Transcriber: Giorgia Aversa Reviewer: Anna Sobota
It’s a hot summer day, about 35 degrees, and you’re waiting for the bus.
There's a hot bitumen road in front of you.
The concrete underneath your feet is radiating heat.
There's no shade on this sweltering suburban street.
The high school student next to you
is standing in the slice of shade provided by the bus stop pole.
Your arms are burning, your mouth's dry, you're getting dehydrated,
and your clothes are sticking to your body.
A woman and two young kids arrive to stand with you.
There’s no seat.
There’s no shelter.
How long are you going to have to wait?
Now imagine doing this on a 40 degree day.
You’re at risk of heat exhaustion.
Your body will be sweating hard, trying to cool itself.
Imagine doing it on a 45 degree day,
on a 50 degree day ...
At temperatures like that,
you’re at risk of heat stroke, illness and death.
It’s hard for us to really understand
what a global temperature rise of 1.5 or 2 degrees is going to feel like.
But as temperature records crumble around the world,
we can see that future speeding towards us.
But what’s it going to feel like in our homes and on our streets?
It could feel like sleepless nights and bleary, uncomfortable days.
Trapped in your home, blinds down, lights off - claustrophobic and isolated.
It could feel like wondering about whether you can afford to turn the aircon on
or taking your kids to the shopping centre down the road -
it’s the only cool building near your house
where you’ll slip inside the walk-in freezer just for a moment,
just to feel some relief.
It could feel like working outside under heavy safety equipment, feeling faint.
What we do know is that as temperatures rise,
our summers will become more dangerous.
You might not realise,
but heatwaves are actually a deadliest environmental disaster.
They kill more people than floods, fires and storms combined.
They're also a vastly underestimated risk around the world.
All of us here are going to be impacted by longer and hotter heat waves.
But it’s our most vulnerable who are going to be baking in hot homes,
working outside without protection
and waiting, standing for the bus every day under a burning sun.
There are lots of big, ambitious ideas
about how to make our cities more sustainable.
But today I’m here to talk to you about a simple, yet critical one.
A step towards the cities of our future:
achievable, effective, affordable bus shelters.
Bus shelters are essential infrastructure to support our shift
to more sustainable public transport, like electric buses.
They empower people living in hot suburbs, and they address environmental injustice.
And they might seem simple, and to some they might seem small,
but if we are going to transform our entire society to reduce carbon emissions,
it needs to happen everywhere:
our electricity grid, our workplaces, our schools, our homes and our streets.
And without these local solutions to transfer to more public transport,
we're not going to be able to reduce carbon emissions at the rate we need to.
And we’re going to be leaving our most vulnerable and marginalised
to suffer as temperatures rise.
Already in western Sydney temperatures reach up to 50 degrees on the ground
and these are some of the same suburbs
where less than a quarter of the bus stops have any shelter.
Would you catch the bus?
Transport is our third largest source of carbon emissions
and cars are responsible for roughly half of that.
We hear a lot about electric cars as a solution,
but if we're going to reduce carbon emissions fast,
we need to be shifting towards public transport.
Cities where we travel in one air conditioned bubble
to another air conditioned bubble on searing hot roads won’t work.
The transformation to a sustainable, equitable future
is complex, and global, and local.
We need ambition and action now.
Lots of cities in Australia and the US were built around cars
and that's made us highly reliant on them.
Two of the cities with the highest carbon emissions for transport
for their low population density are Houston, Texas and Melbourne, Australia.
We need to avoid a future
where the fortunate are driving smart electric vehicles
and the less fortunate are left waiting for the bus every day
under an increasingly deadly hot sun.
I’ve spoken to people across Australia’s hotter suburbs about their ideas
for the bus stops of the future.
I’ve heard great ideas like green roofs, solar panels, air-conditioned pods,
wi-fi or phone charging ports,
even misting curtains or heatwave safety information.
Not one person has mentioned more hot hard metal services or more advertising.
(Laugher)
I bet every person in this room has a better idea for a bus stop
than a pole by the side of the road.
Designing and installing great bus stops with cool, accessible design
will tangibly improve the lives of people in hot suburbs,
and it will demonstrate to the world that there can be transformative,
sustainable change in a city built around cars.
Changes we don’t have to wait for.
Changes we can start building today.
Now, where do you want to catch the bus?
Thank you.
(Applause)