Conceptualizing choices in the commuter belt: travel time and journeys to work in late twentieth-century Sydney and Melbourne, Australia

Abstract

This article examines media discourse about commuting travel time in Australia’s two largest metropolitan areas – Sydney and Melbourne – between 1970 and 2000. In major newspapers from each of the cities, reportage and commentary conveyed expanding commuting geographies oriented towards the mass pursuit of home ownership enabled by public policy and reflective of pluralism around households’ time use preferences. In a period when time use was widely understood as increasingly pressured, the choices available to households were frequently portrayed as responding to a wide range of opportunities but co-existed with discourses of market-driven compromise and consequences.

Commuting between home and workplace inherently embodies choices. In any given city, historical decisions, typically by public bodies and businesses involved in urban development and transport, determine where housing and jobs are located and the possibilities for travelling between the two. Within this context, people typically make a string of related decisions about where to live and work, and otherwise how to best make trips to places requiring their own or their household members’ physical presence. Such choices often involve an element of compromise.

Political discourse in liberal democracies throughout the second half of the twentieth century frequently turned around positioning about choice. Those, for example, seeing markets as a vehicle for freedom, or seeking to extend or protect reproductive rights, explicitly used the language of choice, with the implication that those opposed to their ideas were proponents of compulsion.¹ An enormous body of social, economic and psychological research continued to explore choice, including, for example, the malleability of choice and the limits of rationality in decision-making.² Choice politics also had an important influence on cities. The idea of a ‘property owning democracy’ emerged as a slogan in the United Kingdom in the 1920s, and commitments to home ownership as a choice became entrenched across much of the political spectrum in Anglophone countries after World War II.³ Urban planning’s supporters sometimes presented it as a means of enabling efficiencies and fairness around property choices, while detractors saw planning as impairing or antithetical to choice. This included, for example, narrow critiques around freedom and land use, or more broadly, that planning was inflexible, ineffective or did not reflect the pluralism of societies.⁴

A key but underexamined aspect of commuting choice – and compromise – is how travel time has been discursively understood.⁵ Time use choice more broadly underwent important shifts in the decades after World War II that were directly related to commuting. The most significant of these was the increased participation of women in the labour market in many countries. Historians have suggested this was driven by a combination of changing views of women’s agency and self-realization, along with households’ desires to increase their ability to purchase consumer goods.⁶ However, researchers of time use in the post-war period have also drawn attention to gender inequities. The idea of ‘double duty’ or a ‘double shift’ was frequently used to describe continuing social expectations – and realities – that women’s paid employment had to be balanced with their primary responsibility for unpaid domestic work.⁷ Separately, the structural economic transformations that began in the 1970s gave rise to new regimes of work in different countries that led to time use becoming perceived as more fluid and pressured.⁸

Against this background, this article examines public discourse around commuting travel time and choice in Australia between the 1970s and the end of the twentieth century through the lens of media reporting and commentary. In doing so, it focuses on Sydney and Melbourne, the nation’s two largest metropolises. In the year 2000, the former had just over four million residents, and the latter approximately three-and-a-half million residents, with their populations having growth substantially since World War II. Both were physically expansive, with low density suburbs extending in many directions around their central business districts (CBDs). While there was significant commercial and industrial decentralization to their suburbs after 1945, both CBDs remained important employment centres, hosting the central institutions of state governments along with the head offices of many of the nation’s largest businesses, known colloquially in Australia as ‘the big end of town’. Each was the focus of their metropolitan areas’ radial road and public transport networks.⁹

The analysis will be based on daily newspapers from the two cities – the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) (including its Sunday edition, The Sun-Herald) and Melbourne’s The Age (including The Sunday Age).¹⁰ Both were established in the nineteenth century, with the SMH being Australia’s oldest continuously published newspaper. Each is considered a newspaper of record, undertakes serious public interest journalism and has historically had broad national influence. During the study period, both were published as broadsheets, associated with general middle-class readership (that is, distinct from tabloids oriented towards working-class readership or the specialized business press), had large circulations and were editorially liberal conservative but not consistently party partisan.¹¹ Given their status, researchers have frequently used them as the basis for discursive analyses of life in the two cities.¹²

Examining their discourses around commuting offers perspectives on changing intersections of mobility, time use and choice politics with potentially wider resonances in other large cities, particularly across liberal democracies. After reviewing previous international and Australian research on late twentieth-century commuting and choice, it will be observed that both cities in this period had expanding geographies of perceived opportunity and compromise. The analysis will then turn to certain recurring discursive features around commuting travel time – limits of choice, reporting of the consequences of choices, gendered commuting differences and business and governmental positioning as facilitators of choice.

