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Australia Transportation

How Sydney Destroyed Its Trams For Love of the Car (theguardian.com) 308

An anonymous reader shares a report from The Guardian about the questionable decision in the 1950s to get rid of Sydney's trams in favor of private cars. From the report: In the late 1950s Sydney ripped up its tram network, once one of the largest in the world. Nearly 1,000 trams -- some only a few years old -- were rolled to the workshops in the city's eastern suburbs and stripped of anything that could be sold, before being unceremoniously tipped on their sides, doused with sump oil and set ablaze. Barely a decade before its closure, Sydney's tram system had carried 400 million passenger journeys a year on a network of more than 250km, primarily serving the eastern, southern and inner-west suburbs, and stretching as far north as Narrabeen at its peak. But the explosion of car traffic in the postwar years persuaded the New South Wales government that urban freeways were the way of the future (the first in Australia, the Cahill Expressway, opened in 1958), and trams were an impediment to that vision.

The destruction of the network from the mid-50s was swift and brutal. In 1958 the bizarre castellated Fort Macquarie depot at Circular Quay was demolished to make way for the Opera House, and the lines along George Street were torn up. The last Sydney tram ran on 25 February 1961 from Hunter Street to La Perouse (along much of the same route now being rebuilt), packed to the rafters and greeted by crowds of people, before it joined the dismal procession to "burning hill" at Randwick. Mathew Hounsell, a senior research consultant at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney, has called the destruction of the network "the largest organized vandalism in our nation's history." He says the decisions made in the 50s had a disastrous long-term effect. "When the trams were removed from Sydney, mass transport patronage plummeted and private car usage soared. Our space-saving trams were replaced with ever-more space-hungry cars, causing ever-worsening traffic. That wasn't how the planners saw it at the time. They were strongly swayed by powerful international influences, which chimed with the unstoppable rise of private car ownership in Australia.
The trams are slowly returning, as the city painfully rebuilds a tiny part of its old system. "The construction of 12.8km of light rail from Circular Quay to Randwick and Kingsford will cost $2.7 billion at the latest estimate, has caused untold misery to shops and other businesses in its path and will be almost a year overdue by the time even the first section is open," the report says.

"The new line hardly represents a fundamental shift in Sydney's transport thinking, coming as it does alongside the vast 'congestion-busting' WestConnex freeway project, and further investment in metro rail (a separate light rail link is also under construction at Parramatta). But it is a reminder that the city might have looked very different today but for the decision taken in the 1950s -- and ruthlessly carried out -- to prioritize motor transport."
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How Sydney Destroyed Its Trams For Love of the Car

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    The red-eyed toon's cockamamie plan also succeeded down under.

  • Cars are awesome (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @10:56PM (#59021404)

    Instead of bemoaning the car as some sort of evil conspiracy, let's ponder a moment at how great it is. It is available on your schedule, late for work at 930 or early at 5. It goes where you want when you want, can carry you, 3-7 of your friends or family, and enough food to feed them for several weeks. It's always as clean as you want it to be. Nobody sits next to you that you don't know and don't want to sit next to. Cars are popular because they are GOOD. There may be reasons why as a society we want to wean ourselves off of them, but we need to do so with open eyes. People chose cars because cars are (or were) better than trains and trams by almost any measure. If you want to get people off cars, you can't just pretend that away. You need to address the fact that cars are really good.

    • by An Ominous Cow Erred ( 28892 ) on Thursday August 01, 2019 @04:48AM (#59021952)

      They also consume so much space and infrastructure that they make a functional human-scale city impossible if everyone uses one. Instead, to make room for all the parking, buildings have to be spread out, and the cars then need wide roads to transport everyone, which makes things even more spread out, and since the roads are run on a Communist-style *FREE TO USE* basis, they clog up like Soviet bread lines. Widening free roads doesn't solve traffic congestion any more than giving free money to homeless people gets rid of homelessness. Making something free just makes people wasteful in how they use it and encourages more people to get on the gravy train until the resource becomes scarce again -- again, just like Soviet bread lines.

