Ticket To Thrive

Low birth rates are not just an impediment to public transport being built, they will weaken the social bonds and economic advantages this infrastructure brings

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.

1. I’m writing this on a train from Hässleholm in southern Sweden to Stockholm, just to fully – and smugly – embody these ideas :)

2. In contrast with the Liberal Party in New South Wales who are not a party of complete fucking clowns and have been the drivers of Sydney’s recent public transport investment. Including the new Sydney Metro, which, having been up in Sydney recently, I have to begrudgingly admit is absolutely spectacular.

3. The current Labor Party government in Victoria is so fucking terrible at selling the Suburban Rail Loop. And due to this it has made it very easy for the the state’s bedwetters, declinists and shitbags to dominate the narrative around it.