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By admin, on June 24th, 2010 A couple of people have put together a real time tracking map of all trains on the London Underground. It is extremely awesome:
This wouldn’t have cost a single dollar in public money to put together, and from the sound of it the people who put it together just needed the raw data, ran a clever program and came up with something exceedingly useful in just a couple of hours.
Why can’t we ever do anything this cool with Auckland’s public transport system? Why are we still struggling to provide real-time information at our train stations?
By admin, on June 24th, 2010 There’s a very interesting article in today’s “The Aucklander” newspaper (which gets included in the NZ Herald every Thursday) on the future harbour crossing options for Auckland.
Here’s an extract from the article:
Now The Aucklander can reveal another chapter to throw into the concrete and steel mix of our city’s beloved icon.
By Government decree, the bridge, having just celebrated its 50th anniversary, will be priced for removal and the surrounding feeder motorways assessed for future development.
That’s development as in housing, shops and offices, not roads.
The reason? Transport Minister Stephen Joyce has chosen to ignore strongly-argued recommendations from five major regional organisations for a road-rail tunnel from Downtown Auckland to the Shore. Instead, he wants to open up debate about another bridge.
Reports of the current bridge falling to concrete cancer or some other catastrophe, fuelled by the problematic state of the “Nippon clip-ons”, are exaggerated, says the agency charged with maintaining it. But it’s hard to ignore the thought that something needs to be done when we’re spending $86 million to patch it up and this same agency talks of its “economic life”, its “future viability”, of it becoming “maxed out”, and the “resilience of the network” or of it having a “finite lifespan”.
In 2008, the NZ Transport Agency combined with Auckland Regional Council, Auckland and North Shore City councils and Auckland Regional Transport Authority to find an alternative. The tight five commissioned a $1.3 million report from Sinclair Knight Merz consultants and whittled 160 options down to just one preference.
Four tunnels, they chimed, will alleviate the strain on the bridge – two road tunnels with three lanes in each direction and two separate single-rail tunnels. The rail tracks would cover 4km from Esmonde Rd to Britomart; the road tunnels roughly 3km from Esmonde Rd under the soon-to-be-developed Wynyard Quarter to Fanshawe St.
Treasury estimated the cost to be as high as $6 billion. The Transport Agency puts the bill between $3-4 billion, subject to more “detailed engineering”.
The debate about a future harbour crossing in Auckland has, as the article mentions elsewhere, been happening for decades. However, the bridge idea, known in some circles as “the ANZAC bridge” has fairly recently joined the mix. Personally, I think the bridge idea can be tossed away for a fairly obvious reason: “two bridges would look horrific, and the whole point of another harbour crossing is to get another harbour crossing”. So if it’s a choice between a bridge and a tunnel, then I think the answer has to be a tunnel.
But as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, is the whole “we need another harbour crossing” argument another one of ‘yesterday’s battles’ that is looking to solve a problem that no longer exists? Traffic flows across the harbour bridge have been declining in recent years, probably for a number of reasons: higher petrol prices, an increasing amount of available employment opportunities on the North Shore, and the Northern Busway making public transport more attractive for those working in the CBD. Do we really need 14 lanes of road traffic across the Waitemata Harbour? I think not. Will we need 14 lanes of road traffic across the Waitemata Harbour in 20 years time? Well if current traffic trends continue – once again I think not.
Of course, traffic flows are only half the issue here. The other issue relates to the lifespan of the current harbour bridge – or more specifically, the lifespan of its clip-ons. As noted in the extract above, there is some debate surrounding how long the clip-ons will be able to survive: even when you consider the current strengthening work that is going on. So regardless of traffic volumes, we still have the issue about the longevity of the main bridge.
However, just because the clip-ons have a somewhat limited lifespan does not mean that the bridge as a whole is doomed. The core structure is apparently in pretty good shape and has a fairly indefinite lifespan. Furthermore, the clip-ons could be replaced – and new ones “tied in” with the main structure is a better way, and be constructed from lighter but stronger modern materials. In short, from what I have heard, if we replaced the clip-ons with something more modern, new clip-ons could have a very long lifespan. Now there’s the question of how you would do such a thing – whether it would be possible to replace one at a time, and “pre-cast” the clip-on somehow so it could be slotted into place over a reasonably short period of time. Or whether you’d need an alternative crossing option because doing such a thing (temporary floating bridge perhaps? Ha Ha!)
