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By Patrick R, on January 27th, 2012 It’s hard not to get the feeling that for some in the Auckland Plan debate the answer is simply that they just need to get out more. Yes I’m thinking of you Dick Quax. But also Bill Ralston, whose advancing years seem to have settled upon him as a sort of domestic panic; a fear that some one will take his villa away. And the always unreadable and wrong Jim Hopkins. Plus all the other forces that appear to to be running a coordinated campaign against the plan, like the National Party’s pollster David Farrar, who enjoys apartment living himself but whose politics means he has to twist into a funny shape to conjure up bogus arguments against city life, he claims for example that to live in an apartment you can’t have a pet or a family, and imagines Ak turning into East Berlin. So in order to help those who seem to have absolutely no conception that life in Auckland is possible, for some even preferable, outside of a detached suburban 3 bedder I have dipped into my archives. These are simply random examples of the rich variety of lives lived by different people with different interests and different resources already enjoying the ‘absolutely gobsmacking‘ life that so terrifies the good councillor Quax.
I would also add that one area that the recent analysis of the Auckland Plan by Studio D4 and Jasmax did not look at was the inner city itself. There is clearly a great deal of opportunity for increased living in the city as the people pictured below already are. New supermarkets are opening in the city now and of course there is still room for further infrastructure to support and improve living, working and playing in the CBD. But of course I am not, and nor is the Plan, arguing that high or even medium density is to everyones’ taste, but that when given the chance there are many you do seek it. And that these include the young and the old, families with kids, groups of flatmates and people living alone, rich and poor, renters and owners, and every kind of race and outlook, pet owners, new agers and right wingers, strugglers, idlers, and toilers- in short, every kind of person.
First up, meet my mother. Her apartment is in a re-purposed commercial building from the early 20th century. Pretty special and very well placed for public transit as you can see [she can no longer drive]. Also ideal for a single elderly person, extremely secure, all on one level, the building has a concierge and is incredibly handy to both necessities and distractions. The only thing that hasn’t worked well is interaction with health agencies who insist on driving, often just from the hospital, and then of course, parking. They then want reimbursement for these costs although the services are free. Naturally they will happily drive to Albany or Cockle Bay and those costs are clearly buried somewhere in the health budget. Doh! Small problem, but indicative of how deeply imbedded auto-dependency is in our institutions.
The Bolletta family on a very grey evening, for them an apartment offers an affordable way for the young family to live centrally.
The Urale family. OK this is a detached house, but a new one on a tiny Freemans Bay site with no off street parking. Designed for the family by Malcolm Walker Architects, and therefore qualifies as both medium density and urban renewal.
Also a new building, but higher density. Fashion and publishing personality Paula Ryan in her waterfront apartment.
Again High-D, but different location, Newton, and different value. Complete with art loving cat.
 The loveliest of Auckland’s far-too-few Heritage apartments: Courtville flatmates.
 A return to the original use: Living above the business. Gallerist Michael Lett in his modernised flat over his old gallery space on K’Rd. The first occupants of this Victorian or Edwardian building doubtless did the same. But with as much style?
Another residential conversion. Compact apartment in the old George Courts Building ideal for young couple.
Inner city living is also for the young at heart: Peter Bromhead in his crisp apartment that will soon be looking down on the new Parnell Train Station.
Those genuinely concerned about housing affordability need to understand that even sweeping views of the CMJ is no barrier to successful rental or ownership for many if the price is right. Very serious students with a very relaxed cat included.
I could go on but the post would get too long…
By Nick R, on January 27th, 2012 I’ve recently been involved in casual discussions with Shoreite friends over the merits of a new harbour crossing, hearing many words in favour of motorways and railways and the like. I thought I’d use this post to outline the issues and opportunities of a new crossing to the North Shore as I see them, and outline one possible alternative for rail that might be just what the doctor ordered. Admin has touched on something very similar in the past however it could be worthwhile to take another look.
Requiem for a motorway tunnel
At first glance the NZTA proposals for a new harbour crossing are quite encouraging… that is if we assume the people of Auckland would not settle for a hideous motorway bridge destroying their new waterfront precinct and demand a tunnel instead.
A harbour tunnel certainly has it’s appeal: it would take all that state highway traffic out of St Mary’s Bay and Victoria Park and send it underground on a long invisible bypass of the city centre. We could separate peaky city commuter traffic from traffic going nowhere near downtown. It would allow us to wind back the harbour bridge to something more like a local arterial, probably with walking and cycling lanes too. We could pull down the much despised Victoria Park viaduct and remove half the lanes from St Mary’s Bay, perhaps even renovating it to act something like a western version of Tamaki Drive.
Those would be some great outcomes, but on closer inspection there are several huge issues with the harbour tunnel plan:
 The approach motorway to Sydney's harbour bridge and tunnel. Do we want this in Freemans Bay and Northcote?
- First and foremost, it would cost around five billion dollars. That is an absolutely huge cost, how can we fund that? What else would we forgo if we did fund it, or rather what better use could we find for several billion bucks? How many intersection improvements, bus lanes and cycleways would that fund? On five billion dollars the cost of capital alone comes in at $750,000 a day!
- Secondly, do we actually ‘need’ a second motorway crossing in that same corridor? Do we need six more lanes of motorway when traffic on the existing bridge has been trending in reverse for the last half decade? After all, it only goes from the area around Onewa Rd to the Central Motorway Junction. Beyond that, do we actually ‘want’ a brand new route with plenty of capacity feeding into Spaghetti junction, something that might simply encourage more people to drive more often and create even more traffic and car dependence.
- Thirdly, this five billion dollar proposal is for a motorway tunnel only, there is no public transport component. Certainly if a motorway tunnel was built this would allow a pair of lanes on the bridge to be marked for the busway, but if you think about it that wouldn’t be much improvement over the way the busway works already. Same route, same vehicles and capacity, same constraints through downtown, just a little less impact from congestion on the bridge.
- Finally, would there actually be much improvement to the capacity of the transport system? A six lane tunnel would provide three lanes each way, so in the peak it could move an extra 6,000 vehicles per hour. At our occupancy levels equates to less than 8,000 people per hour. That’s less capacity than the busway, at about twelve times the price!
If we look at it again we really need to go back to the drawing board. Five billion dollars to tidy up the waterfront and duplicate a few kilometres of motorway to move only 8,000 people an hour, I don’t think so. The BCR on a motorway tunnel must be abysmally small given such a huge cost and minimal benefits.
If not a motorway, then what? Are trains an affordable option either?
What we need is something more affordable, something that will reduce traffic rather than generate more, something that has wider reaching benefits and will actually reduce travel times in the long run. Given that we already have an eight lane motorway across our harbour, surely the next crossing should be a high quality rapid transit link. One that is cheap, compact and relatively simple to build, but can shuttle tens of thousands of people to where they need to be each day completely independent of traffic congestion.
What we really need is a crossing that can move several times as many people for half the cost. This should be possible with rapid transit: a two lane public transport tunnel would be far cheaper to build than a six lane motorway tunnel (not to mention all the associated interchanges and linkages), yet two lanes of rapid transit could carry at least twice as many people per hour than six lanes of motorway.
