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By admin, on August 22nd, 2010
While browsing through a few North American transport blogs I found myself looking at the “Buzzer blog”, from Vancouver. The interesting thing about Buzzer, is that it is a blog run by Translink – the organisation which operates Vancouver’s public transport system. Effectively, their version of ARTA (except Vancouver was smart enough to not sell off all its buses).
While obviously official blogs need to ‘toe the party line’, and outline an ongoing series of positive stories about what’s going on with transport in Vancouver – Buzzer is actually a surprisingly good read. Just tracking down some recent posts there are a whole range of things, including a detailed analysis of feedback Translink has received on the relatively new Canada Line, a post that lets people know about special public transport services to an event, photos from the opening of the Canada Line to mark the one year anniversary of that date, and a fantastic post that asks people for their suggestions about how route-mapping could be improved to better highlight the frequencies of services.
The great thing is that people can post comments, and there’s a dedicated person there to reply to them. Furthermore, the blog format allows quite a lot more depth – whether that be in the form of more in-depth discussion or just more photos – than would ever be possible in the old-fashioned media release.
Reading something like this got me thinking how it would be really fantastic to have something similar in Auckland. While blogs like this one and Jon C’s Auckland Trains provide “outside the tent” analysis on what transport upgrades are happening, we only know what is already out there and we while we may be important cogs in the wheel of getting people more interested in what’s going on in transport matters within Auckland – having an official blog published (most probably by Auckland Transport post Super City transition) would be a superb way for that organisation to truly interact with the public. They could use it to let people know about service disruptions, important milestones, special events, and so forth – in much the same way that media releases are done now. But perhaps most excitingly they could use it in ways similar to Vancouver’s Buzzer Blog – to put out suggestions for comment, to invite ideas, to let people really know what will be going on within what I imagine will be a pretty closed-off and secretive organisation.
By admin, on August 6th, 2010
As I noted in yesterday’s blog post, which went on to rather dominate the comments thread, I will be out of the country in North America between September 3rd and September 26th. Leila and I are taking a three week holiday that has been about two years in planning. The plan is as follows:
September 3rd: fly to New York
September 3-7: stay in New York
September 8th: Amtrak train from New York to Boston
September 8-10:stay in Boston
September 11: Flight from Boston to Montreal
September 11-16: staying in Montreal and Quebec City (train between cities)
September 17: fly from Montreal to Washington DC
September 17-20: staying in Washington DC
September 21: Amtrak from Washington DC- New York
September 21-23: staying in New York
September 23-24: flight back to NZ
From a transport nerd perspective I am very much looking forward to seeing the New York Subway and the Washington DC Metro in particular, although the transit systems of Montreal and Boston are certain to also be fascinating.
One issue which has been at the back of my mind in recent times is what will happen to this blog while I am away. It will be during the last weeks of the lead-up to the Super City elections, the time the Onehunga Station (finally) opens and the time that the CBD rail tunnel business case is first released. I’ll probably be able to do a little bit of blogging from internet cafes: although I will probably take that opportunity to share my experiences in the various North American cities I am visiting.
I do have my handy blog assistants, who I am sure will keep things running a bit with what’s going on here in NZ. But I think it’s probably timely to remind people that I am open to people submitting “Guest Posts“, and in particular if there’s a transport issue that you think is worthy of being raised by way of a guest post then I’m quite happy to schedule quite a few posts to “pop up” while I’m away and keep things reasonably busy.
Oh, and if there are any really useful tips for visiting any of the cities listed above I’d be more than happy to hear about them!
By admin, on July 19th, 2010
Over the past few days my anti-spam mechanism seems to have been getting a bit over-excited, and has been catching a lot of “false-positives” for some reason. Hopefully it sorts itself out after a while, as I really do need an anti-spam (otherwise the comments really would be flooded with spam).
If you post a comment and it doesn’t show up, feel free to send me an email (address under “Contact Us” in the sidebar) and I should be able to approve it pretty quickly. Don’t worry about posting your comment again, or editing little bits out of it, I assure you the system has received the comment – it just got marked as spam for some reason.
Thanks, and sorry for the annoyances.
By Jeremy Harris, on April 27th, 2010
Who’s talking about what in the amazing world of the Transport Blogoshpere?
Enjoy.
By Nick R, on April 25th, 2010
Hi all,
Joshua has kindly given me a login for the blog so that I can join him and Jeremy in making regular posts on transport topics. It is probably a good idea that I introduce myself as you may be seeing a bit more of my thoughts in the future, so here goes:
My name is Nicolas Reid, some readers may know me as Nick R from the comments pages, the CBT forums and various other blogs. I spent the first 25 years of my life growing up in Auckland but I have been based in Melbourne for the last few years. I have a background in organisational psychology and ergonomics and worked in New Zealand as an ergonomics consultant and a injury prevention researcher. Currently I work as a researcher at the Monash University Accident Research Centre, where I divide my time between injury data surveillance and ‘human factors’ crash prevention research. I am also very passionate about public transport, urban design and other planning issues, so I have been working on a planning masters at RMIT here in Melbourne. In about six months I should be able to graduate and make the move to work as a professional planner and one day not too far from now I plan to be an ethical, socially responsible property developer (if such a thing can exist). As a researcher I’m very interested in using reliable data and evidence based methods to separate informed conclusions from hearsay and ideology.
