43inches:
What you say is just not true, everywhere I have lived in Australia I have been no further than 1km from a store such as Coles/Woolies/Aldi/IGA, every one has been easily walking distance.
This is BS. Visit any of the newly built suburbs on the edge of Melbourne. Furthermore there is minimal public transport in the new suburbs.
I've never needed anything more than a small hatchback for shopping, not sure what justifies a Ford Ranger for picking up bread. If I look at my street of mostly older Australians who have retired, No one drives a compact, large sedans are the smallest cars, with three owning Dual cabs and don't even work anymore or transport anything bigger than a suitcase. I own the smallest car which probably travels the most distance out of anyone in the street.
Lucky you. for anyone with children, towing, trade, business or sports requirements a microcar doesn't cut it. The usual practice, if you can afford it, will be two cars, one large, one small. Electric is nice but only if you don't need range or are time poor. if you live or travel regularly in country areas, you need something that can take a bull bar to survive the inevitable Kangaroo and Deer collisions.
I assume you live in Melbourne, A city that had a huge chunk of it's rail network dismantled in the 80s, and then reserved land used for development, governance failures. Massive spends on freeways with until recently almost nothing to rebuild the rail and bus network, again governance failures. No rail to the airport when it was built with the intention of a rail link in the 1970s, again governance failure. The bus system is token at best, the subsidy system for it is a joke, they subsidise a 15 minute interval bus to run from Frankston to the Airport in an arc via Dandenong, a 5 hour trip for $3, but can't get a 15 minute interval bus service to the next suburb to provide links to the trains in the outer suburbs. The stations have enough parking for 1 train carriage with 6, 6 carriage services per hour at most, there's no park and ride system. These are all government failures that should have been fixed years ago, yet stagnate.
No rail network was dismantled. Investment in public transport was curtailed between circa 1960 and 1990 in favor of freeways in Victoria for two reasons:
1) The bloody minded behaviour of communist public transport unions made the system totally unreliable and the resulting low patronage made it uneconomic.
2) the American style layout and low population density of melbourne makes European style public transport uneconomic outside the inner city core. melbourne is now bigger than Los Angeles.
Now repeat the above in every city in Australia.
Victoria still burns BROWN COAL for base load, its basically rotten wood, if you've ever held brown coal you would see how bad the stuff is. A nuclear powerplant could easily provide cheap and reliable base load to several cities, meaning all the electric transport in that city becomes a lot greener.
A simple and significant start would be to provide electric school buses for all government schools within the school zone, enough to actually service the local area and get the mums off the roads in en-masse SUV rushes.
Agreed, but the ALP policy is no nuclear energy - not one bit BTW Australia contains at least 30% of the worlds uranium reserves. The miners can't even find the edge of the deposits around the Flinders Ranges.
I use the UK as an example, why, because they have changed in the last 20 years, most of which in the last 10 years. They went from nearly 50% reliance on coal for energy to 0%. That was not a gradual or stepped change, they did it in a few short years.
Sure, and the UK is a tiny country with a high population density that makes it economic. It also has a larger manufacturing base to support such infrastructure projects.
In Europe and the UK I use the trains where possible and a Fiat500 rental or similar if not. . In Australia, outside capital city cores, we don't have enough population density to make trains viable.