In the lead up to next month’s state election Chris Minns and NSW Labor have been dropping transport policy ideas like they’re going out of fashion.
Much of it seems to be ill-thought-out populist dogma that is, at best, harmless: mobile phone chargers at busy train stations, or manufacturing more trains locally. The first is a cute irrelevance, while the second could be a boon for Newcastle but is really an employment and business policy, rather than a transport one.
Last week’s high-profile policy unveiling is anything but harmless.
If elected, NSW Labor has promised to introduce a $60 weekly cap per vehicle on toll roads in Sydney thus ending ‘Toll Mania’. Their argument is simple and easy to pitch in the short-attention-span world of social media: public transport fares are capped, so tolls should be too.
The logic is flawed and if this policy is introduced it will be bad news for the state. Let’s have a look at why.
Public transport is a social good, cars are not. We, collectively, want people to take public transport. Cars, usually carrying just one person, produce a negative externality to the city. They cause congestion, they pollute, they need to be parked somewhere all day and night and, once in awhile, they crash into a pedestrian or cyclist and kill them. We subsidise public transport because we can all get around faster, more healthily and safer when people use it. Just because we cap Opal fares does not mean we should cap tolls.
Induced demand. Cheaper tolls will encourage people to drive more. If you’re planning a trip for Saturday and you’ve reached your Opal cap, you know that you can take the train for free. Hooray! If Chris Minns’ policy becomes reality this logic will apply to toll roads. You could do laps on the M5/M7/M2/Eastern Distributor all weekend if you fancy. For free. Free for you, anyway.
There is no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to tolls. The NSW government collects all public transport fares in the state and uses them to (partially) pay for all public transport service. This applies even if the bus or train is run by a private operator. Tolls do not work like this. One company, Transurban, owns almost all the toll roads in NSW. Contracts have been signed stipulating toll prices. If the NSW government changes the pricing structure, they will have to pay the shortfall to Transurban. If a driver hits the $60 weekly cap the rest of their ‘free trips’ will be paid for directly by the taxpayers of NSW.
NSW stands for New South Wales, not Newcastle-Sydney-Wollongong. Minns’ is keen to point out that that the brunt of road tolls are worn by residents of Western Sydney. This is undoubtedly true. After all, our toll roads are in Sydney and the people that use them generally come from areas that lack high quality public transport or walkable mixed-use neighbourhoods. If this policy is enacted, residents from regional NSW, public transport users and anyone that does not regularly take toll roads will be directly subsidizing the road use of those that do. It’s a transfer from rural to urban, from public transport to motorists, from have-nots to haves.
This policy is regressive. It is targeted firmly at the middle. Labor have stated just 51,000 car owners will benefit from the policy. The rich don’t care about tolls, although they will benefit too. The poor are less likely to own a car and less likely to take toll roads often. This policy doesn’t reduce tolls in a way that benefits occasional users such as people from the country, public transport users and those that work locally. It will only benefit regular toll users that are clocking in more than $60 a week.
Chris Minns is promising to end Toll Mania in Sydney by giving our state’s heaviest 50,000 users a free ride on the roads courtesy of the rest of the state. Photo credit: The St George Leader
A lot of people, I’m thinking about taxi and rideshare drivers, tradies and long-distance commuters, spend a lot more than $60 a week on tolls. These users will have their toll bill reduced dramatically and will take more trips on toll roads than they otherwise would. Why not? They’re free! All this extra money will go straight to Transurban shareholders, courtesy of the NSW taxpayer. This policy isn’t just populist, it is corporate welfare on a staggering scale.
The people of NSW deserve a government that can think critically about the rapidly changing world we live in and introduce infrastructure and policy to help us all survive and thrive. This policy demonstrates that NSW Labor are thinking only about residents of Sydney, do not take climate change or urban congestion seriously and are playing fast and loose with our collective wealth.
A toll cap will push more people onto motorways and off public transport. It will be expensive, diverting transport funding away from public transport projects and towards corporate profit. It is a regressive policy that demonstrates a profound ignorance of the complexity of our state’s transport system.
If you’re thinking of taking a punt on Labor to win the election next month you should put your money where your mouth is and buy a few Transurban shares, too.