Commuting and choice in the late twentieth century

Understandings of commuting and choice underwent significant change during the second half of the twentieth century, especially in places where mass automobility reshaped housing markets, impacting on the use of other forms of transport and otherwise altered subjectivities in myriad ways. As archetypically embodied by Los Angeles and its freeways, access to car ownership and improved road networks were widely perceived as an extension of temporal and spatial agency and a manifestation of liberal democracy.¹³

Considerable research sought to understand the choice implications of the massification of the private car, including measuring travel behaviour through large sample surveys that assessed time allocated to travel, especially for journeys to work. Combined with ever-increasing computing power, such surveys helped to inform iteratively more sophisticated attempts to model mobility choices in light of different transport infrastructure scenarios, public transport service levels and land use arrangements at a metropolitan scale. Originating in the United States, such methods were adopted around the world.¹⁴ In parallel, urban economists analysed the role of commuting in residential location decision-making by households.¹⁵ The concept of travel time budgeting advanced by some researchers argued that most people made choices so as to not spend more than a given amount of time a day commuting, thus impacting on their housing and employment decision-making.¹⁶

However, research found that commuting patterns were not uniform and choices were not evenly distributed. Gender analysis suggested that within families men typically had primary access to a vehicle and tended to travel further, especially more than married women balancing domestic labour.¹⁷ The impaired access of Black Americans to suburbanization also extended to automobility, which in turn had commuting and time use implications.¹⁸ As the physical extent of many cities expanded, some analysis explored what was seen as ‘excess commuting’ or ‘wasteful commuting’.¹⁹ The term ‘exurbia’ came into use to describe places physically beyond traditional suburbia but which nonetheless maintained long-distance commuting relationships with established employment centres.²⁰ Many of the key spatial planning concepts of the twentieth century – for example, the ‘neighbourhood unit’, the ‘linear city’, ‘satellite cities’ or ‘the new urbanism’ – sought to ‘contain’ the need to travel within cities.²¹

Australia’s experience of commuting and choice both reflected and differed from that of other higher income countries. Large-scale travel behaviour surveys were conducted by public bodies to inform metropolitan and transport planning. For example, in the early 1970s the federal government’s Cities Commission analysed commuting within broader household time use in Melbourne and the smaller regional city of Albury-Wodonga.²² Journey to work questions in the national census found that car use for commuting rose substantially between the mid-1970s and the end of the century, while public transport use in Sydney fell from 30 per cent to just above 20 per cent and in Melbourne fell from around 25 per cent to less than 15 per cent. Most of this patronage loss came from buses. However, both cities retained passenger rail networks that were crucial for moving commuters to their CBDs. Although they did not have large mode shares from metropolitan-wide perspectives, trams in Melbourne and ferries in Sydney were significant in certain areas.²³

