Mainfreight boss Don Braid says better rail and use of an inland port should restrict the need to reclaim more of the Waitemata Harbour.

Mr Braid, the Herald Business Leader of the Year for 2011, is unconvinced by the case from the board and management of Ports of Auckland on the need to fill in more of the harbour.

Ports of Auckland wants Auckland councillors to “lock in place” a coastal zone allowing it to expand its waterfront operations from 77ha to 95ha by 2055. It has forecast container traffic will increase from about 900,000 to 3.6 million in the long term.

Mr Braid said he was frustrated at how reliant the port was on moving containers by truck and the lack of rail.

“If you are running an efficient port with an efficient transport network feeding it in and out, then you have a very good chance of being able to use the inland port to help with the overflow and restrict the additional land the port might well need.”

That’s quite a good point to consider. We do have a large freight yard at the seaport, a series of inland ports and other rail yards in south Auckland and a mainline railway linking them. If rail utilisation is as poor as Mr Braid says then why not use it to manage peak capacity at the port? Naturally using industrial land in the Auckland suburbs has to be cheaper than making more land by filling in the downtown waterfront.

Now of course the boss of Mainfreight is going to have a vested interest in such activity, they are the owners of one of the rail-equipped inland ports, but what he is talking about seems to make much sense. The article carries on with some interesting figures on container growth:

 The number of containers passing through the port will increase from 900,000 last year to 3.5 million over the long-term, says Ports of Auckland.

Ports infrastructure general manager Ben Chrystall acknowledges there will be more trucks on the road, but a number of factors will limit the impact.

The company plans to increase the number of containers being moved by rail from 11 per cent to 30 per cent and says the percentage of containers reshipped by sea will grow from 25 per cent to 40 per cent. That will result in the percentage of containers being moved by truck halving from 64 per cent to 30 per cent.

A goal to triple the proportion of containers trans-shipped by rail and almost double the percentage going by sea is promising. However while the proportion being trans-shipped by truck may halve to only 30%, this is over the course of a projected four-fold increase in overall container movements. If you run the numbers (going from 64% of 0.9 million containers now to 30% of 3.5 million containers in the long term), they’re actually projecting double the number of containers leaving the port by truck. The port suggests that this impact wont be as bad as it sounds, due to a strategy of using “more efficient” trucks capable of carrying two containers at a time and by operating more trucks in off peak hours. I’m not sure if having a greater number of larger trucks using our roads and motorways across all hours of the day is exactly a low impact proposal.

To finish off the article the Herald takes a strange turn with a perplexing comment from Joel Cayford:

Former Auckland Regional councillor and planner Dr Joel Cayford has calculated that moving 900,000 containers by rail – through residential Orakei, Panmure and Glen Innes – would require 30 trains a day, each a kilometre long, running for three and a half hours, 300 days a year.

I’m really not sure what Dr Cayford’s angle is here, it appears he’s concerned about the effect that having lots of big freight trains on the main trunk line might have on the eastern suburbs. However I do have to question his calculations as they seem to be a little bit of scaremongering, or inaccurate at the least.

If we calculate through his suggestion of carrying 900,000 containers on 30 trains a day over 300 days, with each train being 1,000m long, we can see he has actually allowed 10m of train length for each twenty foot (6.1m) container. By my reckoning about 40% of his freight trains would be carrying thin air. Another point is the fact that 1km long trains wouldn’t be possible, the port freight yard is only about 600m long so that will be the functional limit to how long these trains could be.

I’m also not sure why he has suggested 300 days a year, or about 5.5 days per week. Surely such an operation would have to run 7 days a week like the port itself?

One further thing puzzles me, the “running for three and a half hours” bit. I think the suggestion is that those 30 port trains would all run in the same 3 ½ hour window each day, or in other words one kilometre long freight train every 7 minutes. It’s pretty ludicrous to assume that the port could process a huge train every seven minutes, or that the eastern line could handle the traffic. Am I missing something here?

Anyway, it seems I’m not the only one who is confused:

Ports chief executive Tony Gibson has disputed the calculation, saying the trains would be 500m long, running every 30 minutes for 16 hours a day.

That makes a lot more sense. If you follow these numbers through then shipping 900,000 containers on thirty-two 500m long trains a day, seven days a week means Mr Gibson has allowed 6.5m of train for each 6.1m long container. Plus a 500m long train could be loaded at the port, and one assumes they could manage to send one out every half hour (there are several sidings to hold trains that length). Furthermore two freight trains an hour could often fit in comfortably with the passenger services on the eastern line, however there would probably be issues during peak hour or at pinch points on the network south of Westfield. But with the proposed third track on the eastern and southern lines it would be a breeze.

As an aside, it always puzzles me why they are planning for only a third track for freight and not a fourth. Rail lines always work best in pairs, and a one extra track would provide far less than half the capacity of two extra tracks. It would be the freight equivalent of the western line before duplication. By all means start with just the third track and add the fourth when it is needed, but four tracks on the main trunk corridor leading to the port and Britomart should be the end goal and they should plan for it before any works are undertaken on amplification.

So what is the moral of the story here? Beats me. But it does seem that railing containers out of the port in bulk should be looked into as an alternative to major reclamation.

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?