      So now instead of everyone walking/biking to work in 10 minutes or taking the subway for 20 minutes, everyone winds up stuck sitting in traffic for 1-2 hours. Since buildings are far away from each other now to support the car infrastructure, subways become more expensive and you have to ride them further, and much of your public transit becomes slow uncomfortable buses stuck in traffic instead, so even more people wind up driving. Or, alternatively, if the jobs are REALLY spread out you might luck out and be only a 20 minute drive away, but then you're married to that job and have to move if you get a different one because all the *other* jobs are 1-2 hours away in traffic. If your household has 2 jobs then more likely you got your house to be close to one job but the other then has to deal with traffic.

      • Re:Cars are awesome (Score:5, Interesting)

        by hjf ( 703092 ) on Thursday August 01, 2019 @07:50AM (#59022390) Homepage

        Not every city is Los Angeles.
        I live in a city of 400,000 and I drive my car to work. Before this, I took the bus. I had to wake up early, walk 4 blocks to the bus stop, and take a bus that took 30 minutes to arrive. Back home I would walk. The walk would take me 40 minutes. That's correct: 30 minutes bus (25 if lucky), 40 minute walk...

        Nowadays I drive my car. It takes me 6 to 10 minutes to arrive to work.

        So yeah, driving actually gives me basically 1 hour of my time back. Time I don't really have. Because I work 9 hours a day and I need to take a 15-30 minute nap when I get home because I'm REALLY TIRED.

        I would prefer to bike to work, but my workplace, while "green", "cool and hip", "eco friendly because they switched to LED lighting", doesn't provide bike parking. And since this is south america, leaving my bike chained outside has a significant chance of theft. This is not feasible in summer, though, since temperatures of 30C at 9AM are normal, and this workplace has a strict "long pants only" dress code, where you can't even enter the building wearing shorts. Biking with jeans on 30C weather is not really a good idea, neither for me nor for my coworkers.

        • Oh my ! Bike theft is universal and certainly not a speciality of South America ! And everywhere, it has been a big obstacle to bike adoption. Lucky me, they allow me to leave my bike under constant watch.

          It is rather hot where i live too. I bike in long pants too, by more than 30 C. I change my shirt and refresh myself with a wet towel. I am fortunate enough to be allowed to do do that inside the building too. But otherwise i would refresh myself in a semi discreet spot outside like the parking.

          The problem

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @10:58PM (#59021406)

    Thank the push of big business like GM, Standard-Oil, Goodyear, plus other trying to production up to WWII levels.

    You still see the scars of those past eras on the roads and tunnels:
    1) Solono Tunnel, in Berkeley
    2) The lower deesk of Bay bridge, including the Tunnel in the middle, shows the railways.
    3) Just look at a street and see the raillines on San Pablo Ave from Oakland 14th to San Pablo (pass Richmond).
    4) Branch Lines from Telegraphic Ave and cross points like 51st - you can see the 1890's - where the Bakery, Meat Shop, and other local stores once was. Becuase that location was a train stop / transfer location from the downtown Oakland.

    One facct... in 1906 you could get from Berkeley Campus to Market St Ferry Building in San Francisco faster than you can today, by car, bus, BART, - And you even had to travel by Ferry then.

    • by bferrell ( 253291 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @11:17PM (#59021448) Homepage Journal

      All of the above is true. What else is true the traffic load was lower by far than it is today.

      Bidirectional rail and truck traffic on the lower deck? You betcha... At lower density than today, not even counting the "traffic" that crossed the bay at the same time... You DO know the Berkeley pier was for full blown trains, right? And there was no Dumbarton, San Rafael or San Mateo bridges either so what needed to go there ALSO used the bay bridge or a ferry. Ever been on the bay in really bad weather?

      It's easy and nice to holler "it was better!!!"; and it was... To a point through certain color glasses. But isn't that what certain hat wearing types are doing now?

      All of that said, I like ferries even in bad weather.

      • by dcw3 ( 649211 )

        "All of that said, I like ferries even in bad weather."

        Typical of that area.

    • Nyoo Zild did the same thing as Sydney in the 1950s in Auckland, scrapped or abandoned development of their rail network to build motorways because it had worked so well in LA (seriously!). Also like Sydney they're now spending billions to retrofit a partial rail network onto the city because the motorway traffic is like LA today. As opposed to a few million in the 1950s when a comprehensive rail network was planned but not built.
  • by aberglas ( 991072 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @10:59PM (#59021410)

    Being stuck on tracks, trams really do not mix well with other traffic. Buses work much better. There were also trolly buses (like still in San Francisco) which were better but had similar issues.

