Time to take Yogi's advice - 'Take the fork in the road'

Victorians should be listening to what champion U.S. base-baller, Yogi Berra once said: “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

We have reached that inevitable fork in the road and yes, we are taking it, but sadly the wrong branch of the fork and so rather than easing our troubles we are actually worsening them.

Pages two and three of today’s Melbourne Age are almost entirely about Melbourne’s new $5.5 billion toll road and although many of the physical and economic costs are discussed, not a word is offered about the complications and implication of oil shortages and the curtailment it will have on vehicular traffic, not is any consideration, apparently, given to the urgent need to shift from private to public transport as the shadow of climate change grows even darker and more threatening.

Read the story in today’s Age – “Melbourne to get new western suburbs toll road.”

Victoria’s Andrew Government, like governments around the world, need to explain to its constituents that the party is over and that privately owned vehicles are “futureless” and so the emphasis, and the state’s resources, musty be applied to creating a sophisticated public transport system.

Government must lift its foot off the “spending on roads” throttle and at the same time inject the savings, along with new money, into a modern and sophisticated public system for moving both people and produce.

The unfolding dilemmas of climate change, along with the combined complications brought on by oil shortages, leave Victorians exposed, particularly once the road network become dinosaur-like and a severely disrupted climate brings changes not yet fully appreciated.

Although road networks are almost entirely publically funded and so a public asset, but the benefits go almost entirely to private enterprise and real societal progress hinges on someone with the necessary courage and version enlightening the conversation with ideas that focus on the wellbeing and contentment of people, rather than the short term needs of the economy.

- Robert McLean.