The public have been polled repeatedly since 2012 about light rail and they keep saying the same thing by voting in Labor and the Greens.

No need to doubt this poll; it matches the election outcomes in both 2016 and 2020. As Jon Stanhope has noted, clearly a majority of Canberrans are personally unaffected about our crumbling helathcare system, failing education system, and woeful lack of accommodation … and don’t give a damn about their less-affluent neighbours who are.

Almost every argument I hear against investing in mass transit wreaks of ignorance and general hostility to change. Costigan’s opinion piece titled “Shameful tram poll a load of rubbish!” is no exception. The comment about investing in light rail means taking away hospital beds was a particularly trashy line. Hypocritical even, given that based on Costigan’s opinion piece history, he’d likely have zero problems with maintaining the status quo of Canberra being a low-density, car dependent city. Hypocritical as the trauma caused by our current reliance on cars routinely ties up a significant portion of Canberra’s health resources, including our hospital beds.

The cost of road trauma in Australia is around $30 billion per year. Based on the ACTs percentage of Australian road fatalities, the financial cost of Canberra’s road trauma is over $200 million per year. That figure rivals Canberra’s entire annual transport budget. It represents over 10% of Canberra’s annual health budget. That figure doesn’t include road building or maintenance costs, just the financial cost of crashes. That figure doesn’t include other external costs associated with everyone driving cars either, such as environmental damage or increased rates of childhood asthma from pollution, increased cardiovascular problems from environmental noise pollution, or increased community health costs caused by physical inactivity. It doesn’t include the financial costs associated with the poor mental health of our children, who have grown up being unable to independently explore their communities thanks to parent’s legitimate fears that their child will be killed by a motorist. It doesn’t include the costs of owning and running private cars, which for a two-car family can easily be 25% of an average household income. It also doesn’t include lost opportunity costs families endure every year by having no choice but to fork out for expensive transport appliances.

The combined cost of Stages 1, 2a and 2b of the ACT’s light rail are projected to cost roughly the same as the financial costs of roughly 10 years’ worth of car crashes in Canberra. Every tax dollar we spend on transport infrastructure which gives Canberrans options to leave their cars at home, is a dollar well spent.

Every medium to high density development near mass transit is also an excellent thing. How selfish must Costigan be to want to leave a green field site, adjacent to a major transport corridor and only a few kilometres from two major town centres, devoid of housing? I assume he likes glimpsing at the grass as he drives by. We have a rapidly growing population and a housing affordability crisis. We need to build medium density mixed use areas all over this city to cope. We also need to build mass transit all over this city, as the private car is dangerous, and is the most spatially unsustainable form of transportation humans have ever adopted. Like it or not, the end of the era of the private car is coming; to be honest it can’t come soon enough.

It therefore probably comes as no surprise that if I were asked Costigan’s theoretical question; “Do you support the tram given that it will be used as the catalyst to transform the suburbs along the route to Woden with high rise, just like Northbourne Avenue and much of the green spaces will be sold off for tower development?” I’d be answering a resounding yes, it should have been done decades ago. The original Griffin plan for Canberra saw what’s now Adelaide Avenue as being a grand boulevard of sorts with a range of uses and a range of building types. Unfortunately, car centric planning of the 1960’s and 70’s instead saw the corridor become an “internal freeway”, devoid of character, devoid of buildings, and dangerous to anyone not in a car. Contrary to popular belief, many of Canberra’s green spaces were not spared by the NCDC for the sake of green space, but rather, to minimise the potential for traffic congestion to occur. See Paul Mees peer reviewed article titled “A centenary review of transport planning in Canberra, Australia” for more about this topic. The key development priority of post WW2 Canberra was not to build a grand capital city for people; it was to build a city where driving a car is easy, no matter what the consequences.

Costigan and the NIMBY community council members who routinely applaud him do not represent all Canberrans. They typically represent a vocal portion of an elder generation. A generation who stubbornly continues to advocate for the low density, car dependent environments they’ve lived in since the mid-20th century, despite overwhelming evidence that these environments are fiscally and environmentally unsustainable, inequitable, dangerous, and bad for our physical and mental health. If only Canberra’s younger generations had the time and resources of Canberra’s retired public servants to form their own community council clubs, we’d likely hear far more YIMBY messaging than NIMBY rhetoric about Canberra’s light rail. We’d hear about how people who live in medium to high density housing and commute via public transport are responsible for far fewer carbon emissions than suburban RZ1 dwellers who are forced to drive cars everywhere. We could have more discussions based on facts and science, rather than nostalgia. We could get on with the job of undoing the planning mistakes of the second half of the 20th century and build a better Canberra.