Both Sides of the Political Divide
If you’ve spent any time in Sydney in the last 30 odd years it goes without saying that building new toll roads, alongside approving new fossil fuel projects ($), is about as close as we get to bipartisan policy in NSW. The M4, M2, M5, Eastern Distributor, Cross City Tunnel, Lane Cove Tunnel and the M7 all opened well before Westconnex got underway and it’s a he said/she said as to which major party is more responsible for the excess of toll roads in Sydney.
‘Toll relief’ projects go back almost as far and enjoy similar bipartisan support. The catch being that, with the exception of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Tunnel tolls, any ‘toll relief’ scheme is a direct cash transfer to our privately owned tollway operators and the name ‘Transurban’ just keeps cropping up.
A quick search doesn’t leave much doubt as to who owns Sydney’s toll roads.
Bob Carr kicked off this habit all the way back in 1995 when he was elected on the promise of offering cashback for drivers on the M5 motorway; now part owned by the State Government and part owned by Transurban.
As toll roads spread like tentacles across Sydney a more holistic approach to toll relief was deemed necessary, one that didn’t quite so obviously porkbarrel a few swing seats in Southwestern Sydney.
In 2017 Gladys Berejiklian announced free car rego if you rack up a big enough annual toll bill. In 2019 the scheme was expanded to give discounted registration to moderate toll road users. Just last year the Perrottet government expanded the scheme even further and adopted the cashback model whereby drivers receive a portion of the tolls they pay back directly, in this case after exceeded a given threshold.
Not to be outdone by the Liberals, Minns’ is keen to make sure that the Labor party are offering the biggest boon to Transurban and incentivising car usage the most.
What’s most problematic about the latest iteration as put forward by NSW Labor is that it offers totally free toll road use beyond a threshold. Perrottet’s version only offers a partial discount on toll fees and spreads this benefit to a wider number of people, not just our state’s heaviest toll road users. The Labor version is more costly, less inclusive and less progressive.
Just one more toll road bro
What’s obvious through all of this is that the dream of ‘Build-Operate-Transfer’ was always too good to be true. We were promised massively discounted motorway construction where the brunt of the cost would be borne by the user and seamlessly managed by the private sector.
What we’ve ended up with is a classic late-stage-capitalism grift: the Government splits the construction bill with the private sector who sign lengthy operational contracts with over inflated toll rates and guaranteed quarterly increases, voters complain and so the taxpayer steps back in to foot the bill, only now instead of just paying for the construction of the thing we have to meet the terms of a contract designed to provide ongoing return to Transurban’s shareholders. One of whom, incidentally, is the now former Finance Minister. Although if you have a managed super fund, which is basically every person that has ever had a job, then you’re probably one too.
At this point the road out from the downward spiral is long and politically treacherous. It’s a safe bet that the two major parties will continue their one-upmanship when it comes to new toll roads and subsequent ‘toll relief’.
Come to think of it, whichever way you’re punting this election the safest bet is on Transurban.
In the small town on the banks of the Columbia River in the Canadian Rockies where I find myself, big red diesel locomotives emblazoned with ‘Canadian Pacific’ trundle by several times a day and I’m fortunate enough to have them practically in my backyard.
Two Canadian Pacific locomotives pulling a mixed load south on the Kootenay line on the banks of the Columbia River, just outside of Golden. The front two wagons are loaded with forestry products, possibly bound for the United States.
Sometimes they’re pulling assorted goods wagons, mostly they’re laden with coal. One thing I never get to see going by are the smiling faces of trans-continental travellers.
North America is home to some of the world’s busiest and most productive freight railways but the passenger services are famously skeletal. They make NSW Trainlink and V-Line look almost European by comparison. Still better than South Australia, though.
Amtrak, and its Canadian counterpart Via, provide a barebones service across the continent. Sadly for me, that service does not extend very far in Western Canada.
In September 2022 Amtrak restarted their Covid-paused Cascades service from Portland and Seattle to Vancouver, BC, which barely scratches the bottom corner of the province.