Much analysis focused on the commuting implications of the national model of suburban development. Most existing housing stock took the form of detached single-family dwellings, while new housing was predominantly built on the outer fringes of metropolitan areas where subdivided land was generally available and relatively affordable, if not always well serviced by utilities and other forms of infrastructure.²⁴ Longitudinal studies of the pricing of Australian urban housing in the twentieth century identified a ‘pricing decay gradient’ whereby prices tended to fall with distance from CBDs.²⁵ The Melbourne architectural critic and historian Robin Boyd complained that post-war ‘the little man could still build his own private castle but…it would be so remote from his work that at least one-eighth of his waking hours would be taken in travel’.²⁶ Hugh Stretton was perhaps Australia’s most celebrated observer of urban development in the century’s latter decades and a champion of low-density suburbia from a social democratic perspective. In Stretton’s view, this form of suburban development reflected ‘choice [that] was real, and free’ and contrasted with European planning that limited households wishing to pursue more private space. Nonetheless, he also acknowledged that this form of choice entailed ‘compulsory travelling’.²⁷ The most intensive academic research into Sydney’s commuting patterns in the 1970s was undertaken by the urban economist Ian Manning. Using the census and other data, he comprehensively mapped origins and destinations, estimated relative public and private costs and assessed differences in how women and men travelled to work. Overall, his judgements were that ‘much of the burden of the journey to work is shouldered voluntarily’ and ‘the workers of Sydney choose to travel further than they might’.²⁸ Another prominent urban economist, Max Neutze, similarly suggested that while households took into account ‘convenience to jobs’ when deciding where to live, ultimately the most important factor was ‘the availability of a suitable house at a price they could afford’.²⁹

The later decades of the century also saw significant research into locational inequality within cities, including its intersections with mobility. This sometimes suggested that while households might choose to live in the outer suburbs for housing reasons, they also often faced transport related disadvantages. One study, for example, argued that ‘in a society where home ownership is the norm, freedom of locational choice is a very narrow concept indeed’ for lower income households that were unable to purchase housing in more central suburbs.³⁰ Certain outer suburban places, particularly those that had seen large-scale manufacturing job losses, came to be stigmatized and associated with a lack of choice.³¹ Following from the introduction of ‘urban consolidation’ policies by state governments, in part explicitly to provide more housing choices, researchers examined the supply of higher density dwellings relative to households’ preferences. This frequently intersected with debate among planning academics and practitioners about the ability of governments to reduce ‘car dependency’ and provide transit as a viable choice in suburbia.³²

Opportunities for compromise in the commuter belt

Discourse about commuting travel time in the SMH and The Age was a recurring aspect of their reporting on life in Sydney and Melbourne respectively from the 1970s to the end of the century. As well as running articles and commentary on commuting as such, both newspapers engaged with journeys to work via content discussing employment, housing and domestic life. Commuting also intersected with political and business news reporting and much coverage took place in their real estate sections.

This discourse explicitly and implicitly dealt with choices. Places to live and options to buy residential property were discussed in terms of their commuting implications. However, rental opportunities received little coverage, despite this accounting for a quarter to a third of households.³³ Alongside travel by private car, the effectiveness of public transport networks was seen as a topic of general interest, although train commuting received more reportage than travel by bus or other transit modes. In sum, both newspapers produced content that provided guidance about commuting for their readers and sought to conceptualize the choices and compromises available. In doing so, they replicated public discourse common in choice-oriented societies seeking to enable people to make informed but potentially divergent choices.³⁴

A recurring feature of the conceptualization of choice and compromise in both cities, which echoed vernacular geographies of London, was the idea of a ‘commuter belt’. This was primarily related to their CBDs and was used to label outlying areas in regard to the housing market and mobility changes. In Sydney, the labelling of places within the ‘commuter belt’ expanded ever further west, north and south, taking in areas contiguous to the existing edges of suburbia, but also bringing into the commuter orbit places well beyond the metropolis’ traditional administrative boundaries.

Northwards, the peri-urban Central Coast region (see Figure 1) came to be routinely identified as a commuter belt area. A major impetus was the electrification of passenger rail services to the region’s main centre of Gosford in 1960. This service improvement was extended further north into the 1990s, as was a motorway that also increased the region’s connectivity to Sydney. While there were attempts by planners to foster local employment, and notwithstanding typical return travel times of three to four hours, long-distance commuting to Sydney was integral to the region’s growth from a population of around 90,000 in the early 1970s to nearly 290,000 by the end of the century, when about a third of the workforce travelled to the metropolis.³⁵

Figure 1. Sydney metropolitan area and surrounds. Map based on Geoscience Australia Portal (portal.ga.gov.au) by Geoscience Australia which is © Commonwealth of Australia and is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence and is subject to the disclaimer of warranties in section 5 of that licence.

