A couple of great posts are doing the rounds of transport blogs at the moment, and I think they’re essential for me to comment on. Ultimately, they focus on the question of whether our transport patterns result from some sort of ‘culture’, or whether they simply respond to what the logical decision to make is.
Firstly, there is this post on the Psystenance blog, talking about what is known as the Fundamental Attribution Error, which in social psychology means the over-emphasis “…on the behaviour of others to personality or disposition and to neglect substantial contributions of environmental or situational factors”. In terms of transport matters, this is very applicable – as the post goes on to state:
Thus, the fundamental attribution error in transportation choice: You choose driving over transit because transit serves your needs poorly, but Joe Straphanger takes transit because he’s the kind of person who takes transit. This is the sort of trap we find ourselves in when considering how to fund transportation, be it transit, cycling, walking, or driving.
Let’s say you live in a suburban subdivision. You can afford to drive, and it’s the only way you can quickly and easily get to your suburban office and to the store, and pick up your child from daycare. How do you interpret the decision of other people to take transit? Is it something about the quality of transit where they are? More likely you are going to attribute it to something about those people themselves — they’re poor, or they’re students, or they’re some kind of environmentalists. It’s difficult for people to realize the effect of the situation, e.g. one with frequent transit service to many destinations along a straight street that is easy to walk to. (I’d also point out that students, the poor, and even environmentalists do drive as well.)
Why do Europeans walk more, cycle more, and take transit more? Surely it is something about their culture? But this is an excessively dispositional attribution. I won’t deny that culture plays some role in transit use, especially in the decisions that lead to the creation of transportation infrastructure. But that infrastructure itself and the services provided on it are a strong influence on the transportation choices people make. The European infrastructure situation facilitates those other modes of travel much more so than does typical North American transportation infrastructure.
Where our infrastructure gets closer to the European model, so does the transportation mode choice, and conversely, where Europe is more like the North American model, Europeans turn out to drive more. If culture were really the driving force, you wouldn’t expect to see much fluctuation in transportation choice. But just as North America suburbanized and fell in love with the private automobile, so did Europe, albeit to a lesser extent. Only recently has Europe started again building new tram lines and clawing back space from the car. Copenhagen, now viewed as an urban cycling mecca, wasn’t always one. The rise of the car drastically lowered cycling there in the 1960s. Copenhagen owes its recent fame to restrictions on parking and to its dedicated cycling infrastructure, which have led to a cycling renaissance.
The excellent Humantransit blog picked up on this post, and added some further comments that I find particularly noteworthy. These sections of the post I find particularly relevant to the situation in Auckland:
We’ve all heard the term “car culture” about places like Los Angeles. I’ve always hated the term, but now I understand why: it’s an expression of the attribution error. When we say that Americans drive because they’re a car culture, we imply that that the choice of most Americans to drive isn’t a rational one, in light of each person’s situation, and therefore requires a cultural explanation. Situation includes origin, destination, available infrastructure, available vehicles, special needs (wheelchairs, traveling with children, etc) and the time/cost tradeoff (the urgency of the trip vs the desire to save money).
But in the places most Americans live, given the current economics of driving, and transit options being as they are, the decision to drive is rational for most of the people making it. If most Americans are in situations where driving is the rational choice, we don’t need the “car culture” to explain their behavior, and we can see a clearer path to changing it, by helping to change people’s situations.
Conversely, car advocates who cite current car use as evidence that people want to drive cars are also making the attribution error; they’re implying that everyone who rationally chooses to drive is culturally committed to driving. That’s wrong; some of the people driving cars would like to be in a situation where they didn’t have to.
If I think about my transport situation rationally, I take the bus because parking in the CBD is very expensive and it makes more financial sense to simply catch the bus to work. Being able to check the internet on my phone while being on the bus is also quite nice. For most people who don’t work in the CBD (and many who do whose parking is subsidised), the same economic process doesn’t work, and as a result they logically choose to drive – generally unless they’re too poor, young or old to afford to buy and run a car. This isn’t because Aucklanders are lovingly attached to their vehicles (although that might be the case for a small proportion of the population) but rather because it’s the most logical thing to do. Taking the bus or train when travelling on a suburb to suburb trip is probably going to take you three times as long, cost your more and not even work half the time.
And why is this the case? Well most probably because we’ve spent most of the past 60 years building masses of roads and completely ignoring public transport investment. We’ve also put in place planning regulations (particularly in the case of minimum parking requirements) that are huge subsidies for those that drive. It’s not that we want to have to drive everywhere, or want families to own four cars, it’s that the way we have built our city or even more importantly the way we have built our city’s transport network, that effectively forces us all to act as though we have a car culture.
