Cycling won't get Australia moving

Is the solution a different type of private motorised transport?

Every building in this country is connected to every other building by a road, a street, a lane or a trail. That is the reason that there has been so much focus on keeping the car and giving it more respectability by replacing internal combustion with battery power.

That still leaves us with the large cubicle on four wheels - and you heading for the day when you cannot get out of your own street onto the highway because of gridlock. The roads will be still there - but useless for much of the day. How are we to then recover the roads?

It is bewildering to me that almost nothing is said about moving masses of people on light and low powered three-wheeled motor scooters traveling over truck-free roads. While sacrificing the carrying capacity and weatherproofing advantages of the car, you can still move from home to close to your destination ready for business - without physical effort.

Earlier this month a smash closed the F3 highway, north of Sydney, for hours due to a delay in putting a “contraflow” system in place (the utilisation of existing lesser roads to bypass the problem). Contraflow systems to get cars off freeways can be very difficult to organise. How much sooner could a contraflow system be put into place if commuters were on motor scooters which could be lifted over median strips and gutters?  

Scooters cannot safely share the roads with trucks. The moving of goods and services on one hand and the movement of people on the other need to be separated in both space and time. With cars gone, our major roads are wide enough to allow such separation in space - and time separation is just a matter of organisation. The obvious problems are that the rider can fall off the scooter, and the scooter would only provide breathing space for maybe 20 years, before there is a gridlock of scooters.

Conclusion

Rather than try to think of every possible objection, once we put Australians on scooters, we will sort out the safety problems then - as we did when we put Australians into cars which were no longer limited to the speed of a trotting horse. Cars have served us brilliantly, but they are simply running out of road space.

If private car transport grinds down to a speed which is less than walking pace, the public at large will find a way around the problem - as it always has with every problem it has met throughout history. (Maybe there will be less people living in the north with jobs in the south driving pass people living in the south with jobs in the north. Maybe what you buy in a supermarket will be delivered.)

Unfortunately, parliamentarians and their public service bureaucrats will still have their hands on our money to experiment with their grand ideas.