This is part three in my series of op-eds written for the Melbourne broadsheet The Age, which the paper rejects. You can read part 1 Train in Vain and part 2 Character Development.

The series is build around two premises. 1) The Age is deeply fretful about the city’s growth and is hostile to major projects that would facilitate this growth1, and 2) the paper’s opinion page is shit. Devoid of big ideas and full of terrible writing.

I have decided to keep sending them articles that I know go against their editorial line in a futile attempt to have them to take their role seriously. Every serious city needs a serious newspaper where big ideas about the city are discussed.

Given the paper’s obsession with the cost of the SRL, I thought that this piece might have a shot of being published. But their fretfulness can only understand “cancel the project”, not “bring down the costs”.

Here is the piece:

This week Montreal opened the second section of the Réseau express métropolitain, or REM. A rapid transit system that connects the southern suburbs, through the heart of the city to the north. Two branches off the main line – one to the west of the city and another to the airport – will open in 2026 and 2027 respectively. Once fully complete there will be 67 kms of new track and 19 new stations. The total cost of the project is around 10 billion Australian dollars.

I am writing this article from Sweden, where in Stockholm there is a major expansion to the Tunnelbana currently under construction. A whole new line is being added, plus extensions to two other lines. A total of 30 kms of new track and 18 new stations. The cost is just under 9 billion Australian dollars.

In Melbourne, the first stage of the Suburban Rail Loop’s (SRL) will consist of 26 kms of new track and six new stations. The cost shall be at least 30 billion. Triple the cost of these other projects, for considerably less construction.

Canada and Sweden are not low-wage countries. They are not countries that skimp on safety or quality. They are not countries without dense bureaucratic webs and a range of different stakeholders to be placated. Yet they have found a way to navigate this more efficiently and effectively. With a lazer-like focus on outcomes.

Yet it seems no-one in the Victorian government has thought to pick up the phone and ask them how they’ve done it. The SRL CEO, sitting up in Brisbane in his shorts and thongs, hasn’t thought that maybe global best practice is something he should consider?

Aside from the appropriate use of taxpayers’ money, the reason this is a problem is not because the SRL is a bad project. It is because the scale of rail infrastructure Melbourne needs to build is so immense that it is essential projects are delivered in a more cost-effective way.

Melbourne is a good 50 years behind where it needs to be with its rail network. The premier likes to mention that we’ll be the population of London by 2050, but even with the SRL and the new Metro Tunnel we are nowhere near having anything as extensive as the Tube. Even with our current population we are being embarrassed by cities half our size like Stockholm and Copenhagen, with their dense metro systems.

The Andrews/Allan governments have understood the necessity to build. Its first two projects, the Metro Tunnel and the Level Crossing Removal Project have been about problem solving. Allowing more trains to move more often. The SRL is about offering new avenues and reshaping the way we move around the city. But it is not enough.

The cost of the SRL has meant that Metro 2 has been kicked down the road. Metro 2 is essential for the Fishermans Bend precinct to reach its full potential. Without it, the area is a useless plot of land. As the University of Melbourne has recently recognised. The government’s lack of urgency on this project is short-sighted and neglectful. Were we as thrifty as the Canadians or Swedes we could afford both it and the SRL.

Over the past few elections the Victorian public have made a pragmatic calculation. Faced with the choice between a party that builds expensively and inefficiently, and a party that is hostile to building anything at all, they have sensibly chosen the former.

But politics doesn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to be a game of simply being for or against something. It can be a contest between doing things and doing things better. The New South Wales Liberal Party has understood this. With that state now having the luxury of two major parties trying to outcompete each other on rail projects.

This week’s change in leadership of the Liberal Party in Victoria offers an opportunity to follow suit. To position themselves as a party that will build, and build with greater efficiency. To be a party that wants to be responsible towards – and think big about – Melbourne’s future. With a promise to implement global best practice in doing so.

We have entered into a new era of urban construction. With major cities around the world understanding that public transit networks are the essential veins that allow their cities to thrive. Melbourne’s decades of rail network neglect has left us playing catch up. Unless we can bring down construction costs, we will continue to miss the train.

This is the second in what I see as a series of opinion pieces written for the Melbourne broadsheet, The Age, but rejected by the paper. The first on the Suburban Rail Loop can be found here. This piece is on the importance of an abundance of housing including good design – that “character” doesn’t need to protected, it needs to be advanced.

