The delusion of the illusion

Rational, balanced, evidence-based policy left the room long ago. In its place, it seems all you need now is a clever looking infographic posted to social media, and you’ll be getting “likes” from thousands of professionals and community members already persuaded to a particular agenda and “wanting to believe.” Very few bother to question sources, motives, or logic. As US President John F Kennedy so famously said: “We prefer the comfort of opinions without the discomfort of thought.”

One recent example is this infographic, posted recently to Linkedin. Predictably, it’s received a lot of likes and “thumbs up” – including from some academics who you might imagine are trained to be sceptical. The infographic is effective and simple. The message is clear: one train equals 625 cars. Trains are good, cars are bad.

The source of the graphic has been cropped by the poster, but it was easily discovered thanks to Google. The origin was Seattle Subway (logo cropped bottom right). At first I thought this might be a public transit authority, but a further search revealed Seattle Subway is an “all-volunteer, grassroots organization dedicated to promoting high quality transit for Seattle and the Puget Sound Region on the fastest possible timeline.” So it’s a public transport lobby group. Nothing wrong with that at all, but being a lobby group means the infographic is suspect: it’s designed to promote their point of view, and their point of view only.

Plus, you could also question the extent to which transport circumstances in Seattle, Washington State, are comparable to Australian cities. The population of Seattle is 755,000 and it has enjoyed reasonable growth in public transport up until 2018/19. The public transport mode share was an impressive 23% of trips. But that’s within the Seattle City boundary. The greater Seattle metro area is home to 3.46 million people. The public transport mode share for the wider region is just 10%. And like cities the world over, public transport use has been adversely affected by Covid, and mode shares may take time to recover.

That’s enough for the source of our mis-information graphic. Now to the logic.

First, it assumes a four carriage train is 100% full, while 625 cars carry 1.6 persons on average. If cars were at capacity, they could carry 4 or even 5 people each. Meaning more like 250 cars applying the same occupancy logic. Not 625.

The buses must be big too. 15 buses for 1,000 people means 67 people per bus. Australian commuter buses carry around 44 seated. So the buses in this mis-infographic are also absolutely chockers.

But maybe the biggest fail in logic is the presumption that all 1000 people are leaving from the same place and going to the same destination. Trains are fixed route transport modes, with fixed stations and fixed schedules. They are the opposite of what we all do – varied routes, varied schedules, and often multiple destinations in the same trip (school drop off, work, gym, grocery store etc). The likelihood of all those cars and their passengers heading for the same destination and taking the same route as the people on the train, isn’t just remote but fanciful. That alone renders the mis-infographic closer to propaganda than anything else.

But simple messages are effective, and this flawed logic finds much support – especially amongst politicians who wilfully champion mega spending on transport projects that promise much but deliver little. Witness the latest Federal Budget which promises $1.6 billion toward the cost of a Beerwah to Maroochydore rail extension. The State Government needs to match that with another $1.6 billion. Perhaps tongue in cheek, the Courier Mail reported it would be “full-steam ahead on major rail projects” under the budget. Project enthusiast MP Ted O’Brien claimed “It will get people out of cars and onto trains.”

A couple of years ago I presented on employment trends to the Sunshine Coast Business Chamber, who were also enthusiastic supporters of heavy commuter rail. Except that (according to the Census) of the nearly 300,000 total residents, 140,000 were in the labour force and of these, only 2,739 commuted to inner Brisbane where the rail would take them if it existed. 101,000 worked locally (within the Sunshine Coast), 5,000 in neighbouring Noosa, 4,000 in neighbouring Moreton Bay and a further 2,900 in the balance of the Brisbane region.

So we could see another several billion of taxpayer funds invested into another heavy commuter rail project to take unimpressive numbers of commuters via fixed routes to fixed destinations on fixed schedules, when all about us life is heading in the opposite direction.

It wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was hope that someone was doing the practical research work on the future of autonomous, electric vehicles, more efficient use of existing road networks, micro mobilities, permitting jobs closer to where people live, the potential of drone delivery to reduce last mile delivery traffic, or other initiatives, on a bi-partisan and evidence-based approach.

Maybe what that needs is a clever infographic?