I would also add that one area that the recent analysis of the Auckland Plan by Studio D4 and Jasmax did not look at was the inner city itself. There is clearly a great deal of opportunity for increased living in the city as the people pictured below already are. New supermarkets are opening in the city now and of course there is still room for further infrastructure to support and improve living, working and playing in the CBD. But of course I am not, and nor is the Plan, arguing that high or even medium density is to everyones’ taste, but that when given the chance there are many you do seek it. And that these include the young and the old, families with kids, groups of flatmates and people living alone, rich and poor, renters and owners, and every kind of race and outlook, pet owners, new agers and right wingers, strugglers, idlers, and toilers- in short, every kind of person.

First up, meet my mother. Her apartment is in a re-purposed commercial building from the early 20th century. Pretty special and very well placed for public transit as you can see [she can no longer drive]. Also ideal for a single elderly person, extremely secure, all on one level, the building has a concierge and is incredibly handy to both necessities and distractions. The only thing that hasn’t worked well is interaction with health agencies who insist on driving, often just from the hospital, and then of course, parking. They then want reimbursement for these costs although the services are free. Naturally they will happily drive to Albany or Cockle Bay and those costs are clearly buried somewhere in the health budget. Doh! Small problem, but indicative of how deeply imbedded auto-dependency is in our institutions.

The Bolletta family on a very grey evening, for them an apartment offers an affordable way for the young family to live centrally.

The Urale family. OK this is a detached house, but a new one on a tiny Freemans Bay site with no off street parking. Designed for the family by Malcolm Walker Architects, and therefore qualifies as both medium density and urban renewal.

Also a new building, but higher density. Fashion and publishing personality Paula Ryan in her waterfront apartment.

Again High-D, but different location, Newton, and different value. Complete with art loving cat.

The loveliest of Auckland’s far-too-few Heritage apartments: Courtville flatmates.

A return to the original use: Living above the business. Gallerist Michael Lett in his modernised flat over his old gallery space on K’Rd. The first occupants of this Victorian or Edwardian building doubtless did the same. But with as much style?

Another residential conversion. Compact apartment in the old George Courts Building ideal for young couple.

Inner city living is also for the young at heart: Peter Bromhead in his crisp apartment that will soon be looking down on the new Parnell Train Station.

Those genuinely concerned about housing affordability need to understand that even sweeping views of the CMJ is no barrier to successful rental or ownership for many if the price is right. Very serious students with a very relaxed cat included.

I could go on but the post would get too long…

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.

The issue of density is looked at in detail in this excellent article by Eric Eidlin, a community planner and Sustainable Communities Partnership Liaison for the Federal Transit Administration in San Francisco. He questions whether average density over the whole metropolitan area is really a particularly useful figure when assessing how ‘dense’ or ‘sprawled’ in reality an urban area is. He presents the conundrum we face when looking at density:

Many people …tend to think of “sprawling” cities as places where people make most of their trips by car, and non-sprawling cities as places where people are more likely to walk, cycle, or take transit. This is why Los Angeles, which has more vehicles per square mile than any other urbanized area, and where transit accounts for only two percent of the region’s overall trips, is considered sprawling, while the New York urbanized area is not. We also know (or think we know) that places where people frequently walk, cycle, or take transit tend to have high population densities, and for this reason we tend to view low density as a proxy for sprawl. But as it turns out, the Los Angeles urbanized area—which in both myth and fact is very car-oriented—is also very dense. In fact, Los Angeles has been the densest urbanized area in the United States since the 1980s, denser even than New York and San Francisco.

These facts present a bit of a mystery. If one were to measure sprawl by measuring a region’s average level of Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT), Los Angeles would certainly qualify as sprawling. But if we measure sprawl by population density, LA would not sprawl at all. In fact, it would be the least sprawling urbanized area in the country. How can Los Angeles be so dense and yet also exhibit so many characteristics associated with sprawl, including high levels of car travel (both in per capita and absolute terms) and low rates of walking, bicycling and transit ridership?

A useful way we can start deconstructing the issue of density is to think of two A4 pieces of paper, each with 100 dots on it. On one piece of paper each dot is equally spaced, while on the other piece of paper the dots cluster together in places and are very widely spaced in other places.

Overall, both pieces of paper have the same average density of dots. But really, their distribution is very different. If each dot was to represent 100 people and the paper represented a city, you would have vastly different cities even though their overall density is the same. This is explained in the article:

Sprawl is a regional attribute, so when observers point out that LA is denser than New York, they are not talking about the cities of Los Angeles and New York. Rather they are talking about the urbanized area, which is essentially the combined area of the cities and their suburbs. The other part of the answer is that density by itself—the simple ratio of population to square mile—is not a very useful way to measure sprawl. What matters is the distribution of density, or how evenly or unevenly an area’s population is spread out across its geographic area. If we look at the density distribution in Los Angeles, we notice that its suburbs are much denser than those of other large U.S. cities, such as New York, San Francisco or Chicago. These high-density suburbs compensate for the comparatively low density of LA’s urban core, and, in so doing, increase the average density of the area as a whole. In other words, Los Angeles has both a relatively high density and a relatively even distribution of density throughout its urbanized area.

So, if we continue to use our “dots on a piece of paper” example, Los Angeles would be much closer to the evenly spaced dots example, whereas New York has a huge concentration of dots in its inner area (Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn and parts of Queens in particular) and then quite widely spaced dots further out (outer Long Island, north into New York state and west into New Jersey).

