It's notable that the article focuses heavily on the eco impact. However, that's only half of the story. The other half is how enjoyable cities can be when public transport complements cars and bicycles. Being on the street becomes actually nice. Your kids can bike to school themselves and not die on the first intersection. That sort of stuff. It's absolutely amazing to live in countries/cities that mastered this
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.
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.
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
Because Australia wants to be America when it grows up.
I don't think anyone looks at the USA and wants any of that noise. Possibly maybe the image the USA thinks it is a little (like what is portrayed in Friends). But those guys are not driving on any freeways.
We certainly don't want anything like their car culture.
The unfortunate fact is that there are a shit tonne of Australians who absolutely do idolise that aspect of Americana. They probably don't usually identify it with Americana though, and would go on about how they need a car because they drive out in the country or they need a wankpanzer because sometimes they carry a heavy load. There's a big overlap with the kind of people who would identify themselves as "true Australians" (though the car problem is far more ubiquitous). It doesn't change the fact that this whole thing, especially when applied within cities, is thanks to American imports from the '60s and later.
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