Via (pronounced in the North American style with emphasis on the ‘V’ sound: a cleverly chosen name for the bilingual country’s national rail operator being a French word that has been adopted into English) run a couple of routes across BC but they are few, far between and frequency is measured in ‘trips per week’.
It wasn’t always this way.
Canadian Rail History 101
The history of rail service in Canada is expectedly complicated.
The abridged version is that the many varied and competing private and/or publicly funded railways that sprung up in the golden era of rail construction were consolidated through the 20th century to become two huge companies that own almost all the track in the country (and quite a bit in the United States besides): Canadian Pacific (CP) and Canadian National (CN – of CN Tower fame).
Each company has its own extensive freight network and their own Trans-Continental routes. The more Northern route across the country that passes through cities like Edmonton and Saskatoon is operated by Canadian National and the more Southerly route, passing through Calgary and Regina, by Canadian Pacific.
Red for CP, Blue for CN. Only tracks in Canada are shown. Via’s passenger services are highlighted. Notice how all those lines crisscrossing the prairies of Alberta and Saskatchewan gather together into a single valley as they approach Vancouver. That is the Thompson River Valley which features the eponymous river, the Trans-Canada Highway and two sets of railway tracks: CN on the northside of the river and CP on the south. This screenshot is pulled from the Canadian Rail Atlas which has a bunch of toggleable layers showing rail service across the country.
In the Golden Age of the railways both companies ran competing transcontinental services for passengers along their respective routes. They fought for business with tight timetabling, reliable services and grandiose marketing campaigns.
This 1924 poster shows what the railways thought discerning customers wanted: fast speeds, stunning vistas and class based segregation!
As the postwar decades brought competition from jet aircraft, and high-speed highways became the order of the day, demand for (and profitability of) the railways plummeted. The railway companies started to close passenger routes forcing the Federal Government to intervene by creating Via to provide passenger service and keep the show on the…rails.
When two (transcontinental train services) become one
When Via first launched in 1977 there were two transcontinental trains: the Canadian that had been run by Canadian Pacific on the Southern route and CN’s Super Continental on the Northern route. Both trains ran every day in both directions.
As planes became faster and cheaper and highways better and more plentiful successive governments took a hatchet to Via’s funding leaving the railway to slowly reduce service and cancel routes.
Fast forward to 2023 and it’s a very different picture. There’s only one route now: it retains the Canadian name, but mostly runs along CN’s Northern route.
Since 1990, Calgary and Regina, the largest city in Alberta and the capital of Saskatchewan respectively, have had no intercity rail service at all.
The now abandoned Calgary Via station is in the podium below the city’s eponymous tower while Regina’s heritage listed Union Station is home to a Province-run Casino!
The Canadian is down to twice a week and delays are so bad that the timetable has been padded out by an extra 12 hours compared to mid-century travel times.
Via’s case isn’t helped by the growth of freight rail in that same time period. Freight is enjoying something of a rail renaissance in North America. Sadly, for train travelers, these freight trains get priority along the way which can leave passengers floundering in remote rail sidings for hours at a time.
It’s a predicament that makes it very, very hard for Amtrak and Via to increase services or guarantee reliability.
Golden, BC, was once a rail hub, founded to support the construction of the Trans-Canadian line through Kicking Horse Pass and Rogers Pass (both interesting tales). It’s still a busy freight hub, but passenger service has been declining since the 1950s when passenger services ended on the the Kootenay branch line to Cranbrook and beyond as the highway improved.
When The Canadian was rerouted in 1990, the town lost its last passenger rail service.
Greyhound stepped in to fill the gap, minus the undeniable style of long distance rail travel, largely replicating the train with a coach service between Vancouver and Calgary.
In 2020 Covid hit, and Greyhound pulled out of the Canadian market leaving many towns across the country with no intercity public transport at all. Lucky for Golden a bus line called Rider Express filled the gap providing a pricey coach service once or twice a day. Since then, anyone hoping to reach the mountain hamlet must have access to a motor vehicle, book a $200 airport shuttle or board a slow and expensive coach.
