This the first of two guest posts is from commenter “Icebird” looking at PRT. This post is solely the opinions of “Icebird” and not of the Auckland Transport Blog.
The (eventual) future of public transport?
Nick R has made several persuasive posts on this blog for consideration of “automated rapid transit” or “light metro” as a solution to some of Auckland’s transit issues.
If you’re familiar with some of my comments on this blog and on the CBT forums, you might remember me for lobbying for a different horse in the “innovative transport solutions” derby:
“personal rapid transit” or “PRT” for short.
I wanted to take the opportunity of a guest post to more fully explain just why I’m still enthusiastic about PRT even in the face of widespread skepticism from many, and even outright hostility from some. Nick’s ART system certainly improves on traditional rail systems in many ways, and it’s a very attractive technology. But at the heart of it, ART is still basically a rail system, with both the pros and cons of any rail technology. But if PRT can prove itself in high-capacity operations, I think it could be a game changer, fundamentally altering the way we plan public transport systems and even how we design our cities.
In this post, I’m going tell just what PRT is (for those of you not familiar with the concept), try to explain why I’m so excited about the technology even in its current, mostly unproven form, give you a bit of a rundown on the history of PRT development (trying to answer the question “if its so great, why hasn’t anyone built a PRT system yet?”), outline some of the challenges that still have to be overcome, give my first-hand experiences of riding the “Heathrow Pod” PRT system, and float some ideas about where a potential Auckland PRT system could be built.
Designing the perfect public transport system
Almost every current form of public transport represents a compromise of some sort. There’s probably a bus stop within walking distance of you right now. But the bus that stops there might not take you directly to where you want to go, and its still subject to the vagaries of traffic, so its rarely going to be faster than driving a car without additional assistance.
Trains? Trains are much faster. They don’t have to share the rails with all those cars for one, and there are fewer stations, much further apart. The downside is that there probably *isn’t* a train station within walking distance of where you are right now. So you might have to drive or take a bus to get to the train.
Now imagine for a second that you were designing the perfect public transport system. What would that look like from the passenger point of view?
For a start, there would be spots to board a vehicle all over the place – think bus stop level coverage, rather than train station level of coverage.
Waiting for vehicles to show up at the stop? Forget about it! I want the vehicles to be waiting for me!
And when I board the vehicle, I want it to take me non-stop to my destination. No stops to pick up or drop off other passengers. No changing vehicles. No stop lights. And I want to be able to go from any stop on the network to any other stop on the network.
Oh yeah, and I also want the system to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Sounds like a pretty impossible combination right? Using public transit would be more like hailing a cab than getting on a bus.
Here’s the thing: PRT could actually potentially deliver that level of passenger service. I’d be a fan of the concept for that alone. If it could deliver that passenger experience – how many car drivers might decide to use the system, even if they weren’t compelled to by extortionate parking fees?
So what is PRT?
Start with a small passenger vehicle that can carry 3-6 people. Give it computer guidance so you don’t need a driver. Put the vehicles on their own track – at ground level if you have the land available, on an elevated guideway if you don’t. Put the steering gear in the vehicle so you don’t have to put switches in the track.
Then take the stations off-line from the main track (like a siding on a railway line). Vehicles stopping at stations don’t impede any of the vehicles behind. Your pod can bypass all the intermediate stations between your origin and destination.
Empty vehicles are automatically re-routed to restock empty stations. At off-peak times, a vehicle should always be waiting for you. At peak times, you should only have to wait a few minutes at most. Can you imagine a transit system that provides a higher level of service at 3 AM on a Tuesday morning than at 5 PM on a Wednesday afternoon?
Because the tracks don’t have complicated switching mechanisms, you’ve got much more flexibility in how you lay out your network. Forget long, thin corridors like traditional rail, and imagine instead a connected series of one-way loops, with new tracks constantly forking from, or merging with, the track you’re currently on.
Within those basic parameters, there are various ways of executing the design. The Ultra system uses vehicles with fast-recharging batteries and a sophisticated laser guidance system. The pods recharge while docked, and the guideway infrastructure is largely passive, keeping the construction costs low. Other systems have proposed using linear induction motors, or more fancifully, “mag lev” propulsion.
Here’s the amazing thing about PRT for transport planners: it should be cheap. Elevated guideways sound expensive, but they only have to support small light pods, rather than large, heavy train carriages. So the guideways can be quite small with, relatively speaking, an unobtrusive footprint. A light narrow guideway is easier to integrate into the existing urban environment (by running it above sidewalks or carparks). It can accommodate tight turns and steep climbs. You could attach guideways to existing bridges (I’m looking at you, Auckland Harbour Bridge!).
I attended an Engineers for Social Responsibility evening where the New Zealand holder of the Ultra licence talked about the technology. The cost number he quoted for the system? $13 million per kilometre – total system cost, including guideway, vehicles and supporting infrastructure. That’s pretty competitive with any competing rapid transit technology. As Nick as noted in his Light Metro posts, any driverless system leads to massive saving in ongoing operating costs.
