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Shameful tram poll a load of rubbish!

Polls can be useful or, at times, totally misleading. Or even plain rubbish, like the one on the tram to Woden, says “Canberra Matters” columnist PAUL COSTIGAN

THE Australia Institute conducted a very curious poll recently, reporting the outcomes in the local press on Sunday (September 19). The topic was the tram going south to Woden.

Paul Costigan.

The poll results are not on the Australia Institute website. It is not clear why the poll was taken, who asked for it and who paid for it. A query to the Australia Institute was not answered.

These comments are based on what was reported. 

According to the media report, 1057 people were polled – which we have to presume was whoever answered the phone on August 3 and whoever agreed to be polled. There is bias already.

The poll asked for personal details, political affiliation and then asked whether the person on the phone supported the project – with options being: strongly support, support, oppose, strongly oppose and unsure/don’t know.

From the answers came the headline: “Most Canberrans support light rail to Woden”.

Wow! I used to regard stuff from the Australia Institute as being credible. Maybe not so anymore.

Given the restricted nature of the poll, being the small numbers who answered and did the poll, and then the totally inadequate question – this poll cannot be taken seriously.

Shame on the person who wrote that headline.

If each of those people on the phone was asked: “Do you support the tram if it means that when you go to hospital you may end up in bed in the corridor, you may have to wait hours to be seen and the nurses treating you will be run off their feet?”

Or: “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?”

Or: “Do you support the tram given that public housing suffered because of the costs of the first stage of the tram and there is little hope in the near future that enough money will be allocated to catch up with any adequate supply of housing – let alone have the resources to maintain and manage the present stock properly?”

There are quite a few caveats that should have been included to explain the possible flow-on effects of the high costs of paying for the tram going south.

Many more residents would support the tram to Woden if the economics of the project made sense as well as there being no threat to the urban fabric along the route. 

There would be support if the tram led to improved community facilities, more cultural opportunities and a greater range of green spaces and improved biodiversity.

Sadly, all that will not happen. Instead, plans are well underway to change those parts of the suburbs anywhere near the tram route.

More nuanced and less tricky questions should be the most basic sort of polling that organisations such as the Australia Institute should be involved with. Apparently not so!

That report on September 19 and the poll it represented were a load of rubbish pretending to be something serious. Very misleading and dangerous stuff. 

How long before we see it quoted?

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Paul Costigan

Paul Costigan

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11 Responses to Shameful tram poll a load of rubbish!

David says: 22 September 2021 at 1:52 pm

Hi Paul, In this email article you apparently argue that a majority of Canberrans support the light rail only because they are ignorant.
Have you considered whether you might just be out of touch with community sentiment? That seems an easier (and more humble) explanation of the observable fact that a majority of your fellow Canberrans continue to vote for the light rail project whenever given the chance.

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Whingelico says: 22 September 2021 at 2:13 pm

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.

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Christopher Emery says: 22 September 2021 at 3:40 pm

Perhaps the question should have been “Do you support the the diversion of $billions to Light Rail away from hospitals, police, schools and city services?”

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Hamba says: 22 September 2021 at 5:19 pm

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.

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James says: 23 September 2021 at 9:02 am

Paul, I believe your proposed questions are what are known as partisan push polling. Biased questions based on faulty assumptions made to sound like facts.

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Adrian Glamorgan says: 23 September 2021 at 7:12 pm

A budget has to meet a mix of requirements. Health, education and infrastructure are equally required. Some of the expenditures will be on current items; others will be longer term. The light rail system is an investment into the future: its benefit is not just for the first year it runs, but substantially over the next several decades. I get that you don’t like trams: by the same token, Melbourne should not have built theirs!

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Christopher Emery says: 26 September 2021 at 5:26 pm

I grew up in Melbourne and therefore know they are mostly used to reach a train station. This is possibly because the average speed of trams in Melbourne is 13 km/hr.

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Christopher Emery says: 24 September 2021 at 12:56 pm

Of course if the benefit/cost was positive LR would be an investment. The Auditor General reported that the LY benefit/cost is negative. Currently the proposed Civic/Woden link will be slower, less frequent and with half the seats. Similar to the Civic to Gungahlin link the subsidy per passenger trip will be about $15 compared with $7 for the buses.

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David Jones says: 28 September 2021 at 12:40 pm

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.

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Christopher Emery says: 28 September 2021 at 6:00 pm

Being a public transport advocate for most of my life I could only agree with David if the Light Rail to Woden wasn’t double the journey time, half the frequency, half the seats and double the subsidy per passenger, of our current public transport system.

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