SMH reporting in the 1980s on Sydney’s ‘ever-widening commuter belt’ also mapped it as covering Western Sydney’s Campbelltown, extending even further west into the Blue Mountains, along with taking in the Illawarra region to the south (see Figure 1).³⁶ A 1990 SMH feature similarly outlined ‘where commuters choose to live’ and profiled one-way rail travel times to the CBD as far as one hour and 40 minutes away to the north (from Wyong on the Central Coast), two hours and five minutes away to the west (from Mt Victoria in the Blue Mountains) and one hour and 50 minutes away to the south (from Albion Park in the Illawarra region).³⁷ A further 1999 SMH review of ‘Sydney’s expanding commuter belt’ extended it to Bowral (see Figure 1), notwithstanding an estimated (one-way) 90-minute driving time or two-hour rail journey to the CBD, and generalized it as a part of a ‘comfort zone’ of potentially attractive choices for some.³⁸

The idea of a commuter belt likewise existed in Melbourne as a way to conceptualize time, space and choice. In the early 1970s, the chairman of the state government railways speculated that a fast passenger rail system ‘could become viable as a distant – say, 80 or 90 kilometres – commuter belt appears’.³⁹ Many localities, particularly in the city’s south and east (see Figure 2), were labelled by The Age as forming part of a commuter belt. For example, the federal electorate of Deakin, taking in the suburbs of ‘Forest Hill, Blackburn, Nunawading, Mitcham, Burwood East, parts of Vermont’ was described in the 1980s as a ‘predominantly middle-class…commuter belt developed during the 1960s’, while in the 1990s ‘suburbs like Ormond, Bentleigh, and McKinnon’ were said to be ‘no longer second choice’ and ‘transforming from boring commuter belt to sought-after real estate’.⁴⁰ A 1995 advertorial piece in The Age titled ‘Where to live: the choice is yours’ suggested that ‘unlike the hapless squeezed out Londoners, we live further out mostly by choice’. It went on to discuss ‘end-of-the-line areas [that] have become the backbone of the commuter belt’ and sundry other ‘commuter belt regions…to the east, south to the peninsula, and along the northern growth-corridor’ that ‘for those who are willing to travel a little longer to work’ were ‘wonderful places to live’.⁴¹ Another feature the following year noted that ‘plenty of us spend over an hour in the car commuting to work’ and drew attention to the possibilities of a series of outer suburban localities and adjacent regional cities with train travel times of between just under an hour (Frankston) and one hour and 20 minutes (Ballarat) (see Figure 2).⁴²

Figure 2. Melbourne metropolitan area and surrounds. Map based on Geoscience Australia Portal (portal.ga.gov.au) by Geoscience Australia which is © Commonwealth of Australia and is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence and is subject to the disclaimer of warranties in section 5 of that licence.

These possibilities, in both Sydney and Melbourne, spanned the general attractions of suburbia, such as the opportunity to own a detached house with a garden, as well as more localized factors associated with a particular place. Many people were reported seeing their time use decisions in terms of either basic affordability (that is, an ability to enter home ownership or not) or thrift (that is, relative value-for-money within wider market pricing). In the 1970s, a Blue Mountains resident attending a meeting protesting a pending increase in train fares complained ‘we moved out here for cheaper land, but it looks like it’s a waste of time. With the fare increases we’re back where we started.’⁴³ Similarly, a Central Coast commuter in another 1970s SMH article stated ‘when we first moved up here the difference in cost to me for a week between a house in Sydney and Woy Woy was about $60…this was against the rail fares which were $5 a week’.⁴⁴ Outside of Melbourne, The Age said that ‘Geelong offers excellent value’ encompassing ‘a more relaxed lifestyle, and more importantly, cheaper housing’ for those willing to undertake car or train journeys to the metropolis of ‘about an hour’.⁴⁵

