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By admin, on February 24th, 2010 There are two urban rail systems in New Zealand: Auckland’s and Wellington’s. The two systems are quite different in many senses, but they provide some useful comparisons.
Auckland:
1) Diesel trains
2) Three lines
3) No inter-city services (beyond Pukekohe and apart form the Overlander)
4) Patronage of around 8 million passengers a year
5) Public subsidies of around $7 per rail trip
Wellington:
1) Electric trains (except for Wairarapa, Capital Connection & Overlander)
2) Three main lines, plus the small Melling Line
3) Regular inter-city services to Masterton
4) Patronage of around 11 million passengers a year
5) Public subsidies of around $2 per rail trip
Another significant difference is the way in which the two systems are run. Here in Auckland we have a complicated system with Veolia Transport having the main rail contract, but on top of that having locomotives leased from KiwiRail, some drivers also from KiwiRail, ARTA seeming to co-ordinate things, Ontrack looking after the tracks, Auckland City Council owning Britomart station and Auckland Regional Council being ARTA’s funder. In Wellington, the system is far more simplified, with (as far as I know) KiwiRail owning the trains, operating the trains, owning the tracks, looking after the tracks, looking after the stations and so forth. The Greater Wellington Regional Council contribute to subsidies for the system, and is probably involved in the system’s planning, but there are – overall – far fewer different parties involved.
One particularly striking figure is how much more cost-effective Wellington’s rail system is than Auckland’s. The above figures suggest that Auckland’s system receives around $56 million of rail subsidies per year, while Wellington’s receives around $22 million – even though it runs many more services each day than are run in Auckland. I’m sure the fact that Wellington generally runs electric trains whereas Auckland runs diesel trains contributes to the difference – as electrics are much cheaper to run. But it seems reasonable to suggest that something else is going on here – that perhaps the complexity of Auckland’s system is leading to pretty huge inefficiencies. Looking at where the money gets spent on Auckland’s rail system provides some interesting further information in this respect: I must say I’m slightly curious what the $35 million Veolia contract does include, if it doesn’t include all the other matters listed above.
The difference between the cost-effectiveness of Auckland’s and Wellington’s systems is particularly interesting given the changes to the structuring of rail operations that Steven Joyce announced last year. Generally, it seemed as though Joyce was wanting some structural separation between the agency that owns trains in Auckland and Wellington (which in the longer term will be KiwiRail) and the agency which operates the rail services. This separation currently exists in Auckland, but doesn’t in Wellington. Which does beg the question why, considering Wellington’s rail system seems so much more cost-effective than Auckland’s, we would even consider wanting to do this? Ideologically I can see that Joyce would want ‘competition’ between possible operators, but surely experience tells us that perhaps what we should be doing is applying the Wellington system to Auckland – rather than vice-versa?
Or aren’t we actually interested in making public transport cost-effective after all?
By admin, on February 23rd, 2010 Steve Ingrouille, from the Australian group “Going Solar”, puts out a weekly newsletter on transport and urban development matters. This week’s newsletter has some interesting information on high-speed rail in Spain:  There was an interesting article in the NZ Herald on the weekend about the enormous investment China is making in High-Speed Rail (unfortunately not online).
While high-speed rail is certainly unlikely to ever be viable in New Zealand, it is certainly interesting to see what’s happening internationally. It will be exciting if the USA rolls out a true high-speed rail network over the next decade or so. It seems like a fairly naturally suitable country for that kind of network.
By admin, on February 23rd, 2010 It is good to see NZ Herald transport issues writer Matthew Dearnaley back on deck, as I had severely missed the Herald reporting on transport matters recently. Today’s article looks at the CBD Rail Tunnel, repeating a reasonable amount of what I posted on a couple of weeks back:
Upper Symonds St joins rail station plan
Underground station sites being considered for a $1 billion-$1.5 billion central Auckland rail tunnel have been extended to upper Symonds St.
Consultants conducting a $5 million investigation study for KiwiRail and the Auckland Regional Transport Authority for a 3.5km tunnel between Britomart and Mt Eden believe three new stations should be built to maximise patronage and rail access to the inner city.
Albert St-Mayoral Drive and Karangahape Rd have been proposed locations for some time for the other two stations, but Symonds St is identified in a progress report as a major catchment for rail passengers.
