Transport
If we minimise transport needs, we can lower our greenhouse gas emissions significantly. In Australia, transport is about 15% of all emissions, while household transport is around 30% of the total emissions of a household's.
People will patronise efficient, integrated public transport (single ticket and services that wait for each other across modes, phone notification of service arrival, and frequent and reliable services along popular routes).
Groups or individuals may wish to add a comment (Just register first) about how we can conserve transport energy and therefore greenhouse gas emissions.
Examples may include walking and cycling; car pool or hire; free public transport; free bicycles left around CBD for loan; regular and reliable public transport services (buses, light rail or trains) with realtime SMS alerts; express buses; living near trains and other public transport; better town planning to encourage working near home; work from home; encourage more bicyle-ways; higher density living along public transport routes; get retrained in jobs that do not require large travel (by trucks, planes etc.); replace your car/4-wheel drive with a more efficient one eg. a 5-6L/100km petrol car or diesel with additional particulate filter; remove government subsidies for business car travel and the discount for 4-wheel drive truck chasses; increase petrol taxes; light rail.
Please supply some details of what you would like to see and how it would work.
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Bikes for hire in Melbourne
Hello people..I agree that
Hello people..I agree that the solar-charge electric bikes can is the vehicles in the future..Even now there is a solar-charge vehicle in my country.Thanks for sharing this article..It was nice and interesting article.
SEO Package
Business, Transport & Customers. The life blood of a city.
Cycle ways and iner city rail will not be a problem if business is not viable and at $8.00 a litre there won't be many that survive on a standard business model. What I think we need to do is to look at a typical small business cycle and then find a way to get it to work at $8.00 per litre fuel cost.
If we can’t do that then the streets will be available for cycles to use at any time. I have no idea where you would want to go if Newcastle was a ghost town. Read my alternate vision to the “Vision of a Sustainable Newcastle in 10 years Time” article on this web site.
I would like to think that the picture painted by “Vision of a Sustainable Newcastle in 10 years Time” will become reality however, if we don't get into the nuts and bolts of finding a way to make business work in a city with declining energy and terminal fuel costs, things will be very different by the time fuel hits the $8.00 a litre mark.
Vision Of Unprepared Newcastle
How sadly wrong our ideas were in 2009, building extra cycle ways, moving people into higher density living to reduce fuel consumption, thinking that filthy coal would be a thing of the past.
As I look out over Newcastle's overgrown and weed encrusted streets I wonder where all those people and cars went to, on the land I hope, though I have no idea where. As the cost of fuel went through two, three and then eight dollars per litre businesses were bankrupted in groups, first high fuel users then down through to even the Council, "no business no money" they said as the doors were locked. Even the second hand book shop closed - "not enough customers and repeated robberies" they said.
The queue of coal ships must be over two hundred now, the world scrounging for the only large scale source of energy to keep electricity on in cities smart enough to convert to electric vehicles, like Canberra. Just swipe your credit card and drive away. Those cities are able to employ their people and provide services at least. Pollution and the environment are the least of our worries now.
Well it's after midday, better get home before the street gangs are out, Dad will be home from the mine tonight, it will be great to see him this month.
Bruce Sibthorpe
A negative story I admit, however, it holds the message that if we put our energies and money into the correct things we can make a big difference to the outcome.
Start by thinking through a typical small business cycle, see what it needs then find a way that it can be made to still work at $8.00 per litre.
Regard
Bruce.
No good reason to alight at Wickham.
Ben Ewald, Newcastle.
Thanks Jsheil, Im encouraged to see that you have no good arguments as to why the rail line should be cut at Wickham, except that all transport should use zero emission energy. Why start with the newcastle train? Zero emission standards should be applied to the private car fleet first before paying any attention to the energy used by public transport.
The Sydney trains, being electric vehicles, can easily be run on zero emission green electricity. This option is not available for busses that currently run on fossil petroleum.
The call for the Civic precinct to be connected to the foreshore can easily be met if you consider people as the users rather than cars as the users. People can walk on overpasses or underpasses, at any time, and can cross at level crossings if they are prepared to sometimes wait a minute or two. It is only car traffic that is so inconvenienced by the level crossings.
I think that the foreshore area positively benefits from restricted car access by having lower traffic volumes and lower speeds. If there were multiple streets feeding vehicles into the foreshore area its qualities would be serioulsy degraded by the extra congestion. The supposed benefits of connecting multiple streets to Wharf road are a fiction, while the benefits of the rail line are obvious now, and will be even greater in the future.
Swapping modes at Wickham
Ben, you may have misunderstood my reasoning.