It’s pretty clear then that ‘average density’ over a whole urban area doesn’t really tell us too much about the characteristics of that urban area. But how might we examine density in a more helpful way? The article, thankfully, provides us with some options:

One approach is to measure the extent to which the population density varies across an urban area. Using a statistical tool called the Gini coefficient, we can get a sense of the degree of variation for different urban areas. The Gini coefficient is based on the Lorenz curve, a cumulative frequency curve that compares the distribution of a specific variable (in this case, population density) with a uniform distribution that represents perfect equality.

Using such a measure to compare Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco gives us the following results:

You can see, in particular, how much more of New York and San Francisco’s population is concentrated in a small proportion of land area than in the case for Los Angeles. This is detailed further:

In Los Angeles, 40 percent of the population live on the most densely settled 10 percent of land. By way of comparison, roughly 66 percent of New York’s population, and 67 percent of San Francisco’s, live on the most densely settled ten percent of the land. By looking even further to the right of the graph, one finds that 25 percent of the population in Los Angeles lives on the densest 5 percent of the land. By contrast, 46 percent of San Francisco’s population, and more than 50 percent of New York’s, live on the densest 5 percent of the land. The overwhelming majority of New York and San Francisco’s residents live on a very small portion of their urbanized areas’ land. But this is much less the case in LA.

A second way of measuring density more helpfully is through what’s called ‘perceived density’. This weights the density of an area by the proportion of the area’s population that lives there, effectively measuring the average number of people around each resident of the city. The method of calculation is helpfully described by the example of the fictional city of Metropolis:

Metropolis has a central core of 100,000 residents who live on ten square miles of land and a suburb with 10,000 residents who live on 100 square miles of land. The standard density of Metropolis is 1,000 people per square mile. However, since 90 percent of the population—those who inhabit the core—live in a very dense environment, this standard density number has little bearing on the way most residents experience their city. By giving the core’s density a weight of 90 percent and the suburb’s density a weight of 10 percent—weights that are equal to the respective proportions of the city’s residents that inhabit each part—we get an adjusted density of 9,100 people per square mile, a number that more closely approximates the density at which the average resident of Metropolis lives.

Comparing the different US cities under this ‘perceived density’ measure gives the following results: Under this measurement system we see New York really standing out from any other city in the USA. Los Angeles is still fairly high up there though,  in third place. And our comparison with public transport and walking – while better than average density – still doesn’t exactly align up perfectly.

A third measurement system is also included in the table above, the density gradient index. This is described below:

Bradford pushed the concept of perceived density a step further by developing the density gradient index. The density gradient index, which is the ratio of perceived density to standard density, is an indication of the unevenness of population distribution—or, to use Bradford’s terminology—a measure of “clumpiness.” Table 2 also shows the density gradient index for each urbanized area.

Overall, when comparing the different measurements of density with public transport use, we get the following:

Bradford did a regression analysis to analyze the relationship between perceived density and commute mode (the final two columns of Table 2). He found virtually no association between standard density and the percentage of workers commuting by public transit or walking, but a strong association between perceived density and commuting by transit or foot, and an even stronger association between the density gradient index and the percentage of workers commuting by transit or by foot.

What does that mean for Auckland? Well, until we can analyse our population distribution, perceived density and density gradient index, who knows whether we’re really at the same urban density as Sydney – like the average density statistics will tell us. The best graph I have seen so far is included below, and suggests that perhaps Auckland’s density is a little bit “Los Angeles” compared to Sydney’s “New York”. It would seem that if we’re thinking about land-use policies to boost public transport, walking (and presumably cycling) use, then it may be useful for the “lumpiness” of Auckland’s population density to increase – obviously particularly around our rapid transit network. Fortunately, that’s what most of our plans seem to propose.

Another key ‘benefit’ of allowing more urban sprawl, so say its proponents, is an improvement to housing affordability. There’s some logic in this at a basic level: if you constrain the supply of land then its price goes up is basic economics. But when it comes to reality, things can be a bit more complicated than that.

Yesterday’s NZ Herald ran a story about housing affordability, reporting on the annual Demographia study into this issue:

The eighth annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, co-authored by Wendell Cox in the US and Hugh Pavletich here, showed New Zealand had no affordable markets, and Auckland was the worst.

It noted that it has been only 20 years since most markets in New Zealand were within reach according to the study’s criteria, with average prices equivalent to less than three times the average annual income.

Housing should not cost more than three times annual income to be ranked affordable, Demographia says. Housing costing more than five times the annual average income was considered severely unaffordable.

The average Auckland house is valued at 6.4 times the city’s annual average household income, only marginally less affordable than the greater London area.

As someone with vague hopes of owning a house one day, I’m well aware of how unaffordable it is. Also, I’m well aware of how housing affordability has dramatically reduced over the past decade as prices have skyrocketed.

The report’s authors, typically, blame land-use policies that restrict land supply (like Auckland’s urban limit):

In the report, Mr Pavletich blamed restrictive land policies in Auckland for pushing up values compared with incomes, rather than other factors such as low wages.

“The economic evidence indicates that this trend is strongly related to the implementation of more restrictive land use regulations, especially measures that create scarcity in land for housing thus driving up prices,” the study said…

…Dr Bob Bruegmann, professor emeritus of art history, architecture and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago, introduced the study saying the rise of smart growth policies to tighten land supply had a big effect particularly in Australia “where the recent rise in prices has been particularly sharp and, given the vast extent of the country, the urban containment policies are particularly contentious”.

