In the suburbs between city and country, the motor vehicle has always ruled.
In Caboolture, a large peri-urban centre on Brisbane’s northern fringe, quarter-acre blocks are connected with a sprawling network of black bitumen roads to ferry families to work, school, the shops and back. It’s a hostile environment for pedestrians and cyclists.
“We’ve had a few near misses now,” says Laura Sheather, a mother who lives in Caboolture. “We don’t need a child dying because we pushed our luck a bit far trying to ride bikes to school.”
Sheather’s home is just 1km from her children’s school. She used to take her kids – aged 10, eight and five – on bike trips at least four times a week. They loved cycling and it saved on fuel. But she says crossing Caboolture’s increasingly busy roads is not worth the risk.
“There’s that nerve-racking bit looking at cars, are you actually going to stop or are you going to not see me and clip my kid’s bike?” Sheather says.
Begrudgingly, she has returned to the car.
“We could literally do everything by bike if it was a bit safer,” she says. “Now those one, two, 3km trips twice a day are all by car. The constant stop-start in traffic, it wears down the car and eats fuel. And there’s the 10 minutes getting three kids in one car.”
Natalie Steele lives just up the road. She has never held a licence and has resorted to walking everywhere after giving up on the local bus system.
“The routes are kind of dumb, I’ve got to change to get into town and they take forever,” she says. “I Uber a lot, which costs a lot of money, so then I just end up walking.”
Transport poverty
Public transport on the peripheries of cities has failed to keep up with population growth as people migrate from inner-city suburbs in search of cheaper housing, says John Stanley, the adjunct professor at the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies at the University of Sydney.
He says that bus services should perform two distinct functions – assist in mass transit and allow people to explore.
“In the suburbs it’s very expensive to do both, so you find governments try to do both [in one service],” he says. “The risk is you don’t satisfy anyone.”
The result, he says, is transport poverty. “People buy a second car because there’s no other way of getting around, but they can’t really afford it so something else has to give.”
Fifty-nine per cent of households in Caboolture have two or more cars – a higher rate of car ownership than the national average. In Brisbane’s inner-city just 38.4% of households have two cars.
The Moreton Bay council, which covers Caboolture, has lobbied for improved bus services but the mayor, Peter Flannery, says it’s a chicken and egg argument. “[They] won’t provide the services unless the demand is there and the demand might not be there unless the services are there,” he says.
About 30,000 new homes will be built west of Caboolture over the next 40 years, according to the suburb’s planning scheme. That will require dedicated investment in non-car transport options, Flannery says.
“In the past, active transport was like an added-on extra that you were lucky to get,” he says. “Now it’s a must in new developments.”
Wendy Nash, a Caboolture resident, has been campaigning for greater investment in “active” transport options, including better cycling and pedestrian infrastructure.
“People who can afford a car and can drive don’t see the problem, and the people who can’t drive don’t feel like they have a voice,” Nash says. “If you can build a big road why can’t you build a footpath alongside it?”
Dr Laurel Johnson from the University of Queensland says the rising cost of living, growing environmental awareness and rapid population growth are creating a need for alternatives to private cars as the only transport option, which does not fit within car-centric suburban planning.
“There was an assumption that people in an outer suburb will drive and be able to afford vehicles,” Johnson says. “But a whole lot of externalities have come to bear on us that have changed that.”
She says the historical underinvestment in public infrastructure on city fringes is failing young people.
“If you’re a young person growing up in Caboolture you simply don’t have the same opportunities that you do if you lived in inner-suburban areas,” she says.
“You can’t get a casual job because you’d have no way to get back from Kmart if you finish at 9 o’clock on a Thursday night. There’s no way to get home.”
Kirk Lambie and his wife bought their first home south of Caboolture six years ago. They’ve since had two kids.
His first job in the area as a support worker involved a lot of driving, so as the cost of keeping his car on the road rose he began to look for other options.
“I just kept looking at the price of fuel … I was pretty much driving all the time and the reimbursement rate wasn’t catching up,” Lambie says.
He now works as a cleaner at a local aged care facility. The commute is 10 minutes by bicycle. It has allowed him to spend more time with his kids at home and he’s considering selling the family’s second car.
“It’s also the interactions you make riding a push-bike,” he says. “I see people out walking now and say G’day. You wouldn’t get that in a car.”