As in countless suburbs in Australia and elsewhere, space and newness were highlighted as pull factors to some recent arrivals to Western Sydney’s Campbelltown in the 1980s. While the SMH reported ‘long hours are spent travelling to and from work’, one resident’s view was ‘here we can have the kind of home we want. We could never have afforded a house like this in the City’, referring to what was described by the reporter as a ‘large, three-year old brick house [which] must be the answer to the dreams of many Australian would-be home owners. It has three single bedrooms, a large master bedroom with en suite bathroom, a sitting room-family room, a “formal” entertainment area…’.⁴⁶ Commuting would underpin this area’s population growth from less than 20,000 to nearly 150,000 residents between the 1960s and 1990s.⁴⁷

The historian Graeme Davison has argued that the development of British and Australian suburbia has been long underpinned by a ‘logic of avoidance’ vis-à-vis place-based health and moral risk.⁴⁸ In this vein, a further common opportunity identified by the SMH and The Age as influencing choices was perceived escape or access to places seen as having rural attributes that differed from standard suburbia. Urban pollution and social challenges were prominent issues in the Australian media in the 1970s and trading off travel time was portrayed as a means of mitigation. For example, the Central Coast’s long-distance commuters whose lives were, on the one hand, described as ‘frustrating’ or afflicted by ‘loneliness’, nonetheless were also said to value ‘escape from smog, noise, and traffic hassles’.⁴⁹ The features of ‘country’ places around Sydney and Melbourne were sometimes seen as particularly beneficial to child-rearing. In 1990, a Blue Mountains resident who commuted across the metropolis ‘every day’ was reported in the SMH as having chosen this arrangement ‘mainly to raise his kids in a more country environment’, saying ‘they can ride their bikes in the street and when you walk out the backdoor you’re in the bush’.⁵⁰ Similarly, in Melbourne a real estate feature in The Age suggested that for people willing to spend more than an hour on the train there were multiple places around the city where ‘you could be deep into the country, where houses are cheap and children can walk to school’. One rural commuter’s view was ‘I don’t care what you say, country kids are different, there’s less of the ratbag element.’⁵¹

Probably the most culturally esteemed landscape in late twentieth-century Australia was the coast. However, by this time much of the coastal land in proximity to central Sydney and Melbourne that was suitable for housing had already been developed and higher densities were often limited by resident activism and planning controls.⁵² Accordingly, developing new housing to meet continuing demand often occurred further outwards.⁵³ By the 1980s, when surveying ‘where to buy cheap waterfront homes’ the SMH listed places generally distant from the CBD, estuarine instead of ocean facing and where prices were still well in excess of the then metropolitan median.⁵⁴ To the north and south of Sydney, the Central Coast and Illawarra regions were frequently identified as choices for middle and lower income households wanting some sort of proximity to the coast. For example, a CBD-commuting ‘personnel officer’ living at a Central Coast suburb somewhat away from the shoreline was reported in 1990 as complaining that ‘the travelling gets annoying’ but noting that ‘if we moved back all we could afford would be a unit or villa. Here we have a beautiful four bedroom home close to beaches.’⁵⁵ Likewise, a health administrator who was travelling 90 minutes each way between the Illawarra suburb of Austinmer (see Figure 1) and her workplace in central Sydney in the late 1990s expressed the view that ‘I like my job and I like where I live’ where ‘nobody lives more than 10 minutes from the beach’.⁵⁶

Many of these coastal localities were previously leisure destinations and their characterization as places of commuting opportunity intersected with what historians have sometimes suggested as a general ascendency in Australia of holiday-mindedness.⁵⁷ Austinmer was described in SMH real estate reporting in the 1980s as ‘a former weekender settlement’ that was becoming part of Sydney’s commuter belt, and Katoomba (Blue Mountains) and Toukley (Central Coast) were portrayed in similar terms (see Figure 1).⁵⁸ This was followed in 1990 by Sydney’s outer metropolitan coast, along with the Blue Mountains, being said by the SMH to offer long-distance commuters a ‘cut-price, year-round, vacation lifestyle’.⁵⁹