The more well-known nearby tourist towns of Lake Louise, Banff and Canmore have found themselves in a similar predicament. As the popularity of visiting the Rockies skyrockets, mid-century auto-focused planning decisions are causing major headaches. National Parks are replacing overcrowded parking lots with shuttle buses at popular spots like Lake Louise and the owners of Mt Norquay ski resort are considering building a new train line direct from Calgary airport to increase their customer base.
3 CP locos pull a coal train north-bound on the Kootenay line on the banks of the Columbia River. Most likely bound for the Lower Mainland and beyond.
As of 2023 there is still one way to enjoy the magic of rail travel as you cross the Rocky Mountains along the (arguably more scenic) Canadian Pacific track, but you are going to have to pay for it. If you’ve got a spare $2000 per person you can take the Rocky Mountaineer tourist train that runs twice a week in the summer months. You’ll overnight at a hotel midway in Kamloops so it ends up taking 36 hours end to end, 3 times as long as the coach. You also won’t be able to get off in Golden, the train passes through but it doesn’t stop. This is purely a tourist train and is of no practical use for the people that live in the towns along the way. In fact, the train ends in Banff, which doesn’t have an airport or any other train service (yet!), so to get out of there you’ll have to either fork out for a return ticket, rent a car, or take a bus the last hour or so into Calgary.
Christmas Cheer
Each December, however, the sad plight of the Rocky Mountain railways is forgotten, if only for one beautiful neon-lit moment.
In a spectacular branding exercise meets goodwill generating foodbank fundraiser, each December, Canadian Pacific gives something back to the towns that their coal and freight trains ceaselessly rumble through. The Holiday Train brings some of that Wintry Christmas Magic we hear about from Australia, but that you can only truly obtain in the Northern latitudes.
The Canadian Pacific Canadian Holiday Train (they run an American version on their tracks south of the border) has run every year, Covid excepting, since 1999. Last year it left Montreal, in the East of the country, on November 27th, stopping countless times on its way across Canada before finishing up in Metro Vancouver on December 18th.
The Holiday Train hit the popular tourist destination of Banff at prime time, 7pm. I suspect a slightly smaller crowd greeted the train in Golden at 2pm the next day.
The train has a few bands and entertainers on-board and is adorned in Christmas lights. It pulls up in each town, possibly near, or at, the abandoned train station, the young (and young at heart…and old, and railway enthusiasts of all ages) take photos, the performers do a few numbers each and, in less than an hour, the train blows its horn and rolls another town down the line to do it all again.
For the towns in the Rocky Mountains and across the vast prairies of Central Canada that grew up alongside Canadian Pacific railways, it’s a beautiful but poignant reminder of what once was. In each town, for one brief hour in December, the Golden Age of rail travel returns.
It’s been almost a year since I last posted here, but my excuse is a good one. I’ve been flat out wrapping up Following the Flow, the documentary I’ve been producing for the past three years. You can watch the trailer and find out more on our website. We are also showing on SBS this Sunday September 25th at 4pm to celebrate World Rivers Day. If you missed that you might still be able to catch it OnDemand!
OK now to Marseille.
Spending a week in Marseille, on France’s Mediterranean Cote d’Azur, I couldn’t help but find myself constantly comparing its public transport and urban fabric with that of Sydney. Aside from the fact that I happened to find myself there, I think these two cities have some similarities that make such a comparison worthwhile.
Marseille as an administrative area has the 2nd largest population of any French city, around 900,000 people. The greater ‘Metro Marseille’ region has a population of around 1.9m people spread across 4,000 square kilometres, making it the 3rd most populous metro area in France after Paris and Lyon.
Marseille’s Vieux Port neighbourhood. Being a tourist, I spent a fair bit of time around here. Credit: Tia Monto
Greater Sydney, for comparison, as described by the Australian Bureau of Statistics spans some 12,000 square kilometres reaching from Bargo in the South, Blackheath in the West and as far as Wyong Shire in the North. Personally I would’ve drawn the boundaries a little closer in. This area is home to around 5.2 million people; Australia’s most populous metropolitan area (but perhaps not for much longer!).
At first glance these cities might appear to be on completely different scales, but the relative density of French cities (and also that of the inner and middle suburbs of Sydney), as well as the countless other significant urban agglomerations within a 1-2 hour commute of Marseille probably makes the size and makeup of these cities more similar than they first appear.