Now I know it’s a pretty big call to say that we shouldn’t prioritise another harbour crossing – but let’s have a think about the money. Treasury’s estimate is that the harbour crossings (the roads tunnels and the rail tunnels) could cost up to $6 billion. That is, quite frankly, a crap load of cash. It’s about $1500 for each person in New Zealand, or about $4000 per Aucklander. It would also pay for the CBD rail tunnel, rail to the airport, a Howick/Botany Line and perhaps even more. When we’ve got a route where the existing traffic is declining, how sensible is it really to pretty much spend the region’s entire transport budget for about 5 years on that project? Not sensible at all in my books.
While I do support turning the Northern Busway into a railway line in the future, we must recognise that the busway is fairly new, and also that it has a fairly large amount of capacity left in it before maxing out (although that might well be changed if HOVs are allowed onto it). The busway, plus its stations, cost around $400 million a few years back – so it seems reasonable that we’d want to make the most of that investment before spending say $2 billion in turning the busway into a railway line plus digging a tunnel under the harbour to link that line with the CBD.
So in my opinion, the best option is actually one that does very little in the next decade – as I think Auckland has far higher transport priorities. We should do everything possible to keep the current clip-ons safe and stable, while also ensuring that we’ve designed, consented and costed a new railway line north so it can be constructed when required. In terms of additional roading capacity across the Waitemata Harbour, my honest opinion is that I doubt it will ever be necessary. With higher fuel prices, improved public transport options and so forth, I doubt whether we need to spend $4 billion of whatever it would cost to provide for six additional lanes of traffic across the harbour – whether that’s in bridge or tunnel form.
Once again, it’s one of yesterday’s battles. Additional harbour crossings have been on Auckland’s transport plans for decades – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that in 2010 we really really need one. If you really look at the situation – particularly in terms of declining traffic volumes across the harbour – it seems as though another harbour crossing would be little more than a supremely giant waste of money.
By admin, on June 23rd, 2010 There’s an irony in urban planning that most planning rules fight against problems that existed 100 years ago, and in general no longer exist today. In particular, most planning rules seek to focus on separating uses – which is a legacy of the industrial revolution when smokestack factories ended up next to houses – and on limiting the density of development: once again a legacy of 100 years ago when densities were far too high for what was sanitary and healthy. Over-crowding and industry generated pollution were the two great “urban blights” of the nineteenth and early 20th centuries – and it was a damn good thing that urban planning emerged to control those two issues.
However, now we’re 100-odd years later and the problems that our cities face are in some respects the opposite. In cities such as Auckland there’s little manufacturing “heavy” industry left, and the density problem usually arises from densities being too low, rather than too high – leading to urban sprawl. We also face difficult issues about how to integrate land-use and transport planning properly, as well as creating more liveable and vibrant neighbourhoods: which generally means mixing different activities and uses together. In short, the ‘urban situation’ is enormously different to what it was 100 years ago – and in many respects our ‘cures’ were too successful to the problems of 100 years ago, and now we actually need to balance things up a bit after swinging too far in the opposite direction.
Ironically, most of our urban planning rules still haven’t caught up with the fact that it’s 2010 and not 1890. We still worry about maximum allowable densities, rather than minimums, we still try to separate land-uses at every possible opportunity (the zoning disease as I called it a few months back) – in short our current planning rules tend to generally be trying to achieve the exact thing that our overall strategies want to avoid: auto-dependent, low-density, single-use, sprawl. In short, urban planning is stuck in the past: it’s fighting yesterday’s battles and ignoring today’s ones. Urban planning is fighting against over-crowding and industrial pollution, even though there is hardly any now; and ignoring (or simply failing to address) what the real problems are: urban sprawl, auto-dependency, bland single-use developments and so forth.
The reason I mention all of this is that the declining traffic figures through Wellsford, across the Harbour Bridge and on State Highway 16 at Te Atatu that I commented on yesterday make me wonder whether we’re doing something similar when it comes to transport. While transport policy isn’t 100 years out of date like land-use planning is, I do think that in some ways it’s quite possibly 5-10 years out of date.