Furthermore building a PRT system doesn’t require an all-or-nothing commitment. You can start small, then expand the system. The nature of the system means that vehicles have the freedom to pursue alternative paths between to their destination. That means that part of the system can be shut down without necessarily affecting the rest of the network. Thus you can continuously expand the network in an incremental fashion, rather than the current model where the rapid transit network tends to expand in large, very expensive chunks, with little activity in between.
Go on, what’s the downside?
This sounds a bit too good to be true, so your skepticism levels might be on high alert. The debate between those who passionately believe in the technology, and those who believe it cannot and will not work is vigorous.
The first major problem of PRT is that its largely unproven. The first “modern” systems have only just rolled out, and only in low-capacity operations that don’t really test how the technology will perform in a busy urban environment. Many of the benefits of PRT will only be realised if it can be succeed in high-capacity operations.
The conveniently brings us to another issue frequently raised in opposition to PRT: “It doesn’t have enough capacity”.
Now a high-frequency rail system will have a higher absolute capacity than PRT. I’ll happily concede that point. But PRT might very well have enough capacity.
The Ultra system is currently licensed to travel at 40 km/hr with 3 seconds gaps between vehicle’s by Her Majesty’s Rail Inspectorate in the UK. This is very conservative licensing. On a motorway, the recommended gap between vehicles is 2 seconds travelling at 100 km/hr. So if the gap in the Ultra system was lowered to 2 seconds, the guideway would have the same capacity as a lane of motorway traffic. (Ultra is aiming to increase the speed allowed by the license to 80 km/hr).
The real benefits of PRT start to kick in however when you lower the gaps between vehicles even further. A commonly cited “target” by PRT developers is half second intervals between pods. Even factoring in capacity lost due to empty vehicles being redistributed throughout the network, PRT’s capacity begins to match about three lanes of motorway traffic – at a fraction of the land allocation.
High-capacity PRT and high-frequency rail aren’t necessarily in competition with each other. The existence of motorways doesn’t negate the need for a local road network. There are opportunities for PRT to act as a feeder to the rail network, bringing rapid transit closer to a much large section of the population than now. Think of PRT as a bus replacement technology, rather than a replacement for the rail network, at least to start with.
The other major obstacle I see to PRT’s adoption is visual intrusion or the “NIMBY” factor. I don’t think there’s any getting around the factor that an elevated system, even with all the mitigation in the world, will always cause some visual intrusion. If you presented the plans to the good citizens of Auckland today, I’m sure most would say “not on my street”. If you built a system somewhere non-controversial (like Wynyard Quarter perhaps) and they could try it, and ride it, and it lived up completely to all the expectations I’ve laid upon it… I think they would still say “not on my street” but might demand that it be built one street over so they had a station within walking distance.
In the next post Icebird talks about the history of PRT, his personal experience and potential applications in Auckland.
There has been a noticeable change in the reporting of global oil supply issues recently, although not locally. First I was quite surprised to see this article in the UK’s Daily Telegraph. Surprised because hitherto the Telegraph has largely run skeptical views on Peak Oil:
The clever, or coy, replacement of ‘peak’ with ‘plateau’ refers to the fact that global oil supply has been bouncing around on a bumpy plateau since 2005 despite the ever rising price signal from the market. Economics 101 says that this shouldn’t happen; increase in price should lead to an increase in supply. And as the years of no meaningful addition to supply keep accumulating it seems we really have met a geological limit to oil production. As the article points out:
‘The West has the disquieting experience of watching crude soar even as we languish in stagnation.’
And the reason for this is that ‘The West’ or the OECD, for the first time, is not the source of the demand that is driving the increase in price. Hence the reference to 125m Chinese cars, as this is the number of additional cars the article claims are due to hit Chinese roads over the next five years. This is a bit of an oversimplification as it isn’t just in China by any means where demand is growing but all over the developing world this is the case, including the countries that are net exporters of oil like in the Middle East. So much so they increasingly have a smaller quantity to export even where they are maintaining production.
Here’s a consumption graph, sure China and India are steadily growing, but look at that ‘non-OECD’ demand [including Chindia]. Soon to overtake the OECD as the biggest draw on world oil supply. This really is the beginning of a new era.
souce: Samuel Foucher/Logi Energy LLC
Note that there has been a decline in Europe and US, which largely reflects contracting economies. Also something of shame that Japan is not separated out here as post Fukushima they are the only sizable OCED nation to be increasing imports, but not because of a booming economy, quite the reverse, in order to replace the knocked out nuclear energy source.
So you can see why the title of the article with chart is called:
A great image illustrating a very sharp summary of the current situation:
The realization that oil prices aren’t about them anymore has been slow to dawn on Americans after a century of being the world’s swing consumers. But the fact is that the world’s developing economies have been outbidding the developed OECD countries for oil since 2005. Some time this year, non-OECD oil demand will overtake OECD demand, and they will stay in the driver’s seat for the remainder of oil’s reign as the lifeblood of the global economy.
And:
Further, this new demand trend is already structurally baked-in. There is really nothing that America can do about it other than to consume less.