The consultants have shortlisted two almost identical sites, both reaching between the intersections of Symonds St with Khyber Pass Rd and Mt Eden Rd but at slightly different angles, depending on the eventual tunnel alignment… [rest of article here]
…The latest report from the consultants – a consortium of AECOM, Parsons Brinckerhoff and Beca – expects the tunnel will make “a critical contribution in lifting the entire region’s and country’s economic performance”.
That last paragraph is particularly interesting, as it notes the tunnel’s potential to make a huge difference to the economic performance of Auckland, and even the entire country.
What I find is also fascinating is how this project’s timing is aligning itself quite similarly with that of the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway”. The cost of the two projects is also likely to be fairly similar – at around $1.5 billion. The money is probably there for one of the projects, but is unlikely to be there for both. So I guess the challenge for public transport supporters over the next while is to help prove beyond doubt that the CBD Rail Tunnel is a far better and more sensible way to spend that $1.5 billion than a motorway up north that only carries around 15,000 vehicles a day.
By admin, on February 23rd, 2010 I had an interesting meeting at work last week, where we laughed about the fact that urban planning has for so long been about “colouring in” maps – into one zone or another. Somewhat ironically, later on in the meeting we were back in the situation of colouring in maps, but I’ll leave that aside for now. While this post is mainly about urban planning, and how I think we generally do it exceedingly poorly, you can’t detach land-use planning from transportation matters, and the fact that we do urban planning so poorly certainly contributes to poor transportation outcomes as well (although it does not absolve us from getting transportation planning right, which is a pretty common excuse).
For a start, I think it’s important to look at what I think are the two greatest ironies of urban planning. The first comes from the history of urban planning, which developed in the late 19th century as something of an ‘urban code’ to help avoid terrible situations where you had polluting factories next to houses. The irony is that, 125 or so years later, we’re still obsessing about strongly separating business uses from residential uses – even though there’s barely any heavy industry left in cities like Auckland. Urban planning also sought to overcome the 19th century problem of over-crowding, by introducing rules which prevented or minimised the chance of over-crowding. Today, once again we have the irony of most of our planning rules dictating “minimum site areas” per residential unit along with a myriad of other rules that promote a tiny house in the middle of a giant section, and make life pretty difficult for anything else. This happens at the same time our regional planning documents are imploring higher urban densities – particularly in growth nodes. The irony is that we’re fighting 19th century battles against over-crowding and dirty industry in the 21st century when we actually need higher densities and more mixed-use developments.
The second irony is that, as we’ve planned more and more over the past 100 years or so, the outcomes seem to be worse and worse. Ask most urban planners what they think are the ‘better’ parts of Auckland and it’s highly likely you’ll be pointed to the older suburbs. The very same suburbs with under-width streets, houses supposedly too close together, houses definitely too close to the street, no off-street parking and so forth. It is a great irony that the harder we try to get good urban outcomes, the poorer the results seem to be. Once again, it doesn’t help that most of the planning rules seem to contradict the higher-order policies and objectives.
A lot of the problem, in my opinion comes down to the concept of zoning. The RMA was actually supposed to get rid of zoning – focusing on the environmental effects of an activity rather than providing a list of OK activities for each zone – as was previously the case under the repealed Town and Country Planning Act. However, each and every council couldn’t quite get their head around how to plan urban areas without zoning, and as a result we end up with a situation where we are stuck with zoning once again. Here’s a typical District Plan map (Manukau City Council in this example): The pink areas are business zoned land, the “off-white” is for residential uses, the yellow is schools, motorways and other designations while the green is for parks. The purple is a bit of a special zone for the Manukau Institute of Technology. The point is that each bit of land is clearly one thing or another – either zoned for business or residential or something else. Goodness knows the hoops one would have to jump through in order to do a mixed use development with shops on the ground floor, offices above that and then apartments above that again. You’d probably trigger about a million different resource consents.
Now I’m not just picking on Manukau City Council here – literally everyone’s just as bad. Auckland City Council has a “Business Mixed Use” zone, which certainly envisages residential developments within it – but somewhat strangely as part of the process of creating this zone, Auckland City Council made residential developments more difficult in other Business zones. And the mixed-use zone is reasonably sparse around the city.
