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By Patrick Reynolds, on January 30th, 2012 A plainly daft piece on the proposed Auckland Plan by Bill Ralston recently appeared in the NZ Listener. In it he claims, completely without any reason, that the plan sets out to demolish where he lives, as well as every other desirable part of Auckland in the name of instensification. This is simply untrue. It is true that the Plan hopes to encourage Auckland to continue to become a more intensive city, but not by demolishing the very best bits, or even very much of it at all. In fact it is decidedly half-hearted about containing the spread outwards, even proposing 140,000 new detached houses be built in the next 30 years under one scenario. All on what is currently productive and attractive distant countryside, and all to be served by endlessly and expensively rolling out new services: From the current 385,000 detached houses to 526,000! Did you actually read the thing, Bill?
In any case, intensification is clearly a matter of degree and the areas proposed for the kind of high density high rise growth that so alarms dear old Bill [but of course not everyone], is all carefully allotted to currently empty or underused commercial ‘brownfields’ sites on transport corridors in areas like the CBD, Glen Innes, and New Lynn. Not Bill’s neck of the woods. Other areas are intended to be encouraged to move from low to medium density. Bill’s place isn’t on this list either.
Ironically, in light of this reaction, the type of intensification that would go a long way to both accommodating Auckland’s growth and greatly improving our quality of life is about trying to help more of Auckland more closely resemble Bill’s very own suburb. His suburb is, in fact, a role model for how much of Auckland ideally could be. But that isn’t by repeating the thing that Bill thinks his ‘burb is all about, the appearance of the buildings, but rather about how they are organised. Not architectural design, but urban design. Really, how?
Freemans Bay is, along with St Mary’s Bay, Herne Bay, Parnell, Devonport, Northcote, Ponsonby, Grey Lynn, and Mt Eden, a highly sought after and therefore expensive bit of old Auckland. So it is worth asking what is so good about it?
Well most of the buildings are old. That’s it isn’t it? Most people love old houses, with their mature trees, and in Auckland that means Victorian and Edwardian houses, usually detached wooden dwellings. Unlike Sydney, Auckland isn’t old enough to have Georgian buildings and also unlike Sydney or Dunedin there wasn’t the resource of stone or even much brick to compete with the pillage of the native forests that our forebears felt so entitled to use so completely. Furthermore, in a reversal of the trend of the second half of the last century we have recently been rediscovering the advantages of these close-in old suburbs. So instead of looking on these areas as slums and bulldozing them wholesale in order to build motorways as we did from the 1960s we have recently been turning houses like this one: More and more into houses like this one:
But that isn’t the whole story is it? Properly understood three factors make Freemans Bay such a great place to live, and only one of them is the irreplaceable age of the structures. And this is important because while we can’t time-travel and build real Victorian houses again we can take the best urban design features from these areas to improve what we build next, and even fix other parts of the existing city with these ideas too. The three essential features, in no particular order, that make Freemans Bay so desirable are:
1. Physical Heritage
2. Proximity to the centre
3. Population density
All the things that you may like about Freemans Bay flow from these; for example, great cafés and shops? They are a function of the quantity of people around and the desirability of the place, which in turn is because of the density of the housing and the proximity to the centre of town. Retail businesses need enough customers, and specialised ones need an even higher number going by because their appeal is, by definition, narrow.
But hang on, waddaymean population density?, this is just a suburb with detached houses and some shops isn’t it?, same as Dannemora or Botany? Well it isn’t high density but it is medium density and is considerably higher than most more recent suburbs. And here’s how: As this post by Admin shows, when looked at in detail you can see that the narrow streets and painted shiplap conceal a clever spatial order that maximises private space yet retains public charm. It is in fact this spatial order, and its resultant density of population that sustains the local businesses and other amenities all at close proximity.
Of course old buildings add texture and charm, but it is important urban design features and not architectural ones that make the real structural differences. Let’s look at Bill’s favourite café, mentioned in his article: Agnes Curran. Yes it is in a building pleasingly made of plastered brick and the door to the rooms above are surrounded by Georgian style decoration, lovely. But let’s look at everything else that makes this a really successful streetscape and business. The café occupies a tiny space about the size of two car parks, it is right up to the generous footpath, a footpath separated from the traffic by mature Plane trees [with a new one recently added on the right], the trees also accommodate a limited number of on-street car parks. A small apartment building to the left of the shot is smack up the boundary with the cafe and the footpath, and there are other levels of accommodation above retail spaces on the main road. Thus there is an extremely tight integration of the residential and commercial functions of this neighbourhood; so everyone walks, no need to drive when your destination is already right there. Here it is from above: The cafe is in the alley between the grey and reddish rooves at bottom left. Occupying the space that would have to be given over to off-street parking were this a new building- by current council regulation. Note that the houses are closer than is currently allowed in new subdivisions, and that their garden space is all together in one piece at the rear of each house. Small, but all usable, and private. And Ponsonby Rd is, by Auckland standards, relatively well served by public transport, especially in the form of the frequent new Inner Link bus service, connecting this place to the CBD, the universities, the hospital, everything really. It is easy to see that this is quite an intensely built place, but also pleasantly leafy, and is in fact at the intersection of two pretty busy roads; Ponsonby and Franklin. How can it be of such density but still be so pleasant, it must be the design of the buildings? Well that is of course important, but how much they appeal to you is really a matter of personal taste, no, it has much more to do with what is not visible in this picture. To show what that is lets have a look at a cafe in a more recent part of town: Dunkin Donuts at Botany Downs courtesy of Google [sorry but I'm not going there]. And from above: Well in fact there’s a whole lot of food outlets on in this image, a KFC, a seafood place, as well as Dunkin Donuts. And yup they are all pretty nasty new buildings, built to a price and without any conviction that they mean to stay. But also note there are no houses or apartments of any kind here and no one walking. But there is the one amenity that is almost entirely absent from the earlier scene. This is a place rich in carparking. Viewed from above or from street level it is clear that this is a place entirely made for the movement and storage of cars. Yes you can argue that that what most distinguishes the natures of these two places is the age and design of the structures, but it is also clear that the spatial organisation is at least as important a difference. Put simply the first is designed for people and the second for cars. The first has a higher density of humans and the second of machines. The first, of course, commands much higher values and is where Bill wants to live. And the first, while more expensive to buy into, is actually cheaper to live in, because the intensity of the place means the costs of movement are much lower. It is a place that you can easily function without a car at all for example [As local resident, Bill, says in this article].