The sheer numbers of the global population using oil more efficiently will doom us to being the buyer of last resort under virtually any U.S. fuel economy standard. The roughly one billion people in the U.S. and Europe combined are now competing for oil with four billion people in Asia and over one billion more in Latin America, the Former Soviet Union and the Middle East. It’s like a tug-of-war with five people on one end of the rope and one on the other.
The article concludes with this sobering observation:
The conclusion should be obvious and indisputable: We’ll just hand over the keys. As I said last October, OECD economies should expect growthless stagnation at best. Oil has become a zero-sum market where the developing world’s gain will be the OECD’s loss. It’s time we woke up to the new reality of oil demand and acted accordingly. Not by imagining that we’ll be running more than 240 million slightly more efficient vehicles in the future, but by transitioning to rail and retiring them altogether.
The important point is that peak or plateau oil is not about oil suddenly running out but rather the competition for it heating up yet the supply not growing, and at some point beginning to decline. For The US this comes with the uncomfortable and no doubt to many unacceptable idea that they no longer call the shots in this vital market. At least in NZ we have never suffered from this burden but we are nonetheless just as vulnerable to being all but priced out of the oil market as this decade unfolds.
For now the appreciating NZ dollar has allowed us to stay slumbering on this issue as the international oil trade deals in USD, so the rising crude price has not meant reciprocal rises at the pump here. However this makes us doubly vulnerable as all it will take for $3/litre is for the NZD to settle down closer to its historical average with the USD. But then factor in any continuation of rising crude prices too and things could get very alarming very quickly. And all of this without anything special happening like Iran being attacked by the Israelis or any other above ground event [also, of course, possible].
The reason this isn’t understood as much as you might expect is that this is a very big departure from everyones’ experience, so despite seven years of stagnant production it just doesn’t fit with a lifetime of available oil and of the oil market’s responsiveness to the requirements of the West. Really big changes are not only not anticipated they are often not even accepted once they’ve happened. Welcome to the new century.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8998 [shows role of high oil costs in Euros in current economy, good stuff in the comments here too esp. about US v. Euro train use]
Supply chart, non-opec including the world's biggest producer: Russia
Last year the Rugby World Cup was excellent and with the exception of a bit of a hiccup at the start things generally went pretty well. I think that as a result we also we learnt a lot about how to better operate public transport when big events are on and I have seen signs of this recently with a few events at Eden park that I have been too but while we obviously need to remember these lessons there now seems to be new ones that we need learn.
Story 1 – Faults
So first story isn’t actually an organised event but a regular occurrence on the rail network and the outcome fits in with the rest so I will include it. Leaving work one day I made my way down to Britomart with the intent on catching the 5:36 train out west and upon arriving I learned that the previous train, the 5:24 had been cancelled. The 5:24 is probably one of the busiest pm peak trains as it is really the first train to leave town heading west after 5pm so gets a lot of workers on it. As I’m sure anyone can imagine loading up two services onto one is never going to be a pretty thing and the train was packed and standing room only right from town. Adding in a heap more passengers from Newmarket and people at Grafton and Mt Eden were being left on the platforms as the train was simply too full. Of course in this situation there is simply no way that train staff can get through the carriage to collect tickets. By the time the train had cleared out enough for staff to start moving through the carriages we were already past New Lynn but by that time hundreds had already hopped off the train.
Story 2 – Blues vs Crusaders game
This game was on a Friday evening just over a week ago. I was catching the 5:52 so things are normally a bit quieter than the earlier peak trains but leaving town the train was pretty full with a lot of supporters. Once again it was too much for staff to be able to collect tickets (but not quite as bad as the first story). We continued to pick up more people at the stations along the way until arriving at Kingsland a while later. At that point the a large number of people on the train disembarked to make their way to Eden Park leaving the train empty enough for staff to do their job. It’s also worth noting that travel for this game wasn’t free with a ticket.
Story 3 – Warriors opening game
This just happened today (and a shame about the result). Heading to the game things were pretty straight forward with the exception of the train being a few minutes late. There weren’t overcrowding issues like the previous stories but almost all non regular users thought they had free transport included and many didn’t have any cash and ended up getting free rides anyway. I will say it was good to see a lot of security maintenance staff on hand at various places to make sure everything went to plan. The RWC solution of splitting passengers between Kingsland and Morningside was again used and seemed to work smoothly. The issue was again heading home, with large numbers of people leaving at the same time the services get very full and there were only two of onboard staff to collect tickets. I didn’t get my ticket checked till just before we pulled up at Glen Eden and once again hundreds who disembarked before then got free rides.
I think that by now most people still reading would have picked up on the main issue I have had. That is that far to often when events happen people are getting free rides. Now I don’t blame the people getting the free rides as in most cases it simply isn’t their fault someone couldn’t get to them. What I do have an issue with is that because there haven’t been better systems put in place to solve this then the system is missing out on hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars. This might not be a great deal in the overall scheme of things but for a service that relies on extensive operating subsidies it wasteful. I also wonder if part of the problem is that people who only use trains for events like #2 and #3 are used to having trips as part of their travel from things like the RWC.
