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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 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 December 5th, 2010 In my opinion, perhaps the most important factor determining how a particular part of the city will feel are the road widths. The wider the road is, generally the faster people will be encouraged to drive – the opposite is obviously true too. Now clearly in some areas we want wide roads – for example, I bet most people wish Dominion Road was a bit wider so we could fit a lane of traffic, a high quality bus lane, a cycle lane and keep on-street parking. We also spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year in Auckland widening motorways (Manukau Harbour Crossing, Victoria Park Tunnel & Newmarket Viaduct projects are all effectively motorway widening projects) – although the merits of that spend are probably highly debatable in many situations. But is the engineer’s mantra of “wider is better” actually true? I would argue that in most cases the opposite is true – particularly for residential streets and for streets in town centres.
It is interesting driving around Auckland and seeing the relationship between street width and the character of the area. Auckland’s narrowest little streets generally seem to be in places like Ponsonby and Freeman’s Bay – and they contribute enormously to the character of those areas, along with the heritage housing of course. Would John Street be anything like it is if you could zip along there at close to 60 kph? I tend to think not.
Some of the newer developments in Auckland seem to finally be understanding the importance of narrow streets: to generate character and to slow vehicles down. In the Stonefields development, a brownfields redevelopment of the old Mt Wellington quarry, the road-widths have tended to be limited to a greater extent than I’ve seen in most other new subdivisions. The photo below shows that to some extent, although it’s a bit difficult to analyse the widths because there are no parked cars to compare to: Another thing to note is the intersections don’t have massively wide arcs allowing cars to turn corners at high speeds. In fact, cars need to slow right down to turn a corner – gosh that must annoy the traffic engineers!
Unfortunately, such enlightened thinking as we’re seeing at Stonefields has not migrated further south to developments happening around Flat Bush, or indeed to the heart of Manukau City which is still dissected by a massive 70 kph arterial route (despite the fact that there’s hardly any traffic on it because that has been diverted onto the new motorway).
Starting with Flat Bush, there is supposed to be a new town centre being built over the next few years to complement the growing residential area. On the plans, the town centre looks pretty good: it’s close to the massive Barry Curtis Park, it has an obvious main street – and so on, and so forth: So Ormiston Road is going to be the main street, passing through the town centre. Should be quite nice one would think – a kind of new version of old town centres perhaps?
Clearly, nobody told the traffic engineers: Oh great, we have a defacto motorway as the future main street of Flat Bush, with a stupid pointless “kink” in it just to completely ruin our urban design principles. I can totally see cafes and retail shops establishing along here in the future to create a sense of town centre vibrancy. NOT. I can see another Albany megacentre urban design failure in the making.
Finally, turning to the heart of Manukau City – which had been sliced in half for so long by Wiri Station Road – I had some hope for the future of this area once the SH20-SH1 connection was completed. Getting all those vehicles off Wiri Station Road (now called Manukau Station Road, by the way) offered a superb opportunity to slow the road down, narrow it, create a lot more pedestrian connections and tie together two sides of the town centre. So how have things gone? So we haven’t slowed things down at all yet, and the empty road hasn’t been narrowed yet. There’s a shopping mall on one side of this road and a theme park on the other – but what are the chances of a pedestrian actually trying to get across this road? Next to zilch I would think. What an epic failure, what a missed opportunity.
If there is a lesson to be learned from these observations, it is that we really need to be smarter in the way we align our transport and land-use policies. The main streets through our town centres cannot be four-lane superhighways. If we want people to drive slowly, if we want to encourage pedestrian activity, if we want to have streetside retail activity, then we need to keep those roads narrow. We need to slow the cars down, we need to prioritise the pedestrians, we need to give these places some character.
Seriously, we need to do better than this.
By admin, on August 19th, 2010 I have written a number of posts about Flat Bush in the past. For those that don’t know, Flat Bush is a large greenfields development in the southeast corner of Auckland. Over the next 20 or so years around 40,000 people are expected to call Flat Bush home. It approximately covers the area outlined in red in the map below:
 As might be reasonably clear from the map above, Flat Bush doesn’t have particularly good transport links with the rest of Auckland. Links with the southern motorway are generally via quite highly congested roads (particularly to the north), while any form of half-decent public transport out in this corner of Auckland is completely non-existent. Bus timetables for the area show that trips between Flat Bush and the CBD are expected to take about an hour and a quarter.