But of course the people living Freemans Bay do still use cars, but unlike those that live in the these new areas, they don’t have to use them just to get to their local café or other common local amenity, like schools, workplaces, or bars. They walk more and they use public transport more. Why? not because they are cleverer than the people in Dannemora but because their area was designed for those choices to be the most obvious, most productive, and most enjoyable things to do. And we can spread more of this simple genius to other parts of our city, even Botany, if can just reverse the insane auto-centric planning priorities of the last fifty years. This means putting people at the centre of the spatial organisation of places. It means repealing the rules that insist that the car must be catered for first. And it means for many of our primarily residential areas mixing the living and working and playing in the kind of intense proximity that Bill enjoys in Freemans Bay.
And it also means that we must provide systems of movement that do not devalue the very places they are meant to serve. Which of course means fast, frequent, smart, public transit. Something lacking in the newer suburb.
Furthermore, if we can get those planning settings right and are able to encourage the kind of spatial organisation that Bill enjoys so unconsciously in Freemans Bay, it is highly likely that we will see the design of the individual buildings in these places improve significantly, because increased intensity of humans also means increased intensity of economic activity. And, of course, because it involves unlocking the land and the resources currently tied up so unproductively in providing so much amenity for vehicles.
We can have Freemans Bay’s qualities of urban design in other places with contemporary design and technologies, after all Freemans Bay isn’t all old buildings and is all the better for it. It isn’t a museum. Here are two quite different and award winning recent detached houses there, The first by Marsh Cook: And the second by Malcolm Walker: Freemans Bay also has contemporary buildings by Mitchell + Stout, Stevens Lawson, Fearon Hay, Andrew Patterson, and more. Along with council pensioner flats, town houses, and apartment buildings.
And remember, while The Plan doesn’t envisage the core of Freemans Bay changing much at all, it does for some other underperforming areas of Auckland. And as the picture below of Freemans Bay in 1877 shows change is always possible, and can be a very good thing indeed……… Anyway, why shouldn’t more Aucklanders get the chance to enjoy their neighbourhood as much as our friend Bill Ralston enjoys his?
By admin, on January 15th, 2012 While I have often complained about transport not being in the top of people’s minds when voting in nationwide elections, yet so many decisions are made by central government – the flip side of this (and unfortunately it seems that we do get the worst of both worlds) is seeing the transport debate becoming more and more partisan. For some reason, in New Zealand it would seem as though the political right tends to support roads-first transport policies; while the political left is more friendly towards public transport. There are some fairly obvious ideological reasons behind this: the individualised nature of auto-focused transport may appeal ideologically to those who lean to the right, while the more ‘collective’ nature of public transport can appeal to those on the left. Public transport also usually requires a level of subsidy, which further puts off those to the right of the political debate.
What’s strange though is how centre-right governments overseas often take a very different viewpoint of public transport – even of rail, which seems to be a particular dislike of centre-right politicians here in New Zealand. For example, just a few days ago we saw the Conservative Government in the UK approve the £30 billion+ High Speed 2 rail scheme, even in times of significant economic troubles. And, reading through the press release and reasoning behind the decision, it’s a far cry from our government’s approval of electrification – which seemed to be a very reluctant “oh we’d better continue this because we reluctantly promised to do so before the 2008 election”. Here are some sections of the UK government’s position on High Speed 2:
I have decided Britain should embark upon the most significant transport infrastructure project since the building of the motorways by supporting the development and delivery of a new national high speed rail network. By following in the footsteps of the 19th century railway pioneers, the Government is signalling its commitment to providing 21st century infrastructure and connections – laying the groundwork for long-term, sustainable economic growth.
High Speed 2 (HS2) is a scheme to deliver hugely enhanced rail capacity and connectivity between Britain’s major conurbations. It is the largest transport infrastructure investment in the UK for a generation, and, with the exception of High Speed 1 (HS1), is the first major new railway line since the Victorian era.
