It is good to see an integrated approach being proposed, rather than the simplistic more road = less congestion formula we are usually expected to swallow.
I also agree it will likely be more difficult to change attitudes to travel than it will be to apply the solutions, technological or physical. The longer we cling to our determinedly individualistic ways the more serious the environmental and concomittant economic repercussions are going to be.
As a last comment, it is disturbing that we have to assume that there are always, for the foreseable future, going to be more and more people demanding more and more transport. Is there any notion that at some stage we need to reach a balance, or is our "urban footprint" eventually going to turn around and stomp on us?

“So what can we do about it?”

Well, I get the feeling that it will largely take care of itself in the next few years as fuel prices bite and a significant portion of the populace take up alternatives to daily commuting by car.

It is well and truly time to stop building new roads or upgrading existing ones. Let's keep up basic maintenance by all means but otherwise redirect this enormous expenditure into implementing alternatives to private car use, and into developing renewable sources of fuel.

This could include some pretty strong incentives (extra charges for car use in crowded areas) for people to get onto public transport, scooters, bicycles and even their…..wait for it….. feet!! (:>()

Let’s do this before we are forced into it by rising fuel prices. We should be preparing for this very large change rather than just reacting to it as it happens.

Oh, and the other thing we MUST do in places like Sydney and SEQ is plan for limits to population growth…. and in the country as a whole.

I honestly don't know how we are going to deal with this problem without massively re-designing our cities. People often have to take very irregular routes across cities to their jobs that anything other than a car cannot deal with anywhere near effectively, especially if they have to drop the kids off to school en route, and do some shopping after work. It's all well and good for people to talk about public transport, but Sydney and Melbourne are already massive sprawling cities and I can't help but feel that the horse has already bolted.

Perhaps what might be a good idea would be to strongly encourage growth of both industry and residential areas in more regional areas, and start with a very well laid out system whereby where people work, play, learn and shop are all more sensibly integrated or located. Basically, we need to rethink our concept of the city and make it far more user-friendly. Ultimately, I'm sure people don't like all the congestion, but they actually need some really practical solutions, and I'm not sure those proposed will do much to mitigate the grind of a daily cross-country jaunt across Melbourne's outer eastern suburbs.

Like I said at the start, I don't know how we're going to deal with the problem. I'm sure however it is tackled, it will draw a lot of flak though, so I'm glad it's not me trying to make the decisions.

Shorbe, I can’t think of a good reason why we would want to encourage growth (human expansion) in regional areas.

You seem to be saying that we should start from scratch and build new commuter-friendly cities. This seems like a hugely energy- and labour-intensive solution.

Yes some people will find it hard to do without their car for daily home to work and school commuting. But the majority of us won’t, and with a bit of government assistance/persuasion they will not find it too hard to take up alternative methods of transport.

Therein lies the main part of our answer – getting a considerably larger portion of people into car-pooling and onto trains, buses, scooters, bicycles… and for trips of up to several kilometres – their good ol’ feet. Or some combination of these.

Ludwig: Whether people like it or not, we're not going to stop human population growth. Even if we continue to have a birth rate below replacement levels, there will still be massive population pressures from other parts of the world that will affect us and I don't believe even if we wanted to that we could become Fortress Australia in that respect.

As such, if unchecked, the major population centres on the east coast will continue to growth while large sections of regional Australia continue to decline. However, I believe Melbourne (and probably several other cities) is getting to the point where it is unliveable (a relative term of course) unless you're an inner city professional, so the solution is either to rethink the way new suburbs are created on the edge of it, or for some really clever regional areas to plan their development really well and offer a heap of incentives to business and people to move there.

I certainly don't think we use our present transport options very well, but what you're proposing simply can't or won't work for a city like Melbourne which is enormous. What you're proposing is fine for someone who lives within ten, or maybe even twenty kilometres of the city, or even someone who does everything basically along one of the radial train routes. However, there are large numbers of people who live out in a no-man's land where there are no trains. Travel routes to work, school, shopping centres, etc. would require incredibly complex and inefficient changes of buses or car pools. It simply wouldn't work.

When I lived in London, at one point, I lived in outer London, eight miles from where I worked. Whichever way I went, it required at least three different transport options and took a minimum of an hour and a half in one direction if everything connected properly and there were no delays or cancellations. I wasn't going to be there long enough, but otherwise, why wouldn't someone drive in such a situation?

Shorbe, in attempting to move city sprawl to regional areas, you risk ending up with another Ballarat situation where many Melbourne people have taken up residence in the last ten years thanks to the push from local & state Governments. For the original locals, the town has become a nightmare of conjestion at peak hours where major roads are gridlocked and the Ballarat Shire's answer to transport is to put another bloody round-about in what used to be a free flowing road. Regional cities such as Ballarat and Bendigo are not and never will be equiped to deal with large influxes of "refugees" from capital centres. Public transport in Ballarat is woeful and serves only the local area with none servicing smaller outlying areas. The major shopping centres are over crowded and small, even on Sundays. There isn't a single roadway where a motorist's route isn't impeded by round-abouts, pedestrian crossings, traffic lights or stop & give way signs. The water storages are dangerously low, the lake has returned to the swamp which it once was, vandalism rampant, unemployment rife and still the local council demands more and more people come to destroy the place further. Ballarat is getting close to what Melbourne was 30 years ago and yet by 2030, they expect the population to double what it is now. Decentralisation is definately not the answer either.