That’s not to say that no thought has gone into the transport problem that Flat Bush creates. A recent NZTA board paper that I’m having a read through at the moment suggests that a lot of time, effort and money has gone into creating a transport network for Flat Bush. However, unfortunately in Auckland what that means is basically “we’ve build a pile of really wide roads for everyone to start driving their cars along and clog up”. Now short of building the much needed, but probably very expensive southeast railway line, it does seem as though Flat Bush’s transport future will be roads based. But I think it’s worthwhile having a look into how much this approach to addressing transport in Flat Bush is costing.
NZTA’s board paper outlines what’s happening and Flat Bush, and does point out that the area doesn’t gain access directly from the state highway network: So what’s it costing to make this new suburb viable in terms of its transport? Well that’s where things start to get expensive: $676 million to be spent on roading in the area is a lot of money. It is true that a significant portion of this money is to be paid for by developers, but that money will be paid for through higher property prices – not just out of thin air.
Of course this money doesn’t cover roading upgrades that will probably be necessary (or at least considered necessary by roading engineers) as a result of putting 40,000 people out in this corner of Auckland. You can add to the amounts above part of the cost of the $1.3 billion AMETI, previous expenditure on Te Irirangi Drive, the Highbrook interchange and so forth.
While it’s obvious that as our city grows we will need to spend money on improving transport infrastructure, I just wonder whether it would be possible to more cheaply accommodate 40,000 people than what we’re seeing with Flat Bush.
By admin, on May 31st, 2010 As I have mentioned in a couple of recent posts, I am extremely worried that a lot of the work going on at the moment in planning important transport projects (like AMETI) and large-scale land-use planning projects (like Flat Bush) is ignoring one of the most important pieces in the puzzle of sorting out land-use and transport planning in a huge swathe of Auckland: its southeast.
By southeast Auckland I am referring to the area east of the Tamaki River, and right down to where Te Irirangi Drive links in with Manukau City. This includes the suburbs of Howick, Pakuranga, Highland Park, Botany, Dannemora, Flat Bush and others. This area has experienced huge growth and development over the past 20-30 years, but has almost no public transport infrastructure (and pretty poor general roading linkages with the rest of Auckland). In response to the utterly unacceptable current situation, most of Auckland’s long term transport plans and strategies propose a “Rapid Transit Network” (RTN) corridor between Manukau City in the south and Panmure in the north – linking together with Flat Bush, Botany and Pakuranga. This is shown in ARTA’s Auckland Transport Plan:
As you can see it’s all spelled out pretty clearly in the Auckland Transport Plan, and basically the same route gets mention in the ARC’s 2010-2040 Regional Land Transport Strategy, although the RLTS does go one step further in its consideration of this RTN by stating this: I must say as soon as I hear the words “future proofed for light-rail” a huge red flag, flashing lights and a siren starts wailing inside my head that it’s complete and utter rubbish. Most of the things that have been future-proofed for light rail in Auckland have been done so to a vastly sub-standard level, and furthermore why the heck would we want light-rail out there? What would it link into? Would it be faster and of a higher capacity than buses? If not, why would we bother? If so, how much extra would it cost to go to heavy rail and actually link in with the existing rail system at Panmure and Manukau? I really do wonder whether any thought has gone into answering these questions.
In my mind, the huge problem with this RTN being ‘bus-based’ is the issue of “what the heck do we do at Panmure?” If we build a busway (which is what a bus-based RTN is, simple bus lanes do not constitute an RTN), then that’s going to be a pretty difficult and expensive project. There is no protected corridor anywhere near where that dotted line runs, so we’re going to have to get rid of quite a large number of houses to build this busway – so given its length we’re definitely looking at a $500 million+ project I think, if not double that (the final cost would depend largely on how we deal with Te Irirangi Drive). So we spend a huge amount of money to ship a lot of people to Panmure (and Manukau City, which is a bit more useful), but then what? We are effectively left with three options:
- We build a busway between Panmure and the CBD, right next to the existing railway line. This option is expensive and seems really stupid, given the railway line is right there, but would probably be the fastest bus option.
- We have bus lanes along Ellserlie-Panmure Highway and Great South Road and send all our buses that way into Newmarket and eventually into the CBD. This option is clearly cheaper than option one, but whereas it takes a train around 16 minutes to travel between Panmure and Britomart, at peak time it takes the 680/681 bus around 35 minutes to make that journey. So this option is around 20 minutes slower.