Where public transport improvements have been made that make catching the bus or train the logical choice for people, the results have been outstanding. The huge patronage growth on the Northern Busway over the past couple of years is probably the best example of this – a service with excellent frequencies, one that is pretty damn fast (faster than driving critically) and one that is super comfortable to ride. Proving the point that where you offer a superior option to driving, people will act logically and make the change.
On a personal aside, if you get yourself an apartment that is in the central city, and it isn’t a rat hole, your logical choice of transport suddenly becomes walking.
Max that depends on where you work, I used to live up the top of the city but work in Greenlane and driving was actually the quickest and cheapest option.
It’s not that we want to have to drive everywhere, or want families to own four cars, it’s that the way we have built our city
I think that another key point is that all too often we distance ourselves from the decisions. As a society I think we need to acknowledge that in some level, we do want to drive everywhere and that is because we build our cities the way we do. Once we (as the collective) accept this, we will be able to make serious changes.
It is like saying “I’m forced to drive” when we actually should say “I choose to drive” (for whatever reason, valid as it may be).
Let’s remember that we are also part of these cities and societies and that we are continually voting for or against certain decisions.
I’d disagree that parking in Auckland is necessarily “very expensive”. Sure, $4.50/hour on Princess St is horrendous. But casual all-day parking in one of the big downtown buildings is available for $10. Presumably there are significant discounts available for dedicated parks paid for by the month or the year. You’d be hard pressed to find that in many other cities of ~1.5 million.
Any public transport of 4 stages or more is going to cost >$10 (again, assuming a simple casual cash transaction), so driving isn’t necessarily a bad option from that perspective.
A problem is those people who say (or think) we’ve done this because it is by far the most economical way to get around and we should keep on doing it…
DC, I agree parking is fairly cheap by international standards. Also PT is somewhat expensive by international standards one could argue, as our farebox recovery is 45% while many Australian and US cities are 30ish%.
In my situation I live within one stage of the city so my bus is pretty cheap.
Jarbury, it always amazes me when I go to Aussie how cheap public transport is there. $3 something for 2hrs Zone 1 in Melbourne which would get you about the same distance out as Penrose/New Lynn/Takapuna and then $5 something for Zone 1+2 and $10 odd for a daily Zone 1+2. Zone 2 being about as far out, if not further than Pukekohe.
PT can be staggeringly expensive in Auckland. There are no zones in the City of Edmonton (684 km2; 783,000 people), and a 90 minute any-direction transfer is $2.75 (it was $2.50 until last month). You can backtrack on that transfer (which is not allowed in, say, Montreal), and transfer between buses and light rail.
In classic psychological theory the fundamental attribution error actually has two sides. While people attribute the actions to others to internal factors such as their disposition or personality, they tend to attribute their own actions to external factors such as environmental or situational constraints.
So it is a case of ‘I have to drive because of my job or the kids or my gym on the other side of town’, and everyone else chooses to drive because they have ‘a love affair with the car’.
But humans are not always rational actors and cars are THE symbol of freedom. Who can forget the thrill at fifteen of getting your license and your first car? Free! Free as bird! Free to drive you (and your mates/girlfriend) anywhere you wished! Cars DO represent individual freedom, because with a car you can where you want, when you like, and be beholden to no man or any timetable. Especially in the third world, where social controls of all sorts exist, a car is an intoxicating piece of liberating technology.
Also, as dc_red says – PT is SO expensive in Auckland. Driving at current fuel prices is probably slightly cheaper (and a million times more convenient) than taking public transport, certainly for journeys of less than 20 minutes.
“But just as North America suburbanized and fell in love with the private automobile, so did Europe, albeit to a lesser extent.”
The discussions of the psychology of decision making inadvertently provides it’s own good example of attribution bias, highlighted by the above sentence being the only part of the essay that addresses the coincidence of the post-WWII town planning revolution and the rise of the automobile as an urban transport choice.
“Copenhagen, now viewed as an urban cycling mecca, wasn’t always one. The rise of the car drastically lowered cycling there in the 1960s. Copenhagen owes its recent fame to restrictions on parking and to its dedicated cycling infrastructure, which have led to a cycling renaissance.”
Recognising the interrelationship of land use and transport offers an additional explanatory variable for Copenhagen’s cycling rennaisance. By restricting parking in the city centre the suburbs cease to be a logical place to accomodate population growth for CDB businesses. Instead it becomes logical to modify the city centre to allow businesses and housing to coexist, mainly by removing traditional noisy, smelly and smokey heavy industries such as ship building and dockyards and replacing them with waterfront parks and apartments and, most importantly, preserving low-rise character buildings for use either as offices or apartments.
The question that then needs to be answered by sociologists and planners is what are the relative importances of the land use and infrastructure decisions taken by the Copenhagen council and to what extent would either option have succeeded without the synergy of doing both together?
(As Jarbury can probably attest, tertiary studies in planning should be optening planners eyes and minds to these types of aspects and questions.