    Adelaide kept one tram, from the city to Glenelg. But it runs mainly on its own tracks away from other traffic. In the 1980s they wanted to build a tramway to the north east. But very sensibly the elected for an "OBarn" system that let buses run along concrete tracks. The great advantage of that system is that at the end of the track the buses can fan out and take people to where they actually want to go without changing transport modes.

    Today Sydney is largely hollow. There are tunnels everywhere, and for a toll price you can travel quickly about.

    The decision to remove all the trams may not have been optimal, but it certainly was not as unreasonable as is made out. It is not trams vs cars. Rather it is trams vs buses.

    • None of that shit is true, except maybe the bit about Adelaide, no one knows what they do over there.

    • You're not from 'round here, are you?

    • by MrKaos ( 858439 ) on Thursday August 01, 2019 @01:54AM (#59021714) Journal

      The decision to remove all the trams may not have been optimal, but it certainly was not as unreasonable as is made out. It is not trams vs cars. Rather it is trams vs buses.

      Buses, in Sydney, are a disaster. They are more often than not late. A single idiot on Sydney roads can cause *billions* of dollars worth of lost productivity by having an accident whilst sending a text message. Most cars only have *one* passenger so the transport density of people moved is very low compared to the volume of traffic. Trams have a much higher density of people they can move compared to buses. Self driving buses won't solve the problem either.

      It cost so much to go *anywhere* in Sydney and you have to say goodbye to hours of your time just to get around. The Sydney train system only makes sense when you overlay where the trams *were*. Considering the increased density of the trains it was quite obvious that trams had room to expand and the system at the time needed an upgrade.

      Now traffic itself is killing Sydney and it has limited the density of the city itself. Any Sydneysider will tell you the joy of sitting in Sydney traffic in the middle of summer, the "gawkers" who create traffic jams by looking at why someone has been pulled over and the frustration of having to wait any more than *literally* 200ms after a green light if someone isn't paying attention.

      I want a special shout out to Premier Cahill whose corruption has caused a haze of pollution that can be seen all the way to the Blue Mountains and damned us to the traffic hell we endure daily and are still paying for.

      And a special special shout out to the NRMfuckingA who should be held responsible for not only the destruction of social life in Sydney but for every drink driving accident that the city has had since they decided to completely FUCK the city. Sydney's roads were never as organised as American cities.

      Most Sydney dwellers don't know what we lost, unless they study our history, but for those who do everyday life on Sydney roads is a reminder of just how corrupt and self serving the state politicians have always been.

      Sydney is a magnificent city if you don't have to drive anywhere.

    • Trams run on stable, straight track with only minimal suspension to compensate for tiny defects in the rails. Unless your rails are in really bad repair it's a comfy ride.

      Buses run on streets on bouncy pneumatic tires with nothing to hold them straight, possibly with potholes, and have big lurchy suspensions to deal with the uneven roadway. They make big lurchy turns to pull in and out of traffic, and wind up leaning sideways when they pull to the side of the road (because roads have to be sloped at the edg

  • by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @11:18PM (#59021454)

    I'm thinking there are a lot of rose tinted spectacles involved in these sort of stories - sure, there is a move back toward shared public transport in a lot of places these days, but it wasn't necessarily a bad decision to move away from transport systems such as trams et al back in the day and the move back today is more angled around environmentalism than anything else.

    Trams require maintenance (obviously) - both of the units themselves and of the rails and power delivery systems spread all over the city. Cash strapped councils saw the benefit in shifting vehicle maintenance to the individual (through ownership of cars) and of allowing transport networks to be more fluid (through use of busses, which could go anywhere there was a road and more busses laid on at short notice, not to mention special routes for special events) and so they did it. They had to maintain the roads, sure, but then they had to maintain the rails et al anyway, so that was pretty much a wash (if not a net reduction in cost).