If we want a good cost-benefit return then it has to be public transport, the question is which form gives us the most benefit for an affordable cost.
We can probably discount a busway tunnel from the start. A bus tunnel would be relatively expensive due to the demands of ventilation and fire safety (although still miles cheaper than a motorway tunnel), yet the capacity, speed and level of service offered by a busway extension isn’t game changing. The same can be said for ‘light rail’ tramway. A electrified tram tunnel would be cheaper to build than a bus one and the capacity and service level would be better, but it’s probably still not going to give enough bang for buck. To be honest when dealing with public transport in Auckland we’re going to need a huge bang from a small buck to get one over the motorway lobby.
If we want a quantum leap in capacity, speed and service then it seems our harbour crossing needs to be based around a proper ‘heavy’ railway. However the issue once again returns to one of cost. The logical route for a North Shore rail line is to convert and extend the busway, however the grades and curves of the busway aren’t suitable for heavy rail design characteristics. So much of the busway would need to be completely rebuilt if it were to carry suburban trains, possibly with long sections in expensive tunnels. NZTA suggests the entire busway would need to be widened by three metres. The alternative of not using the busway corridor would probably mean building a new line entirely in tunnel. So constructing the train tunnel under the harbour would be relatively cheap (around $1.5 billion according to NZTA estimates), but once we add in the city side connections and North Shore extensions we can start ticking off the billions.
Admin has proposed one solution to this conundrum, suggesting that we could build the harbour rail tunnel and a heavy rail extension to Akoranga and Takapuna while leaving the busway as is. The idea is that bus passengers would continue to use the busway proper but transfer to a fast train at Akoranga for the remainder of the trip into the city, presumably until such time as we can afford to rebuild the busway as a rail line. This idea certainly has it’s merits but I doubt it could ever really work politically or garner much public support. In terms of a radio sound-bite, it is a plan to spend two billion dollars to add one new station at Takapuna. I can hear the words ‘boondoggle trainset’ already.
Driverless light-metro, ticking all the boxes at an affordable price?
What we really need is a rapid transit rail system that can run though a harbour tunnel, but also be cheaply retrofitted to the busway without any major reconstruction. It needs to provide top notch capacity and service with low operating costs, and ideally we should be able to build a whole North Shore network for less than the cost of a motorway crossing if we are really going to win over the public.
Readers of my previous post will know where I am going with this: Driverless light metro could be just the right combination for the North Shore. It’s cheap to build, cheap to run, yet fast, frequent and high quality. I’ve gone into the merits of this form of railway in a previous post, but I’ll quickly recap on what we’re talking about:
- It’s driverless: Computerised operation removes the need for human drivers. This means the trains can run reliably at very fast headways without worrying about drivers missing signals. More importantly the lack of staff massively reduces marginal operating costs, and therefore allows high frequency service to be maintained all day and all night, seven days a week. I cannot stress enough this benefit, in Vancouver for example their Skytrain actually turns a small operational profit despite running every couple of minutes twenty hours a day.
- It’s ‘light’: These systems are specifically designed for urban rapid transit only, so the tracks aren’t limited to what heavy rail can handle. The system used in Vancouver and Kuala Lumpur can handle curves as tight as 15m radius and hills as steep as 1 in 10, or in other words tracks about four times as tight or steep as our regular railways. The vehicles themselves are relatively compact and use third rail power supply rather than overhead line, so tunnels and underpasses can be quite a bit smaller. This all makes it ‘light’ on infrastructure and ‘light’ on cost. This is a huge plus in the North Shore context, tracks could be laid straight onto the busway without modification and new branches and extensions could be built easily in and around the existing urban fabric.
- It’s metro: Again these systems are custom designed just to move people, providing high frequencies, high speed and comfortable capacious trains without delays or interference from freight or anything else. With a train arriving every few minutes at every station on the line it would provide as good a service as the metros of London, Paris or New York.
In summary, a light metro system on the North Shore could be as cheap to construct as a tramway, cheaper to operate each day than buses, yet provide greater capacity and service than even a full blown suburban railway. For well less than the cost of a motorway tunnel under the harbour we could have a whole metro network for the North Shore. Indeed it could also be the perfect mode for other areas of Auckland that have no rapid transit and similar constraints to building it, in particular the northwestern corridor, the upper harbour and southeast through Howick, Botany and Flatbush.
What would a North Shore light-metro cost?
As a benchmark for costs I will use the recent Canada line light-metro that was recently built in Vancouver (which despite the name is actually two lines, a main one and a branch to the airport). The total cost of this project was $2.054 billion in 2009 Canadian dollars, which equates to about NZ$2.95 billion today. This line is actually totally independent of the rest of the Vancouver Skytrain system as it was built using Korean technology that is slightly different to the rest of the network. As such it is a good representation of a complete ‘turnkey’ network like Auckland would have to build.
This three billion dollar sum bought a total of 18.4km of double-track line (comprising 9,080m in tunnel, 7,349m on elevated viaduct, 1,386m at grade and a bridge 614m long), one major junction, 16 stations (8 underground, 6 elevated, two at grade), a operations and maintenance facility, and twenty two-car automatic trains to run on it.
So this represents a cost of NZ$160 million per kilometre for all the track, trains, stations, tunnels, bridges and viaducts needed to build and run the line. As you can see most of the Canada Line was built in tunnel or elevated, so it really represents the top end of what we would pay in Auckland given that we already have most of the corridor available at-grade. Using this rough guide we can get a ball park figure of what light metro might cost on the North Shore.
Lets start with the harbour tunnel itself, a 3.2km link from Wynyard wharf to the vicinity of Onewa Rd interchange. NZTA have estimated this would cost about $1.5 billion to construct to heavy rail standards. For the purposes of this exercise I’m going to drop this back to $1 billion to account for the fact that light-metro can handle steeper grades, tighter curves and would have a much smaller cross section so would require substantially smaller diameter tunnel tubes.
 Proposed light metro lines on the North Shore (black). Stars indicate station locations and purple lines are major bus corridors. Next up is the brand new parts of the line. For the city side connection we’ll assume a 1.4km cut and cover tunnel from the corner of Wellesley and Albert St to the start of our harbour tunnel at Wynyard wharf. This includes two stations, one at Aotea and one at Wynyard. As an aside, the site we dig out for the Wynyard station would be the perfect spot to launch the machine that bores the harbour tunnel. From the northern portal of the harbour tunnel we have a line from Onewa up to Akoranga, then from Akoranga let’s continue across Barry’s Point and the adjacent inlet to terminate our branch at an underground station under Huron St in Takapuna. So that’s an extra 3.4km of track (mostly just widening the existing motorway causeway, but with some viaduct and underground) and two new stations at Onewa and Takapuna. Altogether our brand new track requires 4.8km of track with four new stations, applying the Canadian costing gives us a rough figure of $768 million for this section. Once again I will point out this is the average cost of Vancouver’s mostly tunnelled and elevated line, so probably well above the maximum we could expect running it along the motorway in Auckland.