The limits of choice, consequences and enablement

Public discourse about travel time also had other recurrent features. In Sydney and Melbourne, discourses about the limits of choice imposed by governments or markets co-existed with those of opportunities. In an extreme analogy, time spent travelling to work in Sydney by Central Coast residents was likened in the SMH by one commuter to ‘penal servitude’, implying punishment or, perhaps in the context of Australian folklore around convicts, injustice.⁶⁰ More common among this cohort was a view that ‘we have no choice’, with this being reported as due in part to the region’s lack of local employment.⁶¹ Federal government guidelines for income support were reported by The Age in 1979 as generally compelling unemployed people to accept jobs up to one-and-half-hours away from their homes.⁶²

Decisions made in the housing market early in one’s life were seen as binding people to places. A long-distance commuter in 1990 reflected in the SMH on a choice made in 1963: ‘I chose to live on the Central Coast back then because I couldn’t afford the house prices [in Sydney]…even now, financially I couldn’t go back.’⁶³ Real estate price surges are a recurrent feature of narratives of life in Sydney and were seen as having travel choice implications.⁶⁴ During one such market phase in the late 1980s, Campbelltown was viewed by the SMH as ‘being on the verge of pricing itself out of the reach of its traditional resident, the first-home buyer’, with a local real estate agent reflecting ‘the market has gone quite berserk. I have seen some booms but never anything like this.’⁶⁵ The relatively socio-economically advantaged were also said to be facing market constrained choices in the late 1990s, when the SMH reported Illawarra’s Stanwell Park (see Figure 1) as ‘rapidly becoming a dormitory suburb of the southern suburbs’ where ‘Doctors, lawyers, pilots, people who grew up in Cronulla [i.e. an affluent area much closer to central Sydney] but can’t afford a water view are coming’.⁶⁶

What may have once been a good choice might turn bad. Psychological and physical strains could accumulate, as in a case reported in the SMH in 1992 of one Illawarra commuter who had been travelling five hours daily to and from work for a year and said that ‘it really stresses you out…I suffer a lot from more headaches and I’m more irritable’.⁶⁷ Commentary sometimes suggested commuters’ travel time experiences were systemically deteriorating. Increasing road congestion worked against perceptions of expanded choice and its impact on journeys to work received ongoing coverage. For example, in the early 1990s a feature in The Age titled ‘The cars that ate Melbourne’ examined ‘how long does it take to drive 20 kilometres into the city during the morning peak hour’, finding that ‘motorists from the south and east face journeys of more than an hour’.⁶⁸ A planning consultant interviewed in a following article titled ‘And the worst is yet to come’ noted that while an economic recession had temporarily reduced work-related traffic ‘the 20-year trend is that the peak is getting longer and longer’.⁶⁹ More reporting from The Age the following year conveyed an ambiguous situation where a Melbourne real estate agent suggested that ‘a lot of people are coming to inner suburbs, mostly for convenience’ but also noted that ‘the effect on property prices of longer drive times is not as clear as it once might have been because inner suburbs…reached continuous peak traffic levels some time ago’.⁷⁰

Beyond total travel time, the consistency or reliability of journey times was a further source of pain. Chronic delays were reported across the Melbourne rail network in 1984, with a journalist at The Age half-joking that his colleagues had formed a ‘train travellers support group’, with one saying they were witnessing widespread ‘onset of commuter neurosis’ and ‘great aggression’ among passengers.⁷¹ In the midst of a period of ‘rail chaos’, according to the SMH in Sydney in the late 1980s, ‘punctuality and reliability’ were near the top of the list of issues in the findings of a public opinion survey commissioned by the State Rail Authority.⁷² The introduction of a new rail network timetable in Sydney in 1992 was again characterized by the SMH as ‘turmoil’ and numerous interviewed commuters complained of service cancellations leading to longer trips and overcrowding.⁷³