Single-use developments, by which I mean massive tracts of housing without any shops or massive tracts of business activities without any housing, is one of the most tell-tale signs of auto-dependent urban sprawl. People are too far away from where they need to go, so therefore they drive instead of walking. Furthermore, the low densities that typify this kind of development can make it more difficult (but certainly not impossible) to provide high quality public transport, so therefore they drive even more. Because zoning clearly states that a piece of land is for either this use or that use (but very rarely both), fundamentally I think that zoning encourages urban sprawl and works against our higher-order policies that hope to create a more compact, less automobile-dependent, city.
But what alternatives are there? Clearly we want to impose restrictions on what can and cannot be built in certain parts of the city. Some of those 19th century problems that we obsess over still have the potential to be problematic – like skyscrapers being built in the middle of otherwise low-rise suburbia (yes I’m looking at you Herne Bay towers), heritage housing being destroyed, inadequate open space being provided, sunlight being blocked and so forth. We probably also don’t really want trucking companies locating next door to too many people’s houses if we can avoid it too.
My idea is that we can still have something resembling a “zone” – but instead of saying “residential goes here” it might say “this is a growth area” or “this is a traditional town centre so be a bit careful” or “this is an area of heritage residential housing so be very careful what you do”. A key difference between this and the existing zoning system is that these zones could overlap. You could have one edge of your “standard housing area” overlap with your “business area” or a growth node – which would allow higher development densities. The outcome might be something like this (I’ve used Kingsland as an example as it has a range of uses). The area in yellow is generally heritage housing, the areas in red are town centres (Kingsland in the middle and Morningside to the west) and the area in green is generally light-industrial with plenty of development potential for higher densities. Something like this would reflect the range of (sometimes contradictory) aims that we might have for Kingsland: that we want to keep its distinctive heritage housing, we want to make it a vibrant shopping area (and retain an architectural cohesiveness to the town centre) but also we want to provide for some serious intensification as it’s an inner-city suburb with excellent public transport connections.
You could probably apply further layers on here – potentially breaking down your heritage housing area into sub-areas of higher and lower significance, or your growth areas into higher and lower intensities. Another useful thing is that the roads fall within the “zone”, which means that developments to the road network could be required to fit in with their surroundings to a greater extent. Perhaps the most interesting areas are those where two different areas intersect, so you end up with areas of the town centre that are within the green “growth area” – which might have more potential for large-scale redevelopment than parts of the town centre outside those areas. You could also potentially have growth areas coinciding with heritage housing areas – which would mean that whether redevelopment is appropriate would probably be decided on more of a “site by site” basis.
Obviously a council would be far more in depth when coming up with exact boundaries of the different “zones” (for want of a better word). However, the concept of being able to overlay various different “sought outcomes”, allowing a much finer grain of different development types – as an area might be allocated for either business or residential – is likely to lead to far better urban outcomes in my opinion. It’s a step forwards from the 1960s thinking of two-dimensional zoning in my opinion.
By admin, on February 22nd, 2010 There’s some interesting information in the answers to parliamentary written questions submitted by Mt Albert MP David Shearer on the roll-out of the Auckland electrification project over the next four years. They provide a year by year insight into what we can expect to see as this project proceeds between now and 2013.
First step, this year:
Question: What parts of the Auckland rail electrification project are anticipated to be completed throughout 2010?
Answer Text: KiwiRail has advised that in 2010 the first stage of the signalling will be completed, ten bridges will be raised or modified, and traction works will commence with the installation of mast foundations and the erection of masts.
So we can expect to see a pile of masts going up this year, which will be a good visible sign of progress on electrification. The raising or modifying of bridges is a pretty tricky and probably quite expensive part of the process of electrification, but it seems like this will be mainly completed by the end of this year.
Now for 2011:
Question: What parts of the Auckland rail electrification project are anticipated to be completed throughout 2011?
Answer Text: KiwiRail has advised that signalling will be nearing completion in 2011 and installation of masts and bridge clearance work will be ongoing.
It will certainly be a relief to have the signalling project completed. It might mean fewer than the 172 signalling failures experienced on the rail network in the past 12 months.
And 2012:
Question: What parts of the Auckland rail electrification project are anticipated to be completed throughout 2012?
Answer Text: KiwiRail has advised that ongoing installation of masts and overhead wires and final clearance works and signalling will be undertaken in 2012.
So by the end of 2012 most of the physical infrastructure works should be completed. That’s good news.
And finally, 2013:
Question: What parts of the Auckland rail electrification project are anticipated to be completed throughout 2013?