After this we need to look at the busway. From Akoranga to Constellation is bang on 6km long, with four existing stations that would need some level of modification. To account for the fact that most of our infrastructure already exists I’m going to (somewhat arbitrarily) halve the cost of this section. $80 million per km should be sufficient to install track, power delivery and control systems and modify the station platforms. So my guestimate is that it would cost $480 million to refit the busway proper as a light metro line.
Next would have to be an extension of the line to Albany. For this I’m going to assume a 4km route through Albany to the existing park-n-ride station, mostly elevated with short sections at grade and perhaps a tunnelled section in Albany itself. I’m also assuming two new stations: one at Rosedale Rd, the other central to the Mega Centre/University/Mall. Furthermore we will probably locate our stabling facility in the industrial area somewhere near the new Rosedale station. Once more applying our costing figure gives us a price of $640 million for this extension.
Where next? Well the obvious route would be a branch from the vicinity of Constellation station along the SH18 corridor. For the moment we’ll stop at Greenhithe Rd, but eventually this branch could reach right across the upper harbour to Henderson and the Western Line. So here we’re looking at 4.5km of line, mostly elevated, with three new stations at Unsworth/Albany Industrial estate, Albany Highway and Greenhithe respectively. Using our reference figure this comes in at $720 million. A touch pricey for those few stations but I guess the real value would come with the subsequent extension over to west Auckland.
Right, to wrap that all up we are looking at a system of a three metro lines on the North Shore running through a harbour tunnel from the CBD to Takapuna, Albany and Greenhithe respectively. This is a total of 22.5km of double track metro rail (comprised of a 3.2km harbour tunnel, 13.3km of new route and 6km of refitted busway), with five upgraded interchange stations and ten brand new ones. That’s quite a system really, it should work fantastically with a combination of decent bus feeders, the odd park-n-ride and a little intensification around stations.
But the bottom line, how much would this cost? Well to add up these simple estimates we arrive at a maximum figure of $3.6 billion to cover everything, track, stations, tunnels, trains the lot. I realise this is a very basic analysis, but using these figures that’s only 70% of what is proposed for just a motorway tunnel from the lower North Shore to Spaghetti junction. So instead of a motorway tunnel we might be able to build this whole metro system and still have $1.4 billion left in the budget to upgrade the harbour bridge or extend our metro elsewhere! Of course three-point-six-billion is still a huge amount of money, so we could obviously start with the basics first. If we exclude the Takapuna and Greenhithe branches we get a figure of roughly $2.7 billion for the metro line from central Auckland to Albany, and just over two billion if we stopped at Constellation.
So how would it operate, what would it be like to use?
The figures for Bombardier’s ART light-metro trains show that under normal conditions they operate at a top speed of 80km/h and accelerate and brake at a rate of 1.0ms-1 (the can actually brake much quicker in an emergency, and if they are running behind they can boost speed to 90km/h in catch up mode). If we plug these figures and the spacing of the stations along our proposed lines into a little model we can work out what sort of travel times we could expect.
The main line from Albany to Aotea in the central city would take just 21 minutes from end to end. That’s a full 12 minutes faster than the current timetable of the Northern Express bus to Britomart, which doesn’t even take into account the effects of major traffic congestion in the city. It would be about the same time as driving off-peak, and much faster than driving during rush hour.
 What a North Shore light metro network map might look like. The line from Greenhithe to Aotea would take only 23 minutes all up. Right now the best option is the 956 bus using Upper Harbour Drive and the busway, that takes 49 minutes. So we’ve saved an amazing 26 minutes on this route, and again this is much faster than driving if there is any sort of congestion.
The last line between Takapuna and Aotea would take only 11 minutes from end to end. This is a massive improvement over existing bus links like the 839 and 875 that actually take 30 to 35 minutes to make the short trip! Slashing travel times between Takapuna and the CBD like this would have one very good outcome: it would allow the two centres to effectively operate as a single business district. Getting from Queen St to Takapuna by light metro would take you no longer than walking up to the university or catching the bus up to K Rd.
Fast travel times are all well and good, but not if you have to wait for ages to get a train in the first place. So what are the frequencies we could expect? Well if we again assume an equivalent number of trains as used in the costings we got from Vancouver’s Canada line we arrive at a figure of 24 two-carriage sets included in the price of our network.
Based on the travel times for the three lines above we can work out that a single set can make 1.4 return trips an hour to Albany, 1.3 per hour to Greenhithe and 2.7 to Takapuna. So our 24 sets are enough to provide a train every six minutes on each line, plus have a couple of sets in reserve for operations and maintenance.
A train every six minutes on those three lines is itself is a fantastic level of service, however it gets better. Because the lines overlap there would actually be a train every three minutes between Constellation and the city, and a train every two minutes through Akoranga, Onewa and Wynyard stations! That sort of frequency makes transfers a complete breeze. With computer control maintaining regular spacing you would never wait more than three minutes to transfer between any of the three lines. And if we recall the driverless operation allows us to affordably run the system at these headways all the time, these are the same frequencies and quick transfers you’d get at any time on any day of the week. Transferring to get from Albany to Takapuna would be just as painless at 2am on a Sunday morning as it would be on a weekday at peak hour.
But what about capacity? Could a light-metro system really move more people than a huge motorway?
In a nutshell, hell yes. A motorway lane hits the wall at approximately 2,000 vehicles per hour, so our motorway tunnel would have the capacity to carry only 6,000 vehicles per hour in the peak direction. At the usual levels of vehicle occupancy that’s a maximum of just 8,000 people per hour each way through the motorway tunnel.
So what of the metro? As we worked out above our light-metro system could easily operate under the harbour at one train every two minutes each way. With a comfortable capacity of 342 passengers per two-carriage train that works out to be 10,260 people per hour each way (and quite a bit more if we are happy to crush load people in like sardines).
So just using little two-carriage train sets we can carry more people than the motorway crossing, but as patronage increases we could very simply couple more pairs of carriages together to make longer trains. With four-carriage sets the peak hourly capacity would go up to 20,520 people, and with six-carriage sets we could move 30,720 people per hour. That’s almost four times as many people as the proposed motorway tunnel.
In other words a cheap twin track light-metro tunnel could move as many people as a motorway tunnel twenty-three lanes wide!
But there’s an even bigger gulf to consider. With a motorway crossing all those 6,000 vehicles per hour have to use the same old motorways and streets either side of the tunnel. All that extra traffic will still need to funnel down either the northern motorway, Esmonde Rd and Onewa Rds at one end, and through the to the southern and north-western motorways at the other. On the other hand our light-metro system includes the cost of new tracks right up to Albany, Takapuna and Greenhithe, so we could move tens of thousands more people per hour right across the Shore and the harbour without a single extra car on the motorway. In reality we’d probably see less considerably less cars on the motorway if it were so easy to get around without driving, plus all the buses would be redeployed to feed the local stations so there would be far fewer of them in congestion on the motorway (and some arterial routes) too.
In conclusion: huge benefits at more affordable price
So there we have it, a broad indication that a truly world class metro rail system could indeed be possible right across the North Shore for the sorts of costs that have been proposed for a harbour crossing.