Kevyn, I guess that brings us back to the chicken/egg debate over land use patterns v transportation. Using the Copenhagen example, I would say that it was a change to transport policy (get rid of parking and upgrade cycleways) that allowed and encouraged the changing land-use patterns. Of course over time the process becomes self-reinforcing as a stronger CBD and more mixed-use and higher-density development makes public transport more attractive, useful and efficient. But to get that ball rolling I think you need to start with transport policy changes.
About PT cost in AK.
I have never really understood why it costs so much for such a poor service. Comparisons are not always fair but in Stockholm, a 1.4m people city just a little smaller than AK, for $120 you could ride every single route/line of bus, train, subway and tram for 30 days as many times I needed. In Ak, you have to to pay double that to do the same in a network about 20% the size of the one in Stockholm.
Pubilc transport is also great for freedom, especially to those under 15 (16 soon).
In Christchurch and Wellington especially it gives teenagers the freedom to move around the city without waiting on a parent to take you, and without them knowing when you’re going.
This was my experience moving from a rural area into Christchurch when I was 12. The bus service gave me much more freedom to explore than if I was dependent on my parents.
You also have the same issues with the elderly, disabled.
Then for the general public PT gives much more freedom to be able to visit the CBD.
GOP, it costs a lot *because* it is a poor service. It is inefficient and awkward, which means relatively few people use it and the fixed costs of the vehicles and infrastructure plus the operating costs (which could be utilised by a lot more people overall if it they run efficiently) must be spread across the small pool of passengers. This means fares must be quite high to stop subsidies from being astronomical.
The other issue is the contracting arrangements and the ineffective commercial-subsidised split makes it hard to have a proper integrated ticket, the solution that the various operators grudgingly allowed has been designed specifically to stop too many people using it (i.e. priced worse that just paying the individual operators fares in most cases).
A significant part of Auckland’s higher PT fares is that the region never really had a period of developing as a railway city. Consequently very little of Auckland’s housing is concentrated around railway stations. Auckland’s old tram and ferry suburbs are extremely low density compared with their equivalents in Sydney.
Stockholm and Wellington appear to have initially had land-use/transport planning similar to Copenhagen’s five-finger-plan. In these three cities the low population density has been achieved by using railways as the finger bones, the flesh being the housing within walking distance of the stations. The area between the spread fingers is undeveloped green-space. The alternative approach used in Christchurch and Auckland has been the use of greenbelts and/or large parks scattered at random. That results in the same density being acheived in a much less tranport friendly way because much more kms have to be travelled to move the same numbers of people to achieve the same trip purposes.
Although Christchurch is the only one of the aforementioned cities without an extensive motorway network it is notable that only Auckland and Wellington’s motorways directly serve the CBD in competition with the pre-existing railway/tramway corridors.
COPENHAGEN: Evolution of the Finger Structure
http://www.qub.ac.uk/ep/research/costc10/findoc/cs08-cope.pdf
Then of course you can add the distorion to land prices caused by free parking and lack of demand pricing for arterial roads. While these may not fit the strictest definitions of subsidies they are most definitely market distortions which naturally lead to self-reinforcing suboptimal transport and land-use decision making by purchasers, providers, planners and policy makers.
The nett result, as Nick points out, is that all this becomes an excuse for cheap and nasty service.
one of the other reasons (I believe) our PT fares are so high is that the system is a messy mixture of purely commercial and contracted by the councial services. This discourages competition for contracts as the incumbent almost always has an advantage when bidding for a new service.
Also, the commercial operators run the peak services commercially and make a profit off them and then the council subsidizes them to run the off-peak services. So the council can’t use the profit from the commercial services to help make the overall fares cheaper.
The reason I brought Stockholm as an example is that it does have suburbs, and motorways, and people drive and the public transport system is as complex as it can get with 1 company dealing with tracks, other with the train services, about 5 dealing with the buses and yet another one with the subway but this all makes sense because it is thought as a system and not trying to cover the costs of every single trip … it is the service that matters.
The note on Copenhagen is interesting also because that’s one of the key things that is missing from our PT system … it is solely devoted to move people to the CBD … think this, if you want to go to the zoo from Te Atatu, MAXX says that the quickest trip at 10 am is walking the 9.5km to the zoo (it says it takes 2hours 22) … if you want to walk less, then MAXX suggests to walk only to Henderson (5km) then take the train to Baldwin Ave and walk the 2.6km to the zoo (all in 2 hours 23) … ahh, driving takes about 10min at 10am. My point is that to make our PT network useful we need it to make it GO somewhere and act as a connection between areas in the city rather than just a commuters tool.
Indeed, I think that moving to a network instead of a CBD focused radial system would make it much more efficient and cheaper overall, as you would be able to capture all the various trips all over the region and avoid having empty vehicles running back to the suburbs during the morning peak, etc. Keep the buses and trains nice and full all day long.
