What real examples, Phil?

You mention Houston and Detroit as examples. Houston's population growth is a bit under 0.25% per annum and Detroit has seen its population fall by a quarter in the first decade of the millennium. Neither of these cities have the comparatively cancerous growth rates of Australian cities. So what wonderful examples do you have for cities with high population growth rates?

Perhaps population should also be left to the free market instead of central planners.

Phil, thanks for the comprehensive response.

You wrote:

<< Ludwig: you are wrenching my comment about congestion way out of context. I said: ".....an increase in population WITHIN A GIVEN AREA will involve an increase in traffic from most of the new people using cars....." >>

I do my best to interpret things as they are supposed to be interpreted, but it is certainly one of the fundamental problems with this sort of communication that things get misinterpreted and that clarification is often needed.

But on this occasion I’m not seeing any significant difference in the way that I interpreted this particular point and the way in which you have clarified it.

Yes, population increase within a given area is a major factor in congestion.

So I guess what you are trying to say here is that we CAN have overall population increase just as long as it is not in areas with congestion problems. Is this right?

Your whole argument, as you say, is about decentralisation. So if we can get new residents to live outside of our congested cities, then all will be honky dory, end of story!

Well, I must vehemently disagree.

Decentralisation has some value, within a stable-population or very-low-population-growth scenario. But within anything like the current very high population growth scenario, it is NOT the solution!

The LAST thing we need is to just duplicate a lot of the problems in new centres, or to turn large areas of natural or rural environment into intensive human environments, with all the associated impacts on the surrounding environment.

Fester, I know Detroit has shrunk drastically over the last 30 years. My point is that its economy will rebound, even if its population does not, because its land prices have been allowed to fall in response. But the UK has a "rust belt" in which housing and urban land NEVER become affordable no matter how high unemployment goes and for how long - because the urban planning system keeps the prices propped up.

For statistics on population growth in US cities:

http://www.newgeography.com/content/002769-the-urban-us-growth-and-decline

Houston grew from 4 million people to 5 million, 2000 to 2010. Without house price median multiples moving much over the "affordable" 3.0. This phenomenon is replicated in many cities and regions in the USA. See data at the above link. The fastest growth rates in US cities blow today’s tiny Antipodean minds. Melbourne WAS once the world’s fastest-growing city, in the era of “can do” pioneering. The pioneers descendants are “can’t do” wusses.

While "per capita incomes" tend to be lower in the affordable-price US cities (there are 200 out of 260, in fact, it is not just Houston), discretionary income after housing costs are much higher. Gyourko, Mayer and Sinai suggest in "Superstar Cities" (2006) that large-scale spatial "sorting" is occurring in the US, with lower income workers and the industries that employ them, tending to agglomerate in the cities where land costs are low. The UK has no equivalent phenomenon; the equivalent workers tend to be unemployed. Australia is doing exactly the same to its economy.

Ryan Avent, in “Too Hot For Jobs”, finds that when high-income industries open up in low-land-cost cities like Austin, several times as many spin-off jobs for lower income workers are created in comparison to the same new jobs in a high-land-cost city, probably because there is so much more discretionary income after housing costs, circulating and trickling down, not to mention business profits after land costs.

And I repeat what I said to “Divergence”: is it better to accumulate SOME debt for more infrastructure, or MORE debt for NOTHING, and this debt mostly falling on the young?

Ludwig, you say:

".....The LAST thing we need is to just duplicate a lot of the problems in new centres, or to turn large areas of natural or rural environment into intensive human environments, with all the associated impacts on the surrounding environment....."

OK, now we are getting to the difference between you and me. You see the fact that Australia's land mass is 0.6% urbanised, shock, horror, and I see it as quite OK to increase this by, say, 0.01% per decade for a few decades, as some sort of crime against the Gaia Earth Mother.