Despite my day job being in foreign affairs, and here on this Substack I write more philosophical pieces, a large percentage of my time is actually spent thinking about urban planning in Melbourne. I don’t claim to be an expert on urbanism, but I got ideas and desperately want to write about them. And, of course, urban design is foreign affairs and political philosophy. A city’s soft power is essential to the primary purpose of cities – attracting and facilitating talent, and the way this talent agglomerates, mixes, and morphs is vital to the capabilities of both individuals and nations.

This is why I spend a lot of time thinking about urbanism. It’s the platform from which everything else important flows. So it is definitely in my wheelhouse, even if practitioners in the field may disagree.

The other component of me writing this piece is my war against The Age’s Opinion page (a war they may not realise they are in).

The Age’s Opinion page – to be polite – isn’t what it should be, or what the city deserves. It’s not interested in big ideas and good writing. It embodies what I see an innate provincialism and, for want of a better word, the dingleberryness within many of the key institutions of the city and the state. Also the fretting. My god, the fretting is relentless. It’s fucking embarrassing.

So the idea behind my imaginary war is to write the kind of pieces that I think The Age should be publishing. Knowing full well they never will. But my thinking is that if I keep sending them this style of piece it may inspire them to think a little more about what an opinion page in a large city should publish. Maybe someone at the paper will realise that a city of 5.5 million people (and growing rapidly) might actually need a daily forum for serious ideas about the city. And that as Melbourne’s sole broadsheet this is their role.

This might be overstating any influence an email quickly dispensed to the bin may have (probably little to none), but it’s an amusing little exercise for me nonetheless.

So this is the piece I wrote:

The Victorian government’s recent release of its new designated higher density activity zones has received significant pushback by those wishing to “protect neighbourhood character.” Of course, this argument is often used as a disguise for people wanting to protect their property values. However, what if we took the idea seriously? What if Melbourne should be actively thinking about its character? What if good design was just as important to the city as increasing housing supply?

Australians are, by nature, an aesthetically disinterested people. Our national disposition is one of practicality over polish – if something functions well enough then we are satisfied. To waste time and resources on design is not only inefficient it is also seen as a bit pretentious and suspicious.

Yet this disposition is undermining Melbourne’s need to find its urban comparative advantage. Lacking natural beauty, Melbourne must compensate with a focus on man-made style. Yet currently there is a failure within the Victorian government to think about this style strategically. An inability to understand the soft power of urban environments, an inability to have a sophisticated understanding of the city’s culture, and how this should be reflected in both our new buildings and urban infrastructure.

Travel to cities of great urban beauty around the world and it's the aesthetic consistency of a neighbourhood that makes them compelling. Cities like Paris and Copenhagen have understood this and new buildings are designed with their surrounds and maintenance of their cultural image in mind. Melbourne is failing to implement its new buildings in this way.

Catch the 86 tram up High St from Northcote to Thornbury, or the 6 along Lygon St in East Brunswick, and you’ll see a series of apartment blocks built with no attention paid to existing character, and no understanding of local culture. Just a hotch-potch of random architectural styles, and plenty with no style at all.

Several of the “Gold Coast” style buildings in the Docklands and Port Melbourne are also at odds with the kind of city Melbourne is. There’s a laziness here of trying to conform to the “fun in the sun” culture of the northern states. It’s not who we are, and it’s not terrain that we can compete on anyway. We need to embrace our geographic conditions and not rely on cliché Australian themes.

This laziness extends beyond new buildings and into other areas of urban infrastructure. Melbourne inarguably has the world’s ugliest trains and trams. Horrible silhouettes, awful colour schemes and deeply embarrassing seat moquettes. As the city with the world’s largest tram network, the Victorian government should see our trams as a major strategic asset. Yet save for the lone W Class trundling around the city circle, none of our current fleet are in any way compelling.

That no care or consideration is paid to what should be a very easy win for Melbourne is indicative of the broader problem. This a lack of consideration of how urban design can be used to infuse confidence and aspiration into the city’s daily life. There is little consideration of how we want Melburnians to feel when they step out of their front doors. How we use our visual landscape and urban infrastructure to animate pride in the city, create a distinct identity for ourselves, and to foster bold new ideas for our future.

