It is a problem we complain about but our authorities do little to resolve it.

They close off streets, divert traffic into congested streets, widen freeway and bridges, forcing more traffic into city centres causing grid-lock.

I am a town-planner and have read numerous state and government reports on decentralisation. Unfortunately corporate dictates politics and the congestion with the resultant pathetic solutions will only increase and implode.
Many past governments attempted to develop business centres in the outer-regions but we always end up catering to big business and building up the city centres.

It is time that thinking people abandon the city centres for the sewers they are becoming and venture out to the greener perimeter.

Aquarius I worked for 22 years for the NSW DMR,it had been the roads board and during my service became the RTA.
I found it not as bad as others did but management even today is far worse.
During the beginning of Enterprise bargaining I was elected as one of six union delegates to the negotiation team.
Training followed at the level very senior staff received.
Current and past policy is/has been to cut costs in construction/renewal.
This leaves all too ofter roads built for today not tomorrow.
To work on the road, it becomes your factory floor,you see ways to stop delays,just minor spending.
But far too many desk jockeys will not listen.
Just on 4 lane divided roads bringing main steam traffic out to right hand lane before a intersection banked up with stalled traffic helps.
At a traffic prang, ten minutes delay takes and hour to return to normal.
I will watch with interest.

Aquarius we definitely do need to get people's workplaces out of the city, but, as a planner I'm not surprised you can't see through the trees to the wood. After all it is the members of your discipline, & the other bureaucrats, that have caused the fiasco.

The problem in not business, it's government. Get the public servants out of the city, & business will follow. After all the business in the city is based on the number of public servants, with their high pay rates, that draw the retail trade. Then it is the amount of business to be negotiated with government purchasing departments that draw much of the rest. Spread the bureaucrats, & the rest will follow.

If anyone was really interested in equity in the electorate, it would be law that the same percentage of the public sector wage bill be spent in every electorate. After all, why shouldn't the bush see some of it's taxes coming back into their districts, in the form of those nice fat public service pay cheques.

Truth be told the public sector is the biggest & most successful miner in the state. Just it mines every acre in the state for money to drag back to Brisbane, but pays no royalties.

Belly, widening roads to cope with increased volume in one direction is good and well, but if we half the volume by forcing it to travel in the opposite direction the congestion would be reduced by 50%.

Hasbeen, I agree with everything you've said and I've encountered this frequently while working with governments. My experience in Victoria and NSW has been that state governments are trying to de-centralise bureaucracys admittedly at too slow a rate. My intent of this topic is too get as many people concerned to draw state government's attention to the problem.

Far be it for me to pretend I know as much as you do, true.
I know I do not but my thoughts are these.
First in holiday times and peak load the Pacific Highway becomes a car park.
I was part of the move to close overtaking lanes of less than say 2 klms in those times?
Reason? in every holiday period multi fatal road trauma and deaths took place at the end of those lanes.
Parking lots at both ends motorists die, trying to get in front, it works still on remaining single lane roads.
My first post was about intersections that should have had over passes or round abouts again on the Pac.
Two lanes each direction it lets traffic flow freely.
BUT tourist side roads, not widened or serviced well during highway reconstruction are death traps.
And many die there too many.
Traffic just on a normal weekend can bank up twenty cars/trucks long, much more in holidays.
Stranded motorists take risks.
As a natural part of good/defensive driving, I merge to the right lane if clear EVERY TIME at least 200 meters before such intersections.
Most do not, most think my wish is to over take slow moving cars.
It is to share the road show respect I do so.
If we make laws, put a merge right sign there, or mark the road merge,we may improve the flow,we may also create a new problem I am well aware accidents are caused by motorists not road conditions.

Aquarius, what about continuous population growth?

All else being equal, this factor makes it damn near impossible to prevent traffic congestion from worsening (along with all manner of other things).

It dilutes, cancels out or completely overwhelms any efforts made to reduce congestion. And yet it is something that just seems to get left out of the discussion when it comes to town planning.

Town planners have the great tendency to accept continuous population growth with no end in sight as a given, without thinking at all about how the growth rate might be slowed and eventually stopped.

The final size of a town, with a target population, should be a fundamental factor in real town planning. In fact, the absence of this makes a complete mockery of town planning, IMHO.

