I live in the suburbs, directly across the road from a prominent state-integrated primary school – and by ‘directly’, I mean I can walk in a straight line down my driveway, across the street and through the office building door. As you’d expect, just about the entire length of the block is a school zone with four substantial speed humps. One of these is a pedestrian crossing, installed last year when the council added a second footpath to our side of the road.

Each day, I watch motorists navigate these humps, I watch parents take over the surrounding streets, dropping off and fetching their kids, and I watch pedestrians walk up and down. Each day, numerous drivers will hit the speed bumps so hard and fast they bottom out their cars or give serious airtime to whatever flotsam is in the back of their ute, and more parents and kids just cross the road at will than walk along the path to the new crossing.

As with any other city, ours has a plethora of cycle paths and lanes. Having cost many millions to install over the years, they serve a good purpose. I use them myself when I fancy a pedal, and I know one person personally who rides his bike 5km to work and back every day. Sadly, I doubt the same can be said for other residents, some of whom clearly feel they shouldn’t be restricted to their special lanes while most others seemingly have no desire for that mode of transport – such is the overwhelmingly barren state of those paths and lanes.

I share these observations in the wake of this week’s 2024 National Land Transport programme release. As expected, the coalition government has done what it promised it would and prioritised investment in roading infrastructure. Of the $32.9 billion total, basic calculations reveal about $18.4 billion relate directly to road maintenance and improvements, $6.4 billion has been allocated to public transport, $460 million to footpath and cycleway improvements and $1 billion to rail. The rest consists of road policing and safety ($1.7 billion), weather event recovery, resilience and climate response, debt repayments and so on.

As you’ll read elsewhere in this EDM, our own industry has praised this government’s plan. But, as expected, the opposition, academics and interest groups have bemoaned the priority being placed on road infrastructure while the likes of cycleways and rail have had their allocations slashed. This will drastically, negatively, impact on things like vehicle emissions and pedestrian safety, they say.

While everyone’s entitled to have their say and share their opinions, I feel it necessary to counter that for the better part of a decade, the shoe has been on the other foot. As my opening anecdotes illustrated, it’s seemingly made little difference, while the rest of our roading infrastructure has suffered for it.

From my own humble, everyman point of view, yes, it’s about time investment went back to roading infrastructure. We’ve said before it is as much about safety and efficiency as anything else. It means all road users, from commercial and public transport vehicles to private motorists, whether in gas-guzzling V8s or EVs or on motorcycles, can complete their journeys more quickly, easily and safely while experiencing reduced fatigue and wear and tear to their vehicles. And, in the case of commercial vehicles, that means avoiding unnecessary costs being passed on to consumers brought about by premature repairs and increased diesel consumption.

Further, yes, investment in public transport systems is good (and we have $6.4 billion worth of it here), but we certainly don’t need a further proliferation of cycleways and speed humps right now. If anything, it seems we need increased spending and effort on education and enforcement, encouraging and incentivising people to use these facilities properly and obey the road rules, and penalising them when they don’t. And that all starts every morning when we take our kids to school and lead by example by doing something as simple as crossing the street.

Take care out there,

Gavin Myers
Editor