Well research and interesting, informative article!
There's no doubt the NBN will assist decentralisation outcomes!
And dramatically improve the quality of medical services and education.
As finite fossil fuel dries up, we will need to very seriously decentralise.
This is arguably the best way in practical terms, to de-carbonise much of our economy.
And we must proactively plan for it, sooner rather than, reactively, later!
City dwellers currently produce 2,5 times the carbon of their country cousins!
Very rapid rail roll-outs will contribute to much of that decentralisation/de-carbonisation, which will also contribute to a return of housing affordability, and house sales profits, which sensibly, rely almost exclusively on volume, rather than margins.
Very rapid rail links will virtually pay for themselves, if some of the resumed land is set aside as urban and then sold to would be home owners.
Many smaller centres, replete with their own CBD's and industrial parks, will allow us to enjoy a superior quality of life, than we currently enjoy, for a fraction of the energy we consume today.
Planned cities maximised at around thirty thousand, surrounded by green belts and or wetlands, are large enough, to cater for all the so called benefits of urban living!
Cafes, theatres, supermarkets, farmers' markets, shopping centres, sports venues etc/etc, without the crowds and crime rates that cruel it!
And we should be moving inland, onto high ground, so that our most arable land,[coastal flood plains,] is retained for food production.
Our wasted waste ought to power our homes, then convert poor rocky/salinated land in the proposed green belts, into the most productive, carbon, nitrate and phosphate rich land anywhere!
[50% of the carbon produced by coal fired power, is the product of pushing power down transmission lines!]
Moreover, smaller centres support a level of neighbourly cooperation and concern, that simply disappears in larger centres, where individuality and a dog eat dog competition seems to predominate?
We do need to resurrect neighbourly concern and cooperation!
Our very future as a species quite literally depends on it!
Rhrosty.

Perhaps what is needed is to decentralise the public transport systems in Australia. Two cities that I have spent extended periods in and display a descentralised transport at least for rail are Washington DC, USA and Paris, France.

In both cities, each line goes from one side of the city to the other. In Washington, the 5 lines intersect at a number of stations ringing the CBD, with each line often intersecting at least two of the other lines. The Paris Metro is even more decentralised with no central group of nodes for the 14 lines. Again most lines intersect and is very easy to get between any two locations.

DKit

Public transport systems need to be centred on the Great Gibber Desert.

This would decentralize public transport.

Not sure I'm following the logic here.

Here's a couple of quick extracts from Mr Elliott's article.

"Nightly news bulletins feature CBD skylines as backdrops. They are typically the headquarters of major companies and the seats of government".

Yup. Large companies, employers who tend to have a large number of employees, favour the city for their headquarters.

"This isn’t to say that the CBDs and their fringe commercial areas aren’t numerically large in terms of employment (they are)."

Ok. We have an urban area that employs lots of people, predominantly in large businesses. That makes sense.

"[In Brisbane] CBD employment actually grew in that period by 18,793 jobs"

"[In Sydney there was an] increase of more than 40,000 jobs in the city area"

So, despite the physical constraints in an already crowded cityscape, major business were able to squeeze even more people into their CBD premises

"The inclusion of the Docklands and Southbank precincts over this period sees the ratios move from 12.1% of greater metro Melbourne jobs in 2001 to 14.3% by 2011 – a significant increase of sorts"

While in Melbourne, they simply expanded the CBD area into some nearby, non-suburban space.

In summary:

"There are more jobs in the city centres now than 10 years ago - significantly more."

But surely, this fact alone puts into perspective the amount of time and energy invested in making them more accessible?

The dimension that the article misses - possibly deliberately, given the author's professional interests - is that there are very specific and measurable reasons why big companies locate themselves in city centres.

I'm pretty sure that none of them particularly enjoys doing the daily commute, and asking their people to do the same. And I'm also pretty sure that, given the opportunity, they would move to suburbia, or even outer woop-woop, if it was able to reduce their overall cost of employment.

Sadly, the suburban catchment area is rendered unattractive by its lack of infrastructure. While very few of their prospective employees live in outer woop-woop. And even fewer of their current employees wish to move there.

This article raises some interesting points, but it is all rather one-sided.

For example, it begins by showing CBD employment relative to state-wide employment, which is not particularly relevant to the issue of urban transport planning but does appear to boost Ross’s argument that CBD employment is relatively small. Later Ross switches to the more appropriate measure of the % of metro-area employment in the CBD, but his claim that “suburban jobs have been growing as fast or faster than in the inner city” is not supported by his actual data, which show the proportion of jobs in the CBD increasing in both Sydney and Melbourne, though the change is not major.

His central point is correct, though. Most jobs are not in the CBD.

However, I’d questions some of the conclusions he draws from this.

First, while Ross is probably correct to assume it is harder to increase public transport use for suburban workers than CBD workers, it is surely not impossible. The suburbs have their own employment “hubs” (shopping centres, industrial estates) that can be serviced by public transport. And other options, such as walking or cycling, may well be more attractive for suburban workers who may have shorter trips on less dangerous routes to and from work.

Second, suburban transport systems deal not only with workers but also with students, shoppers, shift workers (who I expect are under-represented in the CBD workforce), goods movements and a host of other users. The transport load is more evenly distributed throughout the day, without the rush-hour peaks that characterise CBD commutes. Hence congestion is more acute and costly for CBD workers.

Third, as Pericles points out, employment in the CBDs is growing, and this trend is likely to continue. Given the congestion problems we already face, the CBDs’ particular problems do deserve special attention.

I agree that this article is interesting and well-researched.

One question that arises is whether growing employment in the suburbs means that it makes sense to rely to a greater extent on private transport and suburban public transport (with more emphasis on construction of ring roads) rather than public transport systems that take people to and from the city centre.