A new round of Sydney-Melbourne rivalry has broken out in the last few years. This time, it's over which city has the most dysfunctional train system.
Sydney has unreliable services, and has cancelled failed projects for a metro and a 'smart card' ticketing system. Melbourne has unreliable trains, a smart card system that wasn't cancelled but should have been, and an unfunded metro project.
Residents of Brisbane and Adelaide also chafe at problems with their rail systems. Only Perth, it seems, knows how to run trains reliably and build new lines that work.
The most common remedy suggested for Sydney's problems is to privatise City Rail, letting market forces loose to promote efficiency and innovation. But the economists and journalists advocating this course seem unaware that Melbourne has conducted an experiment with rail privatisation since 1999.
The results in Melbourne are clear: subsidies have increased, services have deteriorated and public accountability has vanished behind a wall of spin and commercial confidentiality. And reliability is still deteriorating — the figures for the first quarter of 2010 were the worst on record — while Sydney is at least seeing a modest recovery.
Challenges as diverse as climate change, insecure oil supplies and rapid population growth point to the need for effective public transport. So what is causing the problems in East Coast cities, and what can be done to fix them? The most common answers offered by Australian commentators are public ownership, insufficient funding and low urban densities.
The way to test possible causes is to compare Australian cities to those where public transport works efficiently and provides a real alternative to the car. Among the leaders in this group is Zurich: at the most recent census in 2000, 63 per cent of trips to work in the City of Zurich were by public transport, 12 per cent on foot or cycle and 25 per cent by car (down from 26 per cent in 1990).
Comparable figures for public transport in Australian metropolitan areas ranged from a low of 6 per cent in Hobart to a high of 21 per cent in Sydney, with the car shares ranging from 71 per cent in Sydney to 83 per cent in Adelaide. The difference for trips to school was even greater: in Zurich City, the car share is only 2 per cent, compared with 60–70 per cent in Australian cities.
Of course the City