For this, neighbourhoods with character are important. But this doesn't mean freezing them in time. Nor does it mean forgoing the essential density that the city needs. The solution to all this – and to hopefully calm to those suspicious of the government’s new activity centres – is not complicated. It may simply be the humble brick.

Brick is timeless and cool. It has a restrained sophistication with a little industrial grit that represents Melbourne well. It looks the part through Melbourne’s grey, wet, winters, yet equally provides style and grace to alfresco cafés and beer gardens in the warmer months. Brick can blend harmoniously with the city’s Victorian-era architecture. Prefabrication can now make brick cost-effective too. Some architects and developers are starting to understand this, but it needs more official encouragement.

Melbourne is within a period of significant growth. To be a city of opportunity and ambition this should be a positive, but unfortunately it is eliciting a lot of fretting instead. To calm people’s anxieties we need to allow them to see the positivity in this growth. This makes good design not just about Melbourne’s soft power and identity, but vital to the social licence for the city’s growth. To provide people with something pleasing to observe with their own eyeballs that gives them confidence that change isn’t a threat.

Yesterday I published an essay on humanity’s current declining birth rates, and why one overlooked reason for this phenomenon may be women – quite rightly – having higher expectations on partnership and fatherhood, and men not rising to the task.

The impact of this is significant for humanity as a declining population affects almost every aspect of our lives. So I thought I’d focus on a specific example, my favourite thing in the world – public transport.1

In Melbourne, the age bracket that most uses public transport is 10-29 year olds, then going up in 10 year increments ridership falls away. Without a significant cohort of younger people the incentives for governments to invest in public transport decreases. You can already see this in the behaviour of the Liberal Party in Victoria – a party that sees its voter share being predominately over-50s, and thus has become incredibly hostile to the building of new train lines.2

Australia’s strategy to negate a below replacement level birth rate has been to import people. Which is great and the country is infinitely superior and more interesting now than it was several decades ago because of its immigration policies. However, because the skills bar for migrants is placed so high, the median age of a migrant to Australia is currently 37. This does very little to push Australia’s overall median age down and increase demand for public transport.

This is important because – contrary to what governments articulate3 – public transport is not simply a mode for getting from home to work and back home. Public transport is both the veins and the soul of a city. It’s how a city cross-pollinates, how it accesses and spreads ideas, and how it socialises with itself. It’s how it creates a vibrant urban culture.

Metro systems are innovation machines – they encourage cosmopolitanism, and breed economic and cultural finesse. It’s no coincidence that the cities we see as being highly sophisticated –Paris, New York, Tokyo, Seoul, Berlin, Milan, London – all have dense metro systems.

Even if you are not speaking to anyone while on public transport you are still being a social part of the city. You observe – or should observe – your surrounds. You notice aspects of the city that you wouldn’t if you were in the isolated bubble of a car. Markets form around train stations – shops, cafés, restaurants and bars – they breed opportunity, liveliness and placemaking. There’s a lifestyle to being on public transport, a way of being in the world. You are a social actor – part of your city’s buzz and hum.

This sociability is important because it builds a common sense of purpose, and negates the dark emotions of isolation. Central to our current global democratic degradation has been a serious decline in social interaction. Social media is not really social at all, as it create silos, and silos are anti-social. A general rule for our modern world could be – bad ideas tend to travel digitally (except, of course, this newsletter), while better ideas travel face-to-face. Being face-to-face drives people to moderate themselves, to think before they type, to be empathetic, and better understand the people around them. It encourages what should be the essential generosity and compromise of human interaction.

Without a large cohort of young people to incentivise investment in public transport infrastructure there is also a negatively bleeding into other areas. What countries like The Netherlands and Denmark have understood is that infrastructure that creates physical movement – walking and biking – produces major savings in healthcare costs. Walking or riding to a train station every day is incredibly positive for you as an individual, even without the other social and economic benefits. This, in turn, takes major strain off hospitals and medical clinics.

Without the democratic pressures of a youthful population, governments will see no reason to invest in the public transport from where all this wonderful positivity flows. We won’t just become older and smaller, we’ll become more insular, angrier, less sophisticated, less inventive, poorer, and less healthy. Our cities will also become incredibly boring places, having lost the life that makes them so compelling.