Answer Text: KiwiRail has advised that in 2013 work on rail electrification will include final installations of masts and overhead wires, and arrival of the first tranche of electric multiple units.
This one actually raises more questions than it answers. Only the first tranche of electric multiple units will be arriving in 2013? How many will that entail? When are the rest arriving?
By admin, on February 22nd, 2010 Auckland City Council owns five parking buildings within the Auckland CBD – Fanshawe Street, Downtown, Victoria Street, Civic and Karangahape Road. All up, these parking buildings provide quite a few thousand spaces in the CBD. I must say I have always found it rather strange that Council does own car parking buildings – as after all does it not contradict with others plans and strategies they have to minimise the number of people driving themselves into the CBD?
While I certainly am not generally an advocate for councils selling off their assets, I wonder whether there are good grounds for an exception to be made here. Is it perhaps a bit of a conflict of interest for council to retain its parking buildings? Another interesting issue to look at is the value of the various car-parking buildings owned by council. The ARC’s “Region Viewer” website has some very interesting information on property valuations, and gives us an insight into what Auckland City Council could potentially make if it sold its parking buildings.
I get the following valuations of the parking buildings:
- Fanshawe Street: $15.6 million
- Downtown: $68.5 million (see image below)
- Victoria Street: $40.4 million (see image below)
- Civic (can’t really be separated from the Aotea Centre above it, so wouldn’t bother)
- Karangahape Road: $9.1 million
Here’s an image of the Downtown carpark, showing the valuation: And Victoria Street: That’s $133.6 million all up. You could buy back a pretty big chunk of Auckland’s buses for that price.
By admin, on February 21st, 2010 The Public Transport Management Act (PTMA) was passed in September 2008, just before the previous government lost power. As I have explained previously, the PTMA allowed for greater regulation of public transport services – in particular bus services. The most controversial part of the Act allowed public agencies to contract all public transport services in their area, should they so desire. It is this part of the Act which the current government is now reviewing.
Paul Mees’s latest book, Transport for Suburbia, dedicates a whole chapter to planning, markets and public transport. It has some very interesting points to make about the regulation of public transport. As a bit of background, in 1989 public transport was deregulated in New Zealand, creating a split between commercial services and subsidised services, and perhaps most importantly, removing any particularly strategic way of putting together bus and train routes – leading to the messy situation that we find ourselves in now.
Interestingly, around the same time the UK went through a similar process of deregulation – although London was excluded from this. The fact that London was excluded provides an excellent ‘case study’ for comparing the effects of deregulating public transport services. Mees picks up on this:
…the market model seemed very attractive to policy makers… and so bus services were deregulated in both Britain and New Zealand. However, even the Thatcher government baulked at applying the market to London: the British capital was spared, initially temporarily, but eventually permanently. London was required to competitively tender its bus services, but under the control of a public agency which determined timetables, routes and fares. Without intending to, the British government set up an experiment to compare market-based public transport with the planned variety, and the excellent data published by the UK Department of Transport enables the results to be assessed.
The near-consensus, which includes pro-market observers like the European Commission and Wendell Cox, has been that the London model dramatically outperformed deregulation. In the decade following deregulation, operating costs per bus were reduced, and the number of bus-kilometres operated increased, in both London and the other cities. This was due partly to wage cuts and partly to increased use of regular buses and minibuses instead of the traditional double-deckers. But costs per passenger did not fall in the deregulated cities, because patronage declined dramatically: the promise that deregulation would produce more customer-focused services was not fulfilled. In London, by contrast, patronage held steady so the cost per passenger was significantly reduced…
…Before deregulation, London produced about one-third of urban bus patronage in England; now it accounts for two-thirds, despite housing only 7 million people, compared with 12 million in the six metropolitan counties. But while only carrying a third of the passengers, the metropolitan areas consume nearly two-thirds of ‘concessionary fare reimbursement’ – a result that appears to be due to the higher fares charged and the increasing domination of ridership by those travelling on concession tickets.
British bus deregulation has not produced free-enterprise public transport at all; nor has it produced innovative services that respond to contemporary needs. Instead, it has produced a new version of the 1970s ‘British disease’ that Thatcherism was supposed to have cured: a mendicant, declining industry that relies increasingly on carrying ‘captive’ passengers at concession rates or even for free, and charging the government at full-fare rates.
