Dispatches from the sunburned wastelands

Canberra is situated in the foothills of the Australian Alps, and is interspersed with a series of small hills, which makes the setting very scenic. It's also got a north and a south side, divided by a big man made lake (Lake Burley Griffin). Canberra is a peculiar city in many ways - It's brand new, for one: The Capital City of Australia was designed in the early 1900s (by a native of the USA, called Burley Griffin), and was laid out and constructed mostly in the 1950s.
The central part of the city, laid out as a massive circle, houses the Australian Parliament, and most of the federal government departments. The rest of Canberra was designed as a series of isolated villages, each one with a residential suburb surrounding a shopping district, with its own schools, libraries etc. The older suburbs were intially also laid out in a circular fashion, but luckily the madness was halted (have you ever tried to navigate through the streets of a strange ciy when every street is a circle?).

In between these villages are a multitude of green belts, parks and nature reserves, linked by 100s of kilometers of (mostly bike) trails. This sounds idyllic, but the problem is that this type of design creates a very low-density, dispersed city - It's great if you live in one of the villages/sububs, and need to go the shops, which are only a short stroll away. But, unfortunately, most people need to go to work...And therein lies the problem - you have to travel very long distances from the suburbs to your place of work, beause of all the nature reserves that get in the way of things like, well, roads. You will be forgiven if you thought that the Canberrans came up with a terrific public transport system to solve this probem...No, that's not the Australian Way. Here in the United States of Australia, the public transport system is so poorly executed, that nobody bothers using it...Yes, everyone drives to work, and thus negate all of the environmental benefits brought on by the the parks and green spaces (plus, it generates a vast amout of wallaby roadkill every day).

Posted by HannesB at 4:47 PM Comments