Comparing Sydney to Paris in this way would be less useful as Paris is on an altogether different scale with 13m people spread over 19,000 square kilometres. The vast bulk of them, 11 million, living in the 2,000 square kilometre urban area. Density and total size wise, Sydney has more in common with Marseille than Paris. Besides, I didn’t go to Paris so I can’t exactly write about it!
Metro
Until 2019 Sydney didn’t have a metro. This is more a quirk of definition than anything else. From a tourist or resident’s perspective much of the Sydney Trains network effectively functions as a metro. It is sometimes described as a mix between a European metro and suburban railway (or S-bahn in the Germanosphere).
Marseille built a more traditional metro system in the late 1970s and it now consists of 2 lines running short 4 car rubber tyred and driver operated trains.
A metro train pulling into Castellane Station on Line 1.
The scale of the system is pretty modest with 31 stations spread across 23km. Note the typically high European station density with an average of a station every 750m.
I really like the sleek simplicity of the over door map on-board the Marseille Metro.
Sydney’s Metro, as I’ve expressed elsewhere, is a different beast entirely. Using longer 6 car driverless trains in two years time it will span 65km from Tallawong to Bankstown, coincidently with the same number of stations as Marseille’s system: 31. In Sydney that’s a station on average every 2.1km.
I discussed the problem with the density of stations on Sydney’s Metro in detail in the context of the CBD and Southwest Metro and also in regard to Metro West. In short, there’s nothing inherently wrong with widely stopped stations but it does mean that more people are going to need to use another mode of transport to actually get there. It changes the dynamic of what a metro does. In Marseille, metro stations are close enough together that if you live anywhere near a metro line and are able, you can comfortably walk there.
Louis says ‘Sortie thataway —>!’
Tram
Like Sydney, Marseille has 3 tram lines – and two of them share a significant amount of track in the CBD. In fact, their network diagrams have a lot in common!
The Marseille tramway serves 32 stations across 16km of route while Sydney’s light rail serves 42 stops across a 25km system.
There’s some definitely network similarities going on here…
Next year, with the opening of the Parramatta Light Rail, Sydney’s major satellite city will feature it’s own modest tram system. So too, since 2014, has Aubagne, 20 minutes by train from Marseille’s main station, had its own 7 stop tram system.
In the urban core of Marseille the tram typically runs in streets that have had car traffic completely removed, so too with George Street in Sydney.
Rue de Rome is for trams, bikes and people.
In both cities as the tram leaves the CBD it tends to run in a median or kerb right of way next to mixed traffic lanes and in both cities there are some short sections of tunnel. Sydney’s L1 is a bit of an outlier here running along an old freight corridor.
One key difference in the systems when considering the urban fabric more broadly is the length of the trams. Thanks to some weird wrangling with the RMS, Sydney’s L2 and L3 are serviced by coupled pairs of Alstom trams totalling 67m long – enormous in an urban environment. This was essentially done to increase the total capacity of the line without increasing service frequency – ostensibly to avoid delaying motorists at busy intersections along the route.
The trams in Marseille are a more conventional 42.5m long.
People, trams and outdoor dining. Rue de Rome has some serious George Street vibes.
It turns out the similarity of the two systems goes way back. In 1876 Marseille opened its first horse drawn tramway. In 1899, its first electric tram. The system was slowly dismantled and replaced with buses and trolley buses starting in 1945 and finishing in 1960. Only one 3km line remained in operation through this period. The first service in the modern network ran in 2007, 47 years after the old system’s almost total closure.
For comparison, Sydney’s first horse drawn tramway began service in 1861 and its first electric tram in 1898. Sydney’s tramways began to be dismantled in the 1950s to be replaced by buses, a process that wound up in 1961. The first stage of Sydney’s current light rail network opened up in 1997, 36 years later.
Evidently the processes that drove the demise of Sydney’s tramways played out the world over.
Buses
Fixed line transport (trains, metro, trams) are the friend of the tourist. It’s easy to figure out where they go, typically straightforward to acquire tickets and you usually don’t have to press the button or pull the cord to alight. Buses offer a more varied experience and in many cities they are totally impenetrable to visitors.