NZTA really should look at realistic alternatives to a hugely expensive motorway tunnel under the harbour, given that a motorway that would only further entrench Auckland into a spiral of traffic congestion and parking issues. If we do want to spend billions of dollars on transport under the harbour then why not spend it on a light-metro system that will have far greater benefits and a lower cost?
By Patrick R, on January 26th, 2012 As there’s been a lot of discussion about population density here I figure this post from good ol’ Cap’nTransit is on the money. Yes this is my view too, you think more density is needed? Well build the transit and the density will follow [all else being equal], foolish to try to wait for some ideal density then meet that demand with infrastructure. Transit supply is causative. Or as the Cap’n says: ‘The population density to support my ass’
Here are two interesting posts on Twitter and Transit. One beautiful the other more for the quants. Both instructive.
The second is via Atlantic Cities where there is also this argument for High Speed Rail in the Union’s most populous State, California. Newt of the GOP has been banging on about the US heading back to the moon in some kind of pissing contest with China, but frankly if they can’t even get a train to run from SF to LA and any decent speed I think he’ed better dodge that race. *Note for Geoff: These arguments here for HSR are intended as a metaphor for local arguments for urban transit, not as a literal argument for HSR in NZ. Same things apply, land use transformations, economic return not a financial one etc, but at a vastly different scale.
More from the States on gas prices [as they call them] and what to do, and for once this doesn’t involve bombing somewhere else or other wise frackin’ it all up.
Closer to home; no round up from me will be complete without at least a passing note on resource supply issues. As we head to the exciting singularity of peak damn near everything it’s good to see some people have their heads up. Here’s an introductory note from across the ditch, what I especially like about this is that it states a view that I also have, namely that it could just be that a world with less freely available oil may well be a lot better in a number of ways; once we’ve made the adjustment. Like London after the peasoup smog and mountains of horse-shit. I’m also guessing less isolation, more localiasation, more human interaction, less alienation. Perhaps more meaningful lives. Perhaps.
There’s also this guy, Denis Tegg, I know nothing about him but he has been manfully plugging away on this issue in NZ for a while and here he is bringing an important shelved report to the surface. I say manfully because there is a really creepy silence on this issue and Climate Change in the mainstream media and in government in NZ. It’s like if we don’t mention these problems they’ll just go away.
Look away Actoids! Here’s a well reasoned piece on the attractions and limitations of neoliberalism. It’s short too. Relevant how? Transit like our cities need long term planning, by elected bodies. The market is a great tool, but a lousy master, and an even worse god. As I think we’ve just seen.
Those interested in the strange ways that change can happen will like this. Why the US Marine Corp may well lead the US into a solar future.
Back to transit, and more personally; I have new wheels, yay! and loving it, but won’t be going to these extremes to protect them. No.
By admin, on January 26th, 2012 You would think that calculating, and analysing, the density of a city would be a fairly perfunctory mathematical task, and would tell us useful information about the nature of that city. As I noted in this previous blog post, perhaps the most challenging aspect of calculating a city’s ‘average density’ is working out where its boundaries are. For Auckland, there are a variety of boundaries and therefore a variety of average densities.  But even that approach can lead to some surprising results – as pointed out in Paul Mees’s book “Transport for Suburbia”, New York and Los Angeles have a similar density, so do Vancouver and Las Vegas. Yet each city has a significantly different level of public transport usage. Mees puts this down to the quality of public transport provision being more important than density when it comes to ridership, although equally one could also start asking questions about how we’ve measured density – especially as saying Los Angeles and New York have the same density just seems to be so incorrect.
The issue of density is looked at in detail in this excellent article by Eric Eidlin, a community planner and Sustainable Communities Partnership Liaison for the Federal Transit Administration in San Francisco. He questions whether average density over the whole metropolitan area is really a particularly useful figure when assessing how ‘dense’ or ‘sprawled’ in reality an urban area is. He presents the conundrum we face when looking at density:
Many people …tend to think of “sprawling” cities as places where people make most of their trips by car, and non-sprawling cities as places where people are more likely to walk, cycle, or take transit. This is why Los Angeles, which has more vehicles per square mile than any other urbanized area, and where transit accounts for only two percent of the region’s overall trips, is considered sprawling, while the New York urbanized area is not. We also know (or think we know) that places where people frequently walk, cycle, or take transit tend to have high population densities, and for this reason we tend to view low density as a proxy for sprawl. But as it turns out, the Los Angeles urbanized area—which in both myth and fact is very car-oriented—is also very dense. In fact, Los Angeles has been the densest urbanized area in the United States since the 1980s, denser even than New York and San Francisco.
These facts present a bit of a mystery. If one were to measure sprawl by measuring a region’s average level of Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT), Los Angeles would certainly qualify as sprawling. But if we measure sprawl by population density, LA would not sprawl at all. In fact, it would be the least sprawling urbanized area in the country. How can Los Angeles be so dense and yet also exhibit so many characteristics associated with sprawl, including high levels of car travel (both in per capita and absolute terms) and low rates of walking, bicycling and transit ridership?
A useful way we can start deconstructing the issue of density is to think of two A4 pieces of paper, each with 100 dots on it. On one piece of paper each dot is equally spaced, while on the other piece of paper the dots cluster together in places and are very widely spaced in other places.
Overall, both pieces of paper have the same average density of dots. But really, their distribution is very different. If each dot was to represent 100 people and the paper represented a city, you would have vastly different cities even though their overall density is the same. This is explained in the article:
Sprawl is a regional attribute, so when observers point out that LA is denser than New York, they are not talking about the cities of Los Angeles and New York. Rather they are talking about the urbanized area, which is essentially the combined area of the cities and their suburbs. The other part of the answer is that density by itself—the simple ratio of population to square mile—is not a very useful way to measure sprawl. What matters is the distribution of density, or how evenly or unevenly an area’s population is spread out across its geographic area. If we look at the density distribution in Los Angeles, we notice that its suburbs are much denser than those of other large U.S. cities, such as New York, San Francisco or Chicago. These high-density suburbs compensate for the comparatively low density of LA’s urban core, and, in so doing, increase the average density of the area as a whole. In other words, Los Angeles has both a relatively high density and a relatively even distribution of density throughout its urbanized area.
So, if we continue to use our “dots on a piece of paper” example, Los Angeles would be much closer to the evenly spaced dots example, whereas New York has a huge concentration of dots in its inner area (Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn and parts of Queens in particular) and then quite widely spaced dots further out (outer Long Island, north into New York state and west into New Jersey).
It’s pretty clear then that ‘average density’ over a whole urban area doesn’t really tell us too much about the characteristics of that urban area. But how might we examine density in a more helpful way? The article, thankfully, provides us with some options:
One approach is to measure the extent to which the population density varies across an urban area. Using a statistical tool called the Gini coefficient, we can get a sense of the degree of variation for different urban areas. The Gini coefficient is based on the Lorenz curve, a cumulative frequency curve that compares the distribution of a specific variable (in this case, population density) with a uniform distribution that represents perfect equality.