The reporting of choice and consequences was sometimes distinctly gendered. In keeping with historic Australian patterns of alcohol use, a SMH journalist estimated in the late 1970s that around a quarter of male Central Coast rail commuters ‘have a few beers’ on their journey home, despite the risk of being fined, with it being reported that ‘one indignant commuter claimed he deserved the same rights as the man who had a couple of beers in the pub after work’.⁷⁴ Sydney’s affluent peri-urban Baulkham Hills Shire (see Figure 1) was sometimes said to be part of the city’s ‘Bible belt’ and a 1981 SMH article emphasized the prevalence of traditional domestic arrangements whereby ‘five acre commuters’, that is, ‘the shire’s husbands’, were ‘absent for long hours, commonly from 7am to 7pm, commuting or pursuing their careers’. Meanwhile, it was reported ‘the wives preferred their suburban roles as full-time mothers. Few were anxious to return to the workforce despite the fact that a high proportion of them had tertiary qualifications.’⁷⁵ In contrast, the impact of unreliable trains on childcare arrangements was voiced by commuting women. During a period of rail disruptions in the early 1990s, a woman living in Western Sydney observed ‘I pay the Government $110 a week for day-care, but if the crowded trains don’t get me home on time, I’m slugged an extra $10 for the first ten minutes I’m late and then an extra $1 a minute after that. There’s no justice.’⁷⁶ Later that decade an Illawarra woman likewise explained her preference to drive: ‘I’d rather use public transport, but it’s too inflexible. If your train leaves at 4.38 and you take a long phone call at 4.20 your whole day can be stuffed. With kids in after-school care you can’t afford to be late because they turn into pumpkins at 6pm.’⁷⁷

In light of such issues, various social and technical changes were mooted. An early 1970s proposal by the Sydney Chamber of Commerce to ‘drastically stagger working hours’ through the generalized introduction of ‘flexitime’ arrangements was reported in The Sun-Herald as being opposed by a commuter advocacy group and most trade unions.⁷⁸ Telecommuting was put forward as a technically feasible means of reducing some individuals’ travel time but never actually broke through into mass adoption. In the 1980s, there was discussion of workplace-based childcare centres whose benefits were said to include ‘…less commuting. Workers are more likely to get to work on time. They are less tired having avoided the harrowing experience of dropping a child at Point B.’⁷⁹

Both politicians and businesses actively positioned themselves discursively as enablers of travel time choice through major transport infrastructure projects. For example, ahead of the 1972 federal election, the Leader of the Opposition pledged in Melbourne to construct additional tracks on existing rail lines to ‘allow express trains to operate from the rapidly developing outer suburbs’, saying ‘this will significantly reduce travel time’.⁸⁰ Before the 1999 Victorian state election, the Australian Labor Party committed to building a ‘fast rail link to Geelong which would reduce travel time to 45 minutes’ and to ‘reduce travel time to Ballarat to less than 60 minutes’.⁸¹ This can be readily viewed as a continuation of the long-standing practice of Australian governments of facilitating favoured constituencies’ access to property ownership and otherwise generally subsidizing suburbanization.⁸² However, Australian transport infrastructure planning had an uneven trajectory over the late twentieth century. Environmental opposition curtailed many major urban road projects from the early 1970s, particularly where they would impact on existing suburbs or native vegetation.⁸³ Federal government spending on urban public transport was also highly variable.⁸⁴

Nonetheless, a wave of major road projects progressed during the 1980s and 1990s, in part the result of new models of public-private financing gaining traction and the increased use of tunnelling. The SMH and The Age reported travel time savings estimated in the planning of these projects, such as, for example, the proposition that Sydney’s Eastern Distributor ‘may save up to 60,000 motorists up to 40 minutes each day’, or contour mapping of time savings across different parts of Melbourne anticipated from the City Link project to develop 22 kilometres of motorway, including between the CBD and the city’s main airport, while also centrally connecting other major roads.⁸⁵

However, the veracity of such claims was often contested. Ahead of the construction of Sydney’s M2 motorway, a 1994 letter writer to the SMH invoked previous road projects and argued that ‘travel time savings, even the genuine ones which delighted motorists when the F3 [i.e. another motorway] opened…disappear quickly as more motorists are encouraged to commute by car’.⁸⁶ Subsequently, a 1997 SMH article outlined the findings of a motorist lobby group’s report that the M2 was indeed ‘not the success story for [drivers] that they [the motorway’s private operators] would have hoped for’, with calculations suggesting that while the link offered travel time savings of up to 35 minutes, peak hour train travel was cheaper and faster.⁸⁷ Later in the decade the SMH reported that Truth Against Motorways, a group opposing the Eastern Distributor, litigated against the project’s financiers alleging ‘false and misleading conduct’, with it emerging that there were competing forecasts for the use of the road at given levels of travel time savings and toll pricing.⁸⁸