Mees also talks briefly about the New Zealand situation, and what the PTMA meant:
Similarly disastrous result in New Zealand prompted the repeal of deregulation which was replaced by the ‘London model’ from 1 January 2009. Even the leader of New Zealand’s ultra-dry ACT party supported the change, pointing out that following deregulation ‘Auckland moved from being the second-highest user of bus transport in the Australia and New Zealand region to the second-lowest on a population-patronage ratio. Britain is now the only part of the developed world where the policy persists.
Unfortunately that might not be true for too much longer. We really can’t mess with the PTMA.
By admin, on February 21st, 2010 It’s interesting to see that people are still ignoring the signs that say Grafton Bridge is for buses only. A NZ Herald article explores the issue further:
Lucrative bus lane
New bus-only lanes on Grafton Bridge have helped swell Auckland City Council coffers by $1.7 million since they were introduced in December.
More than 11,000 drivers have been stung for using the bridge between 7am and 7pm, when both lanes of the central city bridge are reserved for buses.
A senior councillor admitted the signs alerting motorists to the change were inadequate.
“The signage needed to be upgraded, without doubt,” said transport committee chairman Ken Baguley.
“I’ve suggested to officers that, with the benefit of hindsight, you’re not alerted to the fact that it’s a bus lane very well.”
[rest of article here]
I’m surprised the number is that low actually. The one time I caught a bus across Grafton Bridge, on my way to the opening of the Newmarket train station, there was someone on the bridge taking photos of cars travelling across it when they shouldn’t have. In the mere time it took the bus to cross the bridge I saw three or four cars travelling across it in the opposite direction. A cool $600 of revenue in just a couple of minutes.
While obviously it’s important for the signs to be clear, I think that the high number of people crossing the bridge in their cars does show a bit of contempt for public transport amongst car drivers in Auckland. Hopefully the $150 fine is useful ‘education’ for them. I also wonder whether the hours of operation for the route being bus only (7am-7pm Monday-Friday) confuse some people into thinking that it’s OK to cross when it isn’t.
From another perspective, it’s quite a useful source of funding for council. Maybe once we have the Super-City operational we’ll see that funding going back into public transport services.
By admin, on February 21st, 2010 Humantransit has a very interesting post on how to become a transit planner. It’s worth quoting in full i think:
Every week or two, I get an email asking me how to get into the transit planning business. I’m aware of four fairly common paths, none of which I took myself:
- Become a bus or train driver, and rise up through the ranks of operations management. Have good ideas about service design and express them enthusiastically but very, very patiently. If you’re smart, practical, personable and patient, this may be your best path, especially if you lack the grades or inclination to do graduate work.
- Get a graduate degree in transport engineering, where you’ll learn a lot about networks, modelling, traffic, roads, etc. Success in that degree can lead to entry-level jobs, either in consultancies or governments, and there are many opportunities to move into transit planning from there.
- Get a management or public administration credential, become a bureaucrat, someone who manages processes inside governments or large organizations. Sell yourself as a process manager. You can easily end up managing a public transit planning process. This, I think, is an especially common path in Australia or New Zealand, where there is a particular reverence for management in general and a belief that managing doesn’t require a professional background in the thing being managed.
- Get a graduate degree in urban planning with an emphasis in transport if available. You’ll learn a lot about land planning, development economics, urban structure, and a range of other useful things about how cities work in general. There are plenty of opportunities to explore public transit in this context.
What, you ask? Isn’t there a standard training path that all transit planners take, and exams they all pass? Not really. Different universities will have programs with more or less focus on transit. (Tip: At graduate level, what matters is not the courses offered but the specific expertise and interests of the faculty.) But there really isn’t a standard curriculum, or set of qualifications, or certification exam, that all transit planning professionals have done.
The diversity of backgrounds among transit professionals is, on balance, a good thing. Transit is intimately connected to a lot of other disciplines, and the best way to stay aware of those connections is to have each of those disciplines inside your team or organization. When I put together “core planning teams” to work intensively on a particular project, I try to make sure that I have a mixture of types of education and qualification. (It also keeps us from lapsing into professional jargon.)
So is there a “best” path to take? It depends on your goals and skills, but I do have an idea of what’s most needed. We need more people to come at transit through path #4, the study of urban planning in general, because the sustainability agenda of the next few decades is about building cities a certain way. Remember: Urban form dictates a city’s transit outcomes much more than transit planning does! That, for example, is why I belong to the Planning Institute of Australia, the professional body for land use planners, even though many of my colleagues belong to engineering groups.
