Letter from Marcus Wiggan, Oxford Systematics Australia

Commentary

Your Views?

This is all too obvious in Melbourne (where I live most of the time), where the inner city has had a major boom in new (and expensive, and generally child unfriendly) units and flats in medium high density areas of what is the inner city. This is also the location where walking and cycling and public transport is by for the best and as a result it is a real option (even without any ideological commitment - a very good test of sustainable behavior) to give up having a car. This is boosting richer income/lower child holding households into improved situations - while the outer areas remain, due to their very low densities and connections between quite distinct but still adjacent suburbs or facilities, the province of high child holding lower income households - who are forced into not just one but often two cars that they really can't afford.

This pattern has been clear for several decades, but rationalization of public facilities has increased the range that people mulct cover to access key facilities (both in time and space). The distances preclude walking and cycling, which are are not practical options for the combinations of distance, dependent shepherding and nighttime movements (security) as well as the basic inability of current public transport to serve such areas. Even as close in as 12 km, non-rail-linked major activity centres are not accessible (or rather cannot be returned from) after as early as 6 p.m.

None of this is new.

However the promotion of Portland and Zurich as models seems to mysteriously omit the major economic and environmental benefits secured by those within the 'sustainable centre'.. and the dwelling prices have risen to suit.

In the longer term there will of course be some adjustments - but a longer term that will largely preclude many of the spatially disadvantaged now..

The gap between the vision of a need for changes in city activity systems and key activity locations, of housing stocks and densities and locations, and the reality of passing through the steps and adjustments required to reach them have been severely understudied.

The transitional processes impact on work practices, decades long public facility investments, migratory patens and family life cycles: on the underemployment of many in a changing economy requiring far flung spatial searches for jobs (and thus personal transport for all but the favoured few who have spatial advantage in their location or lower sunk costs and transfer costs in changing it)

Clearly the purity of the complete sustainable vision is only reachable via a series of less than perfect steps. (examples include reducing car dependency and lowering energy costs and parking area and road space costs) via small motorcycles.. there are many other measures that have simply not been assessed in terms of effecting the transitional process, in terms of altering commitments to a currently unsustainable direction, and in terms of the types of vision need to ensure that movement occurs without the cost impacting most heavily on spatially and economically disadvantaged.

I would like to see some serious attention paid to these issues. transitional maybe, but we are addressing a decades long program anyway. with any discount rate at all, however small, these costs must weigh heavily in the balance against some of the (undercosted) costs of not reaching a sustainable state in time...

It is not just a question of one generation v another, but of the factors that must be surfaced to make the movement occur in cumulatively the best direction, if not the perfect one. the accumulated costs and gains in each year are as real to many as the costs if we do not reach a sustainable endpoint!

There are catalytic conceptual issues that need to be worked upon in several disciplines

Even such a simple issue as costing unpaid work (an obvious shortfall in transport assessment since the early work in time use in transport done after Szalai, and which I participated in myself in the 1970's) has taken several more decades to get into the national accounts of even the first few countries to recognize this aspect of gross social product... an in transport the methods of time valuation made it clear that this needed to be done for coherent and complete evaluations 25 years ago... yet time valuations for walking cycling motorcycling are still not treated coherently and consistently in evaluations.. let alone other actors required for a proper sustainable evaluation accounting balance! and as for the age/health access to the 'sustainable' modes by age group, this sees to have entirely eluded many polemicists in the area..

There are remarkably few fundamental disagreements on the need for a sustainable human environment, but the means of defining what these are and how to assess the balance of advantage or otherwise are still not coherently treated in the now all-important the transitional processes, policies, instruments and adaptations needed for and more sustained and less ideologically-driven attention to broaden the base of the community understanding and professional appraisals in all the affected fields.. and to inform the redistribiutional actions and investments essential to allow a fair distribution of the present costs (and indeed benefits) of these movements in the sustainable direction.

I have a comment for you!

This transitional area is one that Shell could validly invest in to its own shareholders advantage as well the goals and practical realization of sustainability.

Marc Wigan
TRi Napier University Scotland
Oxford Systematics Australia

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