Bob Dey’s Property Report had an excellent analysis of the study – also published yesterday:

The argument might seem simple: Provide more land on the fringe, and enough of it to generate competition, and prices will come down. Against that, a counter-argument is that extending suburbia further from the centre increases transport costs, which ought to be taken into account in the overall housing cost picture.

The more complicated question is: How, without a calamity, do you put land prices into reverse without upsetting the existing market? Would buyers accept the absence of capital gain? Lenders have been hit by defaults during the global financial crisis, but would they accept long-term housing deflation? What happens to the construction industry if builders see reduced capital gain at the end of their project?

This is a very interesting question to consider, and one that has been in my mind as I have a think about what might happen to property prices around Auckland if – for argument’s sake – we were to just remove the urban limit and allow pretty much unfettered sprawl. I suppose there are two scenarios:

First, it could make the big difference that Demographia think it would and significantly lower housing prices throughout the whole urban area. While this could be great for me, if housing in inner parts of the city become significantly cheaper, I tend to think that the broader economic consequences of plummeting housing prices (particularly in a country like New Zealand where people have so much of their wealth tied up in housing) could be quite severe. In the long-run I guess it would be good for housing to become more affordable, although it’s interesting to note that other cities with unaffordable housing (Sydney and Vancouver) tend to be the cities vying with Auckland at the very top of various league-tables of the world’s most liveable and desirable cities. In the short run, a huge drop in housing prices seems likely to have a pretty major, and potentially disastrous, economic impact.

The second scenario is that allowing more urban sprawl wouldn’t make much difference to housing prices, except on the extreme urban periphery. There’s some logic to this scenario too: prices in a particular area are determined by the level of demand and supply in that particular area. Adding more houses near Drury doesn’t change the supply of housing in Ponsonby and seems unlikely to change the demand for housing in Ponsonby – so why would it have a huge impact on Ponsonby house prices? Arguably, all we would be doing by allowing more urban sprawl is shifting the poor out to the urban periphery – where they replace housing costs with transport costs, and we all need to subsidise them by building new roads, pipes, schools and so forth.

This second scenario is looked at in another recent article on Bob Dey’s excellent website, where he quotes from Patrick Fontein’s (yes, the primary author of the Studio D4/Jasmax report) submission on the Auckland Plan:

Mr Fontein said the urban limit had been so stringently applied that buying & trading land within it was an investment class in itself, which had led to inflated section prices: “Auckland Council needs to ensure there is sufficient land zoned for urban intensification, as well as greenfield development.

“Releasing more land will somewhat improve the affordability of new house prices, but as new houses on the external Auckland suburbs are still priced in excess of $550-600,000, releasing more land will have almost no impact on housing affordability in the $200-$450,000 price range. Careful consideration needs to be made of the total infrastructure costs of new greenfield locations, as the cost of infrastructure in certain locations will add substantially to developed land cost.

“The main effect on existing Auckland property prices of releasing substantial new greenfield development sites will be to reduce demand for low-amenity-value existing suburbs, such that these suburbs over time will become less attractive, will not be able to attract re-investment capital and these low-amenity suburbs will gradually decay. This will have the effect of making these low-amenity suburbs even less desirable, which then makes these suburbs more affordable!! (eg, some people upgrade from an older low-amenity suburb to a new house in a new subdivision, and there are relatively not enough buyers attracted into the older low-amenity suburb).”

Obviously this is just the opinion of one person – albeit someone who has been pretty close to the industry and has looked at the matter in quite a bit of detail. His key link between housing affordability and urban sprawl relates to the reduced focus there will be on reinvesting in poorer suburbs, leading to their further decay – with the corollary being that through such a process they will become more affordable. I may have somewhat misinterpreted what he means, but it sounds something like what I call the ‘Detroit doughnut effect’ where urban sprawl leads to decay and near abandonment of many parts of the existing city. Not exactly what I think we want already troublesome parts of Auckland to descend to.

I still think there’s an argument that the incremental, well planned, release of additional land for development has some effect on housing prices – more to ensure they don’t go higher rather than bringing them significantly lower. But that needs to be matched with providing more housing units in the parts of Auckland where people actually really want to live – through clever and well designed (and located) intensification. Obviously there are parts of Auckland where intensification isn’t appropriate, or where only a certain level of intensification is appropriate. Working that out is complicated, ensuring good design is complicated, aligning our transport infrastructure investment with where we are focusing intensification is complicated. Devising schemes to create a supply of affordable housing where people want to live is complicated. But that’s OK: if it was easy it would be boring.

Of particular interest in the chapter on Detroit is an explanation of how key a role parking plays in the structure and shape of edge cities. In fact, parking seems to be the driver for pretty much everything about how the Edge City is shaped and how it functions – interesting to note when you consider how planning generally ignores parking to a large degree (aside from making stupid rules that are backed by little logic).

The developer’s rule of thumb is that in Edge City, there must be one parking space per every worker. Because one employee uses about 250 square feet of work space and each car requires four hundred square feet to be parked, there has to be about one and a half times as much space to park the cars as there is to nurture the drivers.

If the developer does not provide that much parking, he will have grave difficulty getting bank financing. His project will not be judged commercially viable. In fact, in many Edge City jurisdictions, the developer is required by law to provide that much parking. The lawmakers don’t’ want people to park on streets and lawns, either. Their experience, too, has led them to believe that one worker will equal one parking space.