Using such a measure to compare Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco gives us the following results:
 You can see, in particular, how much more of New York and San Francisco’s population is concentrated in a small proportion of land area than in the case for Los Angeles. This is detailed further:
In Los Angeles, 40 percent of the population live on the most densely settled 10 percent of land. By way of comparison, roughly 66 percent of New York’s population, and 67 percent of San Francisco’s, live on the most densely settled ten percent of the land. By looking even further to the right of the graph, one finds that 25 percent of the population in Los Angeles lives on the densest 5 percent of the land. By contrast, 46 percent of San Francisco’s population, and more than 50 percent of New York’s, live on the densest 5 percent of the land. The overwhelming majority of New York and San Francisco’s residents live on a very small portion of their urbanized areas’ land. But this is much less the case in LA.
A second way of measuring density more helpfully is through what’s called ‘perceived density’. This weights the density of an area by the proportion of the area’s population that lives there, effectively measuring the average number of people around each resident of the city. The method of calculation is helpfully described by the example of the fictional city of Metropolis:
Metropolis has a central core of 100,000 residents who live on ten square miles of land and a suburb with 10,000 residents who live on 100 square miles of land. The standard density of Metropolis is 1,000 people per square mile. However, since 90 percent of the population—those who inhabit the core—live in a very dense environment, this standard density number has little bearing on the way most residents experience their city. By giving the core’s density a weight of 90 percent and the suburb’s density a weight of 10 percent—weights that are equal to the respective proportions of the city’s residents that inhabit each part—we get an adjusted density of 9,100 people per square mile, a number that more closely approximates the density at which the average resident of Metropolis lives.
Comparing the different US cities under this ‘perceived density’ measure gives the following results: Under this measurement system we see New York really standing out from any other city in the USA. Los Angeles is still fairly high up there though, in third place. And our comparison with public transport and walking – while better than average density – still doesn’t exactly align up perfectly.
A third measurement system is also included in the table above, the density gradient index. This is described below:
Bradford pushed the concept of perceived density a step further by developing the density gradient index. The density gradient index, which is the ratio of perceived density to standard density, is an indication of the unevenness of population distribution—or, to use Bradford’s terminology—a measure of “clumpiness.” Table 2 also shows the density gradient index for each urbanized area.
Overall, when comparing the different measurements of density with public transport use, we get the following:
Bradford did a regression analysis to analyze the relationship between perceived density and commute mode (the final two columns of Table 2). He found virtually no association between standard density and the percentage of workers commuting by public transit or walking, but a strong association between perceived density and commuting by transit or foot, and an even stronger association between the density gradient index and the percentage of workers commuting by transit or by foot.
What does that mean for Auckland? Well, until we can analyse our population distribution, perceived density and density gradient index, who knows whether we’re really at the same urban density as Sydney – like the average density statistics will tell us. The best graph I have seen so far is included below, and suggests that perhaps Auckland’s density is a little bit “Los Angeles” compared to Sydney’s “New York”. It would seem that if we’re thinking about land-use policies to boost public transport, walking (and presumably cycling) use, then it may be useful for the “lumpiness” of Auckland’s population density to increase – obviously particularly around our rapid transit network. Fortunately, that’s what most of our plans seem to propose.
By Guest Post, on January 25th, 2012 This is a Guest Post by William Stewart
When I first moved to Christchurch after leaving Auckland in 2004, I was amazed by what was then to me, the best execution of public transport I had ever seen. The biggest barriers to me in using public transport have always been ease of use, comfort and affordability.
No-one’s going to use a bus system which is complicated, illogical and difficult to find out which bus route to travel on or where to catch your bus. The core of the system in Christchurch was the Central Bus Exchange, a staging area through which almost all buses (excepting the Orbiter outer ring service) in the city were routed through. Having all the bus stops in (or beside) one building meant that transfers were easy, that you didn’t have to walk far to get between stops and the easy to understand maps helped visitors and new PT users find their bus stop. Compared with Auckland’s multitude of departure points from Downtown, Mid City, Civic Center, Albert St, it does make it a lot easier to the non native user to find their stop. Aiding ease of use were large electronic signage which clearly and accurately display arrival times of all buses using the Exchange and what platform they depart from. Each platform also had a smaller sign which displayed only departure times for that particular platform. While electronic signage is becoming increasingly common in Auckland over the last 10 years, because all of Christchurch’s CBD buses depart from the same place, every passenger has access to the signs, as opposed to many of the inner city stops in Auckland (i.e Albert St, Customs St) which don’t, and all to frequently have had their printed timetable vandalized.
After you’ve made public transport easy to use, you also have to make it comfortable. Your own weatherproof clean car with padded chairs is always going to be more attractive then a bench (if you’re lucky) on the street with possibly no rain cover and definitely minimal wind cover. Once you add in the dangers of being alone at a bus stop late at night in town, the litter, stench and graffiti that plagues our inner city stops, public transport can become a very unattractive option. With the Bus Exchange, Christchurch was able to provide a modern and comfortable venue for PT users. You could wait indoors for your bus, safe from rain or wind or excessive heat thanks to the interior air conditioning, relaxing on padded chairs in a security patrolled safe and well lit environment. We are seeing more and more people realize that these are the type of facilities that needs to be offered to PT customers. With the development of New Lynn, Britomart and Manukau, Auckland is getting there. Unfortunately these are all mainly beneficial to train users, there isn’t really anything which offers the same level of ease to bus users. Which the construction of Britomart I had hopes that they would better integrate the bus system with the train station, but that hasn’t happened. New Lynn is primarily a train station and while the bus station is integrated, it is designed for people to sit outside for their bus rather than in.
Here are some photos of the old bus exchange: 
Christchurch also meets the third tenet of providing an attractive choice to private transport which is affordability. It’s not really relevant to the Bus Exchange but Christchurch does enjoy integrated ticketing based on a time scheme rather then zonal. Users may travel on any number of buses for 2hours and pay only $2.30. If they travel longer, they pay $4.60, the daily max charge.
With the events of 22/2/11, Christchurch lost much of its city center including the bus exchange. We had a temporary bus exchange for a few months which filled an emergency requirement. 
Thankfully October 2010 bought an improvement with a purpose built Temporary Central Station. I haven’t had a chance to use this new exchange extensively as a passenger, but I believe it will certainly fill the gap until we get the promised brand new under-grounded (so that emerging buses do not impact pedestrian movement) bus exchange at some future point. Another major impact the earthquakes had was on traffic within the city. With the central city cordoned off for well over 8months, and the central part of the city still cordoned off, traffic every where else in Christchurch has been chaotic with all of that throughput which usually uses the city center’s 4 one way lanes redirected to roads which are not designed to handle that quantity of traffic. This isn’t even mentioning the fact that due to having to bypass around the giant rectangle of closed city center added more time to every journey. This understandably had a massive impact on the bus times and for the first few months after the quake our services were unreliable, always late and very inconvenient.
With the gradual reopening of the city center, timetable adjustments which reflect increased journey times and some central city through roads being opened, traffic is slowly getting back to normal. With a bus exchange located once again in the city it makes it easier to get cross town and transfer between routes. While most shops and businesses have relocated out of the city center, the bus exchange being back does mean that people can once again easily commute into town. This will play a crucial role in the rebuilding of our CBD. Here’s a comparison of diagrams of the old and new interchanges: And some photos of the new temporary interchange:
By Matt L, on January 25th, 2012 This post is a little different in that I don’t have a solution to the problem so am throwing it out to the readers to get their thoughts.