There is no rational justification at all to “preserve farmland” in any nation that exports massive surpluses of primary produce. All the income growth in the world economy for the last 60 years has been in urban economies; the relative “terms of trade” between rural and urban product has moved fourfold in favour of urban product during that time. Refer Richard Florida, “The World Is Spiky”. The fact that farmland is only worth $2000 to $10,000 per acre, shows what a low value use of land it is. AND it’s environmental impact is different to, not better than, “urban”.

I agree we do not want to duplicate a lot of the existing problems that exist with Australia's cities. In fact taking the pressure off the existing cities by having new ones to move to with far lower costs and far lower congestion, would be a b----y good idea. The problems that already exist are being worsened by the "growth containment, city-centre first, fixed-route-transport-system-first" planning policies. Infastructure costs are in fact higher under this scenario; there is no authoritative academic literature at all that says otherwise. The cost of disruption and access and the cost of land, make infrastructure provision and maintenance and upgrading far more expensive than greenfields expansion or long-term low density.

There is low-hanging fruit in cost savings under intensification from VERY low density to "not so low" density, but after that it is all counter-productive. I will post references as soon as my word allowance on this forum allows

Calthorpe and Fulton, “The Regional City” (2001) found that while savings can be made from more compact development, these are not linear: at a certain level of density costs begin to rise again, mainly because a point is reached at which existing infrastructure is insufficient, and expensive new investments are called for by way of replacement or expansion.

Holcombe and Williams, “The impact of population density on municipal government Expenditures” (2008) found that increased population density had no statistically significant effect on government expenditures in cities with populations from 50,000 to 500,000, and higher population density is associated with higher government expenditures for cities larger than 500,000.

Ladd, “Population Growth, Density and the Costs of Providing Public Services” (1992), finds that:
".......The increasing per capita spending as the density of counties rises above 250 people per square mile provides important evidence to counter the view, which emerges from engineering and planning studies, that higher density reduces public sector costs....."

Cox and Utt (2004) “The Costs of Sprawl Reconsidered: What the Data Really Show”, find that:

“.........The highest density municipalities have higher than average expenditures per capita; the slowest growing municipalities have higher than average expenditures per capita; and the oldest municipalities have the highest expenditures of all per capita.......

“.........two reports: Costs of Sprawl--2000 and The Costs of Sprawl—Revisited, projected that from 2000 to 2025, America would incur $227.4 billion in gross additional costs for what the study terms "uncontrolled growth" (less dense, more sprawling growth) versus "controlled growth" (more dense, less sprawling growth). This equates to approximately $9.1 billion in gross additional costs per year.
The figure of $227.4 billion may seem large. Yet in the context of 25 years and an average population of 115 million households, it is actually rather modest. The $227.4 billion would amount to only $80 per household annually, or $29 per capita……”

It is obvious that THESE costs are miniscule in comparison to the costs imposed via inflated house prices, by policies of urban growth containment; and the latter are shared grossly inequitably.

"So what can realistically be done about congestion? There is no silver bullet."

It is telling that Ross Elliott fails to mention the driving force behind the worsening congestion problems in our capital cities.

As other posters have pointed out, we simply cannot build infrastructure fast enough to keep up with the demands imposed by rapid, immigration-driven population growth. Hence the worsening infrastructure bottlenecks and congestion in our capital cities.

Slashing Australia's ridiculously large immigration intake would obviously ameliorate the growth pressures on our already overcrowded capital cities and prevent worsening congestion down the track.

Yet, Ross Elliott fails to mention immigration in his article. I was puzzled by this glaring omission until I stumbled upon some of Mr. Elliott's other scribblings. A self-declared expert in urban development matters (i.e. a rent-seeking property developer with a vested commercial interest in endless growth), Mr. Elliott is a big fan of a "Big Australia", irrespective of the costs. According to Elliott, flooding our capital cities with hundreds of thousands of immigrants ever year will actually SOLVE our infrastructure woes, while also making our cities more "vibrant" and "innovative"!