During the 1990s and early 2000s traffic growth is Auckland particularly was quite dramatic. This is shown in the graph below: But what is also obvious from the graph above is how things have changed since 2004. Basically, over the past five years traffic volumes have actually remained steady across the entire state highway network, obviously bumping around a bit.
There were many reasons for this dramatic increase in the late 90s and early 2000s: cars got cheaper when tariffs were removed, people got richer, the city continued to sprawl, the population grew quickly and public transport was ignored. At the same time, throughout the 1990s we saw a relatively low level of transport investment in Auckland, with (rightly or wrongly) the main areas of investment being safety improvements, and often rural road improvements during this time. As a result of unusually low levels of investment in roading (and pretty much nothing in public transport), coupled with high levels of traffic growth, unsurprisingly congestion got a lot worse. Levels of traffic growth were predicted to continue forever (and still are), and traffic modellers warned of ‘gridlock’, with a sense of panic about Auckland’s transport future setting in.
Whether that same situation still exists today is an interesting question. Slowly, but surely, the wheels of government (locally, regionally and centrally) began to grind into action – and Auckland got a lot of money for transport for the first time in a very long time. Over the past 10 years we’ve probably seen around a billion dollars spent on upgrading the rail system, and I’d guess a few billion spent on improving the state highway network. At the same time, we’ve seen petrol prices increase significantly – which in 2008 particularly resulted in big drops in the number of vehicles travelling along certain parts of the road corridor. And finally, some real effort has gone into improving public transport, giving people a more realistic alternative to driving than they’ve had in decades.
With higher fuel prices an inevitability in the future as oil supplies peak and then dwindle, which will be added to by the need to finally pay for the CO2 emissions from our vehicles, I wonder whether we’ve ‘moved on’ from the times of anticipating traffic growth to simply go up-and-up forever. I wonder whether our current transport policies – particularly the super-expensive roading projects like the Puhoi-Wellsford upgrade, another harbour crossing and widening SH16 – are actually a response to the transport situation of 5-10 years ago, rather than a response to where we find ourselves now.
And this is a real concern. Land-use planning’s utter failure to ‘keep with the times’ has had disastrous results as our cities – as we have continued to build sprawling messes like Flat Bush, even though we know it’s really stupid to put 40,000 people out in the middle of nowhere. Sprawl has been shown to be environmentally destructive and enormously economically wasteful, but because of a massive inertia in the planning system, we somehow keep creating rules that reinforce it. I worry that the same inertia is driving our transport policies, and actually we’re fighting yesterday’s battles. Do we really need to widen the northwest motorway to help fix the transport problems we face in 2010, or is that project intended to fix a problem that existed (or was anticipated to exist) back in 2003?
The same goes for so many of our roading projects, and I really really think that we need to ask the same question over and over again. Is this project solving a 2010 transport issue or a 2003 transport issue? Are we fighting today’s battles, or yesterday’s?
By admin, on June 22nd, 2010 Tomorrow ARTA will launch the next step in improving Auckland’s bus system – their “b.line” project. I first got wind of this concept a few months back, and I did a hopeful post that it seemed as though we were starting to see the rollout of the “Quality Transit Network” that ARTA have been promising for many years now, but haven’t got around to actually implementing. Here’s the media release:
b.line tackles public transport disbelievers
The Auckland Regional Transport Authority (ARTA) and bus operator, NZ Bus, with the support of Auckland City Council’s Transport Committee, will officially launch b.line tomorrow. b.line is the first visually identifiable, simple to use, high frequency bus service for Dominion and Mt Eden Roads. The b.line service includes b.line branded buses, bus flags and bus stops. b.line buses are scheduled to run a minimum of every fifteen minutes from 7am to 7pm every week day. Over time, additional, high frequency b.line services will be implemented throughout the region.
ARTA’s General Manager Customer Services, Mark Lambert said, “While public transport in Auckland has achieved very good growth during the past five years we are now focused on public transport making an even greater contribution to moving people around Auckland. This requires a step change in public transport planning and performance by ARTA as outlined in the recently released Auckland Regional Passenger Transport Plan 2010 (RPTP).
“A huge potential target market for public transport exists in Auckland. For many people their perception of public transport is based on an experience from years ago. Although there is still work to be done, a great deal has happened in respect of service levels and infrastructure development during that time which many Aucklanders simply aren’t aware of.