In this regard Marseille is a revelation. Cash payment is accepted on board (2 euro for a 1 hour any mode transfer ticket), almost every stop has a shelter featuring a network map, timetable and often a live next-service display, every stop has an easy to remember name and, best of all, on-board displays that actually work let you know where the bus is and what stop is upcoming – plus you can see where to transfer to other routes, trams and metro. Can you tell I’m a big fan?
This is actually a tram stop, but the info at bus stops was just as comprehensive.
There are some downsides: the system is extremely popular and not frequent enough. Bus overcrowding is severe more often than not. Fare evasion seems rife, although periodic tickets weren’t particularly expensive so maybe a lot of people have annual passes and just don’t need to tap on. We were waved onto buses on multiple occasions without paying for some reason or other. The buses mostly operated in mixed traffic though I have to say, despite the narrow roads and haphazard parking, traffic never seemed to be too bad. I’ve definitely been stuck in a lot worse bus traffic in Sydney. This could be a bias of the routes I was travelling on, maybe things are worse in commuter neighbourhoods.
A short wheelbase bus plying a narrow road in the old part of town. Note the bollards in the foreground to stop cars blocking the footpath and a car (legally) parked obstructing the footpath on the far side.
As in Sydney, rear door boarding is discouraged by signage, but unlike in Sydney it often happens anyway, particularly when there are a lot of people trying to get onto an already crowded bus. Despite the crowding I didn’t ever see a bus driver not let someone on (although a few passengers elected to wait rather than scrum their way on) and only once did our driver completely skip a stop with waiting passengers. As opposed to Sydney it seems like the onus of safety falls more on the passengers than the driver.
Onboard displays showing accurate next stop information are on every bus and they actually work! It reminded me of the time when Sydney Buses started having these circa 2005, but they were either always off, showed static or ran ads…not so useful!
Another funny similarity with Sydney is the existence of a B1, although Marseille has a B2, B3A and B3B as well. Like in Sydney the B1 signifier meant an important and frequent route. The Marseille B1 runs from a downtown Metro station out to an isolated university campus and seemed to operate in a mix of bus-only lanes and mixed traffic. Also like the Sydney B1 the Marseille B1 has its own vehicles, articulated buses instead of double deckers. Sadly I didn’t manage a photo of one.
Ticketing
Buying a ticket from the machines at metro stations (and some tram stops) is extremely straightforward. Just click on the photo of the British flag to swap it into English and select the duration of your ticket. 1 hour starts at 2 euro, 24 hours is 5.20 and as far as I’m aware you can go as high as an annual ticket. Options!
Buying the ticket on the bus is a little bit trickier, without French I’m not sure if the whole gamut of tickets was available onboard but we had no trouble buying 1 hour tickets from the driver.
Contrast to Sydney where we lack time based fares which, despite some shortcomings, are very, very tourist friendly. On the plus side all opal services (pretty much all services) allow tap on/off with a credit card which is obscenely tourist friendly – at least if you aren’t price sensitive and have a credit card! The flip side of that is that paying cash fares is all but impossible in Sydney and to do so you’d have to figure out that you need to go to a convenience store and buy an opal card with cash there – tricky!
Suburban Trains
I didn’t take any suburban trains in Marseille so I’m going to refrain from commenting on them but I’m fairly sure they exist in some capacity.
Intercity Trains
Marseille St Charles is a terminus station along the same lines as the ‘Sydney Terminal’ intercity platforms at Central. From here high speed ‘TGV’ trains, express ‘Intercitie’ trains and local/regional ‘TER’ trains extend out across Provance, France and even to a handful of international destinations.
Figuring out which trains require pre-purchased tickets and how to nab the best fare isn’t super easy, but compared to schlepping to an airport, travelling through French stations is a breeze. In the past few weeks I’ve taken all 3 kinds of trains a bunch of times and as anyone who has trained around Europe can attest, the whole thing works remarkably well.
Marseille St Charles is at a junction point of the 2 Metro lines making it an easy connection to the rest of the city.
