Clever Aussie map raises serious questions

The effect is hideous: most of Australia disappears while the cities — especially Sydney — get distended and overinflated.

This map raises serious questions.

Why are Australians crowded into so few cities? Shouldn’t we spread out more? Few of us want to live like hermits in the bush. But what about small towns? Should population be going into country towns instead of crowding into our big cities?

You only need to go out your front door in a big Australian city to realise how bad the traffic is. As cities get bigger, the number of people trying to reach any one place tends to rise, and that makes for more and more bottlenecks.

Australia has a weirdly large share of big cities for its size.

Australia has few small cities compared to the rest of the world. According to one analysis Australia has a greater share of urban population living in cities of over 750,000 people than any other major country. (The data is from the year 2000, but the latest census tells us capital cities have been growing faster than the rest of the country, so the pattern would be even stronger now.)

A lot of people argue we should stop population growth in the bigger cities. Put people in country towns, they say. Is that a good idea? What’s the right size for a city?

WHAT ARE CITIES FOR?

Land in cities is a lot more expensive than in the country. Obviously there must be a benefit to being in a city. What is it?

The answer is options. If you live in a small town there may be one employer and one or two shops. There may be a bowling club but not a soccer club. Life in a small town won’t suit everybody. The bigger the city the more options there are.

If you’re a heart surgeon or a motorbike mechanic, you probably can’t find enough clients if you set up shop in a town of 10,000. In a city of 3 million, you can.

In a bigger city you are more likely to get a job that matches your preferences, have friends that match your preferences, join a club that matches your preferences, and so on. This is what they call a network effect - the bigger the city is, the more options there are: in work, hobbies, live music, food and people.

This turns up in the statistics. Because people can specialise more, in big cities people are more productive on a per person basis. This is why people keep on moving to big cities. That’s where the money’s at.

So sending people to little cities might fix traffic, but we might end up ruining people’s options while making them (and us!) less well-off.

BUT: TRANSPORT COSTS A LOT

As cities get bigger, you need better transport. Having more options in your city is irrelevant if most of your city is too hard to get to.

At first, you have a village people can stroll around. This works until it gets too big.

Then you have a town that suits cars and bikes. This works for most people, but traffic gets worse and worse.

Next, you’re in a city that needs a bus system for a couple of crowded places.

Next you need a train system.

Finally you need a mass-transit subway that runs every few minutes.

Many of the most successful cities of the world got big after building excellent subways early in their existence — London, New York, Paris and Moscow are all famous for their subway systems.

China has recently realised that if it is going to have modern cities it needs to connect them via high quality subways. It has done so very quickly, as the following gif illustrates:

Source: Wikipedia Commons

So the problem is this. Big cities only work well if they have great transport infrastructure. And if you don’t built that infrastructure early on, it can become incredibly difficult to build it later, when your city is full of expensive land and high wages.

This is the problem in a lot of Australian cities. We didn’t build enough transport infrastructure, or we built the wrong kind. Sydney even pulled out its tram network around 70 years ago. Now we’re reaping the results of underinvestment in the form of bad traffic and crazy land prices in the places that do have good access.

That’s bad news. High land prices mean the benefit of cities go mostly to those who are already rich.

While building transport infrastructure seems to be expensive now, it is probably only going to get worse in future. It might be expensive, but it is not clear that it is too late to do so. Except for one little risk.

THE X FACTOR

Cities keep getting bigger. They’ve grown and grown. Even as the internet has meant we can communicate over thousands over kilometres, cities have been getting bigger and bigger, richer and richer.

But every trend has its breaking point. Logic says the internet can hurt cities. With a bit of remote working, Skype, social networking and a bit of shopping online, there’s little reason a person can’t live a varied life outside a city. It is not exactly likely that the internet will undermine cities. Not yet anyway. But it is not impossible.

Within our lifetimes there is a chance we will start to see people leaving cities in real numbers.

And if house prices keep going up in cities, there are lots of reasons for people to give it a try. If the centuries-long trend towards cities eventually falls apart, a lot of very expensive city infrastructure could end up being worthless. The people who make decisions on building infrastructure should not be worrying about this yet, but they should definitely be watching the trend so they know when it is time to worry.

Jason Murphy is an economist. He publishes the blog Thomas The Thinkengine. Follow Jason on Twitter @Jasemurphy

Originally published as Aussie map raises big questions