A planning student’s perspective on international transport systems

Daniel Kinnoch shares his experiences of various transport systems around the world. After studying Urban and Regional Planning at Ryerson University, Canada. He is now about to commence his third year of Planning at the University of South Australia.

Thank you Daniel for sharing your insights with The Planning Boardroom. I encourage you to visit Daniel’s own blog at planninganddesignaus.tumblr.com

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I have just completed a six month study exchange overseas, having traveled through Europe and then settling in Toronto, Canada, where I have been studying at Ryerson University.

I have seen so much, which has been such an inspiration. From living in Adelaide, where I once complained about our diesel trains, one long tram line and irregularly running buses, to going to Berlin, where the transition between heavy rail, trams and subway is so smooth, owning a car would be impractical. Being spoilt in Europe, I then experienced North American cities, where cars were king and you could not travel anywhere without one – and even if a downtown had light rail, it was more for show than practicability.

Toronto has just elected a new city mayor; downtown residents didn’t want him, but the suburbanites did. He wants to rip up the tram lines (the most extensive in North America) and ‘reclaim’ them for cars and eliminate traffic congestion. It baffles me that a city that has been so successful; one that has grown despite the North American economic uncertainty – would even contemplate encouraging downtown car use.

Why are there people who still think like this? They have a massive Transit City project over here, where another four / five major tram lines were to cross the city, even going into the suburbs. The new mayor has scrapped it all, planning to redirect funds into a single new subway line with about seven new stations, in comparison to the planned 156 tram stations.

Where is the sense in this? Do these people honestly have to be forced to live in a European city for a few months to work out that their ideology is so flawed? It is people like this; governments like these, that make me lose faith, even as a student, that the world wants to change for the better. We thought cars were the next best thing, when really all we had to do was look at the streets, the people, the trains – and realise what we already had simply needed fine tuning. Americans seem to think that Europe is ‘medieval’ and stuck in the past. Yet they are centuries ahead of all of us.

When I get back to Adelaide, I won’t complain about the buses or trains anymore. I’ll yell at people who complain at our lack of freeways in our city. I’ll slap people who suggest that there isn’t enough new fringe housing development. I’ll leave my car (despite it being 5 star green rated, most efficient in Australia, 4.2 L per 100 km) in the garage, catch a bus and hope – and pray – that one day, people will be happy with what they have and strive to make that better. Change is great, but sometimes all we need to do is look to the past to realise what worked.