Project proponents also ran advertising campaigns articulating time benefits. Advertisements for the City Link in The Age, for example, presented estimates such as ‘travel time along the South Eastern Arterial from Dandenong to the city will be reduced by 20 minutes’ as ‘facts’ that ‘speak for themselves’.⁸⁹ The City Link’s project director also made himself available for an extended interview with The Age and used it to communicate that ‘we have to deliver travel time savings, travel certainty, and hassle-free driving…that’s what this is mainly about for commuters, and if we don’t we won’t have a business’.⁹⁰

Conclusions

Conceptualizations of choice were thus central to public discourse about travel time and commuting in Australia’s two largest cities in the latter decades of the twentieth century. The SMH and The Age reported extensively on the temporal aspects of commuting choices, informing their readers of opportunities and compromises. Travel time was presented as convertible into, variously, more space, value-for-money, better environments for raising children or access to esteemed landscapes – especially the coast – with the selection of particular places being framed as articulations of household agency and priorities. Readers were also frequently warned of the potential negative consequences of choices. In keeping with gendered differences in commuting patterns measured in travel behaviour surveys, media discourse also articulated different experiences for women and men. For example, travel time unreliability during commutes was framed as a particular risk for women, given their households’ childcare arrangements. Occasionally, limits of choice were demarcated, and certain commuting was said to be forced or pressured because of factors that included housing market pricing dynamics or the absence of local employment. Both commuting by car and by public transport were seen as normative, with much coverage being given to the experiences of people travelling by rail into the cities’ CBDs.

Changing understandings of travel time remade places. The growth of Western Sydney as a whole, and places within it such as Campbelltown, was accompanied by considerable local industrial and commercial development but also the normalization of long journeys to the CBD or other older centres of employment.⁹¹ Further afield, the commuting-influenced growth of places such as the Central Coast resonated with spreading ‘exurbia’ around other major cities internationally where households sought to strike balances between work, housing and lifestyle considerations such as access to beaches, if at great distances from traditional centres.⁹² Discourse in both Sydney and Melbourne aligned with observations elsewhere that improved experiences of mobility as the twentieth century progressed often led to households allocating time to commuting instead of making adjustments in their employment or housing location.⁹³

Business and governments intersected with this travel time discourse in many ways. Much of the discussion of commuting choice took place via real estate market reporting. In keeping with wider contemporaneous political rhetoric around a ‘property owning democracy’ or similar propositions, the discourse was overwhelmingly oriented towards household agency in pursuing home ownership as distinct from rental housing. Political parties campaigned on pledges to improve commuters’ lives, including explicitly in terms of travel times. In office, they pursued major transport infrastructure projects marketed to commuters on claimed travel time savings – a very literal form of choice infrastructure. Alongside other perspectives, such projects, and indeed their business models, were explicitly understood through the lens of household time use opportunities.⁹⁴ Ultimately, liberal democratic desires to enable property ownership and pluralism around time use choices prevailed over the social or environmental claims of travel containment as policy. Nonetheless, targeting travel time would continue to be an element of planning, both in the two cities and elsewhere, through propositions of the ‘20-minute neighbourhood’ or ‘30-minute city’.⁹⁵

Finally, this period further highlights the diversity of meanings associated with travel time. A broad literature has observed how mobility is imbued with emotions and intentions that are not necessarily well captured through benchmarking or applied economics.⁹⁶ As one strand of time use analysis has emphasized, many temporal choices can be viewed as ultimately discretionary even if the psychological and social pressures associated with these choices may also be very real in their experience.⁹⁷ While the allocation of significant amounts of people’s time to commuting was, so to speak, a mass movement, its practitioners in Sydney and Melbourne had many understandings of their journeys and choices.