This started as a plea to remember what decades of bad politics has forced upon Aussies just trying to get where they’re going, but buckle in: We’re going deeper!
I haven’t driven a car since September – that being the last time I was invited as a journalist to the launch of a new car – and that was my first drive since May 2024, when I resigned from Wheels and packed the family off for adventures in Europe.
As a car ‘enthusiast’ and journalist, it feels weird. Obviously. But as a cyclist lucky to be living in a city with multiple great options for commuting, and loads of amenities in walking distance, I feel great. No regrets.
The thing is, this is an experience very unique to living in exactly those circumstances.
So when I see climate activists shouting on social media that cars should be banned (unrealistic) or much more heavily taxed (political suicide in many countries), it pongs of… not privilege, since living in a high-density urban area isn’t always that, but rather situational blindness.
Before my wife and I started our family, we lived in Brunswick, in the very inner north of Melbourne. It had everything we needed within a 5-minute walk, and I was 10 minutes from the centre of Melbourne by bike – or 20 minutes by either tram or train, depending on whether I wanted to walk five minutes to the tram stop or 10 minutes to the train station.
It’s easy, living there, especially for a long time if not you’re entire life, to wonder at how people could be so invested in owning a car and all the costs that come with it – financial and, more importantly in this context, the cost to our climate.
To these people, not even EVs are an acceptable solution to The Problem of the Car. After all, the production of EVs comes with an environmental impact, no matter how reduced the impact is in comparison to the production and lifetime pollution of a combustion-powered car. There are human rights issues in the supply chain, too, and then there’s the microplastics their tyres throw off into the air around us, and so on. It’s all real, all true.
EV owners will argue all day about the improvements and benefits of EVs over combustion cars, and they’re not wrong – it’s just that the ‘climate warriors’ aren’t wrong either.
Their complaints are valid, but their demands suggest they’ve forgotten where they live, with whom they live, and how their little oases of urban density clash with the truth of urban sprawl and the political landscape that both powers and follows that sprawl.
I’ll have to generalise here, as I’ve not been able to find statistics comprehensive enough to argue one way or the other: there’s a palpable impression that those railing against cars (the ‘anti-car brigade’ as they’re often called in the media) are young, or single, or childless, or any combination of those. And, often, they live either in the centre of the city or very close to it. Brunswick, for example, with its fairly bloody impressive public transport infrastructure.
People living at that stage or in that phase are as busy as busy gets. They have places to be and people to see, jobs to do and all the rest.
But their commitments and needs can vary dramatically from ‘the rest of us’. If they don’t live in the outer suburbs and travel an hour each way for work (whether by car or PT), if they don’t have young kids with the school dropoffs (and emergency pickups) and sports and clubs and playdates and appointments…
Well, there aren’t enough minutes in the day to explain how these differences make us far more time poor, far more exhausted, than most could fathom. Many things in life fit into the “you can’t possibly know until you’ve lived it” column, but few are more heavily cemented than what most single and/or childless people know about the life and pressures of parenting.
Really, very few people will experience anything more eye-opening than the “I had no idea…” moment that all new parents are hit with.
Sidenote: I’ve said “many” and “most” a lot here, because I absolutely do understand that many people without kids do have a decent idea of what it’s like, through close ties to friends with kids, through their work, and so on. I’d wager, however, that those single and/or childless people are not quite so unforgivingly and aggressively protesting the car.
For those who choose to start a family, a move to the suburbs is often the next obvious step. If you want space for your child to play at home, if you want the implied safety of quiet streets, renting or buying in the outer suburbs – more and more outer, these days – can feel like the only choice.
That’s not to say there aren’t families in the city and the inner suburbs, but let’s be realistic: Those families either have a lot more money, or they’re prepared to live in far cosier and perhaps less modern conditions than most will tolerate.
“You’re prioritising convenience over the planet,” some will say, ignoring the part where I explained it’s more survival than convenience – and not truly understanding that the classic Australian family life in the suburbs can’t be lived without a car. You can’t just ride or taxi or bus or train your way through these commitments with any sort of reliable consistency. Not over the long term. (I’m happy to discuss this, but I warn you I’ve thought about it a lot.)
It’s here that we could armour up and throw ourselves into a fight about the necessary sacrifices parents and families should be making for the greater good. You could say that moving to the suburbs with my family might feel traditional and smart, but the resulting reliance on cars is only contributing to a worse future for my children, and teaching them to depend on cars as much we’ve always done.
Frankly, you’d be right. I really believe that. Hell, it’s a big part of why we moved to Berlin. But, apartments are normal in Europe. Walking and riding and taking a tram or train are normal in Europe.