In the last few days there has been a bit of a stoush played out on the front of the NZ Herald between a man that was towed and the towing company. The story on Monday was about how he parked in a carpark that was clearly marked as a towaway zone, got towed and managed to get his money back but that isn’t the reason for this post, I wanted to look at why he got towed in the first place.
Here is what he himself had to say about it:
Dan Dwyer, a lawyer, saw the warning signs when he pulled into an empty parking lot on Dominion Rd but figured he’d take the risk given it was 9pm and he was ducking into a video store for just a few minutes.
“I thought about towing at the time but thought I’d only be 10 minutes … I thought we’d get away with it.”
But, when he returned with his movies, he found the Toyota Corolla he had borrowed from his flatmate was gone.
The story then goes on to explain about how he got his money back and he has this to say:
This was nine o’clock at night and there’s not a car in the yard … I don’t know why you can’t park there and nip in quickly.
As the title of the post asks, what can we do to change peoples attitudes to parking, why is it that people feel they can park their vehicle where ever there is an open space and how do we change it. We have seen similar issues with the new shared spaces as well as the Wynyard Quarter that has led to there often having to be staff patrolling the area to prevent this from happening.
On Tuesday we heard back from the boss of the towing company with a very similar response (note: I had intended to write this post before I had seen the response from the towing company)
Mr Burrows, also general manager of the First Recovery tow-truck firm, said it was frustrating some motorists felt they should get a pat on the back for the lack of respect they showed for others’ private property.
“At the end of the day, people shouldn’t even have had to put a sign up to say you shouldn’t park here.
“It’s always someone else’s fault. There was a sign there; he [Mr Dwyer] chose to take the risk. For every time he’s been caught, there’s 500 times he hasn’t.
“Why do people expect to park at someone else’s property and not pay for it?”
So what can we do?
By admin, on January 24th, 2012 The release of the Studio D4/Jasmax report on the Auckland Plan the other day really did throw the ‘cat amongst the pigeons’, as the saying goes – particularly in terms of highlighting the question of what level of change to existing urban areas would need to be made to reach target levels of intensification. That’s going to be a key issue when it comes to big decisions on the Auckland Plan over the next month or two. I’ve commented on the flip-side of this debate a number of times before: the level of urban expansion that the Plan also proposes.
Another key ‘benefit’ of allowing more urban sprawl, so say its proponents, is an improvement to housing affordability. There’s some logic in this at a basic level: if you constrain the supply of land then its price goes up is basic economics. But when it comes to reality, things can be a bit more complicated than that.
Yesterday’s NZ Herald ran a story about housing affordability, reporting on the annual Demographia study into this issue:
The eighth annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, co-authored by Wendell Cox in the US and Hugh Pavletich here, showed New Zealand had no affordable markets, and Auckland was the worst.
It noted that it has been only 20 years since most markets in New Zealand were within reach according to the study’s criteria, with average prices equivalent to less than three times the average annual income.
Housing should not cost more than three times annual income to be ranked affordable, Demographia says. Housing costing more than five times the annual average income was considered severely unaffordable.
The average Auckland house is valued at 6.4 times the city’s annual average household income, only marginally less affordable than the greater London area.
As someone with vague hopes of owning a house one day, I’m well aware of how unaffordable it is. Also, I’m well aware of how housing affordability has dramatically reduced over the past decade as prices have skyrocketed.
The report’s authors, typically, blame land-use policies that restrict land supply (like Auckland’s urban limit):
In the report, Mr Pavletich blamed restrictive land policies in Auckland for pushing up values compared with incomes, rather than other factors such as low wages.
“The economic evidence indicates that this trend is strongly related to the implementation of more restrictive land use regulations, especially measures that create scarcity in land for housing thus driving up prices,” the study said…
…Dr Bob Bruegmann, professor emeritus of art history, architecture and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago, introduced the study saying the rise of smart growth policies to tighten land supply had a big effect particularly in Australia “where the recent rise in prices has been particularly sharp and, given the vast extent of the country, the urban containment policies are particularly contentious”.
Bob Dey’s Property Report had an excellent analysis of the study – also published yesterday:
The argument might seem simple: Provide more land on the fringe, and enough of it to generate competition, and prices will come down. Against that, a counter-argument is that extending suburbia further from the centre increases transport costs, which ought to be taken into account in the overall housing cost picture.
The more complicated question is: How, without a calamity, do you put land prices into reverse without upsetting the existing market? Would buyers accept the absence of capital gain? Lenders have been hit by defaults during the global financial crisis, but would they accept long-term housing deflation? What happens to the construction industry if builders see reduced capital gain at the end of their project?
This is a very interesting question to consider, and one that has been in my mind as I have a think about what might happen to property prices around Auckland if – for argument’s sake – we were to just remove the urban limit and allow pretty much unfettered sprawl. I suppose there are two scenarios:
First, it could make the big difference that Demographia think it would and significantly lower housing prices throughout the whole urban area. While this could be great for me, if housing in inner parts of the city become significantly cheaper, I tend to think that the broader economic consequences of plummeting housing prices (particularly in a country like New Zealand where people have so much of their wealth tied up in housing) could be quite severe. In the long-run I guess it would be good for housing to become more affordable, although it’s interesting to note that other cities with unaffordable housing (Sydney and Vancouver) tend to be the cities vying with Auckland at the very top of various league-tables of the world’s most liveable and desirable cities. In the short run, a huge drop in housing prices seems likely to have a pretty major, and potentially disastrous, economic impact.
The second scenario is that allowing more urban sprawl wouldn’t make much difference to housing prices, except on the extreme urban periphery. There’s some logic to this scenario too: prices in a particular area are determined by the level of demand and supply in that particular area. Adding more houses near Drury doesn’t change the supply of housing in Ponsonby and seems unlikely to change the demand for housing in Ponsonby – so why would it have a huge impact on Ponsonby house prices? Arguably, all we would be doing by allowing more urban sprawl is shifting the poor out to the urban periphery – where they replace housing costs with transport costs, and we all need to subsidise them by building new roads, pipes, schools and so forth.
This second scenario is looked at in another recent article on Bob Dey’s excellent website, where he quotes from Patrick Fontein’s (yes, the primary author of the Studio D4/Jasmax report) submission on the Auckland Plan:
Mr Fontein said the urban limit had been so stringently applied that buying & trading land within it was an investment class in itself, which had led to inflated section prices: “Auckland Council needs to ensure there is sufficient land zoned for urban intensification, as well as greenfield development.
“Releasing more land will somewhat improve the affordability of new house prices, but as new houses on the external Auckland suburbs are still priced in excess of $550-600,000, releasing more land will have almost no impact on housing affordability in the $200-$450,000 price range. Careful consideration needs to be made of the total infrastructure costs of new greenfield locations, as the cost of infrastructure in certain locations will add substantially to developed land cost.