The debate about urban sprawl versus consolidation here in Perth has arisen again in the West Australian newspaper this week, with George Monbiot labelling this city as one of the most unsustainable in the world in terms of urban sprawl and dependency on the car. But as with previous episodes, there has been no mention of continuous never-ending population growth.

You wrote:

<< It is time that thinking people abandon the city centres for the sewers they are becoming and venture out to the greener perimeter. >>

Well, we should not abandon the city centres, but yes some movement of to smaller centres could be desirable, up to a point.

The formerly small centre of Mandurah south of Perth is now a metropolis with its own congestion problems. And other centres in the southwest with rapid population growth have developed new sets of problems.

It comes right back to the imperative of planning for a reduction in the rate of population growth with limits to growth built in to future plans.

Aquarius, as a town planner, I’d be interested to know what you think of this.

Belly, I well know that NSW and Queensland has unacceptable road design practices having spent many years holidaying in coastal areas.
Australia has very bad driver education and licensing practices. I know 90 year olds who had a renewal of their driver's licenses for another ten years. In my case we had to take the car away from my mother-in-law.

Unless the licensing practice and road design is unified and controlled federally and followed standards similar to the US we will continue to have problems.

Ludwig, unfortunately we in Australia tend to ignore the advice of many brilliant planning proposals. I believe it's the attitude of -
"we've always done it that way." People don't like changing established practices and developers are given a free reign.
It would be ideal to follow the historically established practice in
Europe of villages, small towns, linked by efficient transport and surrounded by green pastures. Planners have attempted to introduce this in Australia with no success. Inevitably developers take over and villages and towns merge. As for population growth I doubt whether we'll ever be able to control it unless major economic or natural disasters interfere.

Dear Aquarius,

People go where the jobs are and Ludwig is right - move the public service jobs out of the city and you may have people willing to
live and work outside the CBD. Retail outlets will follow the people.
Also there should be stricter control on inner city devlopment.
Is it really necessary to have so many high-rise apartment buildings
in the city? Why are they allowed to grow and expand at such a fast rate? Better planning and city development should be encouraged by
local and state governments. Traffic conjestion is a serious problem
and more people, more development certainly is not the answer.

BTW - when are they going to build another bridge instead of the
Westgate - whose carrying capacity is well past its "use-by" date.
That's a major accident waiting to happen. Making extra lanes is no answer - as I said - it carries more than it was built to do.

I can only speak about my work life and training I got in traffic management.
On the RTA and in private road construction traffic movement plans are the work first of front line managers, for a time me.
The right to occupi road, stop traffic/work on it has one priority keep the traffic moving.
Bad roads good roads it will never be easy to plan a road for now or the future that is perfect.
I can say with certainty improvements can be made with existing roads, if in the hands of the right people.
That often is those on the factory floor, the front line road workers.
I worked on the NSW Pacific Highway Death strip [news papers branded it rightly that]
We had many too many 24 hours plus diversions, far too many deaths.
Innovation made each incident run just a little better.
Fires floods fatals,saw diversions planned in advance, action plans implemented in an hour not 4 or 5.
While my highway side entry issue may seem small, the real impact is this.
Those needlessly queuing cars.stalled on the side road,get impatient, act badly and die or kill for it.
I want to tell about impacts, a 24 closure deaths and poison spill at truck smash.
My instructions on setting up a diversion? let no truck over ten tonnes go, stop park them all,the Church will serve food and drinks.
The diversion was 108klm.
It had timber bridges with load limits of ten tonnes.
12 hours in to my shift, my team was there for the full 24 police forced me to let trucks go via that route.
Damage to timber bridges over 1 million dollars and truck roll over blocked that by pass for? 24hours.
Traffic management is not easy.

I think that we worry too much about traffic congestion. Peak oil and adaptation to AGW will mean that cars will become relatively far more expensive to run, to the point that the net number of cars and trucks will begin to decline in the not too distant future. I can't see traffic jams of electric vehicles at their current cost.

Bring on Peak Oil!

