Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend a lecture presentation by Enrique Penalosa, former Mayor of Bogota, Colombia about how we as communities need to be more willing to design cities as places for people, rather than for cars. Mr Penalosa was a captivating and entertaining speaker, his 90 minute presentation seemed to last only 30.

His own experience in Bogota is just a Google search away, so I won’t rehash it other than to say he challenged public opinion and brought democracy through equality in terms of not providing high quality services for cars in favour of pedestrians and cyclists.

He presented some great thoughts and challenges for Perth, which is a city that was developed in the 1950′s and 1960′s as a city designed primarily for cars. Perth has fantastic wide roads, no tolls and long freeways. Yet all this infrastructure has still led to congestion. Yet building more roads will simply exacerbate the problem. We as a society need to find better ways of building our cities, ways that favour public and pedestrian transport over the car. As fuel supplies become more expensive, this need will become even more apparent.

We need to destroy the stigma that public transport is for the poor and lower class, and instead promote the fact that it is cheap, fast and convenient. Of course, Perth struggles with its car-based development which has led to urban sprawl in this regard. It is expensive and difficult to offer complete public transport in the hinterland. Accordingly, we need to be more willing to grow the density of our city.

Perth as a city for cars is unsustainable – we need to think of more clever ways to achieve quality of life. We need to work to becoming unwedded to our space-hogging vehicles. For example, why do cars get to enjoy the foreshore views along the Perth Esplanade and Cottesloe Beach? Shouldn’t they be places first and foremost for people?