As might be reasonably clear from the map above, Flat Bush doesn’t have particularly good transport links with the rest of Auckland. Links with the southern motorway are generally via quite highly congested roads (particularly to the north), while any form of half-decent public transport out in this corner of Auckland is completely non-existent. Bus timetables for the area show that trips between Flat Bush and the CBD are expected to take about an hour and a quarter.

That’s not to say that no thought has gone into the transport problem that Flat Bush creates. A recent NZTA board paper that I’m having a read through at the moment suggests that a lot of time, effort and money has gone into creating a transport network for Flat Bush. However, unfortunately in Auckland what that means is basically “we’ve build a pile of really wide roads for everyone to start driving their cars along and clog up”. Now short of building the much needed, but probably very expensive southeast railway line, it does seem as though Flat Bush’s transport future will be roads based. But I think it’s worthwhile having a look into how much this approach to addressing transport in Flat Bush is costing.

NZTA’s board paper outlines what’s happening and Flat Bush, and does point out that the area doesn’t gain access directly from the state highway network: So what’s it costing to make this new suburb viable in terms of its transport? Well that’s where things start to get expensive: $676 million to be spent on roading in the area is a lot of money. It is true that a significant portion of this money is to be paid for by developers, but that money will be paid for through higher property prices – not just out of thin air.

Of course this money doesn’t cover roading upgrades that will probably be necessary (or at least considered necessary by roading engineers) as a result of putting 40,000 people out in this corner of Auckland. You can add to the amounts above part of the cost of the $1.3 billion AMETI, previous expenditure on Te Irirangi Drive, the Highbrook interchange and so forth.

While it’s obvious that as our city grows we will need to spend money on improving transport infrastructure, I just wonder whether it would be possible to more cheaply accommodate 40,000 people than what we’re seeing with Flat Bush.

Another document that looks at the links between planning and transport is to be released by Auckland City Council in the near future, as part of the work they are doing to guide the development of future planning documents in the Auckland region – what they’re calling the “Future Planning Framework“. I have actually been really impressed by the thinking that has gone into the Future Planning Framework, and I hope that this model for planning does end up being extended to the rest of Auckland. The most recent part of this work involves a number of “Planning Position Papers“, the recommendations from which have been put together into this document (a very large 17 MB file!) There are some very interesting recommendations around urban design and planning, which I think are worth a future blog post, but it is the transport section that I will talk about in this post – or more particularly how it looks at the vexed question of “how do we really integrate land-use and transport planning?”

One useful diagram from this study that I think explains the need to balance the “through” aspects of transport with the “in” aspects of what road corridors contribute to our urban environment is included below:
I think a critical part of truly integrating land-use and transport policy is to think more about our roads being part of the urban fabric, and less simply as “through-spaces”. I remember talking to an urban designer last year, and he mentioned the very interesting point that most of the work he felt urban designers needed to do was in the transport corridors – because they are the public spaces of our cities.

The paper has the obligatory recommendation for better alignment between land-use and planning resources: A lot of this recommendation is completely true, and it’s almost impossible to disagree with. But I guess my question once again is “how do we actually make this happen?” As Auckland City Council wrote this plan, they also gave resource consent for a supermarket to shift from Panmure town centre out to Lunn Ave, completely undermining efforts to encourage businesses and people to locate in transit-oriented centres just like Panmure. The level of disconnect between this high-level policy-talk and what happens on the ground is immense.

A second recommendation does recognise the need to focus more on what’s happening on the ground and start thinking about what provisions can be tweaked to encourage development in certain areas and to discourage development from other areas. Before I move on, I must have a bit of a chuckle about AMETI being mentioned in the same paragraph as recommendations for good alignment between land-use and transport policy. The whole reason why we are in the horrible transport situation that AMETI is meant to improve is because of the biggest mistake in the history of Auckland’s urban development: allowing such a huge number of people to live east of the Tamaki River while not providing a good quality railway link to southeast Auckland.