Sydney’s Central Station has roughly hourly departures on what are now called NSW Trainlink Intercity services – the equivalent of French TER trains – in 3 directions: North to Newcastle, South to Wollongong and West to the Blue Mountains. Our NSW Trainlink XPT and Xplorer trains are roughly equivalent to the French Intercitie trains, offering First and Second Class seats and requiring a reservation to travel. The frequency from Sydney is much lower than Marseille as you might expect and there is sadly no antipodean analogue for the French TGV.
Seaport
Getting a bit off topic from the realm of urban transport here but there’s an interesting comparison to be made between the two cities’ harbours. Both Sydney and Marseille have beautiful old harbours surrounded by historic architecture, luxury hotels and tourist orientated attractions. In both cities huge new container terminals have been built away from the old harbours, taking the necessary nuisance of global trade away from the panoramic views of the old port and freeing up much needed space for parking luxury yachts.
Both cities are both well and truly on cruise ship itineraries although Marseille is notable for also being a hub for enormous ferries that connect the French mainland with Corsica and also across to old colonial possessions in Algeria and Tunisia.
Sydney’s last ocean going long distance ferry left some 15 years ago when the Spirit of Tasmania axed their Sydney-bound service.
Urban fabric
Marseille has been continuously occupied since 600BC when it was founded from the sea. Culturally the city seems to be just as connected across the Mediterranean as it is to the French mainland.
Because of this long and varied history, much of the city was built well before automobiles were a consideration. On the positive side, the human scale of so much of the city is a pleasure to explore. On the negative side, people have surely asserted cars into this environment in which they don’t really fit and it is basically a clusterfuck.
In the more commercially orientated parts of the city bollards do the heavy lifting of stopping cars obstructing footpaths. In older and wealthier residential neighbourhoods cars are EVERYWHERE. They’re parked blocking the tiny footpaths and they’re parked partially obstructing intersections. The only saving grace is that thankfully the disease of the ever larger all American vehicle is (mostly) yet to infect Europe, so most cars are 2 door hatches or the size of a Mazda 3. Ten years ago this was true of Sydney, alas no longer.
The surest way to keep cars out of a street is with bollards, just ask the French.
Pedestrian environment
Given all the things I’ve outlined so far you won’t be surprised to hear that being on foot in Marseille is a mixed bag. Neighbourhoods are so dense that if you walk for an hour across the city you will without doubt encounter many interesting goings-on. This really makes it the perfect city to visit as a tourist.
In the Old Port and other central areas pedestrian amenity is amazing. Large boulevards and plazas are given over to people and restaurants and bars spill out into these enormously popular public spaces.
A typical street in the Vieux Port neighbourhood of Marseille.
This trend caught my eye as in much of Australia if a business wants to occupy part of the footpath they need a permit and they’re up against other footpath users for that right. All sorts of people require access to the footpath so in some respects it isn’t an ideal place to sprawl a commercial undertaking. But it’s a shame that like so many debates in Australia, this conversation pits different groups that want to use our (relatively wide) streets for anything that isn’t moving and storing cars against one another.
More Vieux Port. Contraflow bike lanes are pretty common and help make the city heaps more accessible on bike than it is in a car. They also make streets busier and less predictable which encourages people to drive more carefully and go slower. The speed limit here is either 20 or 30, but you’d be hard pressed (safely) going any faster than that anyway.
It’s wonderful to see a city that has reclaimed so much streetspace that a restaurant’s 20 outdoor tables can coexist with street vendors, people sitting around or waiting for the tram, people whizzing by on e-scooters and walkers of all speeds, ages and mobilities.
Micromobility
I spent my week in Marseille telling anyone who would listen (read: my friends) that the micromobility revolution was underway! It was exciting to see and not just when we doubled up on hirable e-scooters for the post-midnight run home one night.
E-scooters and e-bikes with buzzy one syllable names and distinctive colour schemes hang around on street corners, in plazas and occasionally en masse in designated storage areas. Unlike in Sydney, they are extremely popular. When your correspondent went to hire one (well not me actually, I didn’t have the requisite internet to download the app with) the first 5 or so we checked were all out of battery. On several occasions I saw people contracting to these international tech companies out there moving the scooters around and replacing their batteries.
