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.

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.

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.

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.