But anyway, moving along – most of the recommendation above is typical policy “fluff” talk, although it is interesting that the term “incentives” is used. I think that a big part of trying to make development happen where we want it to (and to not happen where we don’t want it) is to tweak our incentives, which generally will mean messing around with the system of development contributions: which developers pay to council to offset the increased demand on council services that the particular development will generate. At the moment these contributions are calculated in a horribly crude manner, generally on a “per-unit basis” – which illogically assumes that a studio apartment a town centre will have the same impact on infrastructure as a 6 bedroom McMansion in Flat Bush.

To actually incentivise development in places like the CBD, Newmarket, New Lynn, Henderson and other places along the Rapid Transit Network – to truly align land-use and transport planning – clearly the rules need to be tweaked so that it makes the most financial sense for developers to focus in those areas. That may mean giving them the most development potential in those areas, but it also might mean waiving development contributions there but raising them elsewhere in “non-aligned” areas to both offset the reduced revenue, but also to discourage development from those other areas. It would also reflect the fact that development located outside town centres and other nominated growth areas is generally very very expensive to service, particularly in terms of transport.

So, getting back to my overall point of this post – how do we really integrate land-use and transport? Well I think there are a few key points:

• We must ensure alignment at the citywide scale. There would be little point in investing all the money in the rail network that we are doing if our land-use plans weren’t designed around encouraging growth in areas around train stations. Similarly, there is little point trying to focus development on areas already urbanised if our transport projects undermine this by encouraging sprawl.
• We must consider the transport network for how it contributes to the urban environment as well as how it provides for people to travel around the city.
• We must tweak our incentives (including development contributions) to make it logical for development to happen in areas where we want it.
• We must ensure that “at the coalface” land-use and transport planners are talking to each other all the time about their work. This is going to get a lot more difficult thanks to the Super City and the splitting off of Auckland Transport.

Until I see developments declined resource consent (or Plan Change requests rejected) because they integrate poorly with the transport network, or development contribution policies being fine-tuned and tweaked to incentivise intensification, or see urban designers in top positions at Auckland Transport, I will find it difficult to believe that all this talk of “integration” and “alignment” between transport and land-use planning is more than just “feel good fluff” that keeps policy planners busy.

This is why I think planning rules really do need to limit the provision of parking.

But is this true? How does Auckland’s population density compare with other cities around the world? How does its land area compare with cities in Australia and the USA – for example? Is Auckland anywhere near the second most spread out city in the world? What about Los Angeles?

Fortunately, Demographia (who I am often quite sceptical about when it comes to planning matters, but who seem to have a reasonably good grasp of this issue) have undertaken an enormously in depth study into city sizes, city population and population densities. Perhaps what is most interesting about their work is how they calculate where each urban area begins and ends – which actually fits together quite nicely with how I tend to think of the issue: I like the idea that we’re not measuring “bits of cities”, such as simply the inner part of the New York urban area – which of course has very high densities but isn’t just what New York is made up of.

For a start, I suppose that it makes sense to look at what the biggest cities in the world are by population – here are the top 20: Auckland doesn’t even make it into the top 200, which roughly corresponds with the number of cities in the world with more than 2 million people.

The next thing that’s very interesting to look at is the physical size of cities in the world – which of these urban areas covers the most space. I remember as a kid hearing that Auckland was physically the same size as London, but is that true?

Well according to the table above, the Auckland urban area was 531 square kilometres in size, making it about a third the size of London. Also interesting to note that Auckland’s about half the size of Perth, and less than a third of the size of the Brisbane metropolitan area. At the top of the list, we see that the New York metropolitan area is the biggest built-up urban area in the world, by size, followed by Tokyo. The New York metropolitan area is about 22 times the physical size of Auckland. By size, Auckland is actually the 181st largest city in the world.

Turning to population density, it is really interesting to see how Auckland compares with other cities in Australia and the USA. Most of the really high density cities in the world are in developing nations, which shows why Auckland and many other large and well known cities end up ranked so low. Yet we still see that Auckland’s population density is a bit higher than Sydney’s and significantly higher than all the other major cities in Australia. Interestingly enough though, one city that has a higher population density than Auckland is Los Angeles. In fact, Los Angeles has the highest density of any city in the USA – not because it has a really dense core like New York does, but because throughout Los Angeles the lot sizes are generally pretty small, a similar situation to what we have in Auckland.