- We get everyone to transfer onto a train at Panmure. In the shorter term this seems like the most viable option, although it obviously depends on integrated ticketing being up and running, and the trains coming frequently enough for the transfer to be relatively painless. However, in the longer term – if this southeast RTN really comes off and is popular, we are going to end up with an awful lot of people transfering from the bus onto trains at Panmure. And there may well very much not be the available capacity on those trains (which would have already come all the way up from Manukau City) to cater for full bus-loads of passengers arriving every 2-3 minutes.
Option three clearly makes the most sense in the short-to-medium term, but in the longer term I really do think that you’re going to get problems capacity wise. One of the main reasons for this is that between Manukau and Westfield, the Southern Line and the Eastern Line share the same tracks (or will do so once Manukau is open). If we run trains on both lines at 10 minute frequencies, then that’s manageable as you have a train every 5 minutes on the combined stretch. However, if you need a lot more trains on the Eastern line to cater for passengers getting on the line at Panmure, then either you need to start “short running” quite a few trains between Panmure and Britomart (and all the scheduling havoc that would create) or you start to get trains at 2-3 minute frequencies on that Westfield to Manukau stretch of the line, which could be quite a problem.
So in the longer term I don’t think that’s going to work. Furthermore, while I am a big fan of designing a a public transport system around transfers rather than one which avoids transfer at all costs, there is certainly a limit to this being acceptable to PT users – and that limit is probably somewhere around the one transfer only level. This also becomes problematic if we stick with our “everyone change at Panmure” policy, because chances are many people would have already transferred onto the southeast busway (or whatever it’s called) at Pakuranga station, Botany station or Flat Bush station. Taking Flat Bush as an example, my recent post showed that the Flat Bush town centre is going to be at least a kilometre away from a future rapid transit station site, while most of the extra 40,000 people anticipated to live in Flat Bush will be further away again. That’s not walking distance, so it’s likely that feeder buses will be necessary to make the system work. The same for Botany Town Centre (which is surrounded by carparks more than anything else) and Pakuranga too. Even given the speed advantages of a busway between Panmure and Manukau, and utilising the very quick Eastern Line, I think that forcing potential passengers to transfer twice is probably one step too far.
Given this situation, my opinion is that there really is only one long-term solution to the “southeast Auckland RTN problem”, and that is a full heavy rail line. This is my preferred alignment for that line: A few things probably jump to mind immediately when looking at that alignment. I’ll work through them:
- But it goes to Glen Innes, not Panmure. This is my solution to the very vexed problem of how a railway corridor could be squeeze amongst the existing bridges that cross over the Tamaki River in the vicinity of Panmure, and also how it could fit in with the Eastern railway line at Panmure without wreaking havoc. This alignment also makes the line much more useful for people living in Howick, Bucklands Beach, Highland Park and other areas. Pakuranga misses out on a station, but I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Highland Park could become a useful transit-oriented development.
- How would you cross the Tamaki River? Well either by bridge or tunnel I think. A bridge would obviously be cheaper, although effects on the estuary’s visual amenity might make that a challenge (unless it was a very pretty bridge). The estuary is fairly shallow around there, so a tunnel might not be that problematic.
- Don’t you take out a lot of houses? Well interestingly enough, the answer is “no”. The line, with a couple of tunnels, manages to miss a lot of housing – although it would impact on green spaces to a greater extent. For a more detailed look at the route’s alignment, have a look here.
- Wouldn’t it be hugely expensive? Well of course, but at a guess I would say around 150,000 people live out in this part of Auckland, and another 40,000-50,000 are likely to live out here in the future. They need to get to other parts of Auckland, their current public transport options are extremely poor – whereas this proposal would provide a trip between Britomart and Botany Town centre of under half an hour. This compares with a peak hour car trip of perhaps around an hour – so I think it would be popular. Furthermore, any RTN route out here is going to be expensive because past planners were incredibly stupid and never protected a route, so even if this does cost twice what a busway would cost, if it attracts three times as many users – it’s probably worthwhile.
