April 27, 2016 - Elizabeth Farrelly
NVDA may not yet be your go-to acronym if you are an inner-city dweller but it could soon be.
One year after his election victory, NSW Premier Mike Baird says he has responded to concerns raised over the WestConnex motorway and Sydney's lockout laws.
It's war. That's the word on the streets of Rozelle and Balmain, at Newtown, Ashfield, St Peters and Haberfield. Mike's Motorway Madness is not their war of choice. They didn't start it and certainly didn't expect to be fighting it all over again. But it is war and, they say, they'll fight it to the end.
So NVDA - Non-Violent Direct Action - is a thing again. If you're a city dweller, NVDA is coming to a hood near you. Motorways are to the city what coal-and-gas are to the country: means for cynical government to funnel both private property and public interest into deep corporate pockets. The country defended itself with Lock the Gate. The city has NVDA. Watch for it.
Protests, heritage, bulldozers, arrests, civil disobedience training days. There's a deja vu to all this, as though history tripped and fell into a half-century repeat cycle. Remember Arthur Dent, from Hitchhiker's Guide, whose planet was demolished for a hyperspace bypass? That was 1978. Even then motorway madness was meme enough for satire. Now, in world terms, it is simply old-fashioned. Yet we're still doing it.
Back in the '70s, Sydney fought the insanity and won, which is why we still have an inner city to protect. Which is lucky, because inner Sydney is that rare thing, a truly unique Australian gem in the crown of world culture. We didn't make the harbour, and our outskirts are like outskirts anywhere. But inner Sydney – chaotic, muddled, incongruous and intricate as medieval tapestry – is exquisite.
Yet the Baird government is at war with it. You think I exaggerate? Consider the signs: the propaganda, the covert action, the tactical secrecy, the outright lies, the surprise attacks, the rampant midnight destruction. Its weapons are many: sell off, chop down, develop. But its two biggest guns – WestConnex and Sydney Light Rail – are designed for maximum destruction, camouflaged as transport necessity and aimed, from east and west, straight at Sydney's beautiful, irreplaceable heart.
Yes, light rail is great, but routing it needlessly to destroy thousands of trees so the racecourse can expand is callous and cynical, designed to hurt those it should serve. As to WestConnex, it is next-level stupid.
First, it won't help congestion. Traffic planners have known since the 1970s that motorways actually generate traffic, so any congestion-beating effect is rapidly lost. Second, its enviro-unfriendliness is immense: massive quantities of greenhouse-generating concrete, huge increase in fossil-fuel transport, furtherance of sprawl. Third, as US cities dramatically discovered, to destroy the inner city to get people to it makes less sense than fighting for peace.
So, yes, dumb idea, as even the Auditor-General has recognised. So the question is this. Is Baird's big infrastructure binge also Baird's revenge? Is this the fightback of suburban puritanism against the inner city's freewheeling creativity? Perhaps even the ghost of transport minister father acting through premier son?
Motorways presume an eternal present – a Pleasantville as soulless and airless as the traffic jams they generate – so it's ironic that you can't understand them without history. Invented by Mussolini, developed by Hitler, beloved by New York's infrastructure muscleman Robert Moses and perfected by Los Angeles, the motorway soon failed as a transport device but was promoted anyway, as many cities including LA are now discovering, by an unholy alliance of automotive and construction companies who conspired first to remove trams and then to build more, bigger roads.
Sydney escaped. We lost our trams, yes, and to a minister who walked through the revolving door to a bus-tyre company. But we avoided most of the motorways – thanks to one individual, Neville Wran.
In 1976, after years of anti-motorway protest under Askin, Wran came in on a promise to end the Los Angelisation of Sydney. Immediately, he set about selling off the motorway reserves.
That was then. But the dream wouldn't die. It persisted under the Greiner government (with transport minister Bruce Baird), when only intense community activism saved the lovely Wolli Creek valley from becoming an eight-lane motorway. (This heartening story, of saving Sydney from the terrible empty-heartedness that flattened so many cities, is entertainingly told in Gavin Gatenby's YouTube doco Saving Wolli Creek.)
Now, three decades on, Bruce's son Mike is driving the same bulldozer through great swaths of inner-city neighbourhoods, home to that same "protest" demographic. While Greiner, having revived the motorway dreaming in the form of WestConnex for Infrastructure NSW, is Sydney's toll-roads grandfather, associated as patron with lobbyist Infrastructure Partnerships Australia and as "adviser" with tollway giant Transurban.
Never mind that Sydney's toll-roads have generally been catastrophes. Never mind that WestConnex is already 70 per cent over cost ($16.8 billion instead of $10 billion), or that the NSW Auditor-General expressed no confidence in its tendering, risk management or business case, or that billions of dollars in contracts were let before the business case was finalised, or that hundreds of submissions to that EIS were improperly treated.
Never mind that we, the NSW public, will pay exorbitantly to fund this most private of public assets – then pay again, between $16 and $26, to use the thing. Or that the tram (which might have helped ease congestion) was the first "luxury" to be excised in design, or that entire hectares of Rozelle waterfront and Sydney Park will disappear under LA-style concrete spaghetti.
Spare a thought for the thousands of teachers and tradies whose inner-west houses are being bulldozed or tunnelled under, including at least 50 listed heritage buildings. They are so undercompensated – often around half market value – that they'll likely end up at the far end of WestConnex, dependent on the public transport link it should provide but doesn't.