The HS2 Y network will provide direct, high capacity, high speed links between London, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, with intermediate stations in the East Midlands and South Yorkshire. There will also be direct links to Heathrow Airport and to the Continent via the HS1 line. It will form a foundation for a potentially wider high speed network in years to come.
A recognition that rail is the way of the future, and not (as I sometimes sense the attitude towards it in NZ is), some relic of the 19th century. The benefits of the project are well understood by the government, and clearly articulated. No Ministry of Transport hatchet job here:
HS2 will be built in two phases to ensure that the benefits of high speed rail are realised at the earliest possible opportunity. The line from London to the West Midlands and the connection to HS1 are expected to open in 2026, followed, in 2032-33, by the onward legs to Manchester and Leeds and the connection to Heathrow. The capital cost at 2011 prices of building the complete Y network is £32.7 billion. At present values, it will generate benefits of up to £47 billion and fare revenues of up to £34 billion over a 60-year period.
The benefits of HS2 will extend beyond the network itself; links to current lines will enable direct trains to run to cities such as Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow and Edinburgh and, with long-distance services transferring to the new network, space will be freed up for new commuter, regional and freight services on other lines, opening up new opportunities for Britain’s existing railways. Links to key urban transport networks, such as Crossrail, will help to spread the benefits further still.
There’s also some clear recognition of the project’s environmental benefits:
HS2 is entirely consistent with the Government’s objectives for carbon emissions. Electrified rail is a comparatively low-carbon mode of transport, especially with the continued decarbonisation of the grid. Speed increases power consumption, but also makes HS2 more attractive to those currently flying or driving. The faster journeys on HS2 – Edinburgh and Glasgow will be just 3.5 hours from London – could transfer around 4.5 million journeys per year who might otherwise have travelled by air and 9 million from the roads. HS2 will also create more rail capacity on existing conventional speed lines for freight – removing lorries from our busy trunk roads. HS2 is therefore an important part of transport’s low-carbon future.
I can’t quite imagine those words coming out of Steven Joyce or Gerry Brownlee’s mouth.
Another example is the Victorian State Government elections of 2010, where the centre-right Coalition was generally found to have better transport policies than the incumbent Labor government – which (apparently) played a significant role in their victory. Here’s what the politically independent Public Transport Users Association said about the respective policies heading into the election:
With public transport the big issue for many voters, the Public Transport Users Association (PTUA) has given its verdict on the transport policies of the parties going into the State Election, with the Greens coming out on top, followed by the Coalition.
PTUA President Daniel Bowen said that packed trains, slow trams, and infrequent buses had voters looking to all political parties for a solution to Melbourne and Victoria’s transport woes.
And he said the Green and Coalition promises for reform through an independent public transport authority were crucial in their party policies receiving the best marks.
“The Greens scored an A, and have an aggressive agenda to upgrade public transport, with a Public Transport Authority being central to better managing and planning the network. The vision of frequent public transport across Melbourne is welcome, and would provide more residents with a genuine alternative to car travel.”
Of the two major parties, Mr Bowen said the Coalition had come out with a stronger set of policies than Labor, and scored a B.
“The Coalition has a number of positive policies, underpinned by a pledge to buy 40 additional trains, and introduce a Public Transport Development Authority to provide central management and planning.
“While we have concerns over the Coalition’s push for the east-west cross-city road tunnel, the pledge of feasibility studies for rail to Doncaster, the Airport and Rowville, as well as level crossing eliminations are very welcome.”
Mr Bowen said that Labor were promising some worthwhile upgrades, ultimately they fell short of what is needed, scoring a C. “Labor seems to have no overall vision for a fast, frequent, connected network across Melbourne and Victoria, and have ignored community calls for a shakeup of the management of public transport, which has scores of organisations involved but nobody taking responsibility for such essentials as making sure buses meet trains.”
Mr Bowen said that despite Labor deservedly trumpeting Smartbus as a success story, it was disappointing that they had not pledging any new Smartbus routes. Labor also lost points for continuing to push the destructive North-East freeway link.
I am rather struggling to understand why New Zealand has to be so different from what is happening elsewhere in the world – where we see centre-right governments that really value public transport and genuinely want to see it improved (rather than having to be dragged kicking and screaming into any steps in the right direction). There doesn’t seem to be any particularly logical reason why the Conservative Party in the UK would value public transport investment so much, while our National Party seems instinctively suspicious that the whole thing is a communist plot.
But perhaps more important than speculating on why this is such a problem in New Zealand, we should start looking for ways in which we can change this. How can we sell the benefits of a smarter and more balanced transport policy to the political right? How can we reassure them that spending on public transport isn’t flushing money down the toilet? How can we enlighten them to understand the benefits of a well functioning rail network, so they’re actually pushing for improvements – rather than always being the skeptical ones sitting on the hand-brake? I know that readers and commenters on this blog come from right across the political spectrum, and I know many people with right-leaning tendencies who agree with the general thrust of posts on this blog – but something’s missing here. Some connection isn’t being made and I really feel that, as a country, we will probably only really start to make long-term structural changes to the nature of our transport system – so it’s more balanced, sustainable and sensible – when we can shift the debate away from being so partisan.
But how do we do that?
