Whereas on the East Coast where we are, it's very wide roads and in fact Brisbane is designed to have in Paris you have the boulevards which were put in by Hausmann it was a military intervention so that if there were the rabble rousers you could send the military down there and that's why Brisbane has much wider streets than anywhere else in Australia so we have really wide ones and so it's very hard for people to think that it's small so everybody has this idea but we've got these large distances and I think it's just to do with the road width And I'm just wondering, since you do travel a lot, about the cultural differences and what we can learn, what can we take on board that from Europe, from Britain, that will make our places better and less car dependent, that would still work in the cultural context that we have?

Yeah, I was thinking about that when I was doing the concluding bits of the Suburbs Report, because I don't think it's realistic to expect a whole cultural, political, social history to just change to someone else's because of transport planning.

But could you infiltrate some of that kind of thinking in particular ways, or could officers start to do that? Because again, I don't know what local government culture is like in Australia, but certainly in England, it can be a bit rigid and a based and engineer based is the ways in which that can start to break down in particular areas for example around this kind of wider civic approach rather than because in England it's about we're doing this for economic growth or we're doing this for the environment can we start to go let's do things that are good for the citizens of the city and build that kind of different approach was talking about can we just start to infiltrate that in particular areas and that may be a way forward rather than expecting wholesale change in culture.

I'll give you another example from France, which I thought was interesting.

In England, and I've been part of it, and it's legitimate, you're either against the car or for the car.

There's no middle ground.

Anything that the green side does that is around increasing car occupancy or something like that is very suspect, it's like treacherous.

So you talked about the economic, how do you get that to work for the Yelby app? Are there different metrics that are required for the outer suburbs and the suburbs that aren't required when you're talking about the commute and the CBD?

Because it's, it's a, it's a, it's a conversation that a city can have and that a central government department will always struggle with because they're just too far removed from the place involved.

Yeah.

And we can't just change our political culture.

Um, these countries have got to where they have around, uh, I mean, say France, um, they have a approach of a state, a strong role for the, for the state.

In other countries, it may not be quite like that, but they still have this different starting point.

We start from somewhere suspended between America and, and Europe.

Um, and, uh, we can't just reproduce that kind of culture and approach overnight.

They're not gonna be listening to this podcast and thinking, "How can we redesign suburbs to make them less carbon intensive in the future?" Are they?