In comments or emails, I’d welcome feedback from transit professionals on whether I’ve described the main paths correctly, and what I’ve missed. Again, I took none of these paths myself, and I’m not the only one. Transit is, ultimately, a remarkably open and permeable field, receptive to many kinds of expertise, and on balance, I think that’s for the best.
While I’m not a transit planner (although some day I might be), I do approach the topic from the perspective outlined in “point 4″, which is probably a good thing. I guess that’s why I focus so much on the inter-relationships between transport and urban planning. After all, transport should help us have better cities.
By admin, on February 20th, 2010 As well as Paul Mees’s excellent transport books, another book that should be “required reading” for those interested in public transport issues is The Transit Metropolis by Robert Cervero. Here’s the product description of this book from Amazon:
Around the world, mass transit is struggling to compete with the private automobile, and in many places, its market share is rapidly eroding. Yet a number of metropolitan areas have in recent decades managed to mount cost-effective and resource-conserving transit services that provide respectable alternatives to car travel. What sets these places apart.
In this book, noted transportation expert Robert Cervero provides an on-the-ground look at more than a dozen mass transit success stories, introducing the concept of the “transit metropolis” – a region where a workable fit exists between transit services and urban form. The author has spent more than three years studying cities around the world, and he makes a compelling case that metropolitan areas of any size and with any growth pattern-from highly compact to widely dispersed-can develop successful mass transit systems.
Following an introductory chapter that frames his argument and outlines the main issues, Cervero describes and examines five different types of transit metropolises, with twelve in-depth case studies of cities that represent each type. He considers the key lessons of the case studies and debunks widely-held myths about transit and the city. In addition, he reviews the efforts underway in five North American cities to mount transit programs and discusses the factors working for and against their success. Cities profiled include Stockholm; Singapore; Tokyo; Ottawa; Zurich; Melbourne; Mexico City; Curitiba, Brazil; Portland, Oregon; Vancouver, British Columbia; and others.
The Transit Metropolis provides practical lessons on how North American cities can manage sprawl and haphazard highway development by creating successful mass transit systems. While many books discuss the need for a sustainable transportation system, few are able to present examples of successful systems and provide the methods and tools needed to create such a system. This book is a unique and invaluable resource for transportation planners and professionals, urban planners and designers, policymakers and students of planning and urban design.
While I will probably get around to purchasing the book properly one day, thanks to Google Books it is possible to get a pretty good taste for what it is about. One particularly interesting part of the book is when it talks about responses to low-density cities with highly complex and dispersed trip patterns. With only 12% of Auckland’s employment located in the CBD, that kind of city describes Auckland pretty well. Cervero outlines how, in cities like these, one of the best responses for public transport to take is what he calls “Adaptive Transport”. This is briefly detailed below:
 There are three different types of “Adaptive Transit” that are described by Cervero: technological solutions such as Adelaide’s O-Bahn, very clever timetabling to make transfers simple and straightforward (Edmonton and Calgary in Canada are given as examples of this), and small door-to-door type services such as “jitneys“. Generally jitneys tend to only work in third-world cities where labour costs are very low.
What I find interesting is the interface between “Adaptive Transit” and land-use planning. This is detailed in the paragraphs below: I am pretty sure that I agree with the main point here – that we should be using transportation policies and projects to help achieve the land-use outcomes that we want, rather than the vice-versa situation. I think in Auckland, over the past 10 years or so, we have been attempting the ‘vice-versa’ situation, of promoting radical changes to our land-use patterns in the hope that these changes will help boost public transport patronage and reduce our automobile dependency. However, because we’ve continued to build motorways like they’re going out of fashion at the same time, there’s been a disconnect between land-use and transport planning which has made it difficult to achieve either the land-use outcomes or the transportation outcomes that we really want.
Now I don’t necessarily think that “Adaptive Transit”, as described by Cervero, is necessarily what Auckland requires. However, I definitely think that we need to be careful about the relationship between land-use and transportation planning. It seems to me as though transportation planning can drive land-use patterns a lot more than land-use patterns can drive transportation outcomes. So therefore, once we’ve worked out the type of city we want Auckland to be – a city that is healthier, safer, and more enjoyable to live, work and play in – we use transport policies (obviously in conjunction with other planning policies) to help drive us to that outcome. Perhaps we’ve all focused on the opposite situation too much?
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