By Patrick Reynolds, on January 10th, 2012
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.
By admin, on December 14th, 2011 Perhaps the primary reason why I am interested in improving public transport is because I think it’s the main way we can manage to both shift a lot of people around a city while at the same time not destroying that city. Urban planning and transport planning is always a balance between the “through” and the “in”. Generally, the more you cater for the through (an extreme example being a motorway) the more you degrade the “in” – the quality of the space. Conversely, it seems that typically you can improve the “in” by reducing the “through” function of a place. Elliott Street, Fort Street and the other shared spaces are hugely nicer places to be now than they were before – because their “through” function has been lowered.
The problem with traditional transport planning is that, since World War II at least, we have sacrificed the quality of our urban environments in the name of making it easier to get around. Where there has been congestion, we have widened roads or built new ones, ignoring to a large extent what the effect of the widening or the new road might be on the quality of our urban environment. Our cost-benefit methodology for assessing transport projects still reinforces this approach: saving a few seconds off a trip counts, degrading the property values of adjacent sites does not.
But it’s not only the impact of wider and new roads on the quality of our urban environments which so strongly connects auto-dependency with poor urban outcomes. We also need to consider the impact of where we store all these cars the 95% of the time we’re not actually in them. By that, I of course mean parking. The excellent Old Urbanist blog has a recent post analysing the proportion of many US downtowns which have been given over to parking – typically mandated by planning rules that require a certain number of parking spaces per area of development. Some of the results are truly scary:
Houston, Texas:
Surface parking (red): 21.3%
Garage parking (yellow): 3.7%
Street area (including sidewalks): 39.7%
Total area for rights-of-way plus off-street parking: 64.7%
Park space: 2.6% (1.1% exluding Discovery Green)
So basically two-thirds of downtown Houston is set aside for either shifting or storing cars. In a large city, the value of this land must be utterly immense – surely it could be put to a more economic use than this?
We find a similar situation when you look at Little Rock, Arkansas – admittedly a much smaller city: Surface parking: 26.5%
Garage parking: 2.7%
Street area (including sidewalks): 32.0%
Total area for rights-of-way plus off-street parking: 61.2%
Park space: 0.0%
For some contrast, let’s look at Washington DC – which has a very well developed Metro system allowing people the choice of not driving into the CBD for work: Surface parking: 1.1%*
Garage parking: 0.0%
Street area (including sidewalks): 43.3%
Total area for rights-of-way plus off-street parking: 44.4%
Park space: 2.53% (5.00% including Ellipse)
While Washington DC has a very low level of parking, it does contain a large number of rather wide streets, which means that we still see almost half its land dedicated to roadspace. The Old Urbanist post offers some further insight on this matter:
Although these numbers are interesting enough on their own, I bring them up to emphasize the importance of the street grid in determining the balance of buildable to non-buildable land. Even the difference in unbuilt area between the downtowns most dominated by surface lots, and those most built out, as is the case for Houston and Washington, is no greater than the difference between Washington and the European cities with the most generous street allotments – the Paris of Haussmann, with its broad boulevards, imperial Vienna of the 19th century, and Barcelona’s Eixample, all of which devote around 25 percent of their area to streets.
It is difficult to imagine a justification for much exceeding the 25 percent figure. Many cities of similar size and far larger than those just mentioned make do with less, including Tokyo, Mexico City and Buenos Aires, while accommodating extensive mass transit systems. The traditional city of narrow streets and small squares, typified by towns of medieval plan, find ten or fifteen percent perfectly adequate.
In addition to their transportation function, streets can also be understood as a means of extracting value from underserved parcels of land. The street removes a certain amount of property from tax rolls in exchange for plugging the adjacent land in to the citywide transportation network. Access to the network, in turn, increases the value of the land for almost all uses. For the process to satisfy a cost/benefit analysis, the value added should exceed that lost to the area of the streets plus the cost of maintenance. (This implies rapidly diminishing returns for increasingly wide streets, and helps explain why, in the absence of mandated minimum widths, most streets are made to be fairly narrow.) For many of the gridded American cities of the 19th century, as I’ve written about before, planners failed to meet these objectives, although these decisions have long since been overshadowed by those of their 20th century successors.
I am yet to conduct a similar exercise for Auckland’s CBD, but I imagine we have much more space set aside for parking garages and much less for surface parking than Houston and Little Rock, and more garages yet narrower streets than Washington DC. But I imagine we are still using a lot of the city’s most precious real estate for little more than shifting and storing cars. Perhaps the most under-rated benefit of public transport projects like the City Rail Link is our ability to reverse this trend: to be able to reclaim significant chunks of the city for more productive uses.
However, while things in the city centre aren’t as horrific as many of these US cities, if you head to many of the more recently built “town centres” you can see some pretty similar diagrams. In the map below of Botany Town Centre we can see the vast majority of space is set aside for shifting and storing cars (red for buildings, green for open space, grey for roads and parking lots): Manukau City Centre is very similar: Not only are these places incredibly unattractive parts of the city to be “in” or to walk around, they are also incredibly, and stupidly, wasteful of one of our most precious resources: land. They are trapped in a cycle of “to grow we need to provide more parking, but the more parking we provide the less usable space there is to build on” which inevitably leads to illogical things like Auckland Transport spending tens of millions on multi-level parking buildings – which will of course further reinforce these areas’ dependency on cars and over time require even wider roads and more parking spaces.