“High frequency bus corridors represent a good starting point for us in our drive to encourage even more people back to public transport. ARTA has identified twenty plus such corridors in the region which will over time and working with our bus operators in the region, be developed to meet the fifteen minutes or less frequency and branded b.line services”.
Mr Lambert said, “Research on bus travel conducted in late 2009 by Colmar Brunton using 504 respondents, both public transport and non public transport users, showed there were a set of key indicators when making a choice, or not, to use public transport.
“In order to make public transport a viable choice, respondents wanted to be able to clearly identify the bus stops, shelters and timetables of high frequency bus services. They also wanted high frequency services to run a minimum of every fifteen minutes and to have real time bus arrival information which we are delivering via web, text messaging and, where available a real time sign at bus stops. Respondents also wanted a percentage of the route to be a bus priority lane at peak times. Simplification of bus routes was also key as many people found the system overly complex.
“Following on from the Colmar Brunton research, ARTA developed the b.line concept working with NZ Bus and tested the concept with a panel of Aucklanders. Fifty nine per cent of respondents said if we satisfied the indicators identified in the research they were likely to increase their public transport usage. Sixty two per cent found the images we proposed using, cheerful, fresh, lively, friendly and fun, making using the service much more appealing.
“While fifteen minute or less service frequency already exists on Dominion and Mt Eden Roads and patronage is very good at peak times, we want to up the ante and encourage those who haven’t considered using public transport before and who might well use services outside of peak times, such as students and families, to realise that, increasingly, public transport is a very viable alternative to car use.
Chief Executive of NZ Bus, Bruce Emson said, “b.line represents a significant step forward for our customers who tell us that one of the biggest barriers to catching a bus in Auckland is the complexity of the public transport system. b.line simplifies the experience and we are confident that Aucklanders will embrace it and our investment in new buses on the b. line, which are now on the road.”
First-off, I think it’s kind of odd to head up the project’s aim as being effectively “to convert nonbelievers” in public transport. Does that mean I’m some crazy public transport religious whack-job believer?
But anyway, turning to the concept itself, I like the idea of identifying in some way “superior” bus routes in Auckland, where there’s some sort of guarantee you’re going to get a good service. I think people are often put off public transport because there’s this fear (generally quite reasonably founded) that you’re going to end up stranded at the stop forever because you’ve just missed the bus and you have no idea when the next one’s coming. B.line seeks to counter this by making it extremely simple: if you see all the designs and logos then you know that you’re on a b.line route and there’s a reasonably good service. That’s a good step in the right direction.
This is the kind of stuff we’re likely to see at b.line stops (I should get out there myself soon and check it out):
And some posters:
 
The very strange thing about this is that “every 15 minutes or less” statement. The reason this is odd is that currently Dominion Road buses operate every 5 minutes or less, while Mt Eden Road buses operate every 10 minutes or less throughout the “Monday to Friday, 7am-7pm” window that this is advertising. Now I’m not a marketing expert, but surely the first rule of marketing is: “if you have a good product, don’t say it’s a mediocre product to try to sell it”. A bus every 5 minutes (Dominion Road) is a very good product, at least when it comes to public transport in Auckland. Sure, the bus lanes could be a bit longer in terms of their extent and their operating hours – but it’s pretty damn good. The same goes for Mt Eden Road, although to a slightly lesser extent, as the frequencies are every 10 minutes. But still, the service is pretty damn good, and better than what seems to be advertised here.
As I noted in my comment on Jeremy’s post, it’s like advertising some no-name band when actually it’s a U2 concert. Pretty damn odd. The only reason I can comprehend this “under-sell” of implementing b.line for Mt Eden and Dominion Roads is that ARTA hopes to extend the concept to other QTNs in the future – but doesn’t want to commit itself to anything better than 15 minute frequencies on those routes. Which is actually quite disappointing really, as in my mind a bus every 15 minutes (and potentially not even that outside Monday-Friday 7am-7pm) doesn’t really constitute what a QTN should be. I would have thought a minimum 10 minute standard would make a lot more sense.
