Councillor Brewer continues to play politics with the CRL as reported in this morning’s Herald; here. I guess this isn’t a surprise as he wants the mayor’s job and Brown’s mayoralty is identified with the CRL. Brewer has in the past made the now common National Party claims of ‘supporting’ public transport while going out of his way to attack any real steps towards meaningful change in this direction. Here is the wonderfully vague waffle on his website:
Promoting transport solutions
Gridlock traffic has long been the number one complaint about Auckland. With the roads only set to get busier, the Auckland Council will need to find sustainable transport solutions, while making sure our neighbourhoods are protected.
Cameron has worked effectively with the New Zealand Transport Authority, the Automobile Association, rail authorities, public transport providers and advocates. He is committed to leading the charge on addressing local transport issues.
This is after the article congratulating himself and other retrogrades like Ken Baguley for getting the bus lanes on Remuera Rd downgraded to uselessness.
But enough on political game playing; there really is nothing duller, the interesting point is not that Brewer is going to spend the next year painting the CRL as black as he can but rather that his current complaint exactly expresses the reverse of what I believe the Council ought to be doing with the CRL. Here is his big idea:
Orakei councillor Cameron Brewer yesterday said it was crazy to spend $112 million in the coming financial year on land purchases for the rail loop when it had no funding certainty.
Well of course buying property is a really exchanging one asset for another, so not really ‘crazy’ unless a particularly poor deal is made. And here’s the thing, transit stations transform land use and value positively, so the Council is in a strong position to make good deals through the purchases around the CRL. Two of the financially most successful transit systems in world, in Hong Kong and Tokyo achieve this success through the very act of investing in and developing property around subway stations. A recent article at Atlantic Cities on the Tokyo system begins with this observation:
Twice during my recent trip to Tokyo, once at Shibuya and again in a suburb to the west of the city, I exited a subway platform only to find myself swaddled in a massive department store. This was the Tokyu store.
Really innovative councillors, especially from the supposedly business savvy right, should be pointing out the investment opportunities for the Council Property CCO especially around Aotea station and at the Downtown Centre that the CRL offers. The article continues:
…the Tokyu Corporation. Established in 1922 as a regional development company, Tokyu today is a massive “rail-based conglomerate” of nearly 400 companies that employs 30,000 people, only a tenth of which work directly for the railway. Beginning in the 1930s Tokyu surrounded its hubs with commercial and retail buildings and sold land near its intermediate stations to universities at good prices, to create reliable residential (and thus passenger) corridors.
My compliant with the Council is not that it shouldn’t buy property where it intends to change that property’s value through transport initiatives but rather that the Property CCO seems rather lacklustre and lacking in sufficient energy to maximise these opportunities. I guess it doesn’t get any such lead from the Council itself.
No surprise as we certainly don’t seem to be blessed with much quality from the C&R ticket. I am most disappointed with Councillor Fletcher, to whom all Aucklanders owe a debt of gratitude for the construction of Britomart, as she is reported as observing:
C&R leader Christine Fletcher said the time was not right for a big budget and a big spend-up.
Well Sydney built much of its metro in the Great Depression, and in many ways it is the perfect time, interest rates are low, especially for local authorities, the construction industry is largely idle, the city and country needs investment in game changing infrastructure, and property can be easily bought. And we are only talking about getting ready to start the real work later which gives a few years for things to change in Wellington.
Instead these local politicians seem to all be taking the lead from the visionaries currently in charge in Wellington; the big idea is to invest in nothing, construct nothing, change nothing, and hope that somehow through all this inaction that there’s a brighter day around the corner.
So my question to Mr Brewer, the man ‘committed toleading the charge on addressing local transport issues’ other than not investing in Auckland’s future, where is your charge heading? Gridlock I guess.
There’s that word again, the thing Auckland needs: Transformation. How altering our transport investment habits is the way to achieve it; lessons from London, should be interesting:
It won’t be enough for the council to just say where it would like development for the expected growth of Auckland to take place will be, it will have to actively facilitate growth to take place in the most desirable areas. How could it do this? Well it could do a lot worse than by starting here:
This is an award winning analysis of how to accommodate Melbourne’s expected growth along transit corridors by Professor Rob Adams. It is well worth reading the whole document, it is not overly technical, well illustrated, and short!
Melbourne faces the same issues as Auckland, only more so; expecting to double it’s population from 4 million to 8 million by 2050. The stresses of this are enormous. This study expands on earlier work based around the rail corridors so therefore is only focussed on the road corridors, however the principles are the same; build along the transit corridors and preserve the character of the existing dormitory suburbs. It concludes that it is possible to accommodate 2.4 million extra people on about 6% of the city’s land. It starts by considering the additional costs of continuing to spread:
The need for change there as here is obvious:
The authors identify the areas where it is appropriate to facilitate growth:
And areas to maintain the current quality:
And importantly the scale of development is firmly controlled in the areas of stability but higher density building is actively facilitated in the proscribed areas:
There is a great deal of detail around where and how to achieve this in the study. The scale of the problem in Auckland is smaller, but so is the available land. Wouldn’t it be great to see if this approach is possible here? Of course we’ll also have improve the standard, reach, frequency, and quality of the city’s public transport as well.
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.
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.