It is in places like Botany, Manukau, Albany, Westgate and (in the future) Flat Bush where we must somehow break this cycle – most probably through providing vastly better public transport options so that people feel more and more comfortable about leaving their car at home. Compared to the opportunity cost of all this wasted land that’s required to support an auto-dependent model of land development, the public transport projects should be dirt cheap.
By admin, on September 30th, 2011 An exceptionally kind blog reader bought me “The High Cost of Free Parking” byDonald Shoup recently. This is a book that I’ve flicked through on a number of occasions in the past, but I’m incredibly grateful of the opportunity to read through it properly, particularly at a time when it seems that Auckland Council is fundamentally reassessing the way it handles parking policy. Page 16 of the “Urban Auckland” chapter of the Auckland Plan says some pretty optimistic things about how the council will be relooking at parking policy matters:
Inappropriate regulations and inflexible standards can impact on good design. These can act as impediments to the development of intensive housing and mixed developments. One factor that can affect the affordability of such projects is unnecessary parking requirements. Sometimes traditional parking standards (minimum numbers of car parking spaces) have been imposed in areas where alternative options (for example parking buildings or investment in public transportation) would imply that such minimums are counterproductive to delivering the goal of intensification, mixed use and affordability. The Council intends to review its approach to parking as part of the development of the Unitary Plan.
Minimum parking requirements have a number of flaws, but a fundamental one is that they effectively force you to spend a lot of money (particular in inner urban areas) to provide for one particular mode of transport (car storage), regardless of whether you actually want two spaces, one space or perhaps even no spaces.
The High Cost of Free Parking outlines a really good analogy between parking policy and hamburgers that’s useful to consider:
Suppose cities required all fast-food restaurants to include french fries with every hamburger. The fries would appear free, but they would have a high cost in money and health. Those who don’t eat the fries pay higher prices for their hamburgers but receive no benefit. Those who do eat the fries they wouldn’t have ordered separately are also worse off, because they eat unhealthy food they wouldn’t otherwise buy. Even those would order the fries if they weren’t included free are no better off, because the price of a hamburger would increase to cover the cost of the fries. How are minimum parking requirements different? Minimum parking requirements force people force people who are too poor to own cars to pay for parking spaces they don’t use, and they encourage others to buy more cars and drive them more than they would if they had to pay separately for parking.
Just as the only people who would really do well out of forcing hamburger purchases to include fries would be potato growers, arguably the only people who do well out of minimum parking requirements are those who build cars, roads and parking buildings. The rest of us, regardless of how many cars we own, are either worse off or at best, in the same position as we would be without such requirements. The sooner we get rid of them the better.
By admin, on August 29th, 2011 The most commonly cited characteristic of urban sprawl is its low-density. In fact, density is often used as the sole way of determining whether a city is sprawled or not – and (following on from that) whether a city’s urban form is conducive to public transport or not. However, you only need to look at a comparison of the density and auto-use of many different cities around the world to see that things might be somewhat more complicated than that: Overall city density is actually, I think, a fairly poor indicator – except at the extremes – of whether a city is dominated by urban sprawl and whether it has a form that works well for public transport or not. The digram below illustrates this point fairly well, assuming that each dot on a map represents a certain number of people, you have two places with the same overall density which are actually vastly different environments: But even then, I think that what I consider to be “urban sprawl” has much more to it than simply what density an area is – even if what we’re looking at is a small part of a city.
A good post on the New Jersey Future blog highlights this issue further:
Low density is certainly one of the dysfunctions of New Jersey’s (and the nation’s) dominant development pattern since 1950, but it is not the only one. Separation of uses – keeping homes, stores, and workplaces each in their own segregated zones, distant from each other – and a lack of connectivity in the local street network (with lots of looping streets and cul-de-sacs and a lack of direct through-routes) also contrive to make it hard to get around without a car. These other two factors can force people into their cars for most daily activities even in neighborhoods with high housing density.
This, of course, means that we can have ‘non-sprawled’ urban areas, even where the density is not particularly high:
Conversely, a mix of land-use types (residential, employment, shopping, etc.) puts a variety of activities – not just a variety of buildings all housing the same activity – in close proximity, shrinking the distances among multiple types of destinations. And a well-connected, grid-like street network ensures that physical proximity actually translates into easy accessibility by offering multiple, direct routes among destinations. That is, it means short as-the-crow-flies distances are also short walking, biking, or driving distances that may not require a trip out onto the regional highway network. And of course, putting dense, mixed-use, well-connected neighborhoods near transit creates yet another option for getting to desired destinations that are farther away.
Los Angeles is given as a good example of a city characterised by large amount of high-density sprawl, with the following paragraphs coming from here:
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?
… 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 …
The LA region’s combination of high, evenly distributed density puts it in an unfortunate position: it suffers from many of the problems that accompany high population density, including extreme traffic congestion and poor air quality; but lacks many of the benefits that typically accompany more traditional versions of dense urban areas, including fast and effective public transit and a core with vibrant street life. Los Angeles has, to borrow a term coined by urbanist William Fulton, “dense sprawl.”
