay for.
The great outcome of this is then no tickets so people are more likely to catch buses, because they’ve already paid for them. Also the goverment saves by not having to produce a ticket system the only loss is the tourist traffic which you would think would be much smaller than what tickets would cost. Plus you’d get increased tourism. Faster buses because just fill up and move on without worrying about tickets.
Plus it means that those who choose to cycle on the roads get to pay for their bike lanes!
Also it would cost virtually nothing.
When I lived in Melbourne, I used public transport or walked everywhere. I owned a very nice small car, but it was just easier and cheaper to use trains and trams. So I sold my car.
Now, I drive most of the time. I don’t want to. I just can’t get where I need to go, at the times of day I travel, with public transport.
I get that bigger cities have a concentration of population that makes public transport more affordable. The difficulty is that Canberra would be a lot more liveable with a better public transport system. To sit back and say “oh it’s the fault of people for not living in higher density housing” ignores the fact that some people have no choice but to use their car until there is an alternative on offer.
I understand the theories that, once people own a car they tend to drive everywhere and, once people have started travelling in their car they tend to travel the whole distance by car. I don’t see how this behaviour is going to radically change until there are more incentives.
For example, until bus travel is cheaper than the direct car cost for travelling the same distance (ie fuel, more regular maintenance, any depreciation based on km’s travelled and possibly insurance (if the premium is based on km’s travelled) there isn’t going to be much change in behaviour. To encourage this, public transport corridors should be more heavily utilised by offerring free parking at major intersections (not town centres that take time to drive in and out of), regular buses along transport corridors and gold coin (eg $1) bus travel along those corridors only.
Also, there should be more incentives for shared car ownership so people don’t feel so obliged to use their cars because of the fixed costs. I know some people LOVE their cars but many of us just consider them a means to get from A to B and only need them occasionally. Hire cars get pretty expensive especially if used as much as weekly. For example, there is pressure for the number of car parks per unit in apartments along major corridors be reduced. This might actually be effective if the body corporates for those apartments were required to provide a certain number of communal cars for the complex.
Why cant we use a system like user pays. That is only pay the amount of rego and insurance for the kilometers you have driven. Not what you might drive on a yearly basis. You could be billed on a three or six monthly basis after use. A bit like how you pay your energy bills . You don’t pay say $400 for electricity before you use it do you? The argument that every one has to pay x amount of dollars for using our roads whether they drive 40.000km or 100km per year is a crock. Just like the buses, the more you use them the more you pay as with the longer the distance on buses (even Trains) you travel the more you pay. Doesn’t that make sense than the rego system we have now? And yes i know there would be a problem with insurance with this idea. But there are always ways around that.
fuel excise?
A few years ago I was living in Melbourne and I had my leg in a cast for about 4 months and couldn’t drive, but life went on pretty normally while I was there. I came up to Canberra for three weeks while in the leg cast and found that I was basically trapped in my home which was the same distance (about 3-4km) to the CBD, as was my home in Melbourne. Everything in Canberra is designed to be a car trip away and the public transport system is useless. I couldn’t even use the crutches to get to the shops because there were no foot paths on many of the streets on the route. I feel sorry for anyone that lives in Canberra with a condition (such as epilepsy) that bars them from driving.
The Liberals here seem to complain that the road and parking infrastructure in not good enough, but it seems that no matter what we do re: roads and car parking it’s never enough, its a self perpetuating problem. Make it easier to drive and remove all other options and more people will drive and the traffic and parking gets worse.
Rawhide Kid Part3 said :
I’m sorry mate, but for those of us who commute, costs are already high enough, and while you might be speaking more of deductions for those who drive less, your idea, once in the hands of a govt. would simply see costs going up for those who rely more heavily on there cars, and have less access to public transport.
Just as most state and territory governments have become addicted to the revenue from gaming and and alcohol, the ACT Government has become over-reliant on the taxing the car owners in the Territory. Just look at how much motor vehicle registration, stamp duty etc. contribute to the coffers and then add in the revenue from traffic and parking fines etc. The Government even encourages repeat offenders by letting them off through the courts so they can be caught and fined again. If they were serious about road safety, the Government would gaol drink drivers first offence but that would be taking their best fine payers out of the market.
The only alternative to not using a car in the ACT is our underperforming and over-unionised ACTION bus “service” which serves the Government well in forcing us to continue to use our cars.
In case someone says I have forgotten to mention bikes, well I haven’t but in reality, the only people who seriously consider bikes as an alternative to cars are a small group of thrill-seeking eco-nuts who are a danger to themselves and a cost to the resources of the ACT that have to pick up the pieces for them.
dungfungus said :
You forgot to mention eco-nuts..uh, no there it is. But you did forget to mention bikes..wait…there it is.
Aha you did forget to mention that you have no idea what you’re talking about. That’s what’s missing!
