33
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
33 points (100.0% liked)
Australia
4439 readers
119 users here now
A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.
Before you post:
If you're posting anything related to:
- The Environment, post it to Aussie Environment
- Politics, post it to Australian Politics
- World News/Events, post it to World News
- A question to Australians (from outside) post it to Ask an Australian
If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News
Rules
This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:
- When posting news articles use the source headline and place your commentary in a separate comment
Banner Photo
Congratulations to @Tau@aussie.zone who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition
Recommended and Related Communities
Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:
- Australian News
- World News (from an Australian Perspective)
- Australian Politics
- Aussie Environment
- Ask an Australian
- AusFinance
- Pictures
- AusLegal
- Aussie Frugal Living
- Cars (Australia)
- Coffee
- Chat
- Aussie Zone Meta
- bapcsalesaustralia
- Food Australia
- Aussie Memes
Plus other communities for sport and major cities.
https://aussie.zone/communities
Moderation
Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.
Additionally, we have our instance admins: @lodion@aussie.zone and @Nath@aussie.zone
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
This isn't a planning problem it's a people problem.
People want to wake up in a moderately priced home, get into their comfortable car, drive in it on a freeway for 20 minutes or so to get to their moderately well paid job.
Also, many Australian's are openly hostile to anyone who does not behave in this way, particularly people who favor any other mode of transport like bikes or buses.
“Many Australians are openly hostile…”
Since when? Last time I checked nobody in the office abused someone for riding or catching public transport to work. Are people picketing train stations? Do they throw eggs at bike riders? Please share your sources for this bold statement.
It's both. People will do whatever is most convenient. If our cities are built to be convenient for cars, people will use cars. And this has the effect of people seeing cars are more convenient than other options and being unable to imagine another way, so they are hostile towards ideas which would improve the city planning.
People in the Amsterdam or Tokyo are not more virtuous than Australians for choosing to ride or take public transport. They do it because their cities are just designed around these things being the easy option.
Are you really talking about cloistered small mindedness though ?
I've never visited Amsterdam or Tokyo but I can imagine, without any difficulty, that planning could make cities more navigable without cars.
Tokyo still needs some cars. Neither trains nor busses run 24/7. For deliveries and accessibility reasons, some people can't use the trains (at least not all of them nor all stations). In this heat we're having trouble with people, particularly the elderly, collapsing in the streets both rural and urban (my wife found an old guy collapsed last week and had to call emergency services :/)
Some of those problems could be solved (more accessible stations and carriages, more accessible busses, etc.) but there are other problems. Bus driver shortages, the number of trains running on a line already at capacity (maintenance and cargo trains run on the same tracks as commuter tracks at night when the commuter trains don't run), and the costs associated with trying to squeeze any more out. Building new lines and stations in the world's largest metro is also eye-wateringly expensive and difficult (see the depth of the Oedo line).
People like to conflate two problems together.
Lots of Australia is small and far away from metropolis.
Lots of metropolis could happily exist with wonderful multi modal transport options like trains bus bike and walking.
Between the two, cars grant autonomy outside public planning for individuals to still be individuals to get between families and economy between remote to remote and metro to remote even when there's no feasible public transport.
The devil in the detail is the problem at it always is anything when you look into it.
Yes there's big opportunity to improve mass transit. Yes there's a place for long range individual and small scale transit. Yes there's a place for last mile delivery.
But the average Joe doesn't really and shouldn't really need to know, or care. Why does it take a nation, that is every individual, to understand and vote for what is nuanced and specific? Why can't bold moves be made and results be explained?
Anyway that's enough drunk reply