Nice philosophical discussion. May I chip in with a real Auckland example?
Most weekdays I travel by bus between Green Bay and the CBD on one of the services that go through Blockhouse Bay. By time the morning buses reach the CBD, or leave in the afternoon, they are generally full, so the service must qualify as ‘successful’. But on my trip home the other day something struck me. Lots of passengers alighted between Avondale and Blockhouse Bay, as usual. This left just myself and a few stragglers completing the trip to Green Bay. As per usual. The same (in reverse) in the morning.
So, basically, Blockhouse Bay residents use the services more than folks from Green Bay. Why? Following the analysis in the previous posts, there would appear to be two possible explanations: 1) bus is the more ‘logical’ transport choice in Blockhouse Bay, or 2) Blockhouse Bay residents display more of a bus culture whereas Green Bay has more of a car culture.
On any given weekday morning I reckon about 3 people use the bus stop near my home, including me. A glance at Google Maps suggests the stop potentially serves probably 200 homes. Out of those 200, I find it very hard to believe that there are only 3 people travelling to the CBD. Mt door-to-door journey takes about 50 minutes. In the car, admittedly it might take 30 (on a good day). But on a bad day it can easily be 50. Add on the stress, the petrol, parking hassles, and then contrast with the chance I get on the bus to read, write, snooze, and the ‘logical choice’ is far from clear-cut. The difference in journey time between bus and car is no different from Blockhouse Bay. The relative differences in cost are no different either, nor the parking nor the stresses. None of these factors can explain why Blockhouse Bay people use the service more than the citizens of Green Bay.
So is it culture? Green Bay is in Waitakere, so is it westie auto-philes versus Auckland urbanites? Seriously, these two suburbs are adjacent and very, very similar. Blockhouse Bay is just as low-density and PT-unfriendly as Green Bay. I may concede that maybe Blockhouse Bay has somewhat higher proportions of recent immigrants, especially from Asia – people who perhaps bring a more PT-oriented culture with them. But I think that’s really pushing it to find an explanation. I think there is a much simper one.
Not all of the buses go on to Green Bay. Many finish at Blockhouse Bay. What’s the result? The result is that to use the Green Bay buses you have to know the timetable. Buses come our way erratically. Most bus stops have no timetable or information – you barely even notice they’re there. You really have to make an effort to use our service. In Blockhouse Bay, you just turn up at the bus stop and a bus will soon arrive. It takes no effort at all.
The bus is no less viable, no less competitive with the car, from Green Bay than from Blockhouse Bay. But, as in so many parts of Auckland, the bus service seems to be run for the convenience of the operator, not to provide an attractive service. ARTA’s approach to bus services in the near future seems to acknowledge that cross-town, suburb-to-suburb services are hard to run effectively. Maybe. But at the moment we can’t even get the easy CBD commuter services right.
Are the Green Bay services less direct, i.e. do they wonder around back strrets for far too long..?
Interesting. Particularly interesting given that Blockhouse Bay residents have other options like the 248 and the 258. Maybe a lower proportion of Green Bay residents work in the CBD than Blockhouse Bay? How do the house prices compare?
It’s not just post-hoc rationalising though I agree it is important.
Humans also appear to form ideological preferences at a young age. I was reading a book on Childhood/Educational Psychology and it was talking about experiments with 8 year olds, for example, explain that Andrew Carnegie was a millionaire who gave away vast sums to charity – was he a good man? Some proportion answered yes, the others answered that it wasn’t right for him to have had all that money in the first place.
I suspect this ideological response is deep down and therefore arguing politics and ideology with people is pointless. It colours everything you see about people.
Even those who famously drift from the extreme left to the extreme right or v.v. retain one feature – an extreme view of humanity, its worth and how to ‘manage’ it.
Those who support car-based transport will support it no matter what, no matter what subsidies or contortions of public policy are required to achieve that end.
In Australia we see hostile attacks on public transport, on cyclists, on high density living, where people are just about accused of treason for not supporting a 1/4 acre house and land and car and all that stuff. Even when it is pointed out that this lifestyle is subsidised, just as much as PT.
And finally, when did the property right of freehold land start including the right to have a say about what the neighbours do. The English common law of property explicitly prevented it – now we read people saying they have a right to ‘amenity’ or ‘lifestyle’ that I’ve never read on any title deed.
If I’ve bought some land that is zoned for a tall building I should be able to start building tomorrow – the end of the matter.
I’ve heard about a study they did of people who had extreme right or left political views where they scanned their brain activity while reading out hard right and hard left statements… Only the emotional part of the brain showed any activity, the part dedicated to reasoning… nothing… Meaning you have to be a little bit crazy to get into parliament, it also shows why Joycey is unlikely to change…