Integrated ticketing would definitely have helped in the first case but for the other two, when there are a high proportion of people who probably don’t regularly catch PT then something else is needed. One possible solution to all of this would be to have a few of the staff ticketing people either on the platform (or before getting to it) so that the onboard staff can just focus on getting people to their destination as soon as possible. Another solution would be to require the organisers of any event that is expected to increase demand for PT to fully pay for the services with free travel included as part of the ticket cost.
One other thing that annoyed me but wasn’t related to free trips was the attitude of some people on the the platform at Mt Albert on the way to the Warriors game. When the train pulled up a group of 5-10 saw that the carriage they were next to didn’t have many seats left. Rather than get on and stand (and it wasn’t crowded) for the 5 mins or so it takes to get to Morningside they decided to slowly walk down the platform looking for a carriage with more space and from what I could tell staff did nothing to try and hurry them up. If this happened at every station trains would almost always be late due to long dwell times. Perhaps we need to automate the doors more, once they are opened they only stay open for a set length of time, say 20-30 seconds at which time they close. Countdown timers like we see on some pedestrian crossings could be used to let passengers know how much time they have left and help to hurry them up.
Today saw lower Queen St transformed from a road into a playground for the Playing in the Streets event so I popped down to have a look, there were plenty of people around but it definitely didn’t feel crowded. Here are some photos (sorry they won’t be as good as Patrick’s)
There were also some demonstrations like this gymnastics one.
While sports where the main theme of the day there were a few other activities for those who wanted to show their creative side and there will definitely be some interesting marks left on the street.
I think it is fair to say that the majority of the events were aimed at kids, not that it is a bad thing. If there was one thing I would like to see it would be it made into more of a carnival atmosphere with more music, activities etc, but at least its a start. Hopefully we start to see more events happening and these two signs become a more regular sight in the city.
A plainly daft piece on the proposed Auckland Plan by Bill Ralston recently appeared in the NZ Listener. In it he claims, completely without any reason, that the plan sets out to demolish where he lives, as well as every other desirable part of Auckland in the name of instensification. This is simply untrue. It is true that the Plan hopes to encourage Auckland to continue to become a more intensive city, but not by demolishing the very best bits, or even very much of it at all. In fact it is decidedly half-hearted about containing the spread outwards, even proposing 140,000 new detached houses be built in the next 30 years under one scenario. All on what is currently productive and attractive distant countryside, and all to be served by endlessly and expensively rolling out new services: From the current 385,000 detached houses to 526,000! Did you actually read the thing, Bill?
In any case, intensification is clearly a matter of degree and the areas proposed for the kind of high density high rise growth that so alarms dear old Bill [but of course not everyone], is all carefully allotted to currently empty or underused commercial ‘brownfields’ sites on transport corridors in areas like the CBD, Glen Innes, and New Lynn. Not Bill’s neck of the woods. Other areas are intended to be encouraged to move from low to medium density. Bill’s place isn’t on this list either.
Ironically, in light of this reaction, the type of intensification that would go a long way to both accommodating Auckland’s growth and greatly improving our quality of life is about trying to help more of Auckland more closely resemble Bill’s very own suburb. His suburb is, in fact, a role model for how much of Auckland ideally could be. But that isn’t by repeating the thing that Bill thinks his ‘burb is all about, the appearance of the buildings, but rather about how they are organised. Not architectural design, but urban design. Really, how?
Freemans Bay is, along with St Mary’s Bay, Herne Bay, Parnell, Devonport, Northcote, Ponsonby, Grey Lynn, and Mt Eden, a highly sought after and therefore expensive bit of old Auckland. So it is worth asking what is so good about it?
Well most of the buildings are old. That’s it isn’t it? Most people love old houses, with their mature trees, and in Auckland that means Victorian and Edwardian houses, usually detached wooden dwellings. Unlike Sydney, Auckland isn’t old enough to have Georgian buildings and also unlike Sydney or Dunedin there wasn’t the resource of stone or even much brick to compete with the pillage of the native forests that our forebears felt so entitled to use so completely. Furthermore, in a reversal of the trend of the second half of the last century we have recently been rediscovering the advantages of these close-in old suburbs. So instead of looking on these areas as slums and bulldozing them wholesale in order to build motorways as we did from the 1960s we have recently been turning houses like this one:More and more into houses like this one:
But that isn’t the whole story is it? Properly understood three factors make Freemans Bay such a great place to live, and only one of them is the irreplaceable age of the structures. And this is important because while we can’t time-travel and build real Victorian houses again we can take the best urban design features from these areas to improve what we build next, and even fix other parts of the existing city with these ideas too. The three essential features, in no particular order, that make Freemans Bay so desirable are:
1. Physical Heritage
2. Proximity to the centre
3. Population density
All the things that you may like about Freemans Bay flow from these; for example, great cafés and shops? They are a function of the quantity of people around and the desirability of the place, which in turn is because of the density of the housing and the proximity to the centre of town. Retail businesses need enough customers, and specialised ones need an even higher number going by because their appeal is, by definition, narrow.
