Melbourne case study: Do the poor have fewer cars?

By Alan Davies

There’s a very compelling case for the government’s proposal to restore indexation of petrol excise, but it’s not true to suggest that most low income households don’t have cars and so wouldn’t be affected (see Shouldn’t the Greens and Labor be supporting fuel excise indexation? ). *In an earlier paper, Currie and Delbosc found that low income households in the outer suburbs who don’t have a car tend to live in locations of higher public transport accessibility – see Transport disadvantage in the suburbs.

This is especially true in Melbourne’s outer suburbs where they’re 13 times more likely to be without a car than other households. (38 per cent of all lower income households in Melbourne live in the outer suburbs.

Read more here: Business Spectator