Tau@aussie.zone 4 weeks ago
Why are they focussing on federal funding only? I would expect federal funding to go largely to the sorts of roads which are important on a broad scale but less desirable for cycling or walking - freeways, highways, major arterial roads, and so forth. State and local government is the level I would expect to find the majority of cycling and walking investment, it seems odd that these are omitted.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 weeks ago
The Commonwealth funds all sorts of projects. They contributed, for example, to Brisbane City Council’s big Kangaroo Point green bridge. That bridge was one of the “five green bridges” that were a major campaign promise by the LNP in 2020. Unfortunately in part due to funding “issues” (read: prioritising roads for cars), that “five” has been watered down to “three”, two of which have been delivered as of today, and the third hasn’t even been up for community consultation on the design or alignment yet (it was, but even that process got stopped cold and will have to be restarted from scratch after the 2022 floods caused BCC to cut all cycling funding—but, again, not road funding).
BCC should fund more of this, as you say. But they don’t. And in the face of poor investment from Councils, it would be helpful if the Commonwealth were spending more than one measly dollar per person. That Commonwealth funding, even if the project itself was delivered by state and local governments, would make it easier to get more done.
As another example, the Commonwealth famously spends a lot on “black spot” funding. They should make it a condition of receiving black spot funding that the intersection and its approaches are upgraded with best practice safe cycling infrastructure (along with a robust definition of “best practice” that takes cues from successful designs from overseas, rather than relying on the current clearly inadequate definitions Australian road engineers use). Instead, a lot of black spot “upgrades” end up making the roads they’re on more dangerous for cyclists.
Tau@aussie.zone 4 weeks ago
My point was that if you’re writing an article talking about how much Australians spend on cycling/walking infrastructure you should at least mention that federal numbers are not the whole picture and that federal is not the level of government that is going to cover most of said infrastructure. Omitting this smacks of the author just looking for a low number to draw attention/outrage.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 weeks ago
That’s sort of fair, but it’s the same argument people use to justify the Commonwealth spending more on private schools than public. “Oh, yeah they do, but the state governments spend more on public schools.” That may be true, but IMO every level of government should have budgets that stand up to scrutiny.
DavidDoesLemmy@aussie.zone 4 weeks ago
You’re right. About 1% of our transport infra spend goes to active transport. And it’s mostly from state and local governments. It’s still very low, but not as disproportionate as the article suggests.