Fifty years of public transport planning in Canberra

Canberra is usually thought of as the archetypal 'car city', with public transport playing a negligible role in overall travel patterns. Historian Robert Freestone, writing of the National Capital Development Commission's planning of the 1960s, refers to 'Canberra's problem with the motor vehicle.' The problem, Freestone adds, was 'largely of its [the NCDC's] own making, as it opted for a predominantly low density growth form' (Freestone, 2011, p. 5). So Canberra is a car city because of its low density, a position that has become the conventional wisdom