But anyway, in terms of what I think of the concept as a whole, as I noted above I think it’s a good idea to make a distinction between QTN services and “other” services. Providing some sort of guarantee with the b.line that you’re going to get “the best PT Auckland can offer” makes good sense. However, I do hope that the reality can match the hype. The Dominion Road bus lanes are under attack by Auckland City Council, the Mt Eden Road bus lanes are incredibly patchy, and in some areas only apply between 4.30pm and 5.30pm in the evenings.
I suppose looking from an optimistic angle, identifying various routes as “b.lines” will hopefully give some extra impetus to improve the bus lanes along it, to give buses better priority at traffic lights, to take steps to provide faster boarding times through “off-vehicle” ticketing as busy stations and any other steps that will help the buses run along the corridors faster. If this happens then b.line will actually mean something – it will actually be a higher quality form of public transport. If it doesn’t, then I fear the whole b.line idea will be “all sizzle, no sausage”.
By admin, on June 22nd, 2010 There’s a really good opinion piece in today’s NZ Herald that refutes the widely held assumption that roads “pay their way” while rail doesn’t. Here it is:
Dean Scanlen: Billions wasted on roads while rail is run off the tracks
Several commentators, including Luke Malpass and John Roughan, have complained about spending by the New Zealand taxpayer on KiwiRail. The suggestion, albeit often somewhat veiled, is that our rail operation should stand on its own as a commercial operation.
But such people seem to have completely missed two factors that destroy their arguments. The first is that any rail operation is as much part of the transportation infrastructure as the roads. The second is that our road network (and its use by motorists) is subsidised much more heavily than rail.
I acknowledge that rail does lend itself to privatisation more than roads. As some of us remember, the Labour government of the 1980s did privatise rail. Perhaps not so well known is that the operation was virtually asset-stripped by its private owners.
It is tempting to blast those owners for short-term thinking and/or poor planning and there might be at least some justification for that response.
But I believe there was another factor at play. In the economic environment of the time, most of the rail operation could only be commercially viable if its assets were stripped and/or run into the ground.
This all raises the question: is it better to subsidise our rail operation to keep it viable, or leave it to make its own way in the market (and almost certainly be run into the ground on all but a few routes in high demand)?
It may only be worth leaving rail to its own devices if we are giving it a “level playing field” to compete in. But we certainly don’t in this country. Our road network and road users are, and have always been, much more heavily subsidised.
A report commissioned by the New Zealand Transport Agency (October 2009) found a shortfall of $1.5 billion a year between what is collected from users of our state highway network and what is being spent on it.
That shortfall, made up by taxpayers, is already several times what is proposed to be spent on the rail operation and is far from the only taxpayer subsidy given to roads.
Our local road network is also heavily subsidised through local authority rates – about another $1 billion a year. There are the “externalities” – road trauma, health problems caused by air pollution, noise, loss of amenity, severance of communities and damage to the environment (including greenhouse gas emissions, which have increased by more than 70 per cent since 1990).
Those costs are either funded by the taxpayer or individuals (particularly the owners of land alongside busy roads) or they are essentially withdrawn from “our” environmental bank account.
Such costs amount to many more billions of dollars. Road trauma alone is estimated to have a “social cost” of more than $3.5 billion a year. Some is funded by ACC levies, the rest by taxpayers and individuals who weren’t directly involved in the crashes. Also, motor vehicle pollution is estimated to kill about the same number of people as road crashes.
Despite the high subsidies our roads already receive, our Government is planning to spend some $21 billion on road upgrading, more than half of which is earmarked for “roads of national significance”. Is this a more effective use of taxpayer funds than the few hundred million some are complaining about rail receiving? I think not.
I have examined the trends at traffic count sites near the Government’s seven “roads of national significance”. I found that, since 2005, the traffic at three of the locations have been trending downwards. At the other four, the growth is well below what NZTA states is the average for the regions in which the roads are located.
The Auckland Harbour Bridge is particularly interesting; since 2005, its traffic has been trending downwards by an average of more than one million movements each year.
Even if those routes were all experiencing high and positive traffic growth, any good traffic engineer would tell you it’s probably a waste of money upgrading them anyway.
Upgraded roads almost always attract traffic from other routes, and/or trips that wouldn’t have been made during congested periods. This is known as “triple convergence”. It causes most upgraded road routes to become congested again within a relatively short time.