As Paul Mees reminded us last week, Auckland’s population density is relatively high – at least compared to other Australasian cities: Auckland’s higher than expected population densities might somewhat be the result of development in parts of the city like Ponsonby and Royal Oak that I wouldn’t consider to be “high density sprawl.” However, some of the more recent development in areas like Botany seem to fit the definition of high density sprawl almost perfectly:
 At least with these places there are some shops across the road. Pity the road’s a 6-8 lane megahighway, about as uninviting environment for pedestrians as you’ll ever see. Just down the road in Flat Bush, we have arguably an even better example of high density sprawl, as here there are very few shops anywhere near these new apartment buildings. I tend to think the best definition of urban sprawl is the type of urban development that promote car dependency. And while Auckland may be reasonably high density compared to other cities around Australasia, we certainly have an urban form (as well as a transportation system, obviously) which significantly contributes to our auto-dependency. Solving that issue will involve a lot more than simply raising urban densities.
By admin, on August 22nd, 2011 The response to my post on whether we should remove the Dominion Road and New North Road interchange was quite interesting, and illustrated what I think is an interestingly varied approach to the ultimate question that we all think about: “what is the goal” we’re trying to achieve through our involvement in Auckland transport issues? Often when I meet up with people, as a result of this blog, the question I most frequently get asked is why do I have such an interest in transport issues? What am I trying to achieve? What would be a “better” transport situation for Auckland and so forth. Ultimately, this all comes back to the question of “what’s the goal?”
As far as I can tell, people come at transport from different perspectives. Some have a economics interest – how can we make the transport system as economically efficient as possible? Some seem to have an engineering perspective – how to move people through space in the best way possible. Some from a planning perspective, how to best integrate our transport decisions with the kind of city we’re creating, and so forth.
I do think that each person comes at things slightly differently, so therefore they will have different goals. Some people might have the goal of promoting public transport patronage, with that as the “end goal”. Some might want to eliminate congestion, some might have the goal of Auckland having a transport system much less reliant on oil, some a transport system that is less polluting, some a transport system that keeps the trucking lobby happy (*cough* Steven Joyce *cough*) and so forth. For example, I think Len Brown’s transport goal is for Auckland to have a world class transport system (both road and rail) that we’re proud of and which can really put a dent in the level of congestion around the region. That’s not exactly the same transport goal as I have, but there are plenty of areas of overlap – so I’m generally supportive of his vision for Auckland’s transport system.
For me, my background as a planner – someone primarily interested in making an awesome city – is instructive in my ultimate goal. I was not always particularly interested in transport issues, for example my Master’s Thesis was written about the Auckland Regional Growth Strategy and the question of whether Auckland should (and could) grow mainly through intensification or sprawl. After a while observing how Auckland worked, along with a trip to Europe and watching the fantastic “City of Cars” videos, I came to the realisation that it was extremely difficult (if not impossible) to actually make Auckland a nicer place unless we really focused on sorting out its transport system – because, typically, it was transport decisions turning Auckland into a pretty horrible place.
Exhibit A: In fact, it seemed to me as though there’s a pretty universal “urban law of physics” – an inverse relationship between ‘quality of place’ and ‘priority given to cars’. Something like this:  Occasionally it’s possible to get around this rule. Many of the boulevards of Paris provide significant capacity for vehicles, while still being really nice urban spaces. But generally, I think the rule applies.
But we’re not Venice (somewhat unfortunately), so having an entire city of Vulcan Lanes and Fort Street shared spaces isn’t really going to work. We need to be able to travel around the city easily, plus we don’t have the space to create a huge number of Parisian boulevards, with central roadways and side alleys. Plus, of course, Paris only works the way it does because the Metro and RER systems shift a vast number of people underground.
So we need good public transport, for the sake of our city. To enable people to be able to get around in large numbers (and for long distances) in a way that provides an alternative to endless carparks and intersections like what we see in Botany – in the picture above. As an example, the Northern Busway helps get many people into central Auckland without the Northern Motorway having to be even wider (and billions wasted on another harbour crossing) and without even more of downtown Auckland being dedicated to parking buildings. So I’m a fan. But at the stage when there are so many bus trips that the city starts to suffer as a result, I would advocate for a rail option – even if it didn’t yet make sense from a pure cost-benefit perspective. It would be necessary, for the sake of the city.
Of course this is not the only reason why I think we need a better public transport system in Auckland. I am concerned about our unpreparedness for peak oil. I am concerned about the economic strain our auto-dependency places on families, I am concerned about the loss of productivity that results from traffic congestion – which generally exists because people must find it cheaper, faster and more convenient to sit in traffic than to take public transport.
But ultimately, my goal is for Auckland’s transport system to help make the city a better and nicer place to be in. So I can accept that messing with the Dominion/New North interchange would probably create a bit more congestion – because I think that cost would be outweighed by the urban benefits of the project: stitching back together a really interesting part of inner Auckland. I can understand why others question transport projects that won’t necessarily have transport benefits – but ultimately I think it’s generally quite well accepted that Auckland has focused too much on shifting people around the city in the past (particularly by car) at the expense of ensuring the city is a nice place to be.
What’s your transport goal?