Essentially, with the ‘everyone will drive to work and therefore everyone needs a parking space’ motto that defines the Edge City (and Auckland’s parking policies) we find ourselves in the rather bizarre situation of providing 50% more space to the storage of vehicles than we provide for the actual undertaking of economic activity which occurs within these places. The ratios seem to hold true in recently developed commercial centres in Auckland, like Manukau, Botany Town Centre and Albany. In these places, parking is the dominant urban feature – presumably because both our planning rules have required it to be and there is the feeling that each worker must be provided with a parking space (for retail areas, I’m guessing this is translated into each shopper).

Given the assumptions above, if we provide parking through multi-level structures or underground, we can increase our densities – but this comes at a pretty high cost. Auckland Transport is effectively trying out this approach in Manukau, by building parking structures to encourage the freeing up of surface parking for development – at an enormous cost.

The book continues:

…the cheapest option a developer has is this. Build a one-story building. Let it cover 40 percent of the ground. That leaves 60 percent of the land to be covered with a simple parking lot. No grass or trees or sidewalks. But the right ratios at the least expense. Which explains why an awful lot of cheap development looks the way it does.

This kind of construction guarantees that all buildings and people will be about as far away from each other as physically possible, surrounded by fields of asphalt. This in turn guarantees that the area so built will be an aesthetic and functional sump.

Places like Westgate, Smales Farm, Apollo Drive (near Constellation Drive) as well as the usual suspects listed above come to mind when you read out this description. The developers have simply followed the parking requirements and created what makes most financial sense. All other planning rules have become effectively irrelevant and you end up with this:

But not every Edge City follows this simple formula – cheapest isn’t always best:

That level of development is only the cheapest kind, not necessarily the most profitable. Buildings laid out like that do not command much rent. If the land in that Edge City is expensive, and the developer puts a small, cheap building on it, he will go bankrupt.

So he may decide he needs to bring in more revenue. To do that, he would want to build more office space on the land. This would require him to make his building wider or taller or both.

This sounds easy, but it present a serious problem. More building kicks all his cost calculations into a new orbit. He needs more parking to match the increased amount of office space. But he has run out of land. Therefore, he must build a multilevel parking “structure”. That will cost more than twice as much per parking space as his initial calculations. That levitates his cost, which requires that he build his building larger still – in order to break even. This, in turn, requires more parking, and so the spiral goes.

What all of this means is that to get a floor-area-ratio (FAR) of more than 0.4 (which, in urban areas and particularly town centres, is very low) life gets really tricky for developers if they are reliant on providing every single person who travels to the area with a dedicated parking space. Look at most of the new retail and office areas of Auckland and you can see the effect of this: more space dedicated to storing cars than to actual buildings. Relatively low employment densities. Poor agglomeration economics. And so forth.

The book doesn’t make this conclusion, but I think that the numbers above highlight the importance of improving public transport – so we can grow our employment numbers and density without ending up in the ugly spiral of parking costs and building size. If we can get more and more people to town centres via ways other than driving, perhaps the biggest benefit we create is through the freeing up of land for more productive uses than car storage. Of course our parking rules need to change as well, because even now we generally force an over-provision of parking (partly by requiring each individual use to provide for its own parking requirement and not allowing the sharing of facilities).

I wonder if the economic benefit of reduced land requirement for parking is measured in the cost-benefit analysis of public transport projects? Similarly, one wonders whether the economic disbenefit of roading projects which encourage more people to drive to an area and park in it, are captured. With parking at the crossroads between land-use and transport policies, it seems to be utterly critical in shaping our urban form.

This report finds the intensification projections in the current draft Auckland Plan unworkable without substantial amendments.

• Without major re-zoning SD4 believes only 45-60,000 extra dwellings can be provided in intensified form in the areas highlighted in the current draft Auckland Plan (this compares with the Plans projections of 300,000).

• With major rezoning and sticking to town centres (as current draft Auckland Plan), an additional 90-120,000 extra dwellings could be provided (compared to projections of 300,000).

• Substantial upzoning in almost the entire isthmus of Auckland, in coastal areas and areas with good outlook is needed, to achieve anything close to the draft Auckland Plan’s additional intensification dwelling targets (300,000).

• If there was major rezoning in most urban areas of Auckland (requiring HUGE political resilience), this could provide an additional 200-270,000 dwellings. Images are provided in sample neighbourhoods by Jasmax Architecture, which highlight the level of intensification that would be achieved with an extra 200-270,000 intensified dwellings.

Interestingly among the authors Key Findings are the view that our town centres are ‘already substantially improved’ and that ‘there’s no sales demand to live on transport corridors’. The former is a very strange position, virtually every town centre I can think of has plenty of scope for improvement and intensification, except a few like the Remuera shops perhaps. And some say like Takapuna, New Lynn, and Mt Albert offer a great deal of opportunity for going up- as in fact the report then goes on to conclude. But then maybe the authors consider oceans of carparking an intense use, and current building height an ideal? The second claim is interesting as at no point did I find any view on how the provision of transport amenity may influence property value or utility. It makes no attempt to tease out an ‘accessibility quotient’ in any area’s particular value. It seems to me that this report is blind to the role of transport in land use. So there is no thought given to how investment by AC, AT, and NZTA, might stimulate demand on corridors, or the isolation of new distant suburbs and increased traffic pressure may negatively effect land values. But then the authors seem to have a firm idea that the council has no role outside of helping private developers: ‘Direct Council intervention to develop in areas not market attractive is not needed’. Like all economic analysis there are a lot of assumptions dressed up as conclusions.

