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The average car is stationary 96% of the time. That’s a fairly consistent finding around the world, including in Australia. A car is typically parked at home 80% of the time, parked elsewhere 16% of the time, and on the move just 4% of the time. And that doesn’t include the increasing time we spend at a standstill in traffic.

Bill Ford, executive chair of the Ford Motor Company, says we’re heading for “global gridlock”. And he’s not alone in saying we cannot simply keep adding more cars to our roads.

The funny thing is that while we own more cars than ever, we’re actually using them less. You might think that’s a good thing; that we’re responding to worsening congestion and health, debt and environmental damage by opting to drive fewer kilometres.

But the problem is, we’re still choking our cities and harming our health, finances and environment by continuing to waste our resources on these increasingly dormant vehicles.

It’s not just the car itself that’s wasted. Consider the resources and infrastructure – both private and public – needed to design, mine, manufacture, ship, sell, fuel, move, store, secure, insure, regulate, police, maintain, clean, repair and dispose of all these cars.

David Owen, a staff writer with The New Yorker, has called cars “consumption amplifiers”. They are emblematic of a hyper-consumerist lifestyle that doesn’t really make us any happier.

Our declining car use gives us an opportunity. If we can adjust our car ownership patterns to match our actual needs, we can plan our lives and cities in ways that don’t revolve around a mode of transport that no longer serves us like it used to.

Fast cars?

By default, we still think of cars as fast and convenient. It might appear that way on the street, but the overall reality is quite different.

For a start, cars are a woefully inefficient way to transport a person from A to B. Typically, only around 20% of the energy from fuel combustion is converted into motion.

If we assume that the average car weighs roughly 20 times more than its driver, we can estimate that for a single-occupant car journey, with no significant other cargo, the effective fuel efficiency drops to just 1% (adding a passenger only raises this to 2%). And that’s before we take into account the broader resource and infrastructure requirements, as mentioned above, for that journey to take place.

The urban car isn’t terribly fast either. Research shows that when we take into account not only the time in transit but also the time spent working to pay for the car and its operation, the car’s average “effective speed” in cities is generally well under 13km per hour. This has been called the “urban speed paradox”. As cyclist and author Greg Foyster has pointed out, “your typical commuting cyclist can beat that without breaking a sweat”.

These and other factors have resulted in what’s called “peak car”. The average distance travelled per person by car has been declining for more than a decade. Commuting distances and average urban driving speeds have also peaked and the rate of new licences is plummeting.

Ford Motor Company’s future trends manager, Sheryl Connelly, has suggested that cars no longer symbolise freedom to this generation in the way they did to baby boomers. The rise of car-sharing schemes has also caused renting to lose its stigma. Young people now prize access over ownership.

Yet, for too many of us, a privately owned car remains the default for almost every transport task. There are times when cars are useful, but for general urban commuting, based on what we’ve seen above, it is like using a chainsaw to carve butter.

Expanding the transport toolkit

Many urban areas around the world are seeing a rapid shift away from private cars as the dominant form of transport. Areas of some cities are even going car-free while reallocating old road space to public or active transport, or back to nature.

In Australia, the City of Port Phillip has devised a plan to halt the growth in car ownership, even as the city’s population doubles, by converting hundreds of parking spots into car-share bays. Each share-car is reported to take up to 14 cars off the road, while cutting the costs of personal mobility by up to 60%.

One local resident was reported as saying the recent addition of a car-share spot at the end of his family’s street had prompted them to sell their rarely used car. “Now that there is a really good number of cars close by, we can make that move to going completely car-free.”

Then there’s the rapid development of other shared transport such as bike-share programs. By 2014, the number of cities with bike-share programs had increased to 850, up from only 68 in 2007.

Alongside all this are new planning models for activity centres, integrated transport networks, and carless or near-carless residential developments.

All the while, speed limits are decreasing, free public transport (at point of access) is increasing, and automobile and business associations are advocating for heavy investment in active and public transport.

Transport in 2017 and beyond

None of this is meant to demonise cars or their drivers, or to suggest that no one should own a car. What I am saying is that the model of everyone owning their own car is best relegated to the 20th century. This leads to the question of what the optimal level of car ownership might be, where we achieve the transport benefits without the waste, damage and expense.

What if in 2017 we focused on developing our personal and collective toolkits beyond the chainsaw, to do a better job of moving ourselves around?

You might get to know your local matrix of transport options better, from walking, cycling and skating routes to public transport, shared transport (car-share, ride-share, bike-share, taxis) and rented transport (cars, trucks, motorbikes, bicycles). Over time, you could then home in on how they work best together.

More of us could consider placing our cars in peer-based car-share or ride-share programs (informal or formal). Or we could even choose to sell our cars, and opt into one of the above schemes as a user rather than provider.

Peak car is upon us, and with it comes the opportunity to choose new models of urban transport that better match our current needs for quality, sustainable living. It is vital work. And like any good tradie, we need to make sure we have the right tools for the job.

Anthony James does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Caroline Lucas MP rightly points to “a cocktail of threats” to the environment from leaving the EU (A ‘green guarantee’ could stop Brexit ruining our environment, theguardian.com, 13 February). She neglects to mention her own role in bringing on these threats: the vote she cast to hold the EU referendum in the first place. In her statement to the Commons on 9 June 2015, when the EU referendum bill was under review, she pointed to the EU’s many environmental protections; called nonetheless for its “radical reform”; noted that achieving this “by walking away from the EU makes no sense at all”; and then, along with hundreds of other pro-remain MPs, invited the voters to walk away. It was a classic muddle of cross-purposes all too familiar from the left on Europe.

