Rural Public Services by Richard E Lonsdale Gyorgy Enyedi

Author:Richard E Lonsdale, Gyorgy Enyedi [Richard E Lonsdale, Gyorgy Enyedi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781000310467
Google: 25SpDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-08-16T04:58:09+00:00

Roads and Public Transport

For a variety of reasons, rural communities have vigorously lobbied for large allocations of funds for road construction and maintenance. Rural Australians are highly mobile and accustomed to long-distance road travel, giving a high priority to all-weather, “hard-top” surfaces for fast, trouble-free driving. Road works also provide a significant boost to the local economy, because of their heavy demands for labor, equipment, fuel, and spare parts. The local tax burden is minimized by political lobbying to obtain favorable reimbursements from state and federal governments. During the 1950s and 1960s, grants formulae were unduly biased in favor of local rural roads, leading to some striking anomalies in the relationship between road quality and traffic volumes. In recent times, grants have become progressively more closely related to traffic demand.

Hard-top roads to the farm gate now exist generally throughout all areas with densities higher than one person per square kilometer, and are being extended beyond these zones. Main roads, even in sparsely populated areas, are usually hard-top. Under the Beef Roads Scheme, selected roads in the remote regions of the interior and far north were provided with single-width bitumen surfaces to enable reliable, speedy transport of beef cattle using road-trains. The federal government has approved a program to upgrade the national highway network which includes the main trunk highways in Australia’s most remote regions.

Thus roads have joined railways in the dual role of providing an essential local service while also sustaining local employment. State-owned railways continue to remain an important service in much of rural Australia, with freight services on branch lines used mainly for livestock, grain, equipment, and farm supplies, but with passenger services being retained only on main lines. All railway systems now experience heavy annual losses, with the only major profitable lines being those engaged in transporting large tonnages of minerals to export ports.

Long distances and the inadequacies of public land transport have ensured that rural Australia is unusually well serviced by airline routes. Small commuter aircraft, requiring a crew of two or three, are increasingly favored, particularly on the “outback” routes with a once-weekly service to cattle stations, aboriginal settlements, and other outposts. Generally the seemingly intricate rural air network looks impressive on a map, but is much less impressive when the timetables are examined, being characterized by low volume and low frequencies. Services also tend to wax and wane, being extremely sensitive to the fortunes of the rural economy.

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