The body of the report looks at 14 different neighbourhoods around Auckland where the Auckland Plan proposes some level of intensification, then undertakes a ‘fine-grained analysis’ to test the level of intensification that’s been assumed against what the authors consider to be realistic. Here are the results: In some areas (Glen Eden, Oratia, Manurewa and Parnell) the report suggests that the Draft Plan has over-estimated the number of dwellings possible, while in other areas like Birkenhead/Highbury, Mt Albert and Te Atatu Peninsula the report suggests that the Draft Plan has under-estimated the extent of intensification possible. Overall, the difference is around 6,000 dwellings across the 14 study areas taken as a ‘representative sample’.

Some of the critiques make good sense, like that of Farm Cove as an intensification area – which makes little sense as the area has been developed quite recently and doesn’t have the potential for much to be added unless you were to wholesale demolish the area (which would be silly as the houses are relatively new): Other critiques make less obvious sense, such as that of Onehunga – which seems to have more potential for intensification in the short-term than the fine-grain analysis gives it credit for:

A lot of the focus is on a few of the diagrams at the back of the report, which give some indication of what the areas in question may look like post-redevelopment, if redevelopment was to happen to the extent envisioned by the study. The Herald article picks up on Birkenhead (presumably because that’s where community opposition may be strongest), but ignores New Lynn and Tamaki for some strange reason: Not exactly ‘forcibly cramming everyone into Victorian slum conditions’ like Councillor Quax’s words would have you believe? Also note that the intensification in both of these examples are focussed around the rail corridors. No awareness of how the improvements in this network can influence property development viability. Especially if supported by other incentives. In this sense the report imagines a more intense Auckland of structures but not of movement: clearly the two will have to grow together.

Here are the authors’ recommended answers, to help implement intensification to a greater degree than has been done before, something critical to achieving the goals of the Auckland Plan:

10. TOOLS AND LEVERS

10.1 Community Consultation

• Council have to take responsibility for community consultation and providing the planning regime that encourages quality development.

• Council needs to provide a very substantial communication programme promoting the community benefits of high quality urban intensification.

• Council will need to deal with the legal / RMA issues of the substantial upzoning

• If the developer is providing what the Council desires, minimise developer community consultation requirements. Fast track approval for quality projects

10.2 Reducing Council barriers inhibiting good quality intensification

• Update planning rules that provide rule “bonuses” for good urban design. It’s so simple: incentivise good urban design: all developers will provide to the level

• A fast track development consent processing scheme, for high quality projects

• Provide Council Case Managers for good quality projects

• Say NO to bad design: developers will very quickly understand and adjust!

10.3 Providing incentives to encourage developers to develop in target areas

• Reducing or eliminating development levies and rates in target growth areas for the first “x” properties. This was very successful in the CBD in the 1990’s

• “Council Project teams” that encourage and nurture early stage development in target areas. Eg Wynyard Quarter. Need development savvy members in team

• Develop community facilities, parks and reserves etc ahead of development.

• Encourage development: Council not to intervene where the market will not go!

Reduction or elimination of parking minimums would be top of my list, which would both lower building costs and increase the opportunity for better building design. Not to mention contribute to reducing the auto-strangulation of the city. But also there are opportunities for flexibility  in regulation, say additional height being allowed in exchange for public amenity- yes ‘incentivise good urban design’. ‘Develop community amenities’…Yes. Like providing world class public transit. I am surprised that the study doesn’t talk about that.

I am very enthusiastic about the demand for good design, but no mechanism is suggested for achieving this, outside of ‘incentivising it’. There are models for design quality control in action overseas that should be looked at. In fact in general I think there are quite a few models for how Auckland could grow in the bigger cities across the Tasman, but that will have to be the subject of another post.

• When Oil Peaked by Kenneth S. Deffeyes
• Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson
• Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil by Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl
• Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives by Jarrett Walker
• Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities by Michael Southworth and Eran Ben-Joseph
• Edge City: Life on the New Frontier by Joel Garreau

Typically, I’ve started somewhat madly by reading through the first few pages of each book. But generally it seems like I’ll be digging through Human Transit and Edge City first. While I’ve only read the first couple of chapters of Edge City, it has thrown up some interesting thoughts – particularly as it’s written from a perspective that’s fairly different to mine and, given it was written in 1992, gives us some perspective in the way that things might have changed over the past 20 years.

An Amazon review give us a reasonably good overview of what the book is about:

This book explores what has become of the suburbs. Garreau’s argues that certain suburbs have developed into a new kind of city, a city without a traditional downtown. He believes that such “edge cities”, are the cities of the future. Garreau’s criteria for an “edge city” are:
–5 million square feet or more of office space
–600,000 square feet or more of retail space
–more jobs than bedrooms
–perceived as one place by the population
–developed within the last 30 years

With these criteria in mind, Garreau sets off across the US to study our major edge cities. He explores edge cities in New Jersey, Texas, Southern California, and the areas around Boston, Detroit, Atlanta, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. In each area that he visits, Garreau takes up an edge city theme. For instance, in Detroit he discusses cars and the role they play in edge cities, and in Atlanta he discusses questions of race and class in edge cities.