But hang on, waddaymean population density?, this is just a suburb with detached houses and some shops isn’t it?, same as Dannemora or Botany? Well it isn’t high density but it is medium density and is considerably higher than most more recent suburbs. And here’s how: As this post by Admin shows, when looked at in detail you can see that the narrow streets and painted shiplap conceal a clever spatial order that maximises private space yet retains public charm. It is in fact this spatial order, and its resultant density of population that sustains the local businesses and other amenities all at close proximity.
Of course old buildings add texture and charm, but it is important urban design features and not architectural ones that make the real structural differences. Let’s look at Bill’s favourite café, mentioned in his article: Agnes Curran.Yes it is in a building pleasingly made of plastered brick and the door to the rooms above are surrounded by Georgian style decoration, lovely. But let’s look at everything else that makes this a really successful streetscape and business. The café occupies a tiny space about the size of two car parks, it is right up to the generous footpath, a footpath separated from the traffic by mature Plane trees [with a new one recently added on the right], the trees also accommodate a limited number of on-street car parks. A small apartment building to the left of the shot is smack up the boundary with the cafe and the footpath, and there are other levels of accommodation above retail spaces on the main road. Thus there is an extremely tight integration of the residential and commercial functions of this neighbourhood; so everyone walks, no need to drive when your destination is already right there. Here it is from above: The cafe is in the alley between the grey and reddish rooves at bottom left. Occupying the space that would have to be given over to off-street parking were this a new building- by current council regulation. Note that the houses are closer than is currently allowed in new subdivisions, and that their garden space is all together in one piece at the rear of each house. Small, but all usable, and private. And Ponsonby Rd is, by Auckland standards, relatively well served by public transport, especially in the form of the frequent new Inner Link bus service, connecting this place to the CBD, the universities, the hospital, everything really.It is easy to see that this is quite an intensely built place, but also pleasantly leafy, and is in fact at the intersection of two pretty busy roads; Ponsonby and Franklin. How can it be of such density but still be so pleasant, it must be the design of the buildings? Well that is of course important, but how much they appeal to you is really a matter of personal taste, no, it has much more to do with what is not visible in this picture. To show what that is lets have a look at a cafe in a more recent part of town:Dunkin Donuts at Botany Downs courtesy of Google [sorry but I'm not going there]. And from above:Well in fact there’s a whole lot of food outlets on in this image, a KFC, a seafood place, as well as Dunkin Donuts. And yup they are all pretty nasty new buildings, built to a price and without any conviction that they mean to stay. But also note there are no houses or apartments of any kind here and no one walking. But there is the one amenity that is almost entirely absent from the earlier scene. This is a place rich in carparking. Viewed from above or from street level it is clear that this is a place entirely made for the movement and storage of cars. Yes you can argue that that what most distinguishes the natures of these two places is the age and design of the structures, but it is also clear that the spatial organisation is at least as important a difference. Put simply the first is designed for people and the second for cars. The first has a higher density of humans and the second of machines. The first, of course, commands much higher values and is where Bill wants to live. And the first, while more expensive to buy into, is actually cheaper to live in, because the intensity of the place means the costs of movement are much lower. It is a place that you can easily function without a car at all for example [As local resident, Bill, says in this article].
But of course the people living Freemans Bay do still use cars, but unlike those that live in the these new areas, they don’t have to use them just to get to their local café or other common local amenity, like schools, workplaces, or bars. They walk more and they use public transport more. Why? not because they are cleverer than the people in Dannemora but because their area was designed for those choices to be the most obvious, most productive, and most enjoyable things to do. And we can spread more of this simple genius to other parts of our city, even Botany, if can just reverse the insane auto-centric planning priorities of the last fifty years. This means putting people at the centre of the spatial organisation of places. It means repealing the rules that insist that the car must be catered for first. And it means for many of our primarily residential areas mixing the living and working and playing in the kind of intense proximity that Bill enjoys in Freemans Bay.
And it also means that we must provide systems of movement that do not devalue the very places they are meant to serve. Which of course means fast, frequent, smart, public transit. Something lacking in the newer suburb.
Furthermore, if we can get those planning settings right and are able to encourage the kind of spatial organisation that Bill enjoys so unconsciously in Freemans Bay, it is highly likely that we will see the design of the individual buildings in these places improve significantly, because increased intensity of humans also means increased intensity of economic activity. And, of course, because it involves unlocking the land and the resources currently tied up so unproductively in providing so much amenity for vehicles.
We can have Freemans Bay’s qualities of urban design in other places with contemporary design and technologies, after all Freemans Bay isn’t all old buildings and is all the better for it. It isn’t a museum. Here are two quite different and award winning recent detached houses there, The first by Marsh Cook: And the second by Malcolm Walker:Freemans Bay also has contemporary buildings by Mitchell + Stout, Stevens Lawson, Fearon Hay, Andrew Patterson, and more. Along with council pensioner flats, town houses, and apartment buildings.