Whilst there are 2 extremes in the rail debate (keep the train services and remove the rail), I agree with neither of these.
The middle ground is to leave the rail there so that we can utilise the infrastructure when we increase passenger numbers to justify light rail (or even trains again) in the future. This objection is on environmental grounds ie. resources and pollution per passenger.
In 2008 there were a total of 1/4 million trips for 2008 to and from Newcastle station (SMH, 21/2/09 - "Workers training to avoid traffic"), and from the current timetable, there are 87 weekday train services each day away from Newcastle to Central, morisset, Gosford and towards Maitland, with an aditional 47 per day on the weekends.
Assuming the same number of train services towards Newcastle, then there are 529 trains leaving and arriving at Newcastle each week. Some of there are diesel and only 2 carriages, but weigh 61 tonnes each, but others are longer, and the others vary in length, but usually from 4 to 8 carriages. Again, being conservative, assuming just 3 carriages plus the engine car (ie. 3 x 41 tonnes plus 1 x 60 tonnes), this gives us 8,202,792 tonnes for 55,016 train services for the year.
This is 33 tonnes of train per passenger trip, with 4.5 people per train on average getting on and off at Newcastle !!
I would be interested to see the number of cars that 33 tonnes of train is equivalent to, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Would it be better to drive 10 Hummers for every passenger instead of running these trains to Newcastle ??
The ideal urban form is similar to European cities, where 5-7 storey housing occurs along best-practice transit routes. This promotes walking and cycling, and improves health of more active residents.
Until Newcastle adopts this urban form, and dramatically increases its inner city population, and then train patronage, it cannot justify using the train, on sustainability grounds.
Sydney's trains are sustainable (almost 1 million trips per week at Town Hall), and there is a best-practice modern public bus transit system, with good urban form, in Bogota, Columbia where the transit system can handle 750,000 people a day - way more than Newcastle presently has. This is a modern bus system, with at-grade entrance, storage facilities, pre-sales ticketing etc.
The latest versions available now are diesel-electric hybrids or natural gas, which have lower emissions. I would like all transport to be emission-free, and ideally electric charged by renewables, but until we get there, these are reaonable alternatives to the sledge-hammer coal-fired electric train.
Wallsend to Glendale Cycleway
Ben Ewald, Newcastle.
There was a tram line from Wallsend to West Wallsend via Glendale that ran for about 30 years from 1905. The line is still designated as a transport corridor, and the old cutting and embankments are still there. At the northern end it crosses the F3 link road at an underpass about 200m from the last roundabout in Wallsend, and at the southern end it comes out next to Glendale TAFE. The council area boundary between NCC and LMCC is about half way along the route.
It would make a perfect 3km cycleway, allowing people from the west lakes area to get to Wallsend and the University without riding on Lake Rd which is busy and dangerous. Both Newcastle and Lake Macquarie councils are working towards such a conversion. Some budget has been allocated: I understand this to be $750,000 from the state government, $300,000 by LMCC and $350,000 by NCC. If it costs the same per Km as the Fernleigh track to build, this is close to enough money.
The two councils have put in an application for funds from the recent economic stimulus package passed by the federal government which includes $40mill for cycleways (Thanks to Bob Brown) for Stage 4 of the Fernleigh track, Redhead to Belmont.
Local politicians Sonia Hornery, NSW, Wallsend, Greg Combet , federal, Charlton, councillor Mike Jackson , ward 4, and some other councillors are all supportive of the Wallsend-Glendale project, so why is it taking so long?
See a video promoting the cycleway on youtube, accessible fromthe Newcastle Cycleways website:
http://users.hunterlink.net.au/~magsb/index.htm
transition towners: Go and ride the track, then tell your local politician to hurry things up.
Newcastle train line redevelopment
G'day how's it going? Just had a chat a couple of guys I think you lot would be interested in getting in touch with. You may have had a chat with them at the train stations from Hamilton-Newcastle.
They're proposing developing the Hamilton-Newcastle train line to make it more accessable, and make the physical track work, more pedestrian friendly. This is in response to a proposal to get rid of it entirely. You can view their proposal at,
http://www.newcastledeservesbetter.com/index.html
Personally, coming from Melbourne where trams are a way of life still, it seems a great wasted opportunity to pull out the rail infrastructure, when it could be adapted into a train/tram combo that would greatly enhance the appeal and accessability of the harbourside and be an asset to the city. That's my 2c anyhow :)
-Tim
www.upyourjumper.wordpress.com
Re: Train line redevelopment
Tim,
Looks like a very detailed proposal, but I can't see any account of costings, energy or greenhouse gas pollution or optimum passenger volumes for the various modes of transport.
