Ludwig,

I am not denying we have an increasing population. However, it is miniscule compared to many other countries, all of whom have amazing transport infrastructure that actually works. Of course, the downside is that smaller population = less income tax revenue. But it's not the number of people that is the problem. It is how they are managed and moved. In essence, it is a logistical problem, not one of density.

The reason we have such appalling public transport in this country is because Federal and state expenditure amounts to a paltry 5%! ($26bn out of S484.5bn in 2010/11) Just 5% of ALL government revenue is spent on roads, rail, water, air and transport communications. A truly appalling figure. It is no wonder we are sitting, exasperated and angry, in ever increasing traffic jams. It is no wonder this country is, quite literally, grinding to a halt.

If you have to blame the government (and please don’t isolate a single party, as all successive governments are guilty of not investing in infrastructure – indeed, under Howard, they positively divested themselves of it) then blame their poor planning, inadequate foresight, irrational moves to privatize public assets, and mismanagement and misdirection of funds. Blame governments incapable of real taxation reform that could see increased spending in those areas most in need.

Yes, increased population leads to increasing burdens on transport infrastructure (and other social services too), but when the system is so woefully planned and executed from the get-go, with no foresight beyond the next election, it is more the fault of government than of the users. And when the numbers are as low as they are in comparison to other countries who all seem to manage with a far greater influx of migrants, your argument doesn’t stack up.

Hasbeen is exactly right. A disproportionate amount of activity that occurs in CBD’s is rent-seeking, parasitical, wealth-transfer activity in the economy. Most of the wealth CREATION occurs elsewhere in the economy.
Congestion is minimised by three things. One, dispersion of employment and jobs-housing balance. Two; road capacity. Three; an urban land price curve that does not “price out” households from locations where they might find jobs and amenities. Modern urban planning fetishes get all three counts wrong. They attempt to plan everything around “centralisation”. They under-invest in road capacity for inter-nodal travel which is where 90% plus of travel is occurring (radial CBD-focused highways are almost as much a waste of time as radial-focused rail). And they force up the price of housing so much that young first home buyers end up commuting from 60 miles away in the Styx, which is the only place they can afford a home. It is, by the way, a flat lie from the utopian planning people, that these households could “save more money on transport than what it would cost them to buy a home closer to work”

Rhrosty’s comment is interesting too. I have seen this as the potential for Mag-Lev if it ever got off the ground commercially. Massive “Mag-Lev-based sprawl”.
But there is an inherent problem with development based around a fixed route transport mode. That is, the uplift in price of the land that is expected by the property owners along the route. Advocates of any rail based transport “investments” are economic illiterates if their proposal does not also include the compulsory acquisition of land, even when this land is already-valuable CBD land. Or worse, they are corrupt cronies of the land owners along the route they are advocating.
It was common knowledge a few decades ago, that automobile based development minimised “economic rent” rather than maximised it like fixed route modes, because it has so many entry and exit points. The train cannot come anywhere near to a fraction as many front doors as private cars come to. For example, read Robert Murray Haig’s works from the 1920’s, or even Frank Lloyd Wright’s various famous essays on urban design.
Rapid Bus Transit is a compromise, but Curitiba's famous example worked OK initially BECAUSE the land for the surrounding "Transit Oriented Development" was NATIONALISED. So of course the housing was "affordable" because there wasn't several hundred thousand dollars per acre of "planning gain" built into the cost.

As for this Ludwig guy, what is his "final solution"? Not that the "population growth" thing is a problem, doomsayers have always been predicting economic and ecological collapse; at 100 million population; at 1 billion; at 3 billion, and so on ad nauseum. Colin Clark, Julian Simon, Bjorn Lomborg, Matt Ridley and George Reisman are the voices of reason on this, the more extreme environmentalists are basically a reversion to the unreason of pre-enlightment, pre-Christian, nature-worshipping paganism.

Ross Elliott is right that an increase in population within a given area will involve an increase in traffic from most of the new people using cars, BUT there is ALSO an exponential effect on congestion, because roads that were once free-flowing at certain times of the day, become “stop-start” instead – and this condition actually involves fewer cars getting through that road during the relevant time frame. This means that “rush hour” has to lengthen out by a lot more than what the increase in numbers of cars alone would have suggested.
Worse, the “reduction in travel distances” that results from increased housing density, is nowhere near linear. “Housing” is always less than half of an urban area anyway. In fact the doubling of population on the 30% to 40% of an urban area that actually typically is “housing”, places pressure on the “public” land that is part of the remaining 60% to 70% (along with commercial land). Schools, parks, hospitals, public buildings, space for infrastructure and rights-of-way. The expansion of public facilities and the provision of more compensating “green space” in the same urban footprint negates the effect of increased housing density on the total urban footprint. The public needs to understand that halving their private living space, does NOT halve travel distances. Authoritative calculations show a reduction of 5-7%.

The iron law of urban density and transport is: increased urban density results in only fractional-linear reductions in trip distance, but congestion increases exponentially; and the net outcome is ALWAYS WORSE for trip times and is a NEGATIVE INPUT to resource consumption and emissions. The fact that transport resource consumption and emissions might show a relationship with density as claimed by Newman et al, is almost certainly via the mechanism of reductions in household discretionary incomes as a result of inflated housing costs. Other “discretionary spending after housing costs” is reduced as well: education, health, hobbies, food, clothing, etc; household formation and childbearing will also be lower in the cities with higher density and higher housing costs - this being the inevitable legacy of urban planning

RE assumes that as “a city that grows is bound to experience more congestion”. And ‘more people will equal more congestion”.

Not necessarily.

Perhaps Hasbeen is right on the money when he suggests moving workers out of the CBD. After all why so many white collared professionals eek out a living downtown stupefies many. Haven’t they - or their bosses - heard of FB? Email? Twitter? And for those oft tossed arguments that they “need to meet others face to face and that's best achieved if we're in the city”, can’t they cab it from the suburbs when required?

Moving city based workers into the suburbs will not only revitalise secondary CBDs, but more and more city office buildings will be available for letting downtown to those who really need to be there. And with competition for space falling so would the rent.

I do agree with many that taxing users of motor vehicles when public transport is poor is unfair. And certainly regressive in many cases. Irrespective of how it is dressed, a congestion tax, car rego, tolls etc are plain taxes that aim at behaviour modification of drivers but will mostly just make them poorer as they will keep driving their cars in the absence of a radical mass transit overhaul.

In order to entice customers to use mass transit rather than tax their use of the car, how about encouraging staggered working hours?

How about trialling free mass transit first in off peak hours then in peak hours?

How about bringing an end to the building of new roads and new tollways and instead spend big time on improving mass transit?

How about comprehensively study if future home owners are one person households, 2 person or families?

How about studying if such households really want to live in far flung suburbs on a big pile of dirt or whether they prefer small inner city abodes.

Surely such matters must be investigated at length and recommendations (with the best data available at the time) made before any urban transport strategy is green-lighted.