By admin, on August 1st, 2011 I’m reading a really interesting book at the moment, The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream by Christopher B. Leinberger. It’s a good book because it takes a historical look at the shift in the mid 20th century away from what’s termed “Walkable Urbanism” and towards a “Drivable Suburbanism” as the main form of building cities and transportation systems and then starts considering more recent urban trends – suggesting a shift back towards walkable urbanism as the economics and environmental effects of drivable suburbanism start to no longer make sense. Changing demographics, particularly the shift away from “two parents with kids” households is also seen as a major cause of the trends back towards the type of urban form (and transport system to support it) that was more common before the Second World War.
There are potentially a few future blog posts to come out of the book, but one thing that I found particularly worth outlining are some of the economic effects of the extreme extent that urban development has gone down the drivable suburbanism path.
Transportation costs were eighteen percent of household income in 2005, second to the amount US families spent on housing (twenty-four percent). This compares with fourteen percent spent on transportation by the average family in Europe, where public transit is much more developed and there is more walkable urbanism. The geometric increase in VMT also indicates the increasing share that automobile transportation plays in US family finances. AAA calculated that the average cost of car ownership and maintenance for a typical car in 2006 was $7,800 per year. This covers loan payments, fuel, parking, maintenance, insurance and incidental costs…
…The result is that owning an average car is the equivalent of having an additional $135,000 mortgage (mortgage interest is tax-deductible, and this calculation assumes six percent mortgage interest). In essence, drivable suburbanism has probably been shifting family spending away from investing in a long-term appreciating asset (e.g. a house) or savings to a short-term depreciating asset (e.g. a car).
This is one of the hidden issues of auto-dependency. If people don’t perceive that public transport is good enough to meet their requirements then they will feel they have to buy that extra car in order to properly participate in society. And buying that extra car can end up being a huge financial burden. Thinking of Auckland, and the particularly crap public transport serving “blue collar” working areas like East Tamaki, Penrose, Mt Wellington, Auckland Airport, Wiri and so forth, the impact on lower income workers is likely to be particularly severe. This seem to be the case in the USA, as the book continues:
The above calculations were for a typical car-owning family, but the findings become even more grim for a working-class family. A 2006 study of eighteen metropolitan areas throughout the country found that working families spend even more on transportation than on housing, a reflection of the ‘drive until you qualify’ affordable housing strategy. “In their search for low-cost housing, working families often locate far from their place of work, dramatically increasing their transportation costs and commute times.” The unintended consequences do not stop there; this mean less time with the family, increased traffic congestion for the region, and greater greenhouse gas emissions.
Traditionally US cities had their poorest residents in the centre, with richer people shifting outwards as they acquired more money. This seems to now be changing, perhaps to reflect more how things are in a city like Auckland – where definitely the cheaper real estate is further out – creating that tricky trade-off of transportation against housing costs.
I think that it would be fascinating to look at the personal costs to families of Auckland being so auto-dependent. Many poorer parts of the city (Mangere & Massey immediately come to mind) suffer some of the worst public transport provision – probably forcing a large number of families to own more cars than they would ideally want to, pushing a big financial burden onto them and making it even more difficult for them to get ahead in life. I’m not sure how you would necessarily go about focusing transport investment in such a way so that it could help lower the extent to which these families need to have more cars than they’d ideally want – but car ownership rates in certain parts of the city could be quite a good measurement tool to work out whether transportation policies were working or not.
By admin, on June 7th, 2011 I think we’re only just beginning to recognise the useful ways in which technology can be combined with public transport to both make the trip nicer and to also analyse the PT system and work out ways in which to improve it. Much of this work is going on outside official agencies – which seem stuck in the dark age when it comes to such matters (try using the MAXX journey planner on a mobile phone, a painful process!)
Back in January we saw Auckland’s entire PT network simulated over the course of a day, in this fantastic video put together by Sciblogs.
An animated map of Auckland’s public transport network from Chris McDowall on Vimeo.
Now there’s a new piece of software, known as “Mapnificent“, that provides an incredibly useful resource: the extent of a city that’s accessible within a certain timeframe via public transport at various different hours of the day. This video explains how it works:
Mapnificent from Stefan Wehrmeyer on Vimeo.
Some of the functions are incredibly useful, I suspect particularly for those searching for houses or working out whether a particular job will be accessible for them via public transport in a feasible way or not. It would be interesting to see, over time, whether real estate agents reckon this is a helpful tool in trying to sell places – it’ll be particularly obvious the parts of the city within say a half-hour PT commute from downtown. If you worked across the road from Britomart train station, and accepted up to a 15 minute walk, you can see in the image below how much of the city would be within 30 minutes of travel time: It’s a surprisingly small portion of the city really, although I guess that’s because of walking times to and from the bus stop or train station. Interesting how effective the Northern Busway is at creating points on the North Shore that are dramatically more accessible than what’s around them. It’s crazy that most of the catchment of Akoranga Station is a golf driving range, and most of Smales Farm’s catchment is a golf course and a massive parking building. If there were ever parts of the city appropriate and attractive for intensification, these are those point. The fantastic speed of trains on the Eastern Line, and I assume the good speed of buses along Remuera Road and Tamaki Drive give that part of the city a surprisingly good score.