And remember, while The Plan doesn’t envisage the core of Freemans Bay changing much at all, it does for some other underperforming areas of Auckland. And as the picture below of Freemans Bay in 1877 shows change is always possible, and can be a very good thing indeed……… Anyway, why shouldn’t more Aucklanders get the chance to enjoy their neighbourhood as much as our friend Bill Ralston enjoys his?
As there’s been a lot of discussion about population density here I figure this post from good ol’ Cap’nTransit is on the money. Yes this is my view too, you think more density is needed? Well build the transit and the density will follow [all else being equal], foolish to try to wait for some ideal density then meet that demand with infrastructure. Transit supply is causative. Or as the Cap’n says: ‘The population density to support my ass’
Here are two interesting posts on Twitter and Transit. One beautiful the other more for the quants. Both instructive.
The second is via Atlantic Cities where there is also this argument for High Speed Rail in the Union’s most populous State, California. Newt of the GOP has been banging on about the US heading back to the moon in some kind of pissing contest with China, but frankly if they can’t even get a train to run from SF to LA and any decent speed I think he’ed better dodge that race. *Note for Geoff: These arguments here for HSR are intended as a metaphor for local arguments for urban transit, not as a literal argument for HSR in NZ. Same things apply, land use transformations, economic return not a financial one etc, but at a vastly different scale.
More from the States on gas prices [as they call them] and what to do, and for once this doesn’t involve bombing somewhere else or other wise frackin’ it all up.
Closer to home; no round up from me will be complete without at least a passing note on resource supply issues. As we head to the exciting singularity of peak damn near everything it’s good to see some people have their heads up. Here’s an introductory note from across the ditch, what I especially like about this is that it states a view that I also have, namely that it could just be that a world with less freely available oil may well be a lot better in a number of ways; once we’ve made the adjustment. Like London after the peasoup smog and mountains of horse-shit. I’m also guessing less isolation, more localiasation, more human interaction, less alienation. Perhaps more meaningful lives. Perhaps.
There’s also this guy, Denis Tegg, I know nothing about him but he has been manfully plugging away on this issue in NZ for a while and here he is bringing an important shelved report to the surface. I say manfully because there is a really creepy silence on this issue and Climate Change in the mainstream media and in government in NZ. It’s like if we don’t mention these problems they’ll just go away.
Look away Actoids! Here’s a well reasoned piece on the attractions and limitations of neoliberalism. It’s short too. Relevant how? Transit like our cities need long term planning, by elected bodies. The market is a great tool, but a lousy master, and an even worse god. As I think we’ve just seen.
Those interested in the strange ways that change can happen will like this. Why the US Marine Corp may well lead the US into a solar future.
Back to transit, and more personally; I have new wheels, yay! and loving it, but won’t be going to these extremes to protect them. No.
I must admit to being quite a map geek, or perhaps more accurately, a geography geek in general. Which is why one of my favourite Christmas presents this year was the excellent bookMaphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks, by Ken Jennings. The book is fantastic, running through many oddities about the wonderful world of maps.
The book talks about this amazing Youtube video, for example:
One of the other fascinating things the book discusses, is the little town of Baarle-Nassau – sitting in the Netherlands (or Belgium, we’ll come to that). Zoomed out, there doesn’t seem to be too much that is strange about the town, sitting near the borders of the two countries: However, if you zoom in, you see a weird mess of grey lines (indicating national borders):
The book Maphead describes the situation:
It’s made up of no fewer than twenty-six separate pieces of Belgium sitting, thanks to a complicated series of medieval treaties between two warring dukes, in the middle of the Netherlands. Some of these little bits of Belgium have little bits of the Netherlands inside them, leading to an impossibly intricate border that divides some village homes in half between the two nations. Your nationality depends on where your front door is, and residents have been known to ‘emigrate’ by moving their door every time the tax laws change. When bars and restaurants in the Netherlands close, landlords just move their tables onto the Belgian side of their establishment and keep on serving.
An aerial photograph of the area (yellow lines show borders) highlights just how weird the situation is. Little bits of some fields fall into a different country than the remainder of that field:
There are some other strange borders, perhaps most notably the Northwest Angle and Point Roberts, but I think this is the weirdest. And most interesting.
Last week I was invited to appear on the Asian Radio Show on RadioLIVE to discuss the topic of what New Zealand can learn from public transport in Asia. Having spent a large part of this year travelling across Asia by public transport I guess I can now consider myself something of an instant expert on the topic, or at least I’ve had plenty of experiences to curry an opinion on the topic. This post summarises and expands on the panel’s discussion, but if you’re interested the original segment can be heard here:
Asia has some fantastic examples of efficient metros, high speed lines, mega bus systems, and even maglevs. I could write pages and pages about some of the great systems I’ve tried that we could try to emulate here. While these are obviously a lot different to what we have in New Zealand, the really key differences are at a strategic level. So what are the differences between transport here and in Asia, and what we could learn or do differently as a result?
