The RegenNarration Podcast
The RegenNarration podcast features the stories of a generation that is changing the story, enabling the regeneration of life on this planet. It’s ad-free, freely available and entirely listener-supported. You'll hear from high profile and grass-roots leaders from around Australia and the world, on how they're changing the stories we live by, and the systems we create in their mold. Along with often very personal tales of how they themselves are changing, in the places they call home. With award-winning host, Anthony James.
The RegenNarration Podcast
240 Extra. Rethinking Roads: Induced Demand, Urban ‘Lounges’ & Utopia
Today, a brief bonus featuring material from my conversation with Shannon Leigh that never saw the light of day, partly due to the wind that blew in, and partly due to Clean State’s mandate for shorter episodes. But it’s worth the listen, with reference to one of Australia’s much loved satirical shows on ‘nation-building’, Utopia.
If you’ve come here first, tune into the main episode with Shannon Leigh, ‘World’s Best Place for Active Transport, with Streets for People co-founder Shannon Leigh’.
To hear the rest of the Clean State series, and more stories of regeneration from around WA, Australia and the world, follow The RegenNarration wherever podcasts are found, or on the website.
Title slide: The shared path with the First Nations stone figure talked about in the main episode by the Swan River / Derbal Yerrigan (pic: Anthony James).
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Music:
By Jeremiah Johnson.
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Flying in the face, of course, to the entrenched ideas of improving transport, which is to widen the freeways I shouldn't even use that term anymore. I don't know what term to use for them now. Toll roads, often in most cities, but effectively there are toll roads.
AJ:Here too, we just pay through it. Our nose is through taxes. I was watching, even at Scarborough on the weekend, the dynamic as the weather warms, where the increased parking they just put in at the south end of Scarborough Beach with a lovely turnaround at the end of it, people were now parking around the turnaround. It was a nightmare, that concept of induced traffic that when you create more space where you think nominally you'll alleviate the pressure, alleviate the congestion. Actually you attract more car-based transport to it and make the problem worse. You double down on the problem. Why do we persist? What has your work turned up in terms of why we persist? Or is it that we find that concept pretty challenging to come to terms with?
Shannon:I don't know why. It's a well-known phenomenon called induced demand For decades.
Shannon:I don't know why, phenomenon called induced demand, and I don't, I don't, I don't know why, and even the ABC show utopia had a great episode on this and it's an hilarious clip actually that shows, you know, the changes to the, the road infrastructure and you know, making the traffic move really well and it's all green go and all lovely, and then as it evolves, it all turns red and really scary in the image and you know it's. They say, well, this is five years later. This is what happens. So, yes, by you know, widening or adding an extra lane to the freeway, it's great at the moment and people are saying, oh, they're saving minutes on their commute. But it's hard to understand in the longer term. Because that commute is great, I will continue to drive it along with the person next door.
AJ:Yeah, and then they go, oh well, I can just drive.
Shannon:It's so much easier and so more and more people use it. It's like traffic and cars, it's like water. It'll just fill this, the space it's given. If more space had been given over to, you know, improving that, the shared path along the freeway that is very congested because it's the only access to to the south and and some groups like to ride there and and a lot of people commute there, um, you know, who knows what the outcome could have been.
AJ:Yeah, tell me why. In urban planning, the metaphor is now that you think about your streets as your lounge room.
Shannon:Have you come across that? Oh, I haven't heard that, but I like it now.
AJ:I think I got this from Clean State actually that there's a metaphor in urban planning. Now that you think about your streets as your lounge room, I thought, wow, that's enticing, if that's becoming a sort of a norm, that you would think about it as how can the streets be a place where you settle in together and actually hang out?
Shannon:Well, it is that you know that idea of that is your public space. People's gardens are getting smaller, houses are bigger, and so that's becoming your only outdoor space. So you know, making sure that that is a comfortable environment for you to enjoy is important. There's also a drawing and I don't know by who that shows if we designed our houses, how we design our streets and roads, and it shows the massive portion that would be given over to the garage to store the vehicle, and the rest of the house is a tiny little space.