    Plus, cars were going to take off anyway - they are more convenient, they offer personal space for the traveller and they were getting cheaper every year. Public transport is often times inconvenient, can be more expensive (hell, take a look at the cost of last minute train journeys in the UK vs just hopping in the car and driving the 100 miles - a last minute train ticket can cost multiple times that of the car journey) and can often be less comfortable (spending 8 hours with the entire side of your body pressed hard against a stranger, not many peoples idea of comfort...).

    So, not quite the questionable decision at all - more a decision of its time, as is the attempt to go back to mass public transport of one kind or another.

    • sure they made the wrong decision, but they made a bet

      now what was questionable was to destroy the electricity network.... we could have electricity powered bus's
      in fact it would be nice if we could go back to that, free electricity in the city for trucks and cars that do not use their motor

      plus tax for all the diesel polluting during the day (forcing delivery and construction to actually THINK about when they want to run)

      John

      • now what was questionable was to destroy the electricity network

        No, that was a logical consequence of deciding to shut down the trams. Had the network been left up, it would have been necessary to maintain it--even out of use, it becomes a hazard if minimal maintenance is not done on it. They didn't want that expense for something that was serving no purpose.

    • You're comparing long distance vs short distance. Take a look at the cost of driving a car to work in London and being squished against a stranger starts to look far more desirable.

      The problem ultimately is that urban planning is fixed with a certain vision in mind, and Sydney was well planned. Whenever a week planned city suffers a change it doesn't go well and the city turning into the parking lot that is is today may not have necessarily been predicted by the council but that doesn't mean it wasn't predi

    • They weren't out to just enable cars, they were out to *promote* cars. They didn't just shut down the tram systems, they actively destroyed them. Why were they in such a hurry to shut down the infrastructure, to rip out the rails, to *SET BRAND NEW TRAMS ON FIRE*? They weren't just reducing the tram network due to lack of use, they were actively destroying it permanently so it could not be restarted, because their end goal was to force everyone to drive, even the people who didn't want to.

      If you feel your f

  • Welcome to italy (Score:5, Interesting)

    by aglider ( 2435074 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @11:32PM (#59021480) Homepage

    For the sake of FIAT(who pays tax abroad) we destroyed all of the public transportation system.

  • by Miamicanes ( 730264 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @11:33PM (#59021484)

    Trolleys & Tramways weren't torn up in some grand conspiracy to promote buses. They were torn up because light rail running at-grade in traffic fucks up traffic.

    Eliminating the trolleys/trams allowed cities to add a lane or two for cars, which made it popular with voters... most of whom drove cars. Cities switched to buses because they didn't fuck up traffic as badly as trams & trolleys used to... and since most bus-riders were poor (compared to car-owners), their preferences were politically irrelevant.

    This is what elected officials in Miami just keep NOT getting, over and over again. Miami voters are promised elevated rail expansion over & over again, vote for new taxes to pay for it, then get bait & switch fucked over again & again when the money gets used for goddamn buses that nobody (except for elected officials) wants. Miami voters are only willing to pay for elevated rail, because they hope it'll get the *other* drivers off the road. At-grade light rail & bus rapid transit can't make that promise, and in fact usually makes traffic congestion along their affected roads profoundly WORSE(*). Ergo, voter-opposition & zero willingness to fund.

    Right now, Miami is on the cusp of a taxpayer revolt over transit taxes. We voted once to approve a half-cent sales tax after being promised Metrorail expansion. The county fucked us, blew it on buses, and actually CUT BACK on Metrorail service. Leaders begged for forgiveness, promised Metrorail expansion if we voted AGAIN for ANOTHER half-cent tag, and we fell for it. Hook, line, and sinker. Criminally-blatant bait & switch... except now, the voter backlash is coming, and the county government is in full-bore existential panic over the real possibility that voters are going to kill BOTH surtaxes & leave transit completely defunded.

    It's the same story in Broward. Voters were promised Metrorail-like elevated transit, then officials came within one vote of blowing it all on at-grade transit instead. Except unlike Miami, in Broward the backlash was INSTANT. Angry voters in Broward made it clear that we want elevated rapid transit or nothing... and the county government backed off (for now, at least) to try finding a way to fund the transit system people actually voted for.