“The main effect on existing Auckland property prices of releasing substantial new greenfield development sites will be to reduce demand for low-amenity-value existing suburbs, such that these suburbs over time will become less attractive, will not be able to attract re-investment capital and these low-amenity suburbs will gradually decay. This will have the effect of making these low-amenity suburbs even less desirable, which then makes these suburbs more affordable!! (eg, some people upgrade from an older low-amenity suburb to a new house in a new subdivision, and there are relatively not enough buyers attracted into the older low-amenity suburb).”
Obviously this is just the opinion of one person – albeit someone who has been pretty close to the industry and has looked at the matter in quite a bit of detail. His key link between housing affordability and urban sprawl relates to the reduced focus there will be on reinvesting in poorer suburbs, leading to their further decay – with the corollary being that through such a process they will become more affordable. I may have somewhat misinterpreted what he means, but it sounds something like what I call the ‘Detroit doughnut effect’ where urban sprawl leads to decay and near abandonment of many parts of the existing city. Not exactly what I think we want already troublesome parts of Auckland to descend to.
I still think there’s an argument that the incremental, well planned, release of additional land for development has some effect on housing prices – more to ensure they don’t go higher rather than bringing them significantly lower. But that needs to be matched with providing more housing units in the parts of Auckland where people actually really want to live – through clever and well designed (and located) intensification. Obviously there are parts of Auckland where intensification isn’t appropriate, or where only a certain level of intensification is appropriate. Working that out is complicated, ensuring good design is complicated, aligning our transport infrastructure investment with where we are focusing intensification is complicated. Devising schemes to create a supply of affordable housing where people want to live is complicated. But that’s OK: if it was easy it would be boring.
By Matt L, on January 24th, 2012 There are some pretty significant works happening this weekend on a number of transport projects around the region so if you are around the region it would be good to try and not get caught up in them.
First up we have the NZTA closing the motorway’s northbound lanes between Market Rd and Gillies Ave to enable them to move move the lanes onto the newly replaced Newmaket Viaduct. The lanes will be closed between 5pm on Saturday and and should reopen on the new viaduct on the morning of Monday 30th. As part of this the large blue crane will be shifted to the current northbound lanes to start taking down that viaduct.
Here’s the full press release:
The motorway’s northbound lanes will be closed between the Market Road off-ramp and the Gillies Ave on-ramps from 5pm Saturday, 28 January, for final preparations to allow drivers on to the new northbound viaduct from Anniversary Monday morning, 30 January.
“Travel delays will be inevitable, they will be considerable and they will be widespread” says the NZTA’s acting State Highways manager for Auckland and Northland, Steve Mutton.
“We’re talking about trying to re-direct up to 65,000 vehicles on the Sunday alone,” he adds. “Even with detours, the impact of the closure will be felt well beyond the Southern Motorway. If people absolutely must travel we’re urging that they allow a lot more time for their journey. “
“We accept that this may cause frustration – particularly on a long weekend – but our best advice is to stay away from the motorway during Auckland Anniversary weekend,” Mr Mutton says.
The closure is necessary so that the NZTA can switch the motorway’s northbound lanes across to the new viaduct. At the same time, the blue lifting gantry used for the viaduct’s construction has to be moved on to the existing northbound viaduct to help with its demolition.
Mr Mutton says construction of the new viaduct is ahead of schedule and the NZTA and its NGA Newmarket alliance partners (NZTA, Leighton Contractors, Fulton Hogan, Beca, VSL, URS, Tonkin @ Taylor and Boffa Miskell) want to deliver the benefits from the project to drivers as quickly as possible.
“To have reached the stage where we’re now ready to switch northbound traffic across to the new structure, significantly ahead of schedule is a remarkable achievement,” Mr Mutton says. “We’ve had fantastic support from drivers while we’ve replaced the old viaduct and we’re now asking people to help us again to keep the city moving through this closure.
“We’re taking advantage of a long three- day weekend so that we can deliver this important project to Aucklanders. We appreciate the support and patience of all drivers and we’ll be working hard to finish as quickly as possible.”
Detours will be in place during Anniversary weekend and detour routes to key destinations are available online, at www.nzta.govt.nz/aklsummerseason and www.facebook.com/switchmyroute.
Mr Mutton repeats, however, that alternative routes will not be able to cope if regular weekend traffic flows occur.
“Even with a managed closure and detours in place, congestion will be extensive.”
The Automobile Association is supporting the NZTA in urging people to avoid unnecessary trips. If they do have to travel says AA spokesman Simon Lambourne, they should plan their journeys and drive with patience and care.
“Congestion will be significant with the closure of the northbound lanes,” Mr Lambourne says, “but the short term pain will be well worth it given the long term benefits of the new viaduct.”
The new southern viaduct at Newmarket opened in September, 2010, after a similar motorway closure.
Like the old viaduct built in 1965, its replacement is almost 700 metres long but it has wider lanes, is seismically stronger, and will produce less traffic noise.
“The viaduct stands at the heart of one of the most critical transport links for Auckland and New Zealand – one that carries on average more than 160,000 vehicles daily,” says Mr Mutton.
The opening of the viaduct’s northbound lanes on Auckland Anniversary Monday marks the latest in a series of large NZTA projects to improve travel through the central motorway junction (CMJ). The viaduct is located at the southern end of the CMJ. At its northern end, the Victoria Park tunnel opened last November, and new southbound lanes through St Marys Bay and across the Victoria Park flyover opened earlier this month.
“These are huge projects designed to help Auckland’s economy and its communities,” Mr Mutton says. “With the support of drivers during Auckland Anniversary Weekend we will be able to deliver the next very significant improvement to their motorway to make travel more reliable, quicker, and safer.”
The NZTA is running an extensive communications campaign using traditional and social media, and a large sign on the lifting gantry on the Newmarket Viaduct to make people aware of the closure and its impact on travel.
The southbound lanes on the Southern Motorway are not affected by the Auckland Anniversary Weekend closure.
Note to editors: In the event of adverse weather the weekend of January 28-30, these works could be delayed until Waitangi weekend.
For more information on the Newmarket Viaduct Replacement Project visit,www.nzta.govt.nz/newmarketconnection
Readers may remember that the same thing happened to the southbound lanes back in September 2010, similar warnings were given but overall things seemed to work smoothly. That was also helped in part by ARTA eventually listening to public calls and put on free trains during the shutdown however that won’t really be very effective this time as ……
Parts rail network will also be shut in many places for electrification upgrade works.
Buses will replace trains on the following lines:
EASTERN LINE: Papakura to Britomart via Glen Innes
SOUTHERN LINE: Papakura to Otahuhu
Please Note: On Monday 30 January additional services will operate for Auckland Anniversay Day festivities.
The most interesting thing about all of this is that the Western line and parts of the Southern line will actually remain open and with the exception of the Labour Day weekend which fell during the RWC, this is the first long weekend in recent memory that we have had even some trains running, in a way it is a little taste for the future once we get our shiny new trains (its not to last though as the entire network will be shutdown the following weekend).
You can see all changes to PT over the weekend here.
Edit: AT have now put on more trains for this weekend on the lines that will be open.
Additional trains will operate on the Western, Onehunga and Southern lines (north of Otahuhu). They will run about every half hour between approximately 10am and 6pm. At other times the normal weekend timetable will be in place.