Public transport is just one issue where declining birthrates will have a negative effect. You can take almost any issue and make a similar analysis. And this includes environmental concerns. Without the conditions to innovate we will be reliant on current, or older, dirtier, technologies for the things we want and need. It’s no coincidence that humanity’s most creative period has come the past 300 years as populations rose. The only option is to create out of our current problems, there is no regressing out of them. And this requires continuing to create human life.

This week Melbourne reopened a small piece of infrastructure that had been closed for refurbishment. The Campbell Arcade is an underground walkway and shopping precinct that connects to Flinders Street station. It was closed because Melbourne is almost finished constructing a new metro line through the city and the new Town Hall station will connect through to Flinders Street via the Campbell Arcade, and so a new underground walkway off the arcade was being built.

This may seem like some very minor local news not really worthy of a dive into the larger ideas currently pushing and pulling at global politics. Yet in his ridiculous response to the reopening Victoria’s Shadow Transport Minister, Matthew Guy, revealed a worldview and approach to politics that is currently consuming conservative politics throughout the Anglosphere – the construction of dark dystopian fantasies as some strange kind of emotional balm.

Matthew Guy: “It’s just another location in Melbourne for us to go and get mugged by people who are out on bail.”

This is an extraordinary thing to say as the city moves towards what should be the celebration of a new metro line and the advantages that it will bring to the city. The party is so addicted to whinging and Chicken Little hysterics that Guy cannot help but use the reopening of public infrastructure as an opportunity for baseless fearmongering.1

We are fortunate in Australia that one of the golden rules of politics – coming across like you hate the people you wish to govern is not going to win elections – still holds true. It’s a rule that should see the Labor Party reelected in Victoria next year.

For a little more context:

Unlike in the United States, there are no “red states” and “blue states” in Australia. Governments change hands regularly and this is a very good thing. But since 1999 the Liberal Party2 has only won a single term in Victoria. The state is now generally considered a “Labor state”, but I would argue this is not due to any demographic or ideological considerations, but simply due to the Liberal Party making themselves so thoroughly unlikeable, and finding new and inventive ways to set themselves on fire almost every week.

Rather than do the necessary self-scrutiny to understand why the party is so unpopular, the Liberal Party – encouraged by, and beholden to, their media cheerleaders – have instead decided to construct a completely artificial and hysterical reality about Victoria as a coping mechanism. To them, the state has become a cross between North Korea and Somalia, simultaneously a totalitarian dictatorship and a lawless, gang-infested, snakepit. Apparently, you leave your own house at your own peril.

This is, of course, absurd to people who live in the state, and also to those organisations to devise liveability and safety rankings for cities around the world – where Melbourne ranks consistently in the top 10. It’s also not borne in the most recent data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics – where New South Wales (pop: 8.5 mil) recorded double to the number of police proceedings to Victoria (pop: 7.1 mil), despite having a population of only 1.5 million more people. And Queensland (pop: 5.6 mil) had 50% more police proceedings than Victoria, despite having 1.5 million less people.

So what is going on here?

The Liberal Party, both in Victoria and federally, are refusing to understand that what is good for ratings and readership of their sympathetic media is now bad for the party’s electoral prospects. This is a difficult problem to overcome. There has always been a symbiotic relationship between political parties and the media, and to divorce from this relationship can feel like an existential threat. Even with all the new tools of modern communication. The Liberal Party feels it would have no place to go without News Corp and clownhouses like Channel 7. But the party is now pitching themselves solely to these media outlets – which need aggressive and negative headlines for a core readership and viewership – and not pitching itself to the broader public, who find this kind of hysterical politics off-putting. Australia’s compulsory voting makes this strategy a losing one.

This catastrophising about the state of our societies has become an animating feature of conservative politics throughout the Anglosphere. In the United Kingdom both the Conservative Party and Reform UK are in a battle for who can declare the UK to be a failed state in the most deranged manner. And then there is, of course, Donald Trump’s “American Carnage” – a fantasy about endemic crime overrunning American cities.

Much of this is driven by an inability to handle the emotional disorder of a rapidly changing world. This leads to a fretting about both the present and the future, and a deeply held perception that the past was safer and more comfortable. The past is a “culturally safe space” for these parties and their core supporters. Addressing this perception of a “broken” UK in the Financial Times this week, Janan Ganesh, highlights that nostalgia has an incredible weapon to use against the present.