There are millions more of these things about, but I’m not much of a photographer…
But it isn’t just the start-ups making this type of mobility seem like a bigger deal. Personal e-scooters and e-bikes seem to be just as common as the humble pushie in Marseille. The great thing is that because of the flexible use of public space for transport, the city is ready for it.
In Sydney we like to carefully delineate roadspace for specific uses. This means that the roads work very well for cars, okay for buses and pedestrians and quite poorly for cyclists. They aren’t really welcome on the footpath or the road.
In Marseille on the other hand, except in the parts of the city where cars are explicitly excluded, the road is for everyone. Pedestrians (old and young), cars, buses, motorbikes, pushbikes, scooters, wheelchairs, whatever. This definitely isn’t ideal, particularly for wheelchair users and the less mobile who have to navigate this treacherous landscape, but it does mean that when something that has the potential to totally change how we get around cities for the better comes along, society doesn’t freak out. E-scooters? No worries, I already have to dodge the motorised variety!
The pedestrian environment can be pretty hostile in Marseille, but at least you aren’t about to get run over by a 3 tonne ute!
Instead of waging war on e-scooters, as we are in Sydney, they are being embraced by the Marseillaise like no doubt so many other changes over the 2600 years they’ve been there.
Lessons for Sydney
This post is much longer than I intended (I never have been one for brevity) and I’m aware that I’m a transport and planning enthusiast who spent a grand total of eight nights in a foreign city. My insights might be interesting but they probably aren’t profound.
That said, I did want to end on a sort of summary of some of the transport/urban design wins from Marseille that Sydney could relatively easily adopt and a couple of other thoughts that comparing the two cities brought up for me.
We need to start taking steps to limit the growth in size of passenger vehicles in Australia immediately. Marseille is car strewn, but it works(ish) because the cars are at least relatively compact. If we replaced all of them with Ford Rangers and SUVs the streets would be so cluttered that no one else, be they on foot or driving a bus, could get passed and the consequences would be deadly. In 99% of cases there is no need for people to drive such large vehicles, they do because it’s convenient, comfortable and you can. Our cities and states can take steps to stop this trend because we know where it leads: just take a look across the Pacific (from Sydney!) or the Atlantic (from Marseille!)
We need to urgently build a network of dedicated micromobility lanes and low speed shared streets. In Sydney the roads belong to cars. That isn’t going to change anytime soon. People want to get out of cars for health reasons and because it’s more fun, cheaper and often faster. But we need safe spaces to encourage that. That means building a lot more dedicated bike/micromobility lanes that are wide enough for all kinds of users; I’m looking at you old guy going 30km/h down the footpath in your electric wheelchair. These lanes need to actually connect all the way to where someone wants to go. Enough with the piecemeal bike lanes that get tacked on when there’s spare space in the roadway. Enough with the chevrons and green paint on a 6 lane highway and calling it bike infrastructure. We need lanes that are separated from traffic or we need 30km/h maximum speed limits and streets that are designed to make going any faster than this completely unviable (see: the backstreets of Newtown).
Frequency is freedom. If you are reliably running your public transport service at a minimum 10 minute frequency all day and into the evening people will use it. We need to stop freaking out about travel time in every conversation about improving transit in Sydney (which cost us several really useful infill stations on Metro West) and start making as many of our trains, trams, ferries, buses and metro as frequent as possible for as long as possible. This is already well underway.
We can and should reclaim as much of the roadway from cars as possible. The standard street in Sydney is one chain wide, that’s just over 20 metres. In so much of the city that means 2 lanes of traffic, 2 lanes of parked cars and maybe 2m on either side for a footpath, trees, bins, cafe seating, bus stops, utility boxes and everything else. We need to take what’s been going on in the city and spread it to our inner suburbs by reducing the number of vehicle lanes, reducing the number of on-street parking spaces and creating more space for all the stuff that is currently crammed onto the footpath. I’m sure it seemed like a huge ask in Marseille and it definitely ruffled a few feathers when George Street was pedestrianised but in both instances no one is looking back. It’s just so much better now for everyone.