Usually, when history repeats, it's with a slight twist. Hence, the hipster is a hippie with 50 years added and the belief system removed. But this last might change. So rampantly unreconstructed is Mike's Motorway Madness that today's hipsters may need to dig deep – deeper than smiley Mike's tunnelling machines – find their beliefs and fight for them, if they want an inner city worth the name. NVDA.
Read more:
NVDA may not yet be your go-to acronym if you are an inner-city dweller but it could soon be.
One year after his election victory, NSW Premier Mike Baird says he has responded to concerns raised over the WestConnex motorway and Sydney's lockout laws.
It's war. That's the word on the streets of Rozelle and Balmain, at Newtown, Ashfield, St Peters and Haberfield. Mike's Motorway Madness is not their war of choice. They didn't start it and certainly didn't expect to be fighting it all over again. But it is war and, they say, they'll fight it to the end.
So NVDA - Non-Violent Direct Action - is a thing again. If you're a city dweller, NVDA is coming to a hood near you. Motorways are to the city what coal-and-gas are to the country: means for cynical government to funnel both private property and public interest into deep corporate pockets. The country defended itself with Lock the Gate. The city has NVDA. Watch for it.
Back in the '70s, Sydney fought the insanity and won, which is why we still have an inner city to protect. Which is lucky, because inner Sydney is that rare thing, a truly unique Australian gem in the crown of world culture. We didn't make the harbour, and our outskirts are like outskirts anywhere. But inner Sydney – chaotic, muddled, incongruous and intricate as medieval tapestry – is exquisite.
Yet the Baird government is at war with it. You think I exaggerate? Consider the signs: the propaganda, the covert action, the tactical secrecy, the outright lies, the surprise attacks, the rampant midnight destruction. Its weapons are many: sell off, chop down, develop. But its two biggest guns – WestConnex and Sydney Light Rail – are designed for maximum destruction, camouflaged as transport necessity and aimed, from east and west, straight at Sydney's beautiful, irreplaceable heart.
Yes, light rail is great, but routing it needlessly to destroy thousands of trees so the racecourse can expand is callous and cynical, designed to hurt those it should serve. As to WestConnex, it is next-level stupid.
First, it won't help congestion. Traffic planners have known since the 1970s that motorways actually generate traffic, so any congestion-beating effect is rapidly lost. Second, its enviro-unfriendliness is immense: massive quantities of greenhouse-generating concrete, huge increase in fossil-fuel transport, furtherance of sprawl. Third, as US cities dramatically discovered, to destroy the inner city to get people to it makes less sense than fighting for peace.
So, yes, dumb idea, as even the Auditor-General has recognised. So the question is this. Is Baird's big infrastructure binge also Baird's revenge? Is this the fightback of suburban puritanism against the inner city's freewheeling creativity? Perhaps even the ghost of transport minister father acting through premier son?
Motorways presume an eternal present – a Pleasantville as soulless and airless as the traffic jams they generate – so it's ironic that you can't understand them without history. Invented by Mussolini, developed by Hitler, beloved by New York's infrastructure muscleman Robert Moses and perfected by Los Angeles, the motorway soon failed as a transport device but was promoted anyway, as many cities including LA are now discovering, by an unholy alliance of automotive and construction companies who conspired first to remove trams and then to build more, bigger roads.
Sydney escaped. We lost our trams, yes, and to a minister who walked through the revolving door to a bus-tyre company. But we avoided most of the motorways – thanks to one individual, Neville Wran.
In 1976, after years of anti-motorway protest under Askin, Wran came in on a promise to end the Los Angelisation of Sydney. Immediately, he set about selling off the motorway reserves.
That was then. But the dream wouldn't die. It persisted under the Greiner government (with transport minister Bruce Baird), when only intense community activism saved the lovely Wolli Creek valley from becoming an eight-lane motorway. (This heartening story, of saving Sydney from the terrible empty-heartedness that flattened so many cities, is entertainingly told in Gavin Gatenby's YouTube doco Saving Wolli Creek.)
Now, three decades on, Bruce's son Mike is driving the same bulldozer through great swaths of inner-city neighbourhoods, home to that same "protest" demographic. While Greiner, having revived the motorway dreaming in the form of WestConnex for Infrastructure NSW, is Sydney's toll-roads grandfather, associated as patron with lobbyist Infrastructure Partnerships Australia and as "adviser" with tollway giant Transurban.
Never mind that Sydney's toll-roads have generally been catastrophes. Never mind that WestConnex is already 70 per cent over cost ($16.8 billion instead of $10 billion), or that the NSW Auditor-General expressed no confidence in its tendering, risk management or business case, or that billions of dollars in contracts were let before the business case was finalised, or that hundreds of submissions to that EIS were improperly treated.
Never mind that we, the NSW public, will pay exorbitantly to fund this most private of public assets – then pay again, between $16 and $26, to use the thing. Or that the tram (which might have helped ease congestion) was the first "luxury" to be excised in design, or that entire hectares of Rozelle waterfront and Sydney Park will disappear under LA-style concrete spaghetti.
Spare a thought for the thousands of teachers and tradies whose inner-west houses are being bulldozed or tunnelled under, including at least 50 listed heritage buildings. They are so undercompensated – often around half market value – that they'll likely end up at the far end of WestConnex, dependent on the public transport link it should provide but doesn't.
Usually, when history repeats, it's with a slight twist. Hence, the hipster is a hippie with 50 years added and the belief system removed. But this last might change. So rampantly unreconstructed is Mike's Motorway Madness that today's hipsters may need to dig deep – deeper than smiley Mike's tunnelling machines – find their beliefs and fight for them, if they want an inner city worth the name. NVDA.
Read more:
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