I am a member of the Campaign for Better Transport, and I’m a former car nut who now lives an almost car free lifestyle (it’s not that I hate cars, quite the opposite, I just find it easier to get by without owning one these days). I’m also something of a cyclist, although I think I like building bikes and pulling them apart more than I actually like riding them.
By admin, on April 10th, 2010
To broaden the horizons of readers when it comes to transport matters, here are a few posts from around the transit blogosphere of late that I have found interesting read:
- Metro Rider LA talks about one of my favourite topics, the high cost of free parking. I find this paragraph particularly excellent:
When you subsidize something, you get more of it. Right now, in this city, we have an artifically high amount of driving because of subsidized parking. This gets us tremendous congestion and very unwalkable streets. It’s no surprise that people do not want to open street shops downtown – who wants to walk near there? It’s just not a nice area to walk around. If we had market-priced parking, then we would also see more transit use, more biking, more walking, etc. These options all become more appealing when we pay the real cost of our driving. Subsidized parking should be a thing of the past.
- Human Transit celebrates its first anniversary. This is seriously the best transport blog I have ever come across, as Jarrett is careful to be balanced in his opinions and use his considerable knowledge to help broaden our understanding of transport planning. I have certainly learned a lot over the past year from reading his blog. He also has the kind of job I aspire to having one day: an international transit consultant who travel around the world fixing cities’ public transport systems. Please come to Auckland Jarrett!
- The Transport Politic discusses a light-rail project in southeast Houston, and the worries of local residents that the project will result in the massive gentrification of their area, eventually resulting in them being priced out. An interesting twist on the wider benefits of public transport projects, although the blog post does argue that transit in and of itself is unlikely to be a powerful enough force to achieve such drastic changes – it needs to be backed up by land-use planning changes. Whether or not the changes are a good thing is an interesting matter for debate.
- Captain Transit compares buses to burgers. Yes, seriously. The point is that up until relatively recently buses were seen as the cheap and nasty side of public transport – its burgers. Yet just as there has been a shift to gourmet burgers over the last decade, there has also been a shift towards higher quality bus-based public transport. The Northern Express in Auckland is a classic example.
- Back in Auckland, Jon C at AucklandTrains has Auckland City mayor John Banks outline the emphasis he places on getting transport right in the Auckland Super City. Aside from repeating the utterly incorrect urban legend that Auckland is the second most sprawled city in the world, it is excellent to hear that Banks is so committed to rail these days.
By admin, on April 1st, 2010
The Human Transit blog has an excellent recent post on Los Angeles, and how it could well become the next great “transit metropolis”. There are some pretty big plans floating around Los Angeles at the moment to expand their rail system. The expansion of the rail network is shown in the map below: Los Angeles is, of course, a far far bigger city than Auckland. But in other respects there are some similarities. Both cities are currently extremely car dependent, both cities have widely distributed employment patterns (and therefore relatively weak CBDs) and both cities have higher densities than one would think at first glance (particularly in the case of Los Angeles).
Jarrett, from Human Transit, explains that just because Los Angeles doesn’t have a single, strong CBD, that doesn’t mean it’s not a suitable urban form for public transport:
When I talk about North American public transit to people here in Australia or New Zealand, I don’t talk much about New York or Boston or other old cities where the depth of urban history approaches that of Europe; Australians and New Zealanders already know Europe better than most Americans do. I talk a bit about Portland, because of its land use laws, extensive light rail, and special downtown. I talk about Vancouver, becuase of SkyTrain, and its growth management, but above all because of its dramatic densification over the last few decades.
But when I really want to surprise them, and shift their thinking, I talk about Los Angeles. Educated Australians, like educated Europeans, have mostly been there as tourists, and they remember it with the kind of fascinated delight that could just as well be called horror. Even if they haven’t been there, they know it as the car capital of America, the city they’d least think of as the next great transit metropolis.
Los Angeles may still seem hopelessly car-dominated today, but it’s fortunate in its urban structure, in ways that make it a smart long term bet as a relatively sustainable city, at least in transport terms. Two things in particular: (a) the presence of numerous major centres of activity scattered around the region, and (b) the regular grid of arterials, mostly spaced in a way that’s ideal for transit, that covers much of the city, offering the ideal infrastucture for that most efficient of transit structures: a grid network.
Because Los Angeles is a vast constellation of dense places, rather than just a downtown and a hinterland, it’s full of corridors where there is two-way all-day flow of demand, the ideal situation for cost effective, high quality transit. In this, Los Angeles is more like Paris than it is like, say, New York. Much of the core area between downtown and Santa Monica is covered by a braid of major boulevards, all with downtown at one end and the naturally dense coastal strip at the other, every one a potentially great transit market given appropriate protection from traffic. Near the coast, the massive dense nodes of Westwood/UCLA and to a lesser degree Century City, Santa Monica and Venice offer further anchoring to the western end of these markets. On a smaller scale, similar anchors are found throughout much of the region. While gathering people to a transit stop will still be difficult, it will be especially easy to grow an everywhere-to-everywhere network in Los Angeles, because of these patterns.