So that is my suggested solution to “the southeast RTN problem”. I know that the “powers to be” in ARTA and other organisations seem to have different ideas about how to implement this RTN, (or are just sticking their heads in the sand, dumping it in the “too hard basket” and ignoring the issue) but I really think this idea has merit, and is the only one that doesn’t potentially run into “fatal flaw” problems that I believe many of the alternatives suffer from.
By admin, on May 21st, 2010 Manukau City Council seem to have finally come to the realisation that creating a massive area of auto-dependent sprawl out in a far corner of Auckland, miles from any railway lines, motorways or high-frequency bus routes, might not be the smartest idea. Particularly, there seems to be a realisation that the way Flat Bush has developed so far, as a confusing maze of cul-de-sacs, has helped create the beginnings of the most extraordinarily soulless and depressing suburb.
This “realisation” is made clear in the Stage Two Masterplan for Flat Bush. This new Master Plan (whole 72 page, 15 MB document here, summary here) picks up on many of the points I made about street patterns in a recent blog post, and perhaps its biggest suggestion is the move away from the pattern of curved arterials with local roads made up of highly complex and confusing little streets.
Here’s an example of the street network in an existing part of Flat Bush:
Someone living here is only ever going to use their car to get around and undertake most of their daily activities. What a mess.
Fortunately, the Masterplan does involve quite a significant shift away from this type of street network, as shown below:
The areas in grey are those which exist already, while the orange streets show the newly proposed, far more “gridded” street network. This is a huge step in the right direction.
The advantages of a grid-style street network (in a planning sense rather than a transport sense for now) are around the flexibility that is offered to the kind of building typology you end up creating. On the messy cul-de-sac system you have every lot ending up a different size and shape, and that is only really suitable for single-detached housing. With a gridded system, you can have apartments, townhouses, semi-detached and fully detached housing types all using the same type of street network. This offers long-term flexibility benefits, as over time areas that firstly develop at a lower density have the opportunity to increase their densities without having to bulldoze entire neighbourhoods and restructure street networks.
This flexibility is shown in the picture below:
So there are certainly some very good steps forward that this Master Plan encompasses. I now have a little bit of hope that Flat Bush won’t turn into yet another complete and utter sprawled mess, like most of the development that has occurred around the edges of Auckland in the past 30 years. However, there are still some huge problems with Flat Bush, and they are almost completely summed up by the question “but how about its connections with the rest of Auckland?”
Flat Bush is still on the very southeast corner of Auckland. It is still going to be around 40,000 people living nowhere near any motorways, railway lines, high frequency bus services or anything. It is still a hugely isolated place, and in the same way that AMETI ignores the “elephant in the room” of a Rapid Transit Network link between Panmure and the southeast suburbs, Flat Bush’s Master Plan does exactly the same – completely ignoring how the area is going to be provided with rapid transit connections to Auckland’s CBD to the north and Manukau City centre to the south. There are some brief mentions of “light rail down Te Irirangi Drive”, but the potential locations of a train station, how feeder buses to that station might work, how the issue could be addressed in the short-to-medium term and so forth are completely ignored.
This ignorance of “how are we going to link Flat Bush with rapid transit” has already had some seriously bad outcomes for the design of the place. It appears most logical that eventually our most likely rapid transit line will run down the middle of Te Irirangi Drive – in the form of some sort of rail, or a busway (I would just like to state again that simple bus lanes are NOT rapid transit), but the intersection of Ormiston Road and Te Irirangi Drive (the most likely place for a train station) has been cut off from the rest of Flat Bush by a huge new school and the developing Barry Curtis Park. So anyone living in Flat Bush and hoping to walk to the train station is in for a pretty long hike – at least 1 km from the town centre to where a station might go. Gee that was smart – not! I’m also a bit concerned that the Master Plan potentially calls for local streets to be made wider. I’m a massive fan of making local roads as narrow as practically possible (isn’t John Street in Ponsonby fantastic because of its narrowness?) to slow cars down and create more of a sense of intimacy. So wider streets would be a worry to me.
Overall, the Master Plan is a step in the right direction, with a shift to a gridded street network in particular being an utterly crucial change to at least give Flat Bush a chance of avoiding becoming another soulless area of sprawl. However, I am still frustrated that very little thought seems to have gone into how people might access other parts of Auckland from Flat Bush without having to use their cars. Specifically, it would seem that once again the Panmure-Botany-Manukau southeast RTN corridor is being completely an utterly ignored. If we don’t develop our urban areas around the existing and proposed rapid transit systems, then I struggle to think how we’re ever going to become less auto-dependent. At the very least an indicative station location, some mention of possible bus routes to that station, and some sort of “transit-oriented development” analysis would add tremendously to this Master Plan.
