The Transport Balance

A couple of weeks back my girlfriend Leila pointed me towards reading a blog post about positive space and negative space. The post is actually about writing, rather than related to any particular transport matter, but it uses an architectural concept to make a point about writing. That concept is equally – or probably more – relevant to transport matters than to writing. It explains, in quite a simple way, possibly the main reason why I am a public transport advocate.

The concept of positive space and negative space is explained in a book called 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, by a guy called Matthew Frederick. The explanation is quite simple: “We move through negative spaces and dwell in positive spaces.” Positive spaces are places we want to be in, while negative spaces are the places we travel through in order to get to a positive space. The example given in the aforementioned blog post is a comparison between a house (clearly a positive space) and a street (usually a negative space). We travel along streets to get to a house, or to our workplace, or whatever.

If I take this concept and apply it to transport-matters, I think there’s a slow gradation from positive spaces (say, a pedestrian mall) to a completely negative space (say, a motorway). Generally, the more a street/road is designed to provide for vehicles to travel through it, the less attractive a place it is to be in. This may seem like a complete no-brainer I know: motorways are ugly places and pedestrian malls are effectively close to parks, but it is an interesting conundrum. We need a way to get people and stuff around our cities – there’s no getting past that fact; but at the same time we need to ensure our cities are nice places to live in. So therefore we need to balance the positive and the negative space – in some places it will be more appropriate to have positive space, in others we will need negatives spaces. Or, in an ideal world we could achieve the goals of a negative space (shifting people), with the advantages of a positive space (still ensuring the place is nice to be in).

Now this is where I think we’ve got things very badly wrong over the past 50 years, in Auckland particularly, but the same is true internationally. Perhaps because transport planning has generally been the realm of engineers rather than architects, all our focus has been on shifting people through places, and far too little attention has been placed on looking at what the effects of that have been. I do think that as soon as you move through a place rather than dwell in it, there is a negative effect on that place, although at the same time I also think that there is the potential for “win-win” situations to happen, if only we actually looked at transportation being a balancing act of shifting people through a place while paying respect to that place – rather than simply focusing on the first aspect and ignoring the second.

There are some pretty massive economic reasons why we should be worried about this. By not valuing the space in which we are designing transport to shift someone through, we devalue it – both in a broad sense but also an a pure economic sense. I had someone recently tell me that the rent per square metre on Vulcan Lane (a lovely pedestrianised lane in the centre of Auckland) is about three times the rent of space on Customs Street – which is a busy arterial route that also passes through Auckland’s CBD. The noise, the car-focus and just the ‘negativity’ of the space has reduced its value to just one third of a more positive area. That’s a huge economic cost which we have created through what could be called an unbalanced approach to analysing transport. Here’s a look at Vulcan Lane and a classic example of a road clearly designed with no consideration of its effect on the surrounding area, Pakuranga Road – just to give an idea of the difference between the two:

Vulcan Lane – clearly a positive space.

Pakuranga Road – about as negative as it gets really!

Now of course every street can’t be like Vulcan Lane – otherwise Auckland would be Venice and wouldn’t have any cars (hey actually, that sounds pretty cool, but I’m being realistic here!) So the real question is how we can shift people through a space, and yet maintain the quality of that space? This is where public transport comes into the mix.

I really don’t think it’s particularly possible to shift a lot of people via private vehicles and still maintain the quality of the space. Even in the case of the Champs-Élysées in Paris, I think that it’s a fantastic place despite, not because of, the huge many-laned road that runs down the middle of it. Spaces like Pakuranga Road, shown above, are clearly not where someone would want to be – even though in the example of this picture we are actually right next to a shopping mall and in the middle of what could be quite a good development node. If only it wasn’t for the six-lane highway that runs through the middle of it! In contrast, if we look at the image below, we can see that providing a light-rail line (this is from Portland, USA) can both shift people around the city yet at the same time maintain – or even enhance – the quality of the space that is passed through:It is not only light-rail lines that can seemingly avoid the “shifting people equals negative space” conundrum that effects automobile-based transport. If we look at the Newmarket station redevelopment, it is all about creating a space that is a true hub for the area. A place where people will gather. A place where people want to be, that attracts investment and so forth. I can’t imagine what the car-version would be, perhaps a multi-level carpark? I can’t imagine anyone wanting to be located particularly close to a carpark – both in terms of having a shop, or just in terms of a place to “hang out”.

Public transport’s ability to shift a lot of people within a smaller amount of space (the RER A line in Paris carries about the equivalent of a 50 lane wide motorway on the two tracks of its central section for example) also means that where negative space is unavoidable – for example, the space dedicated to the tracks themselves which I agree is generally quite negative for heavy rail – it is minimised in comparison to car-based transport. The reduced width of the transport corridor also means that it’s cheaper to put underground – with the added bonus that you don’t need to worry about extracting vehicle emissions if you have an electrified rail system. Putting the negative space of a transport link underground completely removes its effect from the city – meaning that more space is able to be dedicated to positive uses, such as buildings, parks and footpaths.

It is quite a fundamental shift in thinking once you consider all the space dedicated to roads and footpaths really is simply ‘public space’, and it’s only because we have given such high priority to shifting vehicles through the space that we have allowed our cities to become so dominated by the cars – and have allowed such a huge amount of negative space to be constructed. I think even about my street – which is a relatively standard width road in a pretty nice corner of Auckland – and realise that most of it is still a negative space. Its “negativity” could be reduced through narrowing it, creating wider and nicer footpaths, making more of an effort to slow cars down, and so on. The case is even more obvious when we look at somewhere like Queen Street in the heart of Auckland’s CBD, shown in the picture below. Why is it that our primary pedestrian boulevard has four-lanes of traffic running down its full length? Why is it even possible for someone to drive the whole length of this street? In a part of the city that is so extremely valuable, why have we simply gifted so much space to cars – when there are so many other routes available for them to travel along? Why have we allowed a street that really should be primarily a positive space to be so compromised? These days I think that Queen Street is probably a “neutral space” – where the light-phasing has slowed down the cars enough for it to not seem too negative, but still the kind of place where as much attention is being placed on getting through the area as being part of the area. And considering it really is the heart of Auckland, I think that’s pretty lame.

I think the “transport balance” that we need to find is a better way to get people and goods around the city, but a way to do so that respects the city. There’s a need to balance the negative space with positive space, to reduce the extent to which negative spaces are negative and improve the extent to which positive spaces are positive. This is why I think that shared streets are a great idea, why I think we need to use our road network smarter rather than simply widening it, and above all – why public transport needs to be a bigger part of the solution than what it is at the moment.