It’s time for people criticising the Government funding of our rail operation to turn their attention to the much larger sums being wasted on our roads.
* Dean Scanlen is a professional transport engineer based in Whangarei.
Scanlen’s examination of the traffic volumes along SH1 north of Auckland (where the holiday highway is proposed), on the Harbour Bridge and on State Highway 16 show some very interesting results:   The holiday highway has been costed at around $1.6 billion, another harbour crossing might be $4 billion and widening the Northwest Motorway is costing $800 million. That’s an absolutely HUGE amount of cash proposed to be spent on roads where the traffic volumes are falling.
Ummmm….. why?
By Jeremy Harris, on June 22nd, 2010 I haven’t posted for a while but some of you may remember I gave up my car about 4 months ago and after 2 weeks of withdrawals it has been a really great experience so far. As such I am now very dependent on my Dom Rd buses which takes me into the city. Last Friday I noticed some B Line labeling had gone up on my bus stop and on the back of the electronic schedule display, I’ve also seen the branding on Mt Eden Rd. This morning when I arrived the timetable had been moved and changed to a yellow B Line one and I finally got my 5 minute schedules. This is really great, the schedule absolutely is a turn up and ride one now and it wasn’t bad before. I am confused about the transition though.
I’ve always thought the B Line idea was a good – even if the services didn’t really improve. Auckland’s bus service isn’t great by overseas standards but you can use it to get around, especially if you live on the isthmus and I think this type of branding can help people realise you can use it to get to work without the world ending. At the time it was first proposed we saw this:
My questions are:
What is going on?
Are we getting these bus stops and branded buses?
Or has the whole concept been scaled back to some half-arse affair?
I’m hoping they are just doing things in stages (I read on one of the blogs that the Mt Eden Rd routes getting some new buses and their newish ones moving to Dom Rd routes was a hold up – this has now happened I believe), the stops and buses will be branded and then we will get a big advertising campaign, which the bus companies should chip in for.
We’ll see I guess. Could be ARTA’s last push for PT.
By admin, on June 21st, 2010 On the weekend I finally got around to visiting the newly opened Avondale train station. The station is fairly simple, but I suppose that’s all that could be really expected as it’s not a major interchange station like New Lynn or Newmarket. The main gain from the new station is its location – far far closer to Avondale town centre than the previous station.
Here’s what it looks like from Crayford Street East:
 I took my Dad along with me for a bit of a “tiki-tour” of upgraded Auckland train stations and his first response was “where’s the shelter?” I would agree with that, and it seems very odd that the shelter are so, well, tiny.
The next photo looks at the tracks as they head towards the city. A new automatic pedestrian gate is located there, which is good for safety although an overbridge would have been better:
 The platforms are pretty damn long, which is good – definitely long enough for 6 car trains – potentially long enough for 8 car trains? Quite amazingly (considering the western line’s shocking hourly frequencies on weekends) we even managed to see a train arrive and depart whilst at the station – which only seemed to reinforce the huge length of the platforms and the tiny shelters: Overall, the station is certainly a vast improvement on what we used to have and its location is much much better in terms of its proximity to the Avondale town centre. I just wouldn’t really look forward to standing in the rain on a cold winter’s morning waiting for my train.
By admin, on June 20th, 2010 Newton in 1959: Newton today: While spaghetti junction certainly is something of an engineering marvel, I really wish we had built the western ring route back in the 1960s instead of destroying what would have become a fantastic inner city area and turning our CBD into an island surrounded by motorways.
By admin, on June 20th, 2010 In typical fashion, I am reading about 14 different books at the moment – one of which is the excellent “The High Cost of Free Parking” by Donald Shoup. In some respects, this is one of the most important planning/transport books that has been written in many many years in my opinion – because it looks at an issue that has a huge impact on the structure of our cities and on the way transportation functions, but for some reason has been almost completely ignored by both land-use planners and by transportation analysts. Of course, that issue is parking.