So what does all of this mean? Well for one it shows that any time someone says “Auckland’s population density is too low for public transport to work” you can absolutely say that they’re talking rubbish. It also probably means that simple population density isn’t necessarily the ultimate defining issue about whether a city’s urban form is suitable for public transport or not. The way in which that population density is structured (small lots evenly spread throughout the city or higher and lower density nodes) might matter more, the concentration of jobs in certain areas might also make more of a difference (although remember that Vancouver has a lower percentage of jobs in its CBD than Auckland).

Ultimately, what this all probably means is that the popularity of public transport is likely to be based more on the quality of the system than it is on the urban form of the city. Sure, there are many things we can and must do to structure our city more efficiently and sustainably, but let’s stop making the excuse that Auckland is too spread out for public transport to work. Because, as the above tables show, that’s complete rubbish.

Urban design is a relatively new discipline, slotting some way between architecture and planning. Here’s how wikipedia describes it:

Urban design concerns the arrangement, appearance and functionality of towns and cities, and in particular the shaping and uses of urban public space. It has traditionally been regarded as a disciplinary subset of urban planning, landscape architecture, or architecture and in more recent times has been linked to emergent disciplines such as landscape urbanism. However, with its increasing prominence in the activities of these disciplines, it is better conceptualised as a design practice that operates at the intersection of all three, and requires a good understanding of a range of others besides, such as urban economics, political economy and social theory.

Urban design theory deals primarily with the design and management of public space (i.e. the ‘public environment’, ‘public realm’ or ‘public domain’), and the way public places are experienced and used. Public space includes the totality of spaces used freely on a day-to-day basis by the general public, such as streets, plazas, parks and public infrastructure. Some aspects of privately owned spaces, such as building facades or domestic gardens, also contribute to public space and are therefore also considered by Urban design theory.

Because urban design is primarily concerned about the “public realm”, the spaces between buildings where people interact with each other, it is enormously related to transport – because after all most ‘public space’ is road-space. It is this strong connection between urban design and transport that Jan Gehl understands perhaps better than anyone else out there.

This is complicated territory, in that transport based urban design seeks to alter spaces that are usually considered to be more like urban corridors (for passing through) rather than urban rooms (for being in). Instead of altering these spaces in a way to improve their efficiency or throughput (like a traffic engineer would), an urban design approach to improving road-space would seek to improve the quality of being in that space. Often, but not always, improving the quality of that space will actually reduce the throughput or efficiency of that space – as measured by traditional transport engineering.

As a huge amount of the urban design that will be happening in Auckland in the future will be located within what are broadly called “roads”, I think it’s utterly essential that the future Auckland Transport CCO gets strongly involved in driving better urban design outcomes. It will be Auckland Transport that decides whether to expand upon the network of shared streets that Auckland City Council is about to create, it would be Auckland Transport’s decision to pedestrianise Quay Street and narrow Queen Street down to two lanes – as suggested by Jan Gehl. So while I’m very pleased to see that Auckland City Council urban design guru Ludo Campbell-Reid has a high-placed job within the new Auckland Council, I sincerely hope that the new Transport CCO gets down to the serious business of making sure that it hires a number of top-class urban designers and focuses on how to make Auckland a better place to be, not just an easier place to get around.

Surely we can eventually aim for great transport space like this – which nicely balances getting people through a space while not destroying that space:

If New York can reclaim Broadway for pedestrians, then so can Auckland, says Jan Gehl, the Danish urban planner credited with having more impact on more cities than any other person in the past decade.

It’s like the line ‘If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere’ in Frank Sinatra’s classic song New York, New York, says the 73-year-old.

He has made a career of reclaiming streets for pedestrians and bicycles in the belief that people and public spaces are the lifeblood of a city.

Since setting up Gehl Architects in 2000, the former academic has worked with about 70 cities, including on the transformation of Melbourne and, most recently, the permanent closure of New York’s Broadway in February this year.

Three years ago, Gehl Architects began a “public realm health check” which found Auckland was in a beautiful harbour setting but a hostile city where too many concessions to the car had created. In the words of Mr Gehl, it was “a mini Los Angeles”.