At the end of the book is a list of US cities that qualified for edge city status in 1992. This is followed by a glossary of words used by edge city developers and a set of “laws” about how edge cities work. These “laws” are statistical observations about human behavior relevant for city planning, such as “the furthest distance an American will willing walk before getting into a car is 600 feet.” Finally, there is an annotated list of suggested readings, endnotes, and an index.

Garreau is neither for nor against edge cities. He tries instead to understand how they work, and why they have popped up so rapidly across the country. He strives to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, coming across more like Jane Jacobs than Lewis Mumford, who argued so stridently for regional planning. Garreau points out that edge cities are being built by developers who are in the business to make money. In other words, they build what they believe will sell, and given the fact that the developments sell so well, a lot of Americans are making the conscious decision that they want to live in edge city developments. Through interviews with developers, employers, and residents, Garreau explores the factors that make edge cities so popular.

He writes “Maybe it worked like this. The force that drove the creation of Edge City was our search deep inside ourselves for a new balance of individualism and freedom. We wanted to build a world in which we could live in one place, work in another, and play in a third, in unlimited combination, as a way to nurture our human potential. This demanded transportation that would allow us to go where we wanted, when we wanted. That enshrined the individual transportation system, the automobile, in our lives. And that led us to build our market meeting places in the fashion of today’s malls.” Cars are key elements in this phenomenon. They make it possible for people to separate their workplaces from the residences, and they define the distances which are considered commutable. They make it possible for people to live spread out enough from each other that everyone can have a front yard, yet at the same time, for the development to be dense enough to support large employers and sophisticated shopping options.

While it’s correct to say that the book doesn’t come out strongly for or against the Edge City, the strong message that I’ve got from it so far is how inevitable the process of further decentralisation, auto-dependency and further creation of more Edge Cities seems to be. Places like Tysons Corner near Washington DC: Garreau describes, rather than promotes, the ‘fact’ that these type of places appear to clearly be the future of urban environments throughout the USA (and presumably, eventually the rest of the ‘new’ developed world). But there’s a sense of inevitability to the whole process, a surety that the future is more of the image above:

Americans are creating the biggest change in a hundred years in how we build cities. Every single American city that is growing, is growing in the fashion of Los Angeles, with multiple urban cores.

These new hearths of our civilisation – in which the majority of metropolitan Americans now work and around which we live – look not at all like our old downtowns. Buildings rarely rise shoulder to shoulder, as in Chicago’s Loop. Instead, their broad, low outlines dot the landscape like mushrooms, separated by greensward and parking lots. Their office towers, frequently guarded by trees, gaze at one another from respectful distances through bands of glass that mirror in the sun in blue or silver or gold or green, like antique drawings of “the city of the future”…

…Our new city centres are tied together no by locomotives and subways, but by jetways, freeways, and rooftop satellite dishes thirty feet across. Their characteristic monument is not a horse-mounted hero, but the atria reaching for the sun and shielding trees perpetually in leaf at the cores of corporate headquarters, fitness centres and shopping plazas. These new urban areas are marked not by the penthouses of the old urban rich or the tenements of the old urban poor. Instead, their landmark structure is the celebrated single-family detached dwelling, the suburban home with grass all around the made America the best-housed civilisation the world has ever known.

You kind of see where the book is heading (although not in an uninteresting way). The supposed inevitability of further decentralisation, based around a car-centric transport system, also comes through in many of the more recent critiques of projects such as the City Rail Link, or in critiques of the metropolitan urban limit. Planning is thought to be working against natural processes of decentralisation, investment in public transport projects (other than a thoughtless “but buses can use roads too” slogan) is seen to be ignorant of changes to urban form, ignorant of a decreased role for the city centre in the future, and therefore just a waste of money.

The book’s observations are backed up by some quite interesting facts (remember, from 1992):

 Already, two-thirds of all American office facilities are in Edge Cities, and 80 percent of them have materialised in only the last two decades. By the mid-1980s, there was far more office space in Edge Cities around America’s largest metropolis, New York, than there was at its heart – midtown Manhattan. Even before Wall Street faltered in the late 1980s there was less office space there, in New York’s downtown, that there was in the Edge Cities of New Jersey alone.

While Edge Cities continued to grow and multiply after 1992, over the past decade I think things have changed and seem likely to change further in the future. If we look at Auckland, the city centre is probably a more vibrant, thriving and dominant place than it has been for 20 years. If we look internationally, we see some trends of ‘recentralisation’ , particularly of residents but perhaps also of businesses too. This recent New York Times article was very interesting, when analysing the issue:

By now, nearly five years after the housing crash, most Americans understand that a mortgage meltdown was the catalyst for the Great Recession, facilitated by underregulation of finance and reckless risk-taking. Less understood is the divergence between center cities and inner-ring suburbs on one hand, and the suburban fringe on the other.

It was predominantly the collapse of the car-dependent suburban fringe that caused the mortgage collapse.

In the late 1990s, high-end outer suburbs contained most of the expensive housing in the United States, as measured by price per square foot, according to data I analyzed from the Zillow real estate database. Today, the most expensive housing is in the high-density, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods of the center city and inner suburbs. Some of the most expensive neighborhoods in their metropolitan areas are Capitol Hill in Seattle; Virginia Highland in Atlanta; German Village in Columbus, Ohio, and Logan Circle in Washington. Considered slums as recently as 30 years ago, they have been transformed by gentrification.

