Australia’s biggest cities are being urged by urban planners to adopt trackless tram technology to curb emissions and improve convenience for its outer residents.
Mike Day, a founding partner at Hatch RobertsDay—an urban strategy consulting firm—has this week come out advocating for the technology after it was trialled by the City of Stirling local government area (LGA) in Perth.
“The greatest attribute of these trackless trams is there’s no need to lay tracks and multi-millions of dollars aren’t spent ripping up roads and putting in steel tracks,” Mr. Day reported AAP.
Mr. Day said the trams will alleviate costs for residents living in the outer suburbs of Australia’s cities by providing an affordable means of travelling to the CBD.
“It’s becoming a myth that there’s affordable housing out in the suburbs because the cost of transport is exceeding the cost of houses,” he said.
Trackless Trams
Trackless trams are purported by many of their proponents to be a hybrid technology of a bus and light rail.Instead of being guided by physical tracks, their direction is led by a digital rail that interacts with the sensors built into the trams themselves.
They also run on rubber tyres instead of steel ones.
Although a primitive means of public transport, the technology is currently being trialled and tested by a number of jurisdictions across the globe.
In October 2023, the City of Stirling in Western Australia—an LGA stretching from inner-city Perth to the Scarborough Beach precinct—announced it would trial trackless trams along a newly-created route until November.
The $2 million trial was funded by the Commonwealth Government’s Urban Congestion Fund (UCF), a publicly-financed endowment solely dedicated to curtailing traffic.
Although touted for their many benefits, trackless trams aren’t without their fair share of critics.
Reece Martin—a Canadian public transport expert and contributor to online publication UrbanToronto—has described the invention as a gadgetbahn, a public transport concept that is innovative and futuristic in theory but far less feasible in practice.
“If there was some new technology that was much cheaper and better than the transit options we have today, don’t you think that some of the world’s leading public transit cities like Hong Kong, London, Madrid or Paris would be adopting it?”
15-Minute Cities
Trackless trams have also been linked to the recently popularised concept of 15- and 20-minute cities.In October 2021, prominent demographer and self-proclaimed “futurist” Bernard Salt expressed this link upon promoting the usage of trackless trams in Melbourne.
“I think at the moment all Melburnians need something positive and aspirational to look forward to,” Mr. Salt said.
“This is the idea of the twenty-minute city.”
The idea of a 15- or 20-minute city, as they are sometimes referred to, is an urban planning concept famously coined by Franco-Colombian urban planner and researcher Carlos Moreno at the 2015 Paris United Nations Climate Change (COP 21) conference.
The idea is for a city’s residents to be able to readily access all of their daily needs within no more than a 15-minute commute from their homes.
Fifteen-minute cities have particularly drawn support from environmentalists and proponents of net-zero emissions by 2050 because of the apparent benefits they yield in terms of sustainability.
According to many of the concept’s advocates, by placing a city’s residents within a small radius from one another, they may be more inclined to use public transport or ride bicycles as opposed to driving their own vehicles around.
Fifteen-minute cities have also drawn widespread criticism from detractors who claim the concept is a testament to the growing encroachment of big government on the lives of everyday Western citizens.
In October 2023, Britain’s Secretary of State for Transport, Mark Harper, made a speech in opposition to the “sinister” plans by local councils to “decide how often you go to the shops, and that they can ration who uses the roads and when.”
Days later, Britain’s Secretary of State for Nuclear and Networks Andrew Bowie appeared on BBC Radio, maintaining that people are worried that 15-minute cities are an infringement on their liberties.