On the plus side, the latest Gehl report has found more people living in the city centre – 21,600 at the last count – and a university city with 63,000 students contributing to the city’s vitality and cultural diversity.

Mr Gehl says Auckland has all the goodies to be a great city and is making some progress. But a major change of mindset is needed to address the balance between how much space is dedicated to cars and how much to pedestrians.

“Having a north-facing waterfront is the ultimate dream of all cities in the Southern Hemisphere – and you have it. But it is poorly utilised and hidden by red fences and used as storage for secondhand cars.”

To break the physical and mental barrier between the city and the harbour, he recommends closing either Quay St or Customs St and narrowing the remaining street.

Other suggestions are reducing Queen St from four to two lanes – Auckland City Council has stopped plans for reducing traffic and creating 24-hour bus lanes after objections from retailers – and halving the amount of city asphalt within 10 years.

The Gehl report says one of the challenges is the system of motorways creating a “traffic machine” to and through the city centre.

“The overall pedestrian environment is of poor quality and therefore does not encourage people to walk across the city centre,” the report says.

Says Mr Gehl: “This nation needs a vibrant wonderful heart and you have all the makings of a good heart here [in Auckland]. What is needed is some refurbishment. One could really make a fantastic city.”

He said Copenhagen had improved every day for the past 40 years “and people have come to love the city”.

Jan Gehl’s recipe for Auckland

* Halve asphalt in 10 years.
* Reduce Queen St to two lanes.
* Close Quay or Customs St to traffic; narrow the other street.
* Provide space for cyclists.

Seriously, let’s just do what he says. He really knows what he’s talking about.

We are seeing some of these ideas come through, in the form of Auckland City Council’s shared streets projects. I’m very much looking forward to watching those come to fruition over the next few months.

Along with 1100 others, I made a submission on the proposal – supporting some aspects of it but opposing others. I noted that some improvements would occur, such as enhanced integration with the surrounding area (the plan proposes to open up the mall to the street more, so it’s not just a big white box in a carpark) and attempts to improve walking/cycling/public transport access. However, I felt that overall these improvements were absolutely not counter-balanced by the negative effects that the enlargement would have – most particularly in terms of its traffic effects.

As someone who has lived near St Lukes for most of my life, and someone who still visits it fairly regularly, I’m aware of the well-known fact that the street network that surrounds the mall is pretty much at capacity during busy times. The traffic report with the plan change did not dispute this fact.  Furthermore, the traffic report confirmed the extremely low proportion of visitors to the mall who use public transport (under 5%), and the relatively low proportion of visitors to the mall who walk or cycle there. As I’ve noted in my recent attempts to improve the bus routes along New North and Sandringham roads, St Lukes is located in an extremely poor and downright annoying place when it comes to public transport. Compared to just about every other shopping mall in Auckland, it is much more difficult to serve well. There’s no train station nearby (unlike Sylvia Park, Henderson, New Lynn and Newmarket), there’s no bus hub nearby (unlike Henderson, New Lynn, Manukau City, Newmarket and in the future Albany) and it’s not even in a location that’s easy to serve with a logical bus route (unlike pretty much every other mall in Auckland). Somewhat bizarrely, the Booz Allen report which accompanied the plan change had this to say about the level of public transport service for St Lukes: Geez, I’m utterly terrified to think what their standard would be for a shopping centre poorly served by public transport. In the real world, bus services aren’t particularly frequent along New North Road & Sandringham Road (at least not the ones that divert to St Lukes), while the railway line is so distant that not even 1 per cent of visitors to St Lukes use it – which means that it can effectively be deemed irrelevant.

So ultimately, it is going to be a big challenge to significantly improve this 4% figure – which means that at St Lukes grows it is inevitable that unless something pretty drastic is done, most people will continue to drive there and the streets will be clogged up more and more. This will be particularly exacerbated by roughly doubling the amount of on-site carparking. To avoid this traffic nightmare, my submission proposed a cap on the amount of parking, and a cap on the amount of additional floorspace that could be developed until the modeshare of public transport, walking and cycling was increased (in other words, put the ball in Westfield’s court as to how they’d go about reducing their own car dependency).