“What makes nostalgia so hard to argue against is that it is an ever-moving target. People pluck their favourite bits from different periods — the homogeneous culture of the 1950s, the industrial peace of the 1990s, the rampant growth of the pre-crash noughties — and combine them into a single fictitious moment. This isn’t just a sleight of hand. It makes it impossible for the present to “win”. Twenty twenty-five has to go up against a Best Of, a compilation from the last century or so.”

Alongside this, there is a psychological trick in how we react to the reporting of crime. Australia is a very low crime society, therefore any crime can feel confronting to us. Crime is being reported in the media because it is so infrequent. You never want to live in a society where crime isn’t being reported because there’s too much of it – where it is deemed an expected and normalised part of life, and therefore not newsworthy. But when crime is newsworthy it makes us feel like it is pervasive.

Also writing in the Financial Times this week, John Burn-Murdoch, called this our “crime paradox” – that both Britain and the US are recording their lowest rates of violent crime in decades, but everyone feels as if their societies are falling apart.

This is an easy manipulative tool for politicians to use. Particularly conservative politicians who have always tried to ramp up people's fears in order to position themselves as people’s security. The problem for the Victorian Liberal Party – as Matthew Guy demonstrated – is that they can’t help but over egg the pudding in a city that has become highly attuned to their bullshit. So while the government continues to dig tunnels, the Liberal Party keeps digging themselves holes.

On Sunday I submitted an opinion piece to the Melbourne broadsheet The Age. Over the past few years The Age has been running a relentlessly hostile campaign against a new orbital rail network for Melbourne called the Suburban Rail Loop (SRL). Being the public transport enthusiast that I am, I thought I could counteract this campaign with an opinion piece that challenged the assumptions and psychological reactions that The Age was basing their campaign on.

Obviously, this was rather naïve of me. There is clearly a firm editorial line within the paper and my arguments were never going to get past the opinion desk goalkeeper.

I expected no reply at all. The piece, afterall, was attempting to embarrass the paper within their own pages. Some media outlets are still open to arguments running counter to their editorial lines, but they are vanishingly few.

However, to my surprise, I did receive a reply and the gall of it was astonishing:

“We have run a number of pieces in support of the SRL in recent months, and those pieces touched on many of the points you raise”.

My daily readership of the paper recognised this as bullshit, and the paper’s own archive confirms that there have been precisely zero articles in recent months supporting the project, let alone articles with similar arguments to my own.

Not wanting to burn any bridges I politely thanked them for their prompt response. Yet, I was still left with an piece of writing that I felt was worthy of publishing, and given the lack of outlets for such writing in Australia I figured I’d publish here it myself.

Melbourne’s metropolitan area currently houses 5.5 million people, but it projected to reach eight million (and potentially more) by 2050. This is something that the current Victorian government is taking somewhat seriously (although far from seriously enough), but other major institutions in the city are freaking out about.

The opposition Liberal Party – a party that has never caught a train in its life – is as suspicious of the project as The Age. Which means that, although contracts for the first stage from Cheltenham to Box Hill are locked in, the entire loop may be thwarted.

Therefore, the project needs constant champions of it like myself to explain why it is necessary. So here is the piece:

I spend my life on public transport around the world. This year alone I’ve travelled on metro systems in Taipei, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Budapest and Helsinki. I maintain a firm belief that the only way to truly understand a city is via its public transport. It is public transport that houses a city’s soul.

Aside from the obvious thrill, the other overwhelming emotion I feel riding these networks is embarrassment. Embarrassment because much smaller cities like Stockholm and Copenhagen have infinitely superior networks to Melbourne’s. And as Melbourne moves towards a population of eight million in the coming decades, the network is both recognisably insufficient and the suspicion of major projects to improve the network is intense.

There is a definite case to be made that the cost of the Suburban Rail Loop is eye-watering. We are highly inefficient at building infrastructure in Australia, and governments need to be more transparent about why this is the case. Also, given the scale of what needs to be built in Melbourne – the SRL is the bare minimum – the government needs to find ways to deliver projects for lower costs. Although without undermining compelling designs.

But the cost of the SRL is not an effective argument against it. As the cost to the city of not building it will be far greater. Nor is the argument that the business case “doesn’t stack up”. As I believe the reasoning behind business cases as holy doctrines is flawed. There are two challenges that can be made against them.