I guess this is what happens when you don’t integrate transport and land-use thinking. We can look forward to much more of transport and land-use planning ignoring each other in the upcoming Super City structure I imagine.
By admin, on May 7th, 2010 Another interesting part of the information I got from NZTA via my OIA request relates to the public transport upgrades being planned for Manukau City – in particular the steps being taken to implement a “Quality Transport Network” (QTN) between Manukau City and Botany Town Centre. This is the first stage in implementing what is going to eventually be a Rapid Transit Network between Panmure and Manukau City via Botany and Flat Bush (which I think should be constructed as a railway line, but anyway).
The map of the proposed upgrade is included below:
The figures in the boxes are the number of buses per hour at peak/off-peak times – meaning that along the core QTN there is to be a bus every 10 minutes during peak times and every 15 minutes off-peak. Hardly fantastic frequencies, but certainly getting close to respectable.
One of the things that I sometimes worry about when it comes to QTNs is that we will end up identifying all our current reasonable frequency bus routes as QTNs, when to me a quality transport network means something better than what we’re used to. To me it means bus lanes for extensive periods of the day, real-time information along the whole route, potentially distinctive buses, high frequencies and so forth – basically a fast and frequent service. Fortunately, it seems as though in this case we will be seeing a decent amount of physical infrastructure works to support this upgrade, as shown in the information below: So the plan is to spend over $20 million on upgrading the street network between Manukau and Flat Bush so that the QTN can be a “proper” quality transport network – I’m impressed.
However, in the longer term I must say I’m a little surprised that the NZTA board paper on this project doesn’t seem to make much mention of the fact that this route is meant to be part of the Rapid Transit Network in the longer term. That means the long term plan is to either have a full busway between Manukau and Panmure via Flat Bush and Botany, or to have a railway line. Obviously that project will be really expensive and will take many years to implement, whereas that part of Auckland desperately needs a QTN now, so I understand the smaller steps being taken. But surely you would want to be really careful to ensure that any QTN works being done now will assist in the construction of a future rapid transit network? Surely this $23 million would be the first little contribution towards a much bigger project in the future? I don’t hear much about that.
Nevertheless, it is very promising to see that a part of Auckland that desperately needs better public transport will be receiving it in the not too distant future. With the Manukau Railway Station becoming a giant transport interchange perhaps it won’t be quite so much the big flop I was worried it might be.
By admin, on December 30th, 2009 Whilst I like to think of myself as a “public transport advocate”, in my ‘day job’ I’m a planner. This has influenced the angle to which I view transportation matters, and as I have explained before, has really determined many of my opinions on transport. But leaving aside transport for a moment, it’s also interesting to think about why I got into planning, and where I wish land-use planning could be different – in much the same way that I wish transportation policies and priorities could be different.
I remember when I have a job interview for my very first job as a planner I got asked the question “why do you want to be a planner?” Quite an interesting question, and the answer I had to it was fairly simple: “to try and make Auckland a better city”. Having grown up here and had a rather unhealthy interest in the structure of the city from a fairly early age, it had generally always fascinated me what parts of the city I liked, what parts I disliked, and so forth. Interestingly enough, after reading a variety of planning books, writing a rather long thesis on the topic and having a great number of discussions, my opinions have rather changed over time (I used to be quite a big fan of McMansions).
As my knowledge of Auckland, and of urban planning, has improved over the last few years, a rather large question has continued to pop up in my mind. I did talk about it to quite a big extent in my thesis, and it also shows up in many good books on urban planning. The question is this: “why is it that the more effort we seem to put into planning for good urban outcomes, the results seem to be ever-worse urban outcomes?” This “paradox” can also be described as “why do we keep building crap?” When all our urban planning textbooks talk about creating vibrant, mixed-use, interesting and sustainable neighbourhoods, why is it that Auckland’s most recent subdivisions look like this?:
 If one was to look at Auckland and try to work out the most ‘interesting’ suburbs, the most vibrant places, the areas where it seems like people want to be, they really do seem to be parts of the city that were built a long time ago. Interestingly enough, they generally seem to be parts of the city that were built before we started planning everything to the last detail, parts of the city built before the Resource Management Act or even before the Town and Country Planning Act (the legislation which preceded the RMA). In fact, if one was to appear rather uncharitable, it could be argued that all this planning has just made things worse.
