This question occurred to me when I realized that Australia and America are similar in some very significant ways. Both started out as British colonies, both are vast in size, and both are far from the mother country. But has the “car culture” ever taken over in Australia the way it did in the United States, after World War II? Australia seems to the same kind of long distances between cities and an much lower and sparser population than the U.S. So, is there much of an intercity rail system in Australia? If not, IIRC, gas (petrol) is expensive over there, so how do people manage if they have European gas prices and American style public transit?
Australia seems from this viewpoint to have much better public transit than Canada and the USA, perhaps because its population is even more concentrated into big cities.
On the other hand, it was the home of Mad Max.
YMMV.
I don’t live in Australia, so I can’t comment on nationwide trends, but one thing I noticed when I spent my honeymoon there is that the cars tend to be smaller than they are in the U.S. - much more along European lines. So while gas prices may be high, they’re probably getting better gas mileage on average than we do here.
I’ll leave it to someone who actually lives there to answer the question about public transit - the only public transportation I took in Oz was the Sydney monorail.
Australia only recently finished connecting its last “major city”, Darwin, to its railroad network. However, there has been a railroad crossing the continent for nearly a hundred years.
Nonetheless, rural Australia is known for its “road trains”, massive tractor-trailor combinations with multiple trailors that move at very high speeds on roads.
New South Wales has the “CountryLink” train system, which connects Melbourne and Brisbane, and pretty much every little podunk town in between.
Sydney and Melbourne both have very effective mass transit systems: Sydney has its light rail network spanning most of the suburban areas, and buses to cover the rest, whereas Melbourne has a fully integrated system involving light rail, streetcars and buses.
I have read that not only is Australia the driest continent but also the most urbanized country of any significant size in the world. There might be some cause and effect flip flops here with the car culture analysis but the vast majority of the population is piled into small geographical areas which isn’t nearly as true in the U.S. or even Canada.
Canada’s a better example. Australia has a lot of its population packed into a few dense areas. Canada’s is more spread out, like the U.S.
Our car culture is very similar to the U.S.'s. In fact, we tend to buy more big horsepower cars and convertibles. The Ford Mustang GT and convertible make up a much bigger percentage of Mustang sales in Canada than they do in the U.S. The only BMW Z4 we even import into Canada is the M4, the high performance variant. We do also tend to buy more small cars like the Honda Fit. What we don’t buy as many of, as a guess, would be full-sized sedans. But in general, we love our cars as much as Americans do. Maybe more.
Oh, I was going to add that Australia has plenty of car culture as well. GM’s Holden division makes cars like the Commodore that we would kill for here. The Commodore has 362 HP. The Holden Monaro was imported in the U.S. as the Pontiac GTO. So Australians do like their big, powerful cars.
In a word, yes. There’s plenty of “car culture” here as **Sam Stone ** notes. The car is the main mode of travel for the bulk of the population.
As noted, there are interstate trains but they’re very slow and most people would fly in preference given the prevalence of cheap air tickets e.g. a Sydney to Melbourne flight is 90 minutes. The train is approximately 12 hours.
The public transport is reasonably good in major cities, although it varies from district to district. Some areas of Sydney, for instance, are very well served by public transport. I live close to the city and am spoiled for options (train, bus, ferry). As a result I don’t need to have a car at all. Some suburbs further from the city are not so lucky and, due to pathetic government planning, have little or no public transport infrastructure. People who live in those places are almost entirely dependent on their cars. Mortgage foreclosure rates are on the rise in the outer suburbs of Sydney at the moment. While higher interest rates are clearly the key factor, financial analysts also consider that higher petrol prices are biting hard in these areas where residents have no choice but to drive.
I would venture that southern Ontario and Quebec is substantially more dense, in terms of cars and the need for highways, than any part of Australia. There are far more people in southern Ontario than in any Australian state, and southern Quebec is about the same as New South Wales. Of course you have huge cities lying in the USA just outside that area that also contribute to traffic flow, like Detroit, Buffalo, etc. However, that’s similar to, say, Pennsylvania or New York, whereas the Prairies would be sort of like Kansas or Oklahoma, in terms of population distribution and traffic pattern.
