Train In Vain

An attempt to write a piece for the Melbourne broadsheet The Age gets the expected result

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.

The piece is obviously Melbourne-centric. 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:

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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 it lamentable.

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 ambition and vision, 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”.

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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.