Simply put, there has been a profound structural shift — a reversal of what took place in the 1950s, when drivable suburbs boomed and flourished as center cities emptied and withered.

The shift is durable and lasting because of a major demographic event: the convergence of the two largest generations in American history, the baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) and the millennials (born between 1979 and 1996), which today represent half of the total population.

Many boomers are now empty nesters and approaching retirement. Generally this means that they will downsize their housing in the near future. Boomers want to live in a walkable urban downtown, a suburban town center or a small town, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Realtors.

This is quite a different vision for the future, and quite a different analysis of the current situation, to what we saw in 1992′s “Edge City”. Interestingly, in this more recent look at centralisation versus decentralisation, we see the “what does the market want” being flipped on its head:

Over all, only 12 percent of future homebuyers want the drivable suburban-fringe houses that are in such oversupply, according to the Realtors survey. This lack of demand all but guarantees continued price declines. Boomers selling their fringe housing will only add to the glut. Nothing the federal government can do will reverse this.

Many drivable-fringe house prices are now below replacement value, meaning the land under the house has no value and the sticks and bricks are worth less than they would cost to replace. This means there is no financial incentive to maintain the house; the next dollar invested will not be recouped upon resale. Many of these houses will be converted to rentals, which are rarely as well maintained as owner-occupied housing. Add the fact that the houses were built with cheap materials and methods to begin with, and you see why many fringe suburbs are turning into slums, with abandoned housing and rising crime.

The good news is that there is great pent-up demand for walkable, centrally located neighborhoods in cities like Portland, Denver, Philadelphia and Chattanooga, Tenn. The transformation of suburbia can be seen in places like Arlington County, Va., Bellevue, Wash., and Pasadena, Calif., where strip malls have been bulldozed and replaced by higher-density mixed-use developments with good transit connections.

It’s too early to tell for sure, but certainly my thinking is that while Edge City was very much correct in predicting what would happen for the rest of the 1990s, it wasn’t correct in thinking that dramatic decentralisation was going to continue forever. What will perhaps tell us most clearly which ways things are headed, in terms of the ‘decentralisation versus recentralisation debate’, is where new office space is constructed over the next 10-20 years. Auckland has seen a decentralisation of its office space to places like Albany, Smales Farm, Highbrook and Ellerslie over the past 20 years, but this trend seems to have ceased in more recent times.

Only time will tell us for sure whether ‘Edge City’ is the future, or whether it was a late 20th century aberration. Looking at the kind of urban environments it creates, I’m kind of hoping for the latter.

This is a new kind of post for readers interested in a quick roundup of transit related news and analysis from around the world. The plan is to aggregate a bunch of links that relate either directly or tangentially to Auckland transit issues. This will include examples of similar transport debates and solutions from elsewhere, but also related issues such as urbanism, energy supply, and economic challenges. Clearly Auckland is facing situations common to other cities in the world, and there is a rich and growing resource online that we can learn a great deal from. It is also intended as an opportunity for readers to comment on any issue raised in the links and especially to share their own resources.

In fact it never ceases to amaze me how similar the debates seem all over the world to our own. And just as we followed other western nations in investing heavily in automobilie and suburban infrastructure over the last 60 or so years this was largely because we faced similar problems and opportunities as those places. But times change and it seems pretty clear that we are now facing new pressures that are best approached by a different mix of answers, but these are still similar to those faced elsewhere. Here, for example, is an incredibly condensed summary of the big picture by Portland based economist and oil analyst Gregor MacDonald at Gregor.us

For a view of how the most dynamic and important developing nation is responding to urban growth, congestion, and quality of place issues here is a summary of China’s commitment to urban rail transit. Important to note that many of the cities mentioned are around the 1 million people mark, like Auckland. And that the writer is emphasizing that the metro solution allows suburbs to retain their identities and economic viability by offering connectivity without destruction. An important reminder that expansion of AK’s RTN network is not all about the CBD, but also about making this suburban city connect and thrive.

For an example of why open space isn’t always the best answer in cities especially to severance issues have a look at this view of Boston’s ‘Big Dig’ via Old Urbanist. Yes the future of the city is greener but better joined up built forms are also often the answer to broken cities.

Long but good. How we can learn from LA, and just stop building expensive and place defiling parking infrastructure. And great data that shows less really is more when it comes to parking, for the sake of our city’s economic health and viability, no matter how counter-intuitive that feels to auto-man.

Two-waying, or how to unlock the economic performance of traffic sewers.

This is just cool, urban explorers.

Learning from the master, or perhaps mistress. Why Jane Jacobs is still relevant.

Why we will never catch up with Australia, or wherever, by paying each other less. Look for NZ on this chart.

One for the urban cyclists out there. Cool rack.

No roundup would be complete without a link to The Oil Drum, too much to choose from, but this short interview shows the mainstreaming of the Peak Oil observation. Feels like old news to me but  this debate and its arguably even more worrying sister Climate Change is curiously absent in NZ. This site is great too, Californian physicist Tom Murphy Does The Math so that we don’t have to.

Quality of place versus speed of vehicle movement: The same part of LA 1894 and 2011. From Atlantic Cities. A site always worth keeping an eye on.

Note the train in the upper left of the first image, I wonder what happened to that line, or is it still there? Happy reading.