Brisbane’s Cross River Rail and Melbourne’s Metro are good projects and warrant funding, but the budget for transport infrastructure is driven more by smart politics than good policy

The Victorian government provided funding for a new city freeway this week but spurned a new rail line. It’s important to understand why governments continue to favour roads over rails

Although there’s a lot of variation across countries, westerners are generally driving less. There’re lots of potential explanations but pinning down the key ones is proving hard

Time-consuming commutes are said to be bad for us but new data from the car-centric USA shows most commutes aren’t that long. The key problem with commuting isn’t time but how far we travel

The long view of travel in Australian cities shows the rapid decline of public transport and the remarkable ascendancy of cars. The latter still overwhelmingly dominates urban travel

The Chair of Infrastructure Australia, Sir Rod Eddington, called for a “mature and dispassionate” discussion about road pricing on Friday. Good, I wholeheartedly agree. This should be the number one issue for discussion nationally in planning the future of our cities.

The Grattan Institute released a new report, Social Cities, under its Cities Program this week. The report addresses “worrying signs that isolation and loneliness are increasing in Australia”. The data shows, it says, “that people’s friendships and neighbourhood connections have diminished over the past two decades”. Notwithstanding the title, the report only addresses city design. [...]

In my last post, I looked at the enormous differences in the cost of subways between some countries and cities. The “take home” message is to be careful extrapolating overseas experience to Australia because there is immense variability across projects. A closely related issue though, is the remarkable cost escalation of what on the surface [...]