The first is what we see with our eyes. In 1930 the Glen Waverley line was extended from Darling to its current destination. If indeed there was a business case in the late-1920s it is doubtful that it predicted the vibrant hub that Glen Waverley is today as Melbourne’s third Chinatown. It is also highly unlikely that this vibrancy would exist without that extension. The city took advantage of the line.

The second is philosophical. Train lines are a unique Keynesian-Hayekian hybrid. They are Keynesian because they are essential government investments to spur activity and growth, but they are Hayekian because this activity and growth cannot be predicted by governments. The knowledge of how people will use a train line exists within each individual, but this knowledge won’t be unlocked until the line is operational.

This makes business cases – and the constant citing of them as evidence either for or against – weak. They are attempts to predict things that fundamentally cannot be predicted. But more than that, they are rooted in the idea that the government’s role is to predict outcomes. This leads us nowhere but bureaucratic paralysis.

Instead, the government’s job is to provide the canvas, and the public’s job is to paint. And for this painting there are observable problems that need to be rectified through a common sense vision of what is necessary.

Having Monash, La Trobe and Deakin universities not on train lines is an astonishing failure of city planning. It limits the access to – and the dissemination of – skills and ideas within the city. While the “car brain” that dominated urban planning when these institutions were built can be blamed for such oversights, it is a situation – and approach to public policy – that we can no longer tolerate.

One of the peculiar contradictions of Australia is that despite being such a highly urbanised country, we lack the urban culture of the great cities of the world. This inhibits our cities becoming major centres of ideas. Australia has declined further on the latest data on economic complexity – the knowledge within a society as expressed through the products it makes. If we want to be a society that does more than just digs stuff up and ships it overseas we need to invest in the building blocks of creativity.

The great global centres of dynamism and ideas – New York, Tokyo, Seoul, London, Berlin, Paris – all have dense high frequency metro networks. Advocates for cheaper options for Melbourne like rapid buses, do not understand metro systems as enormous culture creators. They are nodes of social and economic activity, there’s a style of living and a way of thinking that they promote. Simply getting from A to B is far from the whole picture.

With the right infrastructure a Melbourne of eight million people has the opportunity to become a city of similar global influence. But in order to fully take advantage of our future growth, the city needs to start thinking like a city of eight million people now.

Investing in the future is a sign of a confident society. A society that doesn’t want to stagnate, that has vision and ambition for itself. The SRL is a project of vision and ambition, but the pushback against it is being driven by fear and fretfulness. A perspective that doesn’t see the enormous opportunity in Melbourne’s growth, but instead, naïvely, believes that “if we don’t build it, they won’t come”.

Alongside trying to counter the narratives that the paper has been publishing, the piece was an attempt to also show up the Opinion page in general.

The Age’s Opinion page is a mess of unserious ideas and poor writing. Far too many “What Should I Put In My Kid’s Lunchbox?” type pieces and far too few pieces tackling the important issues facing the city, the state, the country and the world.

The writing that The Age publishes doesn’t see the 800-word opinion piece as an art. Instead what it publishes is loose and lackadaisical, with no care for structure or word choice, and no real desire to entice the reader.

I can’t claim that I have perfected the art of the 800-word opinion piece, but it’s something I am striving towards. Such pieces should have tight paragraphs that flow seamlessly from one to the next – each with its own self-contained argument that feeds into the overarching theme. There should be a pacing to the sentences, that provide a lyricism and allure to the piece. Ideas introduced in the opening paragraphs should find neat or clever responses in the conclusion.

A city of 5.5 million people should have a proper daily forum for big ideas and exceptional writing. This should be as important a part of the city’s infrastructure as its train lines. It’s how a city constructs its culture and projects its influence.

The attitude that Australia is just some dingleberry country at the bottom of the world that has no use for a New York Times-style Opinion section is an attitude that will mean Australia will always be a just some dingleberry country at the bottom of the world that no-one takes seriously. It’s something I don’t want to accept, and something I would love to rectify. But I need the goddamn train lines to do it.

Yesterday, I decided to go out for a bike ride. I was hoping to finish the draft of a forthcoming essay to be published here soon, but it was a beautiful day, so I thought an hour or so out on the bike would do me some good. I could come home with a clear head and finish the draft.

Across Melbourne’s inner north there is a bike path. It used to be the Inner Circle train line that was discontinued in the late-1940s. For those who know Melbourne getting around the suburbs via public transport, without having to go into the city and then back out, is either difficult or impossible (due to infrequent or non-existent buses, and trams that only run north-south). The discontinuation of the Inner Circle Line remains incredibly contentious, preventing the cross-pollination between Melbourne’s hip inner-north. Although the bike path is great, it would be better if it was a least a tram route.