    ---

    (*) True story. Back in the late 1980s, Dade County spent a small fortune synchronizing the traffic lights along US-1 between downtown Miami and Homestead & optimizing their timing to turn South Dixie Highway into a road that was a half step below a freeway. It worked. In 1991, you could drive from Kendall Drive to Cutler Ridge Mall (now Southland Mall) in about 15 minutes... AT FUCKING RUSH HOUR. Then, the South Dade Busway was built alongside the road, and the light timing was fucked to hell to give buses priority. Literally overnight, the time to drive the same stretch of road doubled. And in the ~15 years since, it has only gotten WORSE. If our elected officials had done their goddamn jobs & just extended Metrorail (elevated) along the same route like they originally promised to do, we would have gotten rapid transit AND still had non-gridlocked traffic in that area.

    At-grade transit fucks up travel times for EVERYONE. Grade-separated rail might (in the short term, at least) be a "boondoggle" that fails to visibly reduce gridlock... but at least it doesn't make matters *worse* the way trams, trolleys, and Bus Rapid Transit do.

    • by Zaelath ( 2588189 ) on Thursday August 01, 2019 @12:18AM (#59021546)

      It's a 2km drive from work to the freeway entrance, there are no trams on any of the roads to get there. One Friday afternoon it took me 90 minutes to drive that 2km. There were no accidents or roadwork involved.

      Trams don't make roads worse, cars make roads worse.

      • If it's taking ~90 minutes to drive 2km, your road situation is already fucked & dysfunctional, and transit can't make it much worse (though I'd equally argue that with a road situation *that* bad, money spent on ANYTHING that doesn't involve tunnels or grade-separation would be completely wasted and pointless *anyway*).

        I just wish Elon Musk could get Boring Company tunnels to be at *least* as wide as London's old tube tunnels. At costs that make tunneling cost-competitive with viaducts, we could *deal*

      • ...only if people prioritize their lives that way.
        There are vast regions of the US (I assume that's where you live) where it doesn't take 90min to drive 2km.

        So why do you put up with it?
        Why don't you live where you could walk to work?

        Your specific answers don't matter, because your complaint and evident unwillingness to change suggests that you prioritize OTHER THINGS over that 90min of your life. AND THAT'S FINE, but don't pretend you don't have a choice about it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      No, you're not looking at this from the perspective of 1950's Australia. It was done to please our new American masters with the dwindling influence of the UK and, in particular, to please Ford and GM. It really was an act of vandalism. You find the presence of trams in the US upsetting? I would argue that this is only because road traffic was allowed to develop to titanic proportions and *only then* have they tried to reintroduce mass transit to help. It will take a while for behaviours to shift and for th

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      ... and since most bus-riders were poor (compared to car-owners), their preferences were politically irrelevant.

      Perhaps a good public transport system is a sign of low corruption levels in politics.

    • You think trolleys fucks up traffic, well yeah but getting rid of them puts traffic in the receiving end of a hateful hardcore BDSM gangbang.

      No cities in the world have ever improved traffic by wholesale elimination of a popular public transport system.

    • by mobby_6kl ( 668092 ) on Thursday August 01, 2019 @04:08AM (#59021888)

      At-grade trams are just fine, like yeah there's an occasional accident with cars or pedestrians that wouldn't have happened with separated lines but it's not a huge deal.

      The reason everything fails to visibly reduce gridlock is because in congested areas there's always more demand than road capacity so it will always fill up to some range-inducing equilibrium. I avoid going to the city center here because of traffic, if it were reduced, I'd drive there occasionally, contributing to the traffic.

      Let's say you have a road transporting 100 people/minute. You add a tram that can also move 100 people/minute (numbers completely made up, obviously). 50 people that used to drive now take the tram, and 50 new people that used to stay at home also take the tram now. So the road now only carries 50 people, right? Not for long, because everyone sees that the traffic is now flowing smoother and some more people that stayed home now decide to drive, and some of the tram riders switch too because it's more convenient.

      Overall you've made things much better as way more people can get where they want to go, but you didn't visibly fix the traffic.