One of the fundamental arguments in transportation circles is about subsidies. Public transport gets subsidised in an obvious way (to the tune of about 55% of its operating costs in Auckland), whereas (the argument goes) roads pay for themselves. Of course roads do not actually pay for themselves: with the most obvious element of this being that local roads are generally 50% paid for by councils. But in general the simplistic argument is: roads pay for themselves to a very significant extent, it is obvious people really do want to drive because that’s what they’re doing, and that because people are obviously willing to pay for the privilege of driving, we should continue to provide more roads. Steven Joyce has run this argument on many occasions, even going so far as to say that “funding is not the big issue” for projects like the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway”, presumably because in his mind, the roads are “paying for themselves” through petrol taxes, road-user charges and so forth.
The counter-argument to this “roads pay for themselves” mindset is to show that actually they don’t. There are many ways in which roads to not “pay for themselves”, such as uncosted externalities like CO2 emissions, noise and air pollution, impacts on land values of areas around big, noisy roads and – my particular focus for this blog post – the uncosted impact of parking. Here’s what Shoup says about the effect of having parking generally provided for free, with its “cost” being absorbed by non-drivers:
Each person plays many different roles in life – tenant, homeowner, worker, consumer, investor, and motorist. We pay for parking in all these roles except, usually, as motorists. Because we pay for parking indirectly, its cost does not deter us from driving. Off-street parking requirements “externalise” the cost of parking by shifting it to everyone but the parker. Only when we pay for parking directly does its cost affect our decisions on whether to drive for particular trips.
To make this point clear, consider what would happen if cities required landlords to include the cost of electricity in the rent for housing. Although tenants would pay for electricity indirectly, it would appear free to them. They would buy and use refrigerators, air conditioners, and other appliances without thinking about the cost of electricity. Faulty regulation by the city – rather than the bad behaviour by landlord or tenants – would cause this profligate waste.
Suppose also that a shortage of electricity suddenly developed – with rolling blackouts and economic disruption. An obvious reform would be to separate the cost of electricity from the rent for housing. This unbundling would make residents aware of the cost of electricity, which would begin to influence their decisions about buying and using electric appliances. A further reform would be to vary the price of electricity by the time of day, so that residents would shift their consumption from peak periods when demand is high to off-peak periods when demand is low.
Cities do not, of course, require landlords to include the cost of electricity in the rent for housing. In reality, many building codes require and individual electric meter for each apartment (rather than one master meter for the whole building) to discourage waste. But cities do require an ample supply of parking spaces for every building, and this saves everyone the trouble of thinking about parking and its cost. Parking appears free because its cost is widely dispersed in slightly higher prices for everything else. Because we buy and use cars without thinking about the cost of parking, we congest traffic, waste fuel, and pollute the air more than we would if we each paid for our own parking. Everyone parks free at everyone else’s expense, and we all enjoy our free parking, but our cars are choking our cities.
Requiring all land-uses to provide the level of parking that their use will supposedly generate means that the cost of parking is “rolled in” to what you pay for everything else. Where I live has one parking space (a ratio which would be illegal now, with all residential development generally requiring two parking spaces) and the cost of providing that space is “rolled into” my rent. Effectively, I pay for that space whether or not I was to end up using it. While that cost might not be particularly huge in the scheme of things, in the kind of intensive development that many of our land-use plans envisage, parking requirements will have a severe limiting effect on the level of development that is possible, and add a huge cost to undertaking such development.
The value of land that is dedicated to parking is quite staggering actually, and of course while a shopping centre (for example) is always going to want to provide some parking to encourage people to use the place, if they had the choice of using that land for a more economically productive purpose and using the money saved to somehow get more people to their mall via public transport, walking and cycling it would be interesting to see the results. As an example of what I’m talking about, here’s a site in Manukau City that is almost exclusively used for parking: even though its value is in the tens of millions of dollars: Similarly in Albany, we see that the majority of the Westfield mall’s site is simply paved in asphalt – even though it is hugely valuable: Beyond the simple “land cost” in these two examples, we should also think about the effect that providing all that parking has on the ability of Albany and Manukau City to become the regional centres that they are supposed to be. When half your land is paved in asphalt to simply park vehicles, the chances of actually achieving your desired land-use outcomes become pretty remote. Furthermore, all this parking encourages people to drive to these locations: meaning that we have to build huge roads to cater for them all – once again ruining our urban environment and contributing to our auto-dependency.
A reasonable response to my take on the above examples would be “but Westfield seem to want all this parking, and I would agree that Westfield (in New Zealand at least) seem quite insatiable in their desire to provide their shopping malls with as much parking as possible. But have they really paid for the effects of providing such a vastly huge amount of parking? What was their contribution to the huge four-lane wide roads that wind their way around Albany making the place as truly horrible pedestrian experience? What was their contribution to the widening (or future widening) of the Northern Motorway to handle all these vehicles that flock to their mall on the weekend? It is this issue, that allowing developers to provide heaps of parking is what truly generates traffic flows and inevitably congestion, that has quite an interesting effect on how we should look at parking policy.
Ultimately, I think that having “minimum parking requirements” in our land-use planning rules is completely stupid and counter-productive: perhaps being the single most significant element in creating the auto-centric soulless urban environments that we supposedly want to avoid. The planning rationale for doing away with minimum parking requirements is obvious, that they contribute to exactly the kind of city we don’t want. The economic rationale for doing away with minimum parking requirements is also obvious: that we are forcing a huge cost onto developers who (in some cases) would rather spend that money and land-space on something more productive. Taking away arbitrary regulations that destroy economic wealth should be a huge priority for a government that wants to ensure each mode pays its way as much as possible – don’t you think?
The trickier issue is related to the extent to which we should actively limit the supply of parking – because of its effects in creating traffic congestion. Either way, it’s clear to me that if we’re going to moan about the subsidies public transport receives, it’s hypocritical to not accept the huge subsidies that cars receive as the result of the cost of parking not being unbundled. It’s not like bus and train companies can park their vehicles for free overnight, and they take up vastly less urban space than cars do.
By admin, on June 19th, 2010 There’s an interesting post on “The Infrastructurist” blog that proposes a counter-intuitive, but seemingly very successful method of reducing congestion on motorways: tear them down. Here’s part of the post:
Though our transportation planners still operate from the orthodoxy that the best way to untangle traffic is to build more roads, doing so actually proves counterproductive in some cases. There is even a mathematical theorem to explain why: “The Braess Paradox” (which sounds rather like a Robert Ludlum title) established that the addition of extra capacity to a road network often results in increased congestion and longer travel times. The reason has to do with the complex effects of individual drivers all trying to optimize their routes. The Braess paradox is not just an arcane bit of theory either – it plays frequently in real world situation.
Likewise, there is the phenomenon of induced demand – or the “if you build it, they will come” effect. In short, fancy new roads encourage people to drive more miles, as well as seeding new sprawl-style development that shifts new users onto them.
Of course, improving congestion is not the main reason why a city would want to knock down a poorly planned highway–the reasons for that are plentiful, and might include improving citizen health, restoring the local environment, and energizing the regional economy. More efficient traffic flow is just a wonderful side benefit.
Sound dubious? Here are several examples of how three cities (and their drivers) have fared better after highways that should never have been built in the first place were taken down.
The blog post then gives a number of examples of where this has been done, including turning the Cheonggyecheon Freeway back into a river, not replacing the Embarcadero Freeway or the Central Freeway in San Francisco when they got knocked down by the 1989 earthquake there, and ripping up Harbour Drive in Portland, Oregon. The Seoul example is perhaps the most spectacular, as they went from having this: To this:
In 2002, Mayor Lee Myung Bak pledged to renew South Korea’s capital Seoul by eliminating a 1970s-era highway that literally represented a paving over of the Cheonggyecheon River. His radical plan replacing it not with another road, but with a restored stream along the old riverbed. The immediate result of the intervention was a beautiful new 1000-acre park in the center of the city, lower pollution, cooler temperatures city-wide. What wasn’t expected, however, was the city’s reduced traffic volumes. After all, the road carried 160,000 cars a day before it was closed. But the highway’s closing was enough to convince thousands of people to drive less, or change their habits, as the city offered better public transportation options.
Now I’m not necessarily advocating that we rip out spaghetti junction (although it is tempting), but it is interesting to note that the concept of induced demand works in reverse too. Just as “if you build it, they will come” is valid, so is “if you get rid of it, they will go”. Perhaps one thing that we could/should dismantle is the disgustingly ugly concrete jungle that is the “interchange” between new North Road and Dominion Road. There’s no reason why that couldn’t just be a normal intersection, and become a nice little town centre.
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