And yet this is not for lack of trying. In fact, planners try incredibly hard to attempt to ensure that things don’t turn out badly (note this is different to trying to make things turn out well). I was recently peripherally involved in the final details of the Long Bay Structure Plan, on Auckland’s North Shore. This structure plan, which is basically a chapter of the District Plan, runs to well over 100 pages in length, and has an interim environment court decision that is 357 pages in length. Now clearly it’s too early to tell whether this structure plan will result in a development that is interesting, vibrant and so forth (as well as ensuring its adverse environmental effects are as minimal as possible), but on recent trends one would imagine it will end up being another soulless “anywhere-ville” like most of the rest of Auckland that has been built in the last 20-30 years (with the worst bit being that things seem to be getting worse, not better). But that’s not really the point. The point is that we genuinely do try really hard to come up with good outcomes, but for some reason we seem to fail abysmally over and over again.
I suppose an easy comeback to what I have been saying so far is “just because you don’t like what has been built recently, doesn’t mean that other people don’t like it”. And I guess that’s true to some extent – as obviously people buy houses in Flat Bush, Dannemora, Wattle Downs, Wainoni and all those other suburbs I just described as soulless. But my response to that argument would be that it’s not only me that’s saying this stuff – it’s mainstream planning literature, it’s seemingly what every planner around says, and so forth. Furthermore, it’s not like people have just started saying this stuff recently. Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which is one of the most well-known and respected planning texts of the 20th century (published in 1961 originally) says this (talking about what planners have done to ‘improve’ cities):
…look at what we’ve built with the first several billion. Low-income projects that become worse centres of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Middle income housing projects which are truly marvels of dullness and regimentation, sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life. Luxury housing projects that mitigate their inanity, or try to, with a vapid vulgarity. Cultural centres that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centres that are avoided by everyone but bums, who have fewer choices of loitering places than others. Commercial centres that are lackluster imitations of standardised suburban chain-store shopping. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.
Clearly there are some differences between 1960s USA and 2009 Auckland, but I find it fascinating that for nearly 50 years now it has been clear in the minds of planners that what we’re doing isn’t working. Fortunately Auckland has escaped the worst of the ‘urban-blight’ that has affected the inner parts of many American cities, but I think in other ways we have gone through something quite similar – the massive building of urban areas that haven’t really turned out to be particularly good neighbourhoods. And yet we still plan them. And yet we still build them. What’s going on?
In my thesis, I looked at this paradox in terms of an urban sprawl versus urban intensification debate. Auckland’s planners have been concerned about the city’s sprawl for many decades now, and since 1999′s Regional Growth Strategy have had a specific strategy to ‘work towards’ as an alternative to the sprawl development that has dominated Auckland’s growth over the years. And yet sprawl still happens, with the only thing holding it back being the Metropolitan Urban Limits, which themselves are probably greatly under threat because of the effect they have on house prices (unsurprisingly, if you cut back on the supply of land for housing, but don’t make it easy enough for people to intensify, house prices will go up as housing supply goes down). The reason for this paradox, I suggested, was a sort of “collective action problem” where sprawl was individually nice for each of us – the big house, the big garage and so forth – but collectively messed things up, through congestion, high servicing costs and the loss of countryside.
Perhaps that is somewhat the case. However, when driving around Flat Bush it is a little hard to believe that even individually what has been created is some sort of excellent outcome. In other words, it’s a bit hard to believe that people would enjoy living a million miles from anywhere with incredibly poor transport connections, not having a dairy or any other shop within a 20, let along 5, minute walk from home and having the only green space nearby being a stormwater pond. I mean really, is the picture below likely to be anyone’s ‘paradise’:
 House prices tend to indicate that creating a ‘sense of community’ and being within walking distance of a range of amenities does count for something, with the higher prices in Auckland’s inner areas not just being the result of a shorter commute to work. So if people want to live in interesting, vibrant and varied suburbs with destinations within walking distance, if our planning strategies and plans also favour such outcomes, what’s going wrong here? Once again I return to the basic question – why are we continuing to build crap neighbourhoods?