The path cuts through Royal Park – where the Inner Circle Line once veered off from Royal Park station. There are a couple of steep sections along the path within Royal Park and several uneven bumps due to tree roots having buckled the path. Riding down one of these steep sections, I managed to hit a severe bump and ended up over my handle bars and flew off into the garden bed beside the path.

This was, obviously, quite a shock. But I managed to get up and started to assess the damage. My hands were bleeding quite badly and I could feel that my knees had also been scrapped. Alongside this my right shoulder and arm were in acute pain, unable to move without serious hurt. I found somewhere to sit and hoped that the pain in my shoulder and arm were just a jarring that would dissipate.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case and I suspected something could be seriously wrong, and probably needed to get to a hospital. But being a time of year when people are busy with family events there was no-one to pick me up, so I needed to figure out how to actually get to one.

There was no possible way I could ride, so my best bet was to walk to Royal Park station and get the train to Parliament station, where I’d only be a short walk to St Vincent’s hospital. This is also only a 15 minute walk from my flat. Which was convenient as I would also need to get home at some stage.

At Royal Park station a kind woman who seemed to be carrying a first aid kit in her handbag was able to patch my hands up. Which was helpful as I was getting blood everywhere. Yet as the train approached I realised that I didn’t have my transport pass.

At certain stations on Melbourne’s train network you can simply walk on to a train, but other stations – like those in central Melbourne – there are barriers where you can’t get in or out without a pass. So I was able to get on at Royal Park, but knew I wouldn’t be able to get out at Parliament. I was hoping that I’d be able to convince the staff that I’d been in an accident and the train was the only way to get to the hospital.

Fortunately, this proved to be quite easy. As I was covered in blood and dirt, with a badly ripped shirt, and holding my arm in an awkward position, my story was an easy sell. I only got through about half of it before they let me through the barriers.

Upon reaching the hospital, my next problem was that I didn’t have my bike lock on me. I thought I could go home first to leave the bike and then return to the hospital, but with the pain I was in I thought I had more pressing concerns. So I decided just to find a spot in a corner to park it and hope for the best. I also felt that the bike probably wasn’t my best friend at this point, so wouldn’t be too disheartened if it were to disappear (later a nurse would go out and find it and bring it into the hospital).

Despite the pain I was in, what was amusing about the emergency ward was how the staff took delight in a very Australian trait of adding insult to injury. The first nurse I saw after being triaged quipped “So you’ve had a tricycle accident?” A subsequent doctor asked me whether I thought I might need to go back to training wheels. I suspect emergency rooms staff see a lot of stupid incidents and this was their way of dealing with morons who don’t pay attention to what they are doing (while sending a not-so-subtle message that they should).

After an initial examination it was decided that I would need some x-rays. The doctor also felt I needed to be monitored for concussion, seeming there was a big scratch on my helmet. Although I was pretty certain the initial impact was on my shoulder and the scratch on the helmet was just from the subsequent tumbling along the ground. I got set up on a bed in a partition and was told to relax.

After being periodically checked on I was taken to the x-ray room, where a number of x-rays were taken of my right shoulder and arm. It took a while for the results to be returned, but when a doctor reappeared he told me that I had broken bones in my shoulder and forearm. This was disappointing, as I’m flying to Taiwan in less that two weeks for their forthcoming election and broken bones are going to hinder me a little (today for lunch I practiced using chopsticks with my left hand – I was mildly successful, but it wasn’t easy. I’m very concerned about the cultural shame of having to ask for a fork).

I was discharged from the hospital about 7pm. The quick ride I had decided to go out on around 1pm was a bit more eventful than I had planned. The broken bones aren’t significant enough to warrant a cast, but a nurse put my arm in a sling. I then had to suffer the indignity of walking home along Gertrude St – a street with many pubs and cafés with outdoor seating – wheeling a bike with my arm in a sling and everyone being aware that riding a bike wasn’t my forté.

A final note being a recognition of the wonders of universal healthcare. I was able to enter into the hospital, be expertly tended to for several hours by lovely staff (apart from being made fun of a few times), and discharged without anyone asking me for a single dollar. I can’t imagine what this would have cost me if I’d crashed in the United States.

