Many countries around the world are starting to lift the COVID-19 emergency measures and to slowly return back to normalcy. The reason, more than anything, seems to be to slow the effects of the anticipated recession as state funds are dwindling and money printing presses are running warm. The dos and don’ts of managing this health crisis, I leave to others to discuss. Instead, I want to think through travelling and transport choices in the COVID and post-COVID world. Clearly, many communities are put under enormous economic pressure, especially those that are dependent on tourism, and unemployment numbers are climbing. However, I argue that we should not be so quick to rush back to previous travelling behaviours and in this blog post I want to think through ways to advance to a new normalcy, rather than moving back to what was before.
Firstly, how will the pandemic affect the way we move in the city? The question of public transport is caught up in the issue of contamination as the system is currently built around a high density of bodies in shared spaces. During the last two months, a few times I have had to utilise public transport for essential travel, and the change in travelling behaviour is striking. The empty trams have an eerie feel to them with only a handful of passengers in the otherwise so packed spaces. Naturally, this is due to less people moving around in the city but during the last two months more people have also been selecting cycling over public transport. As we transition out of in-house lockdowns and people once again have a reason to move around the city, will people continue to avoid public transport in favour of cycling, or will there be an increase in the use of cars? Resorting to the private spaces of the individual vehicle is not an option for everyone and it is certainly not a sustainable one. Instead I suggest that other options should be explored. In Melbourne, following the examples of major cities around Europe, there is a proposal for footpaths and bike lanes to be expanded in order to provide alternatives to public transport and to allow for more distancing between people. This will be at the expense of on-street parking. These are great examples of the ways transitioning out of isolation can be combined with more sustainable patterns of life.
At the same time, the European Union is urging European countries to reopen the boarders. “This is not going to be a normal summer… but when we all do our part we don’t have to face a summer stuck at home or completely lost for tourism industry,” Margrethe Vestager, the EU Commission Executive Vice-President announced at a press conference last Wednesday. Although I strongly sympathise with the tourist industry and European countries dependent on wealthy tourists from abroad, let us consider alternative to air travel with less adverse effects on the environment.
Luxuries become habits and habits becomes taken for granted. Before the pandemic, travelling to faraway destinations was no longer a luxury but rather the bare minimum requirement for many. For the last two months, here in Melbourne, we haven’t been allowed to travel anywhere really. As someone who works from home, my life has consisted of a five-kilometre radius around my house, which is about as far as I get on my runs. To travel anywhere right now seems like a luxury to me. I long for the Victorian countryside outside of Melbourne, the beaches and the valleys. I long to meet up with my friends in the city, to see my colleagues at work and to travel to visit my friends in different suburbs. Let us not resort to old habits of treating international flights as the norm. Let us instead treat it as something special, a luxury or the last resort.
Tourism can be undertaken in various ways and local attractions have a lot to offer. Nonetheless, the allures of the different, the far-away and the unknown remain. So, perhaps it is time to properly invest in more sustainable modes of travel. Holidays by train is the new black in Europe, but it is expensive and as many other ‘green’ alternatives therefore not available to or desirable for everyone. I am not sure whether the cost of train travel is representative of the cost of building and managing the infrastructure or, which I suspect, the discrepancy in flight and train prices is the result of allowing the ‘market’ to rule. Nonetheless, before we rush back into normalcy and previous travel behaviours, let us think about what travelling is necessary, what is sustainable and whether this is a good time to readjust some of those itinerant expectations.
Atmospheres of Change 