A centenary review of transport planning in Canberra, Australia

• During the 1970s and early 1980s, the growth in car usage in Canberra stopped.
• At the same time, public transport usage rates doubled.
• This demonstrates how a car-dominated city could change rapidly without changes to the built form.
• However, the story of this turnaround has been suppressed by planners and forgotten by historians.
• Canberra provides a model for other low-density cities seeking to reduce address car dominance.

For the most important periods in its 100-year history, Canberra, Australia, has been planned around the car, with eliminating traffic congestion the number one planning goal. During the last decade, this vision of Canberra has been increasingly questioned, with both Territory and Commonwealth planning bodies advocating a more ‘transit-oriented’ urban form. Trends in transport usage rates and mode shares have not, however, followed the new planning directions: the car remains dominant, while public transport usage rates remain much lower than those achieved in Canberra in past decades.The 2013 centenary of Canberra offers an opportunity to review the development of one of the world's few comprehensively planned capital cities. This paper explores the reasons behind Canberra's apparent ‘love affair’ with the car, and corresponding poor public transport performance. It traces trends in policies and usage rates over the last half-century. In particular, it explores the remarkable, but largely forgotten, transport turnaround that took place in Canberra between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s. Transport policy changes introduced by a reformist federal government saw public transport usage rates double in a decade, while car usage stopped growing.For a time it appeared that the national capital was leading the way towards a transit-oriented future. Significantly, the turnaround was achieved without any substantial change to Canberra's density and urban form. However, road-oriented planners reasserted control and the gains of the mid-1970s to mid-1980s were lost. Also lost was memory of the transport policies that produced these gains: the period was ‘written out’ of histories of Canberra's planning.The paper concludes by considering the extent to which transport policy and urban form have contributed to the changes in transport performance in Canberra over the decades. It examines current government policies designed to create a less car-dominated city in the light of these findings, concluding that present policies are based on a misunderstanding of the factors contributing to the dominance of the car and public transport's current poor performance. The story of how Canberra, a city planned for the car, could change direction so rapidly is important for Australian and international cities seeking to shift towards sustainable transport, because it suggests that urban form may not be an insuperable barrier to improved transport outcomes.