In October last year, the ACT Government informed the community that the Territory would miss our 2025 interim target of reducing emissions by 50-60% on 1990 levels and might well struggle to achieve net zero by 2045. A huge part of the reason for this is slow movement on transport – despite years of advocacy for active travel, for example, Canberra also remains an overwhelmingly car dependent city, with around 60% of our emissions coming from fossil fuel powered transport.
The electrification of the bus fleet and the light rail network are welcome and important changes. But of themselves, they’re not enough. How do shift things?
If you’d like some new year’s inspiration (and a beautiful travel film), you can watch a new documentary by young filmmaker Ingwar Perowanowitsch as he ponders why Germany is making such slow progress in shifting away from car dependency. The film follows Ingwar as he rides from his hometown of Freiburg through a string of European cities that have managed to become truly bike and pedestrian friendly: Paris, Ghent, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Groningen, Hamburg and Copenhagen.
In each place he meets local politicians and activists and explores how they did it and what lessons they learned. Several things stand out.
Most important is that this success never comes easily. Seeing places like Amsterdam now, it’s easy to think they were always this way. But as the film shows, in the post war years it developed into a traffic choked horror that threatened to destroy the city. Each of the cities at some point all decided that they simply could not continue as they were going, and that they had to make a decisive change.
Second, is that leadership is essential. Famously, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has driven extraordinary change in a short period. And as a Hamburg Senator said on the subject of dealing with the resulting opposition: don’t expect to be popular. If you’re not getting resistance, you’re not doing your job properly. But an activist made an important related point. Civil society needs to be impatient.
A third factor is to prioritise people and building livable cities rather than ending up in a sterile ‘car v bike’ debate. It’s about quality of life: a place where you can safely ride and walk; where nature thrives and that is not destroyed by the traffic noise and pollution.
Selling this is best done through compelling stories, which is what inspired the film. As Ingwar said:
‘For a long time I thought good arguments alone would be enough to convince people. But at some point I noticed that words alone reach only the head which forgets quickly. With images and stories however, you reach the heart.’
The documentary gives lots of interesting examples of how each place solved their own particular challenges. In doing so, perhaps most inspiring thing is the sheer scale of the cycling infrastructure that some of these cities have built – from giant underground bike parking in Amsterdam to beautifully designed and colourful bike bridges in Copenhagen.
There is much in the film that we Canberrans could take inspiration from. These European cities realised that given the growth in traffic, it would simply not have been possible to find room for the cars without destroying the cities themselves. So things had to change.
Perhaps Canberra, with all our space, hasn’t reached that point. But then, with all our space and wide roads, we don’t have to make nearly as many hard choices about where to fit bike lanes and pedestrian zones – in contrast to Europe’s compact and highly congested cities, where allocating space is a zero-sum game.
Canberra at some point will need to follow this same path. Our task is to provide the ambition, impatience and compelling stories that will make it happen.
You can watch the documentary (German language with subtitles) for free on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/R5jQc1jXLAU?si=IhIQgmBSD0yO8ohn