Public infrastructure and more bike trails for the bike abled in the community are a motherhood statement that is unlikely to be funded until can promise productivity improvements. The Ruddbots don't account for air pollution, liveability or commute times. Maybe you need to measure the health costs of stressful commutes and equate that back to lost productivity.

We in the working class western suburbs of Melbourne love the Brumby plan. Don’t get fooled by that anti-tunnel demo. That’s the well off inner city types moving into Yarraville and Footscray as a part of gentrification. Labor has finally delivered massive investments for its own people. Those who complain have received nothing but benefits from government time and time again.

The more that the yuppies in the inner city complain and the well-off in the south east complain about the Brumby plan the more I like it

The marvellous thing about bike paths and the like is how few cyclists use them. If you drive along Beach Rd from Port Melbourne to Frankston, you'll encounter dozens - or even hundreds, depending on the day of the week - of cyclists riding along the road. Meanwhile, the bike path provided at the cost of hundreds of thousands of taxpayers dollars is almost completely empty.

Rather than spending even more money on bike paths that so few use, why not require cyclists to use those we've already paid for?

Crikey, who’d live in Melbourne? (:<|

Here are some more ‘outside the square’ ideas:

Live in small regional centres or on the land. In fact, anywhere but in a large city.

Work more from home if you can arrange it, or if you are a boss that can make it happen for your workers.

Stand up and denounce the absurd policies of continuous rapid population growth, that add greatly to congestion, even in smaller centres such as my town of Townsville.

Yair, yair and so on. I mean, all of us on OLO who are even remotely interested in this stuff are familiar with all these points. No need to rehash them here.

The point is; the solutions are pretty obvious. We don’t need to think outside the square. What we need to do is implement some of the basic stuff, like getting people onto their bikes and tootsies and busses (buses) and trains and into each others’ cars (car-pooling) and into smaller cars, blah, blah.

So Rudd is committing 500 million $ of his 6.2 billion auto industry package to the development of greener cars http://herestrouble.com/archive/kevin-rudds-6-billion-auto-industry-package/
Hmmm, at least it is something, but why not 50% of the total amount or something like that? Come-on, we need a more rapid conversion than this to much greater energy efficiency / greenhouse gas emission reductions / renewable energy usage.

Good on you Honda for pulling out of F1. I hope Toyota follows suit and that ridiculous dinosaur activity folds up real soon…along with the bizarre V8 Supercar crapload that has been brought to Townsville, not to be held on some racetrack out of town, but right bang smack in the middle of town!!

As I do not live in Melbourne , my comments relate to cities / towns generally . I agree that society has to get rid of the blinkered view which developed in the late 50s / early 60s that private cars are the only acceptable mode of transport . It would help if media commentators , including those on the ABC , did not constantly make comments such as " we all love our cars " and " Australia 's love affair with the car " . Shows such as " Top Gear " should become politically incorrect . Politicians should stop pandering to the road and cheap petrol lobby . The approach of peak oil and rising petrol prices should be seen as the beginning to the emancipation of the public from its enslavement to the car .

Posting an off line comment I received from Glenn that has an interesting concept of eforrtless bike commuting between LTU and UM

Glenn,

the concept with bike commuting between LTU and UM on a bike with-without electric help engine sounds excellent to me. However, you have the problem with the car traffic that is out of control specially in the times of the day that you want to be riding your bike to and from work. My idea with building the elevated train line from roughly Belford Street bridge over the Eastern on the border of Darebin and Banyule city councils woudl create a separate bike path all the way form LTU to UM. And part of it would be under the elevated train line which would provide some shelter from the elements. Also I envision that this bike path would have separate lanes for traffic going into town and out of town , be well lit at night, and would be ideal for electrically operated bikes that run a bit faster than man and woman powered bikes.

Also the train line would give the bike commuter the extra flexibility of providing a choice if they want to ride the whole way or stop halfway and catch the train.

The more I think about it the better it sounds really.

Maybe the innovation bike/train line running between LTU and UM could be a testing ground for new concepts in green transportation technologies.

We better think big if we are going to solve the challenges of increasing population and global climate change.

Regards,

Roger