They’ve never been normal in Australia, and, as a related aside, you can trust me on this: Many Germans still move to the suburbs, and cars are just as beloved here as they are in Australia – it’s just that there’s more of everything here. Well, everything except land.
View on Threads
But, in Australia, the sacrifice – choosing to live in a smaller home in a more dense and walkable area – is harder to make than many people realise.
That’s because a lot of apartments in Australian cities are made for two, maybe three types of people: wealthy families who can afford a 3-4 bedroom apartment, couples who only need one bedroom and maybe a small study, and the third: the investor who rents or AirBNBs those apartments out.
Apartments also make terrible investments, given that these days they’re often built to poor standards (so are houses, but there’s generally no bodycorp to make things harder), and 2you’ll broadly pay ‘more for less’, as has always been the case when location is considered a selling point.
The anti-car argument has a fair retort, though: If you don’t own a car, you’re freed of the average Aussie’s second-biggest living cost, allowing you to swallow bigger costs in the apartment life. That’s true, too.
Alas, getting bogged down in all of that (and boy could I go on) ignores a couple of dealbreaker-level points: When you’re chasing social change, you have to either convince people to go willingly, or regulate them into compliance.
If you want to change any deeply entrenched habit, especially one supported by decades of shortsighted city planning, you won’t get there by angering and belittling and condescending to the people whose lives and routines will be most affected.
View on Threads
Your battle is with the lying greed and desperation that moves politics. You know that. You probably vote Greens, just like me, hoping to force change where it can’t be made out of conscience alone.
But, as the election results always show, it’s not enough to vote for your local inner-suburban Greens rep and the Greens party in the Federal elections.
It really means getting involved in local council elections in the outer suburbs. You can’t vote there if you don’t live there, obviously, but you can volunteer to door-knock and staff the phones for the poor beleagured Greens reps trying to win over the suburban tradies and business owners that generally throw their lot in with the Libs or, if they’re a little more socially progressive, the Libs Lite ALP.
We’re seeing more Aussies than ever before voting for the Greens, but it’s still a very ‘inner’ thing. There are Greens voters in the outer suburbs, but not many. (Ironically, it’s probably mostly those that moved out there from a life in the inner suburbs, so don’t hate on us outer suburbanites too evenly.)
In terms of cars and high-density living, here’s what you’re up against in the outer suburbs: The people already living there don’t want apartment blocks.
NIMBYism, right? To them, it means an end to the quiet neighbourhood feel they love, it means too many people, which in their mind means more traffic, because they can’t immediately imagine any other outcome.
But more people means a wealthier council. It means more local amenities. It should also mean greater investment in better and more regular public transport, and dedicated cycling infrastructure. But don’t go thinking you can win the argument as easily as that, because they’ll remind you that if the infrastructure isn’t done wisely (and it often isn’t), more buses can mean more traffic stops, and more cycling lanes can mean narrower roads and fewer parking spots.
All of that can be resolved by simply doing things right, but you’re asking them to trust that it will be. And that it won’t be a years-long process with noise and annoying roadworks and closures and power outages as the grid struggles with new demand (mandatory rooftop solar please!), and so on.
You’re asking them to disrupt their lives for a long-term win. Have you met many people prepared to do that? (Promise them some renovations to the local clubrooms and ovals and you’d be off to a good start…)
It’s a lot. So do your reading, speak to their councils and the roads agencies and all the rest, so that you can win suburban motorists over to that long-term goal. Hell, what are you doing arguing for something you’re not qualified to talk about? So get that part down.
View on Threads
Lastly… go gently.
When you’re trying to win over a classic Aussie who grew up in the suburbs and holds tightly to the romanticism and nostalgia of their childhood, in a time when they beseiged by a woke left out to take away everything they know… think of them more as the loved family member you had to firmly but carefully talk down from the ledge of conspiracy theories that plagued us during COVID. (If you were able. If you tried.)
Remember that they’re intelligent people (they are), and none of them are monsters, but many of them have had their fears and frustrations stoked by a breed of politicians, YouTubers and Podcasters who – to their credit – are far more experienced and advanced in the psychological war than those of us who’ve spent too much of our lives assuming good people will always eventually know right from wrong.
It can’t be done with anger. It probably can’t be be done online, either. Sit down with your closest right-wing voters, listen to them, hear them. Don’t condescend to them. Write down their concerns, right or wrong. If you don’t know the answer, ask them if you can look into it and come back to them with what you find.
When I’ve had the energy to do all of that (it’s bloody hard), I’ve been hopeful that good folks can be pulled back from the brink.
Am I gonna end this with a Star Wars quote? Bet.
Leave a Reply