00davist said :
Utter bollocks. Have a look at the ABS stats on cost of living – we’re not doing it tough at all. Australia has become a nation of self-obsessed over-consuming whingers with a sense of entitlement: ‘poor-me-I’m-doing-it-so-tough’ .
“Things are so tight that I can barely manage to pay to drive my massive f%^ck-off 4WD drive to and from my high-paying job in the public service and my McMansion and still be able to afford a giant Plasma television and eat takeaway every second night.”
light rail
Jim Jones said :
Bah, this is ridiculous. Us battlers are doing it real hard.
I can barely afford to go to the coast every second weekend and I had to break it to the missus yesterday that we’d have to cut back the overseas holiday. She was in tears that we couldn’t stretch it to Italy.
And that’s not even mentioning the cost of running me XR6 Falcon and the boat.
I’m 9 months in Canberra, and own a car, and largely (not completely) agree with the entirety of this post:
nice_enough said :
Rawhide Kid Part3 said :
I think you just described taxis. Or car rental. Or car sharing schemes that large cities have.
I think if a city is built around cars, then all the benefits of car travel come with the drawbacks. i.e. traffic jams will get worse, car parks will take up more space, and still be pricey and insufficient, and rego will get more expensive. Sure there is waste in the GDE to decry, but at the best of times, the situation will get only worse. If I get away from the idea that rego pays for roads, and realise that roads, road maintenance and land space for car parking (even paid) is taxpayer-subsidised, then I think continually adding cars is not going to be sustainable. Car use just doesn’t scale. Secondly, price of petrol is only going to rise, out of the government’s control. It only makes sense to build transport alternatives *before* petrol costs $3–4/L.
Not saying that Melbourne has not become a car-dependent city as well. Used to be that Melbourne would appear in textbooks about being a well designed city with public transport (trains). But that’s the CBD and along train lines. Living out in the suburbs (e.g. Point Cook, Rowville, Dandenong etc) there aren’t good ways to get around, and there isn’t a good way to get into a CBD without a car. In fact, most of Australian cities are like that. But consider that Canberra only contains 350,000 people now, and in my opinion, Hindmarsh Drive (the Woden part) looks like it’s already reached it’s limits at evening peak.
FWIW, I drive to work and back along that stretch once a week. Bus twice a week, and bike twice a week. Car trip is further since I have to drive to 2 locations, but if I took it daily a one way trip would take 20 minutes. Bus takes 21–37 minutes if planned, but would take 40 min–1.5 hour if unplanned (i.e. if I take a random bus I have to wait for a long changeover at interchange). Bicycle takes 40 minutes completely off road except at intersections. When I bus one way, sometimes I usually get to carpool back.
While I appreciate the sentiment of increasing usage to compensate for a higher fixed cost, I don’t agree that “the more I drive, the cheaper it gets”. Cheaper per fixed cost but the more I drive, the less money I have in my pocket. It’s like if I buy a big TV, I have to watch it more to make it worthwhile—mm OK.
Jim Jones said :
Well, You missed the point of that!
Jim Jones said :
WOW, Somone more out of touch than the current Govt!!!
00davist said :
WOW. Someone who actually believes the bullsh1t “we’re all doing it so tough” rhetoric that’s been fed to them.
Takes me 25-30 to get to Woden by car from Belconnen
Takes me 15-20 on Motorbike as parking is easier at my place of employment – WAY easier.
Would take me the best part of 2-3 hours if i did it by bus. Simply not an option.
And yes i did look into it in depth. Including just getting to city terminals and walking to work from there. it is the lack of syncronisation between satelite suburbs and the intercity so called xpress busses.
An additive is that the nature of my work does not allow me to leave like other public servants to accomodate the busses schedule. Public transport is just not an option for me at all.
and that is a hugh shame and down point to living here in Canberra.
Jim Jones said :
Your really not getting any of my point are you, Well fine, you dont get it, gret, but lets move on from your trolling, from here on in, dont bother addressing me, unless you actually have a clue what I’m getting at!
00davist said :
To everyone else, here is where I was up to before the trolls set in!
Postalgeek said :
No – no its not missing at all. He makes a totally valid and sensible point, that only thrill-seeeking eco-nuts would fail to agree with.
If pushbikes were actually a valid alternative mode of transport for all, we would see Mum doing the weekly shopping on her treadlie.
The Antichrist said :
Well, for a start, the ‘for all’ is your addition to the discussion. You can go off and have that little straw man argument all by yourself.
As for the blanket statement “the only people who seriously consider bikes as an alternative to cars are a small group of thrill-seeking eco-nuts”, well, I’m keen to step back and let you extrapolate on that theory. We’ll leave places like Asia out of it to keep things simple.
Of course, if you can bring evidence (you know, a FACT) to the discussion that cyclists outstrip motorists as a drain on ‘the resources of the ACT’, I think we could have a very exciting exchange of valid and sensible points.