    • by kqc7011 ( 525426 )
      If Sydney or any other urban area wants to improve mass transit Hybrid Busses are probably less expensive by a very, very large margin. They, the Hybrid's can switch routes by turning the steering wheel. Try changing a route on a light rail system. Does the area not served by light rail have a occasion that brings in a large amount of people needing to get somewhere else? The Hybrid's can re-schedule their routes, kinda hard to light rail to do that. Going from point A to point B always and only, the light
    • Trolleys & Tramways weren't torn up in some grand conspiracy to promote buses. They were torn up because light rail running at-grade in traffic fucks up traffic.

      Yes, but fuck traffic. The whole idea of making your city convenient for a bunch of cars is a shit one, because it inevitably leads to too many cars.

      An active rail line can carry 100 times as many people as a lane of roadway, for only ten times the cost. If you don't have much traffic, a road makes sense. If you do, you really want to get those people onto trains. Building more road lanes doesn't work, ultimately, because it just encourages more people to drive, and then they clog your new lanes — and

    • Who killed Roger Rabbit?
  • I'd lay odds that the system was starting to lose money because people wanted cars. Cars gave you the freedom to go when/where you wanted, and not wait for a tram that might drop you somewhere blocks away from your destination in bad weather. Nobody was concerned about saving the planet back then, so the rise of the automobile was inevitable, as was the drop in riders.

  • Trade-offs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Livius ( 318358 ) on Thursday August 01, 2019 @12:08AM (#59021520)

    There were pros and cons of trams, like everything else, and the rising prevalence of automobiles did change the relationship between trams and the other traffic they shared the road with. But it is fair to say that political leaders were short-sighted, as people did not really think through the implications of urban sprawl nor did they foresee the rise in fuel prices in the 1970s, and that's on top of making decisions about infrastructure with 100-year life spans on the basis of short-term factors.

    • I'm sure there were some decisions made for the benefit of some company or industries (or racism...) but certainly at the time the downsides weren't as obvious at the time. Nobody cared about pollution, and cars do work much better with the lower population densities that existed at the time. There's this video that explains the history quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      I love cars and driving, and precisely because of this, I'm all for getting as many people as possible off the roads and into pu

  • That's in the Clone Wars animated series isn't it?
  • by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Thursday August 01, 2019 @03:48AM (#59021856)
    What a load of bullshit. The tram system wasn't shutdown because they made a call that cars were the future. It was shutdown because it was severely rundown and falling apart due to lack of materials and money (mainly due to WWII), At the time the government decided that fixing it would bankrupt the state so they took the only viable option open to them. Many wanted it to stay open and the majority of public wanted it, but it just was not affordable to bring it up to spec to make its continued service viable.
  • there is nothing specific to Sydney in this story, all cities with trams basically destroyed that infrastructure or reduced it heavily.
    it's amazing to see how cities were transformed around cars so quickly; they paved paradise to put up a parking lot.
    to some extend you can see the same thing happening again, but in reverse, a lot of cities are now trying to keep cars out, reducing car specific infrastructure or making life hard/difficult for cars, mostly to the benefit of bicycles, pedestrians and public tr

  • Believe I saw the Sydney trams operating in the film version of On the Beach. Fitting...

  • I used to be a fan of Trams and Light Rail, until I actually started riding them, living in cities with them, and ultimately - understanding the economics behind them.

    The deficiencies are totally obvious once you actually start riding them:

    1. They have to stop at every red light.
    2. They require entire lanes of road for their virtually exclusive use.
    3. They do not yield to pedestrians, or anyone or anything else for that matter.
    4. They are limited to driving on tracks, which have to be laid and maintained.
    5.

  • Minneapolis, Minnesota did much the same thing around much the same time. Once they had a great network of street cars and other mass transit options, but they ripped it all up in favor of making more room to drive and park cars. Now there is no room for the increasing volume of cars and we realize we made a huge mistake. We have two light rail lines running through downtown now along with a commuter rail coming from the north, but that isn't enough on its own. It's a shame the politicians here are too
  • I see the almighty car has devoured much in Australia as it did elsewhere. Now that i finished my morning commute in a mildly bike friendly city,i am curious to hear how Aussies commute by bike. Is it practical ? Dangerous ? Do you feel at ease ? Do the municipalities try to expand its use ?

    I know the main subject is tramway but biking is a surprisingly good option for work commute even if you come from suburbia to the inner city.

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