Transportation

I think in the future when I look back at this year and the long-term effects of the Europe holiday in particular, the thing that will stick in my mind the most might be the enormous influence riding the train, metro and tram systems of Europe had on my attitudes towards transportation in general. I’ve spent a fair amount of money on books from Amazon about metro systems, Carfree cities, urban planning in general and all sorts of other related stuff in the past couple of months, fueling this ever-growing interest in working out how and why Auckland’s transport system is so car-oriented, and working out the best ways to fix that problem.

I’ve always been interested in transportation. Driving along a stretch of new motorway, or noticing when a new set of traffic lights had been put it was always exciting for me as a child, probably to a rather unhealthy extent. I was drawing street maps (which I obviously have resurrected recently!) from the age of 8 or 9 onwards, and coming up with various further ways in which to express my interest. However, I guess because I didn’t really catch buses as a kid, and that Auckland’s rail system was pretty much non-existent in the 1990s (I even remember writing a 5th form English piece on why the Britomart train station was a bad idea… oh the shame) I mostly focused on motorways and roads with what I did. I couldn’t wait to travel on new and different motorways around Auckland and other parts of New Zealand.

Even most of my early drawn cities rarely had a rail system. The city that I’ve completely revamped in the past year and a bit originally had a couple of railway lines, although mainly because I thought I could put them in for a bit of realism rather than me actually wanting them to do anything particularly useful. At a very late stage I put in a subway system, but that was a bit of a 5 minute job with a highlighter drawing lines across different pages of the city, rather than something the city was actually built around. I suppose throughout university I really began to recognise the flaws of private-transport based systems, which was particularly reinforced for me when I visited Sydney and just loved travelling on the train system there. Sydney’s system was the first half-decent transport system I’d ever been on, and it was so liberating having this whole big system that could easily whisk me from one side of this giant city to the other. I came back with a rather changed viewpoint of the world.

However, I think it was until pretty recently that I began to realise how pointless most motorway expansion projects actually were. Paul Mees, a transportation/land use planning expert from Australia gave a really interesting talk at university a few years ago about how by international standards Auckland’s motorway system was actually really comprehensive already, and much more complete than many other cities around the world – generally leading to the kind of situation we have today where everything’s stacked in the favour of people using their cars as much as possible, and for public transport only really being for those poor souls who can’t afford a car. A better understanding of the economic, social and environmental costs of the car became clearer and clearer to me throughout my thesis study, and also in more recent times with the books I’ve read.

So yeah, I now think of my drive to change Auckland from the auto-dependent sprawled city that it is, to one that supports public transport far better, as something of an obsession. I’m slowly making my own efforts to change the patterns of travel that I have, and I have caught an awful lot of buses lately! I have also got a number of pretty good ideas regarding changes to planning policy documents that I think would help us to shift away from current patterns, that hopefully I’ll have the chance to share in the future through making submissions on future District Plan updates. I’m pretty well-informed about the issue now (although I’m sure there’s plenty more reading I could do on it), and I think there are pretty straightforward ways in which significant improvements could be made, so it’ll be fun to see what can happen. I guess a lot will depend on what happens to petrol prices in the long term though.