I have a few more ideas myself about the answer(s) to this question, and they very much involve transportation matters. But I’m curious to hear what others think.
By admin, on July 21st, 2009 We hear a lot of talk about the need to integrate land-use planning with transport planning. Stuff like intensifying around transport nodes and developing “corridors” and so forth absolutely permeates any planning or transport document that one is likely to have a read through in Auckland. Obviously it’s smart thinking – if we can’t bring trains (or buses) to the people, let’s bring the people to the trains or buses. Properly integrated land-use and transport planning should result in reduced automobile dependency, it should result in less congestion and greater public transport use and it should result in more sustainable communities.
However, this is all just talk, and when you look around Auckland that fact gets hammered into your head again and again and again. To be honest, the integration between transport and land-use planning in Auckland over the last 20-30 years has been pathetic. There are two examples of this that have the potential to be fixed up in the future, but for now stick out like a sore thumb in terms of what happens when you don’t look at these two fundamentals in an integrated manner, but rather see them as isolated and separate concepts.
The first example is what I called “far-east Auckland”, the area that is located to the east of the Tamaki River. This includes Howick, Pakuranga, Botany, Flat Bush, Dannemora and all those other suburbs in between. This area has grown like crazy over the past few decades, and has really been Auckland’s main area of growth in the past 20 years in particular. This area is shown in the aerial photo below:
 This part of Auckland is a classic example of having a lot of land-use planning having taken place, but almost no “higher-level” transport planning. Traffic from this whole entire area gets fed into the two roads at the top left of the photo: Lagoon Drive and Pakuranga Highway, if people are trying to access the bulk of the rest of Auckland. A new interchange at Highbrook has slightly improved this situation, but in terms of roading the very limited number of arterial routes and the fact they all converge on basically the same spot leads to utter traffic chaos. I talked about this in more detail a few months ago.
From a public transport perspective the situation is even worse. There is nothing out here – almost quite literally nothing for public transport. No railway line, no bus lanes, no busway, no transport interchange. All we have are a bunch of buses that, with no priority over general traffic at all, take up to an hour and a half to link this part of Auckland with the CBD. As a comparison, it usually takes a train from Pukekohe to Britomart under an hour to do its trip.
It really does beggar belief that this situation was allowed to happen. The most remarkable thing is that this process continues to be allowed to take place. Manukau City is promoting Flat Bush as one of the main growth areas in the future, with potentially up to 40,000 people living in this part of the city. In the above map, Flat Bush would be the lower-right quarter of the map – where some recent earthworks are visible. In other words, it is miles from any decent transport links other to Te Irirangi Drive. If someone was to ask the question “how long would it take on a bus from Flat Bush to the CBD?” the answer would be pretty scary – one hour and 15 minutes according to the timetable of the 681 bus route). For all the talk about integrating transport and land-use planning, this is a pretty pathetic outcome – simply due to the fact that transport planning has been completely ignored in this particular situation. Only the Howick/Botany Railway Line can ever possibly fix this situation – so why is it not even being planned for?
The second example of terrible integration between land-use and transportation planning is far more fixable, yet it still quite telling. And that is the Northern Busway. In this situation the transport planning has been done excellently, but there has been little if any integration with surrounding land-use planning from what I can see. This may change further into the future – but there’s an amazing irony that most of the busway stations (Albany, Smales Farm and Akoranga in particular) are pretty much surrounded by wasteland. I won’t go into too much detail here about what could and should be done about this, as you can read all about it in a previous post, but once again it’s a tad disappointing to see such little integration between planning and transport.
So, how can land-use planning and transport planning be properly integrated? I think we can learn a lot from what’s happening in New Lynn at the moment. In New Lynn at the moment there is a significant trasnport redevelopment that I outlined a few days ago. This will put the railway line in a trench, and also rebuilt the bus terminal around that new train station. Crucially, in this particular situation we also see the council coming on board and having some vision about how to best take advantage of the good transport links that New Lynn has. This vision is outlined below, and much more information on this project can be found on the council page I linked to earlier in this paragraph.
 This is an excellent example of what we need to see in Auckland. This significant development project around a transport node is an integration of transport planning and land-use planning that unfortunately we just haven’t seen in many other parts of the city. Hopefully it’s a good sign of where things are heading, and we will see many other proposals like this. I also hope that this plan for New Lynn actually happens.
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