At the time, Lucas could have demanded, or at least suggested, that the likely environmental and other costs be specified and advertised to the public ahead of any Brexit vote. Instead she agreed to a simple in/out vote with no further conditions. So perhaps she means to say that the “real fight starts now”?
Jeff Smith
Brno, Czech Republic

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Conservationists hope second group of 14 scimitar-horned oryx bred in captivity will help repopulate original habitat in Chad

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South Downs, West Sussex The buzzard raises its wings and lifts its talons up towards the kite, which responds and the two clash

Dark shadows tumble across the hillside. The clouds are being hurried along by the wind, and the rain is subsiding. A chattering flock of linnets bounces from hedge to hedge, across the shining, wet chalk track in front of me. In the middle of the field is a brown shape, like a large mound of mud. It shifts its position every few minutes. Looking through binoculars, I see it’s a brown hare, hunkered down in the ground, its long ears flat against its head and over its back, munching the grass. It shifts its position again, still chewing, but always scanning the horizon.

A buzzard swoops in and lands a few metres from the hare. It struggles, flapping hard, as if trying to hold on to the ground in the wind, and then it lowers its wings. It has caught something – a small mammal, presumably – but I can’t see what it’s mantling in the grass. It begins to eat, snatching at the prey with its bill. The hare sits up, still chewing, and watches the buzzard.

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In 1999, Australians were paying some of the lowest electricity prices in the world. Now they are among the highest. What went wrong?

Back then, the electricity network in the southern and eastern states of Australia had just been reformed to create a regional wholesale market, called the National Electricity Market. Some states – Victoria and then South Australia – privatised their industry. All states then progressively deregulated their retail electricity markets, and transferred the regulation of their remaining network monopolies to two quasi-federal regulatory agencies, the Australian Energy Regulator and the Australian Energy Markets Commission.

These reforms replaced the state governments’ electricity commissions – derided by some as Soviet-style relics – with what was purported to be a dynamic new arrangement of competition and private risk-taking.

The reforms were bolstered by reports by the Industry Commission (now the Productivity Commission) predicting that even though electricity prices were already low, they would fall further as the pressure of competition drove the industry to become more efficient and customer-focused.

The exact opposite happened. The sector’s productivity has declined sharply after tens of billions of dollars were spent on network infrastructure - particularly substations – that are not used at anything like their full capacity, even at the peak of an Australian summer.

But the failures are not just in the regulation of networks. Our retail markets compare very unfavourably with those in other countries, and our wholesale electricity markets seem to be cornered regularly – most recently in South Australia on February 8, where a lack of available generation led regulators to cut the power to some 90,000 customers.

Besides not being cheaper, the system is also no greener or more reliable. The amount of greenhouse emissions per unit of electricity produced has shown little change, and as South Australia has shown, the system can’t always keep the lights on.

Australia is blessed with a surplus of every conceivable energy resource and no shortage of technical and managerial skill. How did it come to this?

Passing the buck

The common factor underlying these failures is accountability. Officials use the phrase “all care and no responsibility” to describe the situation in which politicians become as skilled in finger-pointing as they are in showing empathy for those suffering through power blackouts.

The latest manifestation of this is the mis-characterisation of Australia’s electricity problem as one of renewables versus fossil fuels. In this view, the solution is to turn back the clock to last century’s high-emission technologies (such as coal), despite the clear risk to the private sector of doing so.

What can sensibly be done to get us out of this mess? The real problem is not renewables – it’s poor governance.

Fixing governance problems is hard, but it’s clear which direction we should take. It needs to be made obvious who should be strung up when things go wrong, or covered in glory when they go right. This clarity will in turn deliver the accountability needed to anticipate and solve problems, rather than the buck-passing and blame-dodging we’re seeing now.

The state model

There are lessons to be learned from other comparable federal countries, including Germany, the United States and Canada. They too have regional power markets and retail competition, but they have avoided the bickering between federal and state governments seen in Australia.

Their electricity networks (except interconnectors) and their retail markets are overseen by the states and provinces – as used to be the case in Australia.

When accountability is clearly established, we will know where the buck stops when the lights go out or prices become unaffordable. But under Australia’s current quasi-federal system, there is an irresistible temptation to point fingers and obfuscate if things go wrong.

Politicians past and present created this problem, and they must now rise above it. The immediate task is not to tinker with existing institutions, but instead to make some fundamental changes.

The starting point should be to recognise that electricity supply is the province (under our Constitution) of the states and territories, not the Commonwealth. It would be better to get on with fixing our own back yards than idly waiting and wishing, often without good reason, for “national coordination”.

We should reassign oversight of networks and retail markets back to the states and territories, as used to be the case. Regional transmission interconnection and market operation should continue to be federally coordinated, but the primary responsibility for pricing and reliability must rest with the states. The states might choose to delegate the oversight of various issues to central entities, but these entities must be clearly answerable to those states under the terms of their delegation.

In some respects these will be major changes, and in others, mainly a change of mindset and orientation. But for too long now we have been pushing a model of governance that does not reflect our constitutional responsibilities, and is at odds with the approach adopted in other federal countries.

It has failed and it is time to change. Other nations’ experience can give us confidence that if we make changes we can look forward to vibrant electricity markets that actually work in customers’ best interests.

Bruce Mountain does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

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