There will also be extra buses on to cater for the various events that will be happening
By admin, on January 23rd, 2012 With only a few days to go of my contribution to this blog, I thought I’d have a look back at some of the statistics of this blog. A few of them can be seen down the left-hand side of this page – as I write we have:
- 1,688 posts
- 1,266,909 words in those posts
- 26,198 comments
- 2,249,494 words in those comments
But some statistics can only really be seen behind the scenes, so for your curiosity here are a few:
It has also been interesting to see how visitor numbers to the blog have changed over time, going from under 8000 views in July 2009 to almost 66,000 in August last year – the busiest month so far. This post on Public Address, in particular, seemed to really bring what had previously been a generally ignored blog, into public view.
Of course, it is the knowledge that many hundreds of people visit the blog each day, and that many of them take the time to comment and share their thoughts, which has kept me going and keen to post almost every day. I’m sure it’ll take me some time to adjust – but in the meanwhile I am curious about how the various readers of the blog found their way here the first time, which post do they remember (if any) which encouraged them to keep coming back and if there are any particular favourite posts. Because, I’m a curious person too.
By admin, on January 23rd, 2012 I’m not going to repeat the excellent Guest Post review of the book Human Transit – other than to note from what I’ve read of the book so far I agree with pretty much everything in the review. It is a very good book. It is a book that should be widely read by those involved in public transport planning, as well as by anyone who find themselves interested by public transport, how it works and how it could work better.
One part of the book that I found particularly interesting, perhaps because it fits with some of the critiques I’ve made of Auckland’s bus network in previous posts (for example: here and here) relates to the question of how much emphasis we should put on peak travel against all day travel. The question occupies chapter 6 of Human Transit, which also provides some useful insights into this issue.
At a basic level, most public transport has times of peak demand which correspond with the beginning and end of the working day. Human Transit notes that the peaked systems (those with the biggest difference between peak and off-peak demand) are almost always systems serving low-density suburban areas – where driving all day is easy and it’s only congestion (or parking costs downtown) which encourage people onto public transport during peak hours. Auckland’s North Shore is a pretty good example of a highly ‘peaked’ public transport market, with very strong demand for public transport to the CBD during peak hours (to avoid congestion and having to pay for parking) but pretty weak demand outside the peak because the public transport system isn’t particularly useful for trips other than those heading to the CBD.
There’s nothing particularly new about all this. Where life becomes interesting is when we start to look at the cost-effectiveness of adding services at different times of the day, or alternatively where we decide to cut service if we need to save money. Human Transit tells us an interesting story in this regards:
In the early 1980s, when I was an undergraduate intern in the planning department of Portland’s TriMet, I remember a day when the manager of scheduling was tearing his hair out in frustration. The agency faced budget cuts and was having to cut service, but the general manager (the chief executive officer of the agency) had instructed them to cut only outside the peak. “Don’t cut the peak,” he had said. “The peak is our bread and butter!”
But as it turned out, there was no way to protect the peak service from cuts and still save any money. They could cut midday service, but this would turn all-day shifts into peak-only shifts, which would make those shifts more expensive to run. This effect was so pronounced that it cancelled out most of the cost savings from the service cut.
There are many reasons why peak services are more expensive to run than off-peak services. Labour is one matter, getting the buses and trains back to the depot when empty (those dreaded “not in service buses”) is another, but perhaps the most significant is the cost of the bus or train fleet that must be owned to provide that ‘peak of the peak’ service frequency. Increasing off-peak frequency generally only requires a bit more fuel and staff cost (and may not even require that if staff are heading back to the depot anyway, or have contracts requiring minimum shift times). Increasing peak frequency typically requires buying more vehicles (be they buses or trains), hiring more drivers, running more ‘out of service’ kilometres and entering into increasingly complex and inefficient rostering procedures. The book picks up on this issue:
Fleet size depends on how many vehicles you need at once, and that, of course, depends on your peak service, not your all-day pattern. Many transit agencies must purchase, license, store and maintain a vehicle that makes only one round trip per day. That’s a huge inefficiency compared to an all-day operation whose fleet may work 10 to 20 hours each day.
I think it was Paul Mees’s book “Transport for Suburbia” which compares Vancouver’s West Coast Express peak-only commuter train with the Skytrain system on this issue. On average, each West Coast Express train has its seats filled around twice a day – one trip in during the morning and one trip out during the evening. In contrast, each Skytrain has every seat filled something like 50 times a day because they operate at high frequencies all day long, providing service for far more trips than just commuting ones. That makes the Skytrain system incredibly efficient to run, even if overall it may not seem as “crowded” during very peak times as the West Coast Express train.
What the book goes on to highlight is that if we are looking to improve the cost-effectiveness of our system, we shouldn’t focus on cutting services outside the peak (even if the buses or trains are fairly empty), but rather look at services during the peak that aren’t at maximum capacity:
…if you see a transit vehicle running nearly empty during the peak period and in the peak commute direction, you may be seeing some actual waste. Suppose that a commuter express bus, doing a long run from a distant suburb into the city, carries only fifteen people, less than half a seated load. If the transit agency is looking at its cost-effectiveness fairly, this situation should look much much worse than a bus with fifteen people at noon, running on an all-day, two-way line. For this one commuter express run, the agency has spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the bus, thousands more for the land on which to store it, and thousands per year to maintain and operate it, including penalty rates for the driver who works a brutal schedule and is kept from spending time with family most days – all to serve only fifteen people!
In this previous post, I compared bus frequency across a number of central isthmus routes: 
Perhaps the most interesting observation of the above (along with Dominion Road’s excellent inter-peak frequencies) is how service levels drop away dramatically after 6pm, which encourages people to travel home during the evening peak. A thorough assessment of whether each and every one of the peak hour services is needed may end up freeing up resources to run a huge number of inter-peak and evening services – at the cost of just a few peak time buses.
The 15 minute frequency all the time of the Outer Link bus is a pretty extreme example of an ‘un-peaked’ service, but is a key element of the route’s success. We are able to afford to run a good frequency service around much of the inner isthmus, even on a Sunday night, because we don’t have the extremely high costs of additional peak services (aside from a couple, to ensure the route can keep to its timetable in peak hour traffic). While those Sunday night buses might generally be empty, over time the guaranteed frequency of the service means that people will learn to trust it and rely on it – influencing land-use patterns, decisions people make about where to live and decisions people make about how many cars to own. The Outer Link’s constant timetable and its regular frequency are all made possible by squeezing the peak a little bit harder (lower frequencies at peak time on some services in the area than there used to be), so we have achieved a really high-quality service at relatively low cost. I suspect though that some additional peak time services, for capacity reasons, will be required inevitably.
This is not to suggest that we should go cutting peak time services ‘willy nilly’, because – after all – the TriMet General Manager was correct in saying that serving the peak is the ‘bread and butter’ of public transport, to an extent. However, it’s worth keeping in mind the cost differences of running peak and off-peak services, so you don’t get quite so grumpy next time you see a predominantly empty off-peak bus, or have to squeeze onto a peak time bus. Even though such an outcome looks inefficient, looks can be deceiving.
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