<< As for population growth I doubt whether we'll ever be able to control it unless major economic or natural disasters interfere. >>

Aquarius, I’m not meaning to get offside with you, just wanting a friendly discussion, but I’ve got to say that it is precisely this that really bothers me about planners, and has done for many years.

I’m talking about the dismissal of the continuous growth factor, or the total acceptance that growth will just continue and the belief that it can’t be dealt with or that it is not a planner’s business to be concerned about it.

It is just so fundamental to planning to know or at least have some idea of growth rates and final population sizes for the places in question.

Not only this, but to plan for or around an ever-growing population is to actually facilitate this growth which leads to ever more pressure on our roads, on all manner of other infrastructure, services, resources, environment and quality of life.

I’ve got to say it straight: I really don't like planners who plan for and therefore facilitate this ever-increasing pressure on us all.

We need to plan for sustainable societies. Never-ending growth is diametrically opposed to this.

Build another road and watch them come, build another road and watch them come, build another...

High-rise development in city centres results from the public demand of living where they work. As long as city centres keep being developed with offices, corporate centres, banks, entertainment, casinos, shopping-complexes people will want to live closer instead of travelling from the suburbs. Multi-storey apartment developments bring big profits to developers and high income to councils and service providers from payment of rates and services.

I fully appreciate the problems of country road and highway control that is not my area of knowledge being involved predominantly in the planning of city centres, shopping centres, hospitals, and academic campuses.

In the 19th century in England we had the village, the small town, and the development of industrial towns. People lived, worked, and had services provided in their immediate community. People could walk to work or catch a bus, roads and traffic conjestion were not a problem. It is only the expansion of uncontrolled city-development that has created our current problems. I've always maintained that development based on the 19th century model would be the ideal solution in Australia. Given that our major cities are already beyond control I had proposed many times the solution of establishing a central agency for trade of jobs. People with identical occupations or job interests could trade their positions with others so they could work close to home. Unfortunately such a programme would be difficult to implement due to human nature being what it is.

As for population control we're well aware that China had a one-child policy and yet their population kept expanding and their cities kept growing to the point where there is one major center of 32 million people. I recently saw a documentary on that center and we would not like to have their problems.

Aquarius, population stabilisation is incredibly easy in Australia. All we need to do is wind down immigration to net zero over a few years, so that total emigration in a twelve month period becomes the total immigration intake for the following year. Emigration will reduce over a series of years as immigration is reduced until they both stabilise at an equal level.

The immigration factor is then taken out of the population growth equation altogether. And we’d still have a sufficiently high immigration intake to acquire essential skills and a considerably increased humanitarian intake than we currently have.

Then we need to get rid of the despicable baby bonus. And that’s it!

No one-child policy, no coercive laws, not even any disincentives to have kids!

Our fertility will re-establish itself of its own accord at a bit below replacement level, as it was before the disgusting baby-bribe introduced by Keating and promoted and increased by Howard, Costello and Rudd.

Births will still exceed deaths for a couple of decades or more before population growth stops altogether. But I can live with that, as it would be a much slower growth rate than at present and an end to it would be in sight.

This is just so essential for planners to know and appreciate. Again I’ll say that it is just so fundamental to planning, on the national level and at all levels below this.

The key point is: we simply MUST plan for a sustainable future. If we’re not planning for that, then what the hell ARE we planning for?

Planning for continuous growth with no end in sight is just madness.

Perth has got some pretty foul traffic congestion problems, as have all our capital cities. I was caught in a doozy yesterday evening.

And yet it has busses (phoowey to ‘buses’) by the thousands, park-and-ride trains and lots of people commuting by bicycle.

The simple cause of all this congestion is rapid population growth.

With this sort of growth, no amount of urban consolidation or near-CBD high-rise is really going to help very much. The sprawl will continue, just possibly at a slightly slower rate of expansion.

For as long as we have this ridiculous growth, any improvements in public transport, car-pooling, working from home, etc, are just going to be chasing the tail of the negative impacts of this growth, and desperately trying to ease the burden a little bit.

None of this sort of planning is actually going to be real planning that could hope to solve the congestion problems.

And yet, our illustrious decision-making politicians and planners are not going for one second to even dare to think about mitigating this growth, let alone suggesting that it should be wound down so that we can achieve a stable population level for our city!

Crazy stuff!