In assessing the plan change proposal, Auckland City’s planner has recommended approval, but with a number of potentially quite interesting alterations. I’ll talk about the amendments that relate to public transport first, and then get on to the parking issue. This is what’s said about public transport:   I disagree with the final paragraph that it’d be impossible to propose a restriction – as in my opinion a District Plan rule can say whatever council wants it to say. Overall, it seems as though the planner’s report clearly recognises the problem that the plan change does nothing much to improve public transport – but then the planner backs away from actually trying to remedy that issue. A pity.

Looking at parking now, this is where things start to get quite interesting. The current mall has around one parking space per 22 m2 of floor space, and Westfield were proposing to retain that sort of ratio – although as a minimum rather than a maximum. However, perhaps as a result of my submission – and certainly it would seem as the result of pressure from ARTA and NZTA – the council wants to propose a maximum parking rate of 1 space for every 25 m2 of retail floor space. This is a step in the right direction, if a small one. However, Westfield are exceedingly grumpy about not being able to build as many carparks as they’d like (I often joke that they’d build a carpark over their grandmother they’re so keen on them). Westfield’s transport expert has this to say about why restricting parking is, in their opinion, the worst thing possible in the whole wide world: Let’s work through these points one by one. With regard to the first point, well the whole entire idea of restricting parking is to make it more annoying to drive and park there, and therefore encourage people to use alternative transport options. You only need to get stuck in a carpark for half an hour trying to find a carpark to learn that perhaps next time you should catch the bus or train there, or go at a more off-peak time. All of which are good things for the surrounding road network, as they reduce the peak-time loads on it. If restricting parking supply didn’t cause frustration and on-site congestion then there wouldn’t be any point to doing it!

In terms of the second point, that’s a complete red-herring as a District Plan rule or resource consent condition could require a certain amount of parking spaces be set aside for staff. Furthermore, isn’t it a good thing to encourage staff to use transport methods other than driving in order to get to work?

In terms of the third point, once again – discouraging those extra road trips to St Lukes at peak times is the whole point of restricting parking supply. I disagree that it would necessarily involve people travelling further to other shopping centres, as one could equally argue that people from afar would travel a long way to St Lukes (and therefore clog up the roads) if its parking was unrestricted. Nobody knows for sure which argument is stronger, so I think it should remain a moot point. What is obvious is that restricting parking would restrict the number of shoppers (unless Westfield actually got serious about trying to attract more people via public transport, walking and cycling rather than paying lip-service to it) and therefore hurt Westfield’s bottom-line. But, at risk of repeating myself, that is the point of restricting parking: to restrict the number of people that can drive to the shopping mall and therefore encourage more sustainable transport options.

There’s actually quite a lot of support for restricting parking supply from various agencies. NZTA’s planning expert has this to say:

ARTA’s planning expert has this to say: In my opinion even a 1:25m2 maximum is pretty tame compared to what is probably really necessary to help ensure St Lukes doesn’t just become a bigger traffic generating monster than it is now, and doesn’t make traffic jams around it even worse than they currently are. I remain enormously sceptical of the traffic modelling outputs that say (with a straight face, unbelievably) that doubling the size of the mall will not have a major impact on traffic, and will only require a few upgrades (like one more lane on Morningside Drive and one more set of traffic lights to access Exeter Road). One does wonder how a full 4000 space carpark will not create a lot more congestion than a full 2000 space carpark on the surrounding road network.

I still remain of the opinion that the development should be ‘capped’ at certain levels of additional floor area until the percentage of people accessing the mall via private vehicle can be reduced. This would ensure that effects on the road network are minimised and to ensure that St Lukes can be a step in the right direction in integrating transport and land-use – rather than a continuation of the extremely horrible “predict and provide” status quo that has led to Auckland being one of the most auto-dependent cities in the world. It would also force Westfield to be a bit creative about encouraging more people to use public transport to get to the mall (like providing them with free tickets with every $20 purchase perhaps?)

However, shifting to maximum parking rates is a step in the right direction, and it’ll be interesting to see what the outcome is on that matter. Hopefully one day Westfield’s thinking on this issue will be dragged into the 21st century out of the dark ages, and they’ll realise that it’s actually in their own best interests to promote public transport, walking and cycling – after all it’s probably damn expensive building carparks!