Typing this has been a little bit of a struggle, but feeling heartened that if I have my hand resting on my laptop it doesn’t hurt too much to type normally. This means I should hopefully be able to finish the draft I got a bit sidetracked from yesterday fairly soon.

There’s no regular newsletter this week due to the above incident and with Christmas. Next week I’ll have a final newsletter of the year, with a bit of a recap of some of the pieces I wrote during the year, and other more pleasant adventures than yesterday’s

Several years ago I was having a chat with my then-local MP and Victorian planning minister, Richard Wynne. The discussion was about Metro 2, the once-proposed train line that would link Newport in Melbourne’s west to Fishermans Bend underneath the Yarra River, before travelling up through Southern Cross Station to the new Parkville station and on to Clifton Hill – connecting to the Mernda and Hurstbridge lines in the north, and the Werribee line in the West.

I made the assertion that Metro 2 was a “game-changer” of a rail-line, to which Wynne quickly shot back that it was actually the soon to be completed Metro 1 that was the game-changer. The problem was that in our assessments we were thinking about public transport in completely different ways. 

For Wynne, Metro 1 was the game-changer because it solved a problem. The problem is the current lack of capacity in the City Loop and the need to disconnect several lines from it in order to run more frequent trains. In terms of doing what it is being built to do, yes, Metro 1 is a game-changer. 

But my assertion was that Metro 2 was the more consequential project because it was a creative endeavour. Metro 2 would be the driver of the Fishermans Bend urban renewal project. Without Metro 2, Fishermans Bend will be an isolated, difficult to access cul de sac, that won’t just be “another Docklands” – the previously poorly executed urban renewable project – it will be worse.

Governments tend to see infrastructure as a response to problems once they become untenable. The current thinking in the Victorian government seems to be that the Metro 2 project will be necessary once the population and economic activity within Fishermans Bend warrants it. Yet without good public transport connections Fishermans Bend simply won’t be attractive to people, businesses, educational and cultural institutions. The public transport creates the attraction, not the other way around. 

There are currently tentative plans for two new tramlines into the precinct. Yet Fishermans Bend covers an area almost three times the size of the CBD, which has five train stations (soon to be seven with the completion of Metro 1) and 23 tram routes running through it. This, to be blunt, is the reason the CBD is the CBD. Its ease of access and dense network of travel options is why it is the city’s most attractive and vibrant area. It may be difficult for people who don’t catch public transport to understand, but most of what is good about cities is created by people who do.

This means that for Fishermans Bend to reach its full potential it needs more than just two tramlines. It needs Metro 2 with at least two stations, but also multiple, multi-directional trams that frequently criss-cross the precinct and connect it not only with the CBD, but the south and east of the city as well. The objective should be to make Fishermans Bend as hostile to cars and as welcoming to foot traffic as the CBD is. 

Which leads to the other major problem Fishermans Bend has – the Westgate Freeway. The freeway is a massive Berlin Wall running through the area that will prevent Fishermans Bend from integrating itself seamlessly with Southbank, South Melbourne and Port Melbourne. The only solution to this is to move it entirely underground from the Domain Tunnel through to the Westgate Bridge. 

This would free up space for a lush linear park and tram boulevard as the centrepiece of the renewed Fishermans Bend precinct. Melbourne used to be good at grand boulevards - think St Kilda Road, Royal Parade, and Victoria Parade (although not Kings Way, which is a blight) – there’s an opportunity here to reclaim this spirit and vision for the city.  

The key to the success of Fishermans Bend will not only be its transport connections and walkability, but who has ease of access to the precinct. Arguably Metro 2’s link under the river to Newport is its most critical component. It would provide an explosion of new opportunities for the rapidly growing western suburbs, as well as a new quick and easy way for these suburbs to reach the CBD. Compared to Melbourne’s east, the western suburbs have a glaring lack of public transport options available to them, and with the Suburban Rail Loop beginning construction in the southeast the government owes the west some greater respect and investment.

Fishermans Bend presents Melbourne with an extraordinary opportunity to enhance its reputation as a city and expand its economic, cultural and social strength. But this opportunity relies on the government understanding and fully committing to the actual drivers of activity, vibrancy and placemaking. Great cities aren’t made by cars, it is their public transport networks that are their true circulatory systems, which most importantly includes their heart.