Normalcy
Chinese high speed rail
In Asia public transport is an immediately accessible and functional part of life and used by a large proportion of the population (together with walking and cycling) for daily transport, in same way that driving is considered completely normal here in New Zealand. Public transport is usually the normal way to get around in Asia, rather than something that is reluctantly provided to those who are too unfortunate to drive. Surely ‘normalising’ public transport as something used by regular people is the first thing we can learn from Asia.
Cost efficiency
In general Asian countries have to deal with either limited wealth per capita, large population pressures, or in many cases a combination of the two. This means that out of necessity Asia must adopt transport and planning outcomes that are efficient in terms of money and resources, unlike Europe which perhaps has the luxury of more money to spend per person. While New Zealand has a small population and relatively high wealth, our transport costs are among the highest per person in the world.
Should we be squandering such a large proportion of our wealth just to get around each day? The good point was made that maybe we should look to Aisa rather than Europe for future transport cues. Given the current state of New Zealand’s economy, perhaps we could take a page out of Asia’s book and look to efficient and cost effective public transport to lower the drain on our economy that comes from expensive and wasteful transport policy.
Ideology and politics
One very important point brought up in the panel was the somewhat peculiar fact that public transport in New Zealand is weighted with political ideology, while in Asia there is no such partisan division. In Asia public transport is politically neutral, it is accepted by all political groups in the same non-ideological way that we in New Zealand treat other infrastructure such as stormwater drainage or electricity supply.
Yet in New Zealand public transport is always framed in terms of leftist ideology and aligned with socialist, authoritarian thinking, while private transport is the domain of right wing capitalists. It is simply wrong that in our country the Minister of Transport writes an editorial response to his detractors and speaks in terms of ideology, ‘freedom’ and how good honest Kiwis chose to live their lives in “the real world”. It must be perplexing for a business visitor from Singapore or Hong Kong to discover that in New Zealand buses and trains are only for jobless sandal wearing hippies, while wasting time and petrol on a congested publicly-funded motorway is the domain of successful freedom loving capitalists!
Anyway, before we descend further into the black hole of partisan politics I will suggest the number one thing New Zealand could learn from Asian transport is to drop the ideological vitriol and accept that public transport can be just as useful to the right wing as the left.
Labour costs and regulation
One thing not touched on in the radio discussion is the issue of labour costs and regulation, I would like to discuss it here because operating and compliance costs can create critical differences which we need to bear in mind when making comparisons between countries. In most of Asia the labour market is so broadly spread you still have things like pedicabs and jitneys, where one operator can move only one or a few people at a time and still make a living (albeit a poor one). To be blunt, most Asian public transport can afford to be highly labour intensive because there is a large, poor working class who are willing to work long hours for a pittance to make ends meet. In New Zealand we have a high standard of living, a high minimum wage and consequently high labour costs. Even on minimum wage a bus driver in Auckland would make more in a day than a Chinese driver makes in a week, or a Cambodian driver makes in a month.
A Thai Songthaew
The other issue is the lack of regulation around operation and safety standards. While not quite the case in the more developed economies of east Asia, in the developing nations basically anything (and everything) that moves is employed as public transport. Not long ago I took a ‘public bus’ across the northern part of Bali that consisted of a large van with no side window glass, no passenger side door at all and a hole in the floor big enough to lose a daypack in! Obviously here they are happy to trade safety and security for low maintenance costs, but we cannot do the same in New Zealand.
I’m really making this point because one often hears the opinion from neo-liberal commentators that we should follow the example of the jitneys and songthaews of Asia in the western world. What they propose is we dump our expensive regulated buses and trains and replace them with a loose network of small privately run transport vehicles operating a flexible, demand responsive transport service that picks people up from anywhere and take them more or less directly to their destination, a sort of shared taxi-van system.
I guess that kind of thing is attractive to a card carrying free-marketeer because it requires no regulation or co-ordination from local government, it provides a ‘flexible freedom’ of travel according to the passengers needs, and it is in the spirit of private capitalism. However what such commentators quietly glaze over is the issue of labour and operational costs. In parts of Asia you can have a small ute with a few wooden benches in the back operating a profitable private transport service (assuming the driver works twelve hours a day, seven days a week of course!). But in New Zealand such a service could never be vaguely profitable for a private operator if they were required to maintain our vehicle safety standards and labour conditions.Also I have found if you’re not going close to where the driver is headed you don’t get a lift! This means that in practice these types of services end up operating a pretty regular route anyway, sending the argument of flexibility and demand responsiveness out the window.
So how to make the change?
To finish up one final question was posed to me in the radio panel: the supposedly difficult question of how to shift people out of their ‘Kiwi’ cars and into more efficient ‘Asian’ public transport? To me this needn’t be a difficult question at all because the answer lies in simple logic: people will generally use the transport that is easiest for them; they will do whatever is cheap, convenient and actually gets them where they need to be on time.
Speaking generally, people drive for transport in New Zealand because we have spent the last seven decades or so focussing our transport policy and funding almost entirely on providing for private road transport, while all but disassembling the public transport system and marginalising walking and cycling in favour of cars. Auckland used to be world leaders in public transport use, but we then planned and funded an all but completely car based transport system and have got exactly what we asked for: an almost entirely car dependent city.