As regular readers will know, I’m a huge fan of the shared spaces we’ve seen rolled out around Auckland’s city centre (and in New Lynn) over the past year or so. It’s fantastic to see pedestrian freely milling around streets that were once the sole property of vehicles, but also to see a regular “eyes on the street” value that traffic can provide, if you compare shared streets to pedestrian malls. In terms of practical implementation, shared streets also seem to be simpler (if more expensive) to make happen, as property access, deliveries and so forth can still be retained. Elliott Street has been a particular success in my opinion (although this photo is taken on a day when the street was closed to cars, generally Elliott Street seems to work the best of the lot): A key part of the shared space philosophy is to reduce the amount of signage and general “road clutter” that normal streets have in spades. Obviously, the distinction between the footpath and the street is also removed, so that all users of the street are put much more on a “level pegging”, having to think and negotiate their way through the space.
An interesting blog post from the UK “As Easy as Riding a Bike” blog, analyses shared streets in Britain (which are really taking off in popularity), looking at the question of what makes some shared streets work really well, but others work not quite so well. The blog post makes the argument (and I haven’t followed the issue close enough to really know whether it’s a completely fair accusation) that shared space proponents say the biggest problem with our existing road environments (in terms of their friendliness to pedestrians and cyclists) is all the signage and separation between different users:
What is causing the real ‘impact’ on the urban environment is, apparently, the engineering measures – not the dozens of motor vehicles clogging up the space.
The problem I have here is that a symptom – the clutter, the rules and the control – is being treated as if it is the problem itself, the root cause of the decay of our urban environment.
Now while I accept that excess clutter and demarcation can be an issue, per se, Hamilton- Baillie is missing the point. There is a correlation between street clutter, rules and control, and the decline of the quality of our urban environment – this much is true. But fundamentally, it is the emergence of the motor car, and its gradual dominance of our street environment, that is responsible both for the declining quality, and the increase in rules and regulations. It has also eroded the natural sharing of spaces that we see in historical pictures, or today in places where the motor car does not exist, or is only present in low volume.
So we have to be very careful not to assume that simply stripping away the clutter, rules and signage of our present-day streets – returning them, essentially, to a nineteenth-century street – will result in a civilized environment, because that clutter did not arise spontaneously. It emerged, as I have said, in response to the motor vehicle, and it is quite clear, to me at least, that if you don’t take action to tame the motor vehicle – not to get rid of it, but to tame it – then you won’t see a civilized street, the kind in which vulnerable users are genuinely happy to mingle, which is surely a prerequisite of a street being shared.
I think this is a fair and well made point. It is the volume and speed of vehicles which determines the pedestrian friendliness of a street as much as the physical design of the place. We are seeing this with the different shared streets around Auckland’s city centre: Elliott Street has very low traffic volumes and high pedestrian counts so therefore pedestrians dominate and the place feels like a “proper” shared space. Fort Street has much higher traffic volumes and pedestrians tend to stick to the sides of the street, meaning you don’t really see the interaction and pedestrian domination of Elliott Street. Fort Street is still a million times nicer than it was before its upgrade, but it hasn’t quite succeeded (yet) to the same degree as Elliott Street has.
East Street in Horsham is shown as a successful example of a shared street – because of its low traffic volumes:
Crucial to the success of this shared street are the restrictions placed on motor vehicles entering it. Only vehicles delivering disabled passengers/drivers to a couple of dedicated parking spaces, and loading vehicles, are allowed down East Street – severely limiting the number of vehicles it has to cope with.
New Road in Brighton similarly discourages traffic – not through outright bans, but through clever design making it an impractical and “silly” through-route for any prospective vehicles: One issue I’ve had with the Darby Street shared space is that it’s actually a really attractive ‘rat-run’ for vehicles travelling from Queen Street to Victoria Street as they can zip down Darby Street and avoid the traffic lights. So you see quite a lot more vehicles using Darby Street as a through route than you would if, say, it was one-way in the other direction and therefore not any use as a rat-run (I can’t really see vehicles from Wellesley to Queen bothering to use Elliott and Darby instead of just Queen Street as the rat-run is much longer).
The blog post goes on to talk about how the ‘balance of power’ between pedestrians and cars in their ‘unregulated interaction’ on a shared street is very important:
Moving on from how rules – or their absence – affect the way in which streets are shared spatially, we can consider how streets are shared in a kinetic sense; how its users, of whatever mode, interact with each other.
Shared space advocates are, again, fans of a lack of regulation. The analogy Ben Hamilton-Baillie often gives is of an ice rink, or a camp site…
…These are environments with no formal rules or regulations, yet with people (and in the latter case, vehicles) moving around and interacting with each other quite happily, and in reasonable safety. Surely we could apply the logic of the campsite, or the ice rink, to our streets? Why can’t we interact freely with each other on our streets the way we do in these other unregulated environments, by getting rid of the rules and regulations that differentiate a street from a campsite?
There is a superficially attractive logic in operation here, but it rapidly falls apart when we start to consider the details. A campsite is, typically, a field with lots of pedestrians in, with perhaps one or two cars actually driving around at any one time. Shared space advocates argue that despite the absence of a regulatory framework, these environments are quite safe. This is obviously true. But they go one step further, and argue that it is the absence of the regulatory framework itself that makes the environment safe. Add more rules about how to drive, they say – treat drivers like idiots – and they will behave like idiots. Putting up lines about where to drive in the campsite might a good example – drivers would probably drive faster, and perhaps with less caution, within those lines, for instance.
So far as it goes, this is plausible. But let’s imagine a parallel example – exactly the same field, but this time, instead of it being full of people on foot, milling about unpredictably, this field is now full of cars being driven about, in just as unpredictable a way. And instead of just the one or two cars you might find being driven in a typical campsite, we now