Push the time limit out to 60 minutes, and we start to see which parts of the city have particularly bad public transport – in that they can’t even get a peak time trip to Britomart in less than an hour: If you ever wanted a visual representation of why it’s stupid to have focused so much of Auckland’s urban development in Flat Bush, Botany Downs, Dannemora and so forth – then this is that proof. Heck even Beachlands and parts of Waiheke Island are more accessible to the CBD than a vast swathe of southeast Auckland. But there are interesting holes too – Te Atatu Peninsula and Massey are suprisingly excluded, a good argument for the Northwest Busway perhaps?
But Britomart is a really accessible point of downtown. How about if we shifted the focus point to somewhere outside easy walking distance of the current rail network – like the Auckland Town Hall. What impact does that have on what’s accessible in an hour long PT trip or less: Accessibility from the south and west is reduced quite significantly, while that southeast area is now well outside the 60 minute accessibility area (indicating that it would probably take people a lot longer than an hour to get to the town hall from these places. One big advantage of the City Rail Link project is that it will bring much more of the city within a reasonable commute of all the CBD, not just the area around Britomart.
However, if we think public transport to the CBD is bad, remember that only 13% of Auckland’s jobs are in the CBD. Other large employment hubs include around Greenlane/Ellerslie, in East Tamaki, Albany and at the Airport. The 60 minute accessibility zones for these are are pretty terrible (and remember that this is for an hour each way, probably the very limit of acceptability):
    I wonder if such maps might make our planner reconsider the merits of decentralising employment. I would also think twice about shifting to Flat Bush any time soon – remembering that the map shows areas within a one hour commute:
 The potential uses for this tool are endless. What a fantastic resource!
By admin, on May 29th, 2011 As a planner by profession, I can quite honestly say that more often than not we do urban planning in Auckland utterly terribly. We focus enormously on silly details: recession planes, consistency with minutely detailed assessment criteria, road-widths, numbers of parking spaces per unit, number of units coming off driveways and so forth – but we miss the really obvious stuff. Like the following:
- Will it actually be feasible to operate a bus service through this area?
- Can people walk to the local shops?
- How can we create vibrant and interesting neighbourhoods?
One particularly important part of urban planning that tends to get completely overlooked – or tossed over to the road engineers, is the fundamental question of “where will the streets go?” As I noted in Friday’s blog post, street patterns have an enormous ability to influence the viability of public transport – with a grid of arterial routes (like Vancouver has) making life far far easier when it comes to serving an area with a decent bus network.
One thing that’s extremely depressing is to see how some of the most recent parts of Auckland are actually the most utterly hopeless at providing a decent street network. In fact, there are areas of the city built in the past few years that are actually nigh on impossible to serve with any form or public transport at all.
An extreme example of planning stupidity is down Schnapper Rock Road near Albany. There are probably hundreds of houses down this road and the various streets that come off it – all developed within the past few years. Potentially well over a thousand people might live down this road – but look at how massively disconnected from the rest of the city they are: By my analysis of the aerial photographs, and a couple of visits to the area, there are no shops at all down Schnapper Rock Road, meaning that your options for doing anything without driving at almost non-existent. How about the public transport – well that’s an interesting route option to try and ask MAXX about: a peak time trip from Dove Place to town gives some interesting options: It takes me an hour and a half, costs me nearly $10 and requires a trip on a freaking school bus! Talk about designing for auto-dependency.
Just down the road things are arguably even worse – thanks to the failure to connect up the two ends of Kyle Road, which should have been an absolute requirement before any development took place around Upper Harbour Primary School: Quite bizarrely, some planner made the decision that William Gamble Drive shouldn’t connect with Huntington Park Drive – which means that the two residential areas located right next to each other are hugely isolated from one another. Furthermore, the one road connecting the William Gamble Drive area with the rest of the world doesn’t even have a footpath along most of its length – meaning that to get anywhere else without driving is pretty much a suicide mission. Fortunately there is a pedestrian connection between the two ends of Kyle Road, which means that it’s only a 1.5 kilometre walk from William Gamble Drive to the nearest bus stop.
Moving further south, the new developments on the Hingaia Peninsula near Papakura aren’t much better, once again having exceedingly poor connectivity to the rest of the road network: This is another place that has some rather amusing public transport options: So I get to walk for two and a half kilometres in order to have the pleasure of a 90 minute bus trip into town. Gee that sounds fantastic!
Even in more inner areas, new developments have often seemed to design their street networks with the expressed purpose of being as useless for public transport as possible – Stonefields near Mt Wellington is a classic example of this: While Stonefields has quite a nice grid, the fact that no effort was ever made to connect up the street network with its southern and western edges means that every future bus route through the area will need to be a pointless loop. While I obviously realise this is a former quarry site and there are some pretty big stone walls making the connection difficult, I am sure if a southern street connection had been a condition of allowing any development in the quarry, it would have happened.
The poor street connectivity means that the new residents of Stonefields need to take a 1.5 km trek to access a bus service: Now I hear there’s an entire “land-use transport integration team” at Auckland Transport these days. Let’s hope that their primary job is to ensure that nothing as stupid as the various recent subdivisions I’ve shown above ever happen again.
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