Either way, Canadians sure do love cars. Fact is, when you’ve got a big, big country to drive around in, it’s nice to have a good ride to do it in.
How much does gasoline cost in Australia?
Around A$1.20/litre at the moment, but highly variable.
That sounds pretty cheap but they don’t sell Litres over here. They labelled our gasoline products “Gallons” and you can purchase the Gallon brand at most locations. They are 2 - 3 times as expensive as your discount brand. I guess it just isn’t cost effective to ship Litres to the states.
Here the term “light rail” means trams, which you appear to be referring to as streetcars. Sydney has a reasonable suburban rail network, but only one short light rail line.
Which would be about $US0.90 a litre, or $US3.40 a US gallon. Cheap by world standards (our price is set to the Singapore oil market price) but I fully expect mass fainting across the US at reading that number.
That’s about the price we’ve been paying in Canada as well. Just over a buck a litre CDN, or about 90 cents.
However, gas prices have been falling like crazy. On the way home tonight I saw the local 7-11 had gas at 77 cents/litre.
Australian urban policy and planning was first based on European and specifically British models.
However, people also eventually looked at the maps and hydrology reports. Further, migration trends and fashions meant that transport policy has not been faithful to the Euo/Brit modell.
For example it is possible to accurately date the development of specific locations in the larger cities, given only:
- the access of the location to buses and trains; and
- the map of roads servicing the areas.
What this means is that parts of urban Australia were developed using the California model: Large domestic blocks of land, served by wide & fast roads.
And other parts were developed on British/European models: Well served by public transport, with roads designed for incidental use of cars.
In terms of intercity: The distances are too large for trains or cars. People fly.
Japanese cars are the majority of private sales. In rural areas, where people do have to drive long distances, there is a rebate on the best fuel for those uses, diesel.
I paid $0.759/L at a Sunoco yesterday. (Well, actually $0.849/L for Ultra 94, but who quotes the premium price?) That’s roughly US$2.52 per US gallon for regular unleaded if my arithmetic is correct.
The differences between North America and Australia pale when you consider somewhere like Russia. About two hundred and fifty million people living in a country larger than Canada, with very little in the way of a national road network. The Soviets discouraged personal transport for a large part of the modern era, so roads were mostly built only as alternatives to railroads for the military. And what cars were available were very inferior to even the most cheapest of the Western vehicles. Car & Driver’s feature on a Trebant they managed to lay their hands on is absolutely hysterical.
Link?
It’s worth noting that while, as some have pointed out, Australia does have a decent inter-city train system, especially on the east coast from Brisbane to Sydney to Melbourne, and across the country from Sydney to Adelaide to Perth, it is generally a slow journey compared to European and Japanese trains.
Also, this is less a product of the trains than the tracks. Australia has a very small population (ca. 20 million people) in a country the same size as the continental United States. Maintaining thousands of miles of tracks on such a small tax base is a difficult task, and one that governments have been increasingly reluctant to undertake. There are many places where the trains have to travel at significantly less than their optimum speed because the tracks aren’t good enough.
Also, there have been cutbacks in the rail services, with many rural towns in New South Wales losing most or even all of their train services. Even relatively close and relatively large towns like Goulburn and Canberra have had their services to and from Sydney cut back significantly in the past few years. My parents live about 20km outside Goulburn, and the reduced services to and from Sydney have been a sore point with many people in the town.
For Americans, it’s worth pointing out that the rail services in the cities (in Sydney for example) are not the subway-style services that commuters in New York, Washington, Chicago, etc. might be used to. While there is a section of underground track in the downtown area, the trains themselves are larger commuter trains, usually double-decker trains similar in style to the Metra commuter trains that serve Chicago, or the MARC trains that run between Washington and various parts of Maryland.
Melbourne has a good tram system. Sydney had a massive tram system, one of the largest and best in the world, until the post-war period, when it was gradually shut down to make more room for cars and other forms of transport. The last service closed in the early 1960s.