The newcastle trains were historically for coal freight, which no longer happens, and the small patronage makes it hard to environmentally justify each train service (although this would be the best outcome if we had a much bigger patronage). Even light rail cannot be justified currently, but if we get enough people living in the CBD, maybe we could put it in then - a great reason to keep the rail corridor as open space.
According to Professor Steffen Lehmann, in Newcastle currently, the world's best practice public transport option (for environmental sustainability and from a cost-benefit approach for passengers) is to use a mix of express and all-stops hybrid buses, with special at-grade platforms to make access easy for those less able passengers, with free transport for elderly, disadvantaged and youth, and well-integrated with rail, ferry, cyling and walways from around Wickham.
Can I transport a small knife
Can I transport a small knife collection via plane?
Alta Vacation Homes
Newcastle's train line
Ben Ewald, Newcastle.
The current proposal to close the rail line to Newcastle is counter to any good public planning, and is based on simplistic ideas of property development. It is clearly a case of private property interests seeking profitable redevelopments at the expense of public amenity or long term sustainability.
With Newcastle East planned as a residential and tourist precinct and the Civic area planned as a cultural, legal and University precinct there is more need than ever to keep it connected by rail to both the Maitland and Sydney lines. The suggestion that all train travellers should alight at Wickham and complete their journey by bus or tram makes as much sense as asking all drivers to park at Wichkam and take the same option. Is it in the travellers interest? Not at all. It is in the interests of property developers who want more land to be labelled as waterfront, and in the interests of those who can see no further than the private motor car, who want to get rid of the irritant of the level crossing at Stuart Avenue. The green bait of a cycleway along the current train corridor is no recompense for the damage that would be caused by the increased car traffic.
The carpet baggers will keep trying to steal Newcastle's rail service, and we will have to keep opposing them.
The reason to alight at Wickham
The reason why train travellers should alight at Wickham and
complete their journey by bus or tram is in the interest of humankind, rather than individual comfort.
Having reached 1.3 times the Ecological Footprint (where 1.0 is the earth's carrying capacity of 6.8bn population at their current living standards measured by resource consumption and pollution created) of the globe, we have surpassed the "Tragedy of the Commons" as applied to the environment.
So we need to find the optimum transport mode to address the constraints of human needs, greenhouse gas pollution, resource consumption, and not get too hung up about the actual mode for the sake of the mode - lets leave that to the expert eco-urban planners.
Lets keep the corridor for the future, but allow access across the rail line to connect the harbour with the tourism and cultural zones. This will revitalise the city, and increase the numbers living centrally.
Many estimates suggest there are only around 10 years left before oil gets too expensive for travel and renovation (look at the demand that will be created by the recent $3,000 Tata Nano car in the 1.1bn populated India). Also see recent book by Jeff Rubin.
Lets look at renovating the areas around sustainable towns eg. a CBD for ultra-sustainability (food, jobs, shelter - 5 storey energy-efficient buildings along public transport routes, strong sustainable communities, health support, water, waste, biodiversity and strong culture).
We should all try to make own communities as sustainable as possible, and lets try to get as many more good ideas as possible into local Energy Descent Plans to help sustainable communities in the Hunter.
BTW, I should declare my interests - I am an ex-Civil Engineer from Pacific Power, energy auditor, and researching part-time for Professor Steffen Lehmann in improving energy efficiency in the Urban Built Environment, with website.
educating council about cyclists
Newcastle Council should get rid of the deadly "bike picture lanes" which are causing cars to squeeze too closely past cyclists. Stop getting annoyed by cars:
Unsign-posted "bike picture lanes" are too narrow & Road Rules 153 & 247 advise not to ride in them. They are car-door-opening-death lanes. When passing parked cars, 30m beforehand, check for cars, then move into the next lane safely, away from door opening zone. critical-mass.info : Bike celebration rides : 1st Friday,Monthly,Civic Park,6pm : groups.yahoo.com/group/Critical_Mass_Newcastle
Solar-charged Electric Bikes can be the Vehicles of the Future
Riding bikes safely is important.
And what would get a critical mass of cyclists together are lots of emission-free vehicles that can take 1 passenger to cover the 50% of trips of less than 5km (in Perth, at least).
My ideal bike/trike is made from a low-energy, carbon-absorbing, strong, light timber e.g. bamboo, and uses an electric motor with many gears perhaps in a Human Powered Vehicle configuration, with a cover to protect the occupants against rain - something like a pedapod. It could then be charged overnight using 100% greenpower or a solar PV array.