The point here is these isn’t any innate cultural or genetic reason why Kiwis drive all the time and Asians don’t, it is simply people doing what is easiest in light of the conditions and options they have. In my opinion the idea that New Zealanders have a ‘love affair’ with cars is more of a justification than a cause. In reality the relationship is ironically closer to that Asian institiution of arranged marriage.
Indeed, to force New Zealand drivers out of their cars would be quite a task when (in most cases) driving is the only realistic option and public transport is in relation difficult, expensive and ineffective. Now I’m not suggesting that driving is inherently better, but rather that New Zealand public transport is usually so poor and marginalised that taking the car is the lesser evil (despite traffic, fuel costs, parking and all). The fact that half the commuters to the Auckland CBD each weekday get there without driving shows that Kiwis will happily take public transport when it works for them.
So the answer is of course that we don’t have to ‘force’ drivers into public transport at all. If we continue to change the planning and funding of our transport system in a way that makes transit an effective and realistic option, then car drivers will make the shift themselves… regardless of whether they are Kiwi, Asian or whatever.
Greece has been in the news a lot lately, for all the wrong reasons. Having travelled through Greece on my way back to New Zealand, I felt compelled to add a personal (and more positive) spin on Greece’s fortunes.
My first few days were spent in Kalamata, where I spent much of the time huddled beneath an umbrella trying unsuccessfully to avoid the blazing sun, while playing backgammon and sipping on iced coffees. The view from my office window is shown below.After spending over 12 monhs in frigid Northern Europe, Greece’s beach culture was refreshing – and somewhat reminiscent of New Zealand. The beach is for hanging out and having fun in whatever way you can.
At one dance party on the beach I witnessed a charming tradition: Paraffin kites would be lit and allowed to fill with hot air, before then being released to sail off over the ocean. The kites would travel for miles, lighting up the night sky like slow moving shooting stars. It was, so I was told, a modern-day salute to the fabled, but ill-fated, attempt by Icarus to fly to the sun on his wax wings.
Putting relaxation, revelry, and tradition to one side, there is no doubt that Greece is a charming place. There’s any number of small coastal villages to visit and while away the hours. The photo below shows the town of Methoni, where an ancient fort overlooks the town and beach.
Thoughts about transport did not cross my mind so much during my week in Greece; there were too many other interesting things going on. I can, however, recommend the long distance buses, even if the KTEL bus terminal in Athens is dire and not easily navigated by the faint-hearted.
I was particularly impressed by the metro in Athens. My favourite example is Monasteraki Station, shown below (yellow building to left), which blends in seamlessly with what is a wonderfully historic square. Many metro stations have in-built displays to show the artefacts that were discovered during excavations for the tunnels and stations. By tastefully blending transport with culture the metro is definitely a winner.
The Old Town in Athens is an absolute urban delight; all those who love cities should wander and savour it’s ancient atmosphere.
All in all I had a wonderful time in Greece. Looking forward I hope Greece can sort through it’s economic challenges and so devote more time and energy to the important business of enjoying life, albeit perhaps now with a chastened awareness of fiscal/economic constraints. I left Greece wanting to see more, which is always a good sign.
*** This post is dedicated to my fantastic hosts: Voula Adamopolous, her family, and friends ***
During my lunch break today I headed down to see how the Fort Street shared space is working. The weather was good so I spent around half an hour watching how the place works. Overall I was pretty impressed by how the area works. People generally have the confidence to walk down the middle of the street, the cars generally travel at a slow speed (around one in four went a bit fast for my liking) and the mix of pedestrian and cars, a kind of glorious chaos, actually seems to work. It’s also interesting to see how the area is starting to change as a result of the shared space. The Kebabs on Queen and Sumo Sushi stores you can see in the photo above have pushed seating out onto the street.
What the Fort Street shared space highlights though is how bad pedestrians have it in other parts of the city. Not far behind where this photo was taken is the corner of High Street and Shortland Street, an incredibly busy intersection for pedestrians but with no traffic calming measures for vehicles zipping down the Shortland Street hill. It’s only a matter of time before something goes wrong there. Plus the bizarre nature of High Street, with its narrow (and generally overflowing with pedestrians) footpaths so we can provide a handful of on-street parking spaces.
For future shared spaces there is one thing that I think could make them better, and that is a noisier road surface. Not only would this slow drivers down (nothing like a rough noisy surface to slow you down) but it would also ensure that when you’re walking down the middle of a shared space in the same direction as vehicles you’d actually be able to hear them come up behind you, rather than feeling somewhat unsettled and constantly looking over your shoulder to see if there’s anything behind you. I’m not quite sure how you could achieve such a surface that’s still comfortable to walk across – while ensuring the noise isn’t so loud as to annoy people in the area, but I think it’s worth looking into.
I think the shared spaces will be really popular as the weather improves. It certainly felt like a really nice place to enjoy my lunch.
Recent Comments