The low-end but extensive network of frequent limited-stop buses, the Metro Rapid, grew from this geography, and someday, the busiest rail transit lines in the American West will prosper from it. One of the most interesting long-term questions about Los Angeles is how to fit high-quality transit to a city of great, wide boulevards — another crucial feature in which the city is more like Paris than New York. All or most these boulevards will ultimately need to give over two lanes to crowded and efficient transit services, which will move far more people per hour than car lanes do. But there is much fun and quarrel to be had working out the details. (Light rail or buses? Side lanes or center lanes? Stations configured how, in what relation to the streetscape? Local or rapid stops? The questions abound.)
Densities in many places are lower than ideal, but Los Angeles, more than any city in the world, has a virtually inexhaustable supply of infill opportunities, even if typical middle-class and wealthy suburbs are set aside. If a divine hand prohibited the paving of one more square inch of California, the Los Angeles region would keep growing without a pause.
A lot of this could be said about Auckland too, perhaps with the exception that aside from the central part of the Auckland isthmus, our street pattern generally isn’t that much of a grid. I find it interesting that having a dispersed number of activity/employment nodes can be considered an advantage, because it means that there is an all-day two-way flow of demand. It’s certainly possible to imagine this in Auckland, with areas like Albany, Manukau City, New Lynn and Takapuna becoming increasingly important over time. Already it often seems as though congestion is worse on the harbour bridge and the northern motorway in the non-peak direction flow (obviously exacerbated by there being only three lanes over the bridge, but still).
Having two-way demand for public transport is really really useful, as it means that you can use the public transport resource far more efficiently. It is not an efficient use of buses and train to have them running empty for half their trips, with people only using them to travel into the city in the morning and out of it in the afternoon. Obviously with a dispersed trip pattern it is essential for the public transport system to form a true “network“, but it seems as though Los Angeles is making progress on that, as hopefully Auckland will in the long run.
By Jeremy Harris, on March 24th, 2010
Last week Jon over at Auckland Trains wrote a post entitled Cheer Up! prompted by a post at Silver Machine about how the negativity of the public transport forums is driving people away and causing politicians to say, “stuff the PT advocates, they are never happy”.
I agree and and admit I have been one of the worst at this.
So I’ve decided to focus on the long term and fighting to ensure as much “good stuff” is included in the long term plans for our city, I believe we will win eventually whether through good arguments or world events. A good first step to positivity is to focus on all the gains we have made since the really dark, dark days of the early 90s:
- The rail system wasn’t removed, it seems crazy to me now to believe people were seriously talking about this.
- The Link bus service.
- Expansion of bus lanes, mainly in Central Auckland.
- Creation of ARTA.
- Public Transport Management Act amendments.
- Construction of Britomart.
- General railway station improvements and continued maintenance of bus stops, new suburban stations and stops.
- Relatively modern bus fleet.
- Train service on Sundays.
- Better bus frequencies.
- Introduction of electronic bus displays.
- New downtown ferry terminal.
- New ferry terminals at Birkenhead and Bayswater.
- New ferry routes to Half Moon Bay and Westaprk.
- The Northern Busway.
- The Central Connector.
- Newmarket station.
- Duplication of the Western Line (almost completed).
Things to look forward to:
- New rail signals.
- Electrification.
- New EMU rolling stock.
- Integrated ticketing.
- New Lynn.
I think looking at this list we have a lot be thankful for and hopeful that the ball is rolling enough now, that the call for further improvements will become overwhelming and the entrenched majority position. I believe the above is the reason we’ve seen patronage staying proportional with population growth and hopeful with the upcoming improvements that will continue till a pro-PT administration is back in the mix.
By admin, on March 17th, 2010
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.
By admin, on August 12th, 2009
This blog really seems to have taken off in the last few weeks, especially in terms of people making comments – which is great as I really enjoy replying to them and fine-tuning aspects of what I’ve said in my original post.
I am quite bursting with ideas for blog posts at the moment, but I thought it would be worthwhile asking what the readers of this blog are interested in finding out more about. So a few questions from me to you:
- Is there anything in particular that you would like me to blog about?
- Do you think I get too political? Should I be more politically neutral in my blog, or continue to go for Steven Joyce by the jugular?
- Am I focusing too much on trains compared to buses, or buses compared to trains?
- Are the posts too long, too short or just about right?
- Do you think some static “pages” outlining information on important transport projects would be a good idea?
- Any other suggestions…
A few ideas for posts I have at the moment include a discussion on the Onehunga Line, as ARTA want me to provide them with some feedback next Tuesday evening at a community consultation meeting. I hope to have my thoughts together by then on the issue. Another idea is to do a really meaty analysis of time-savings benefits, and why I think they’re stupid. And another is to do a bit of a general “here are the transport projects I think Auckland needs in the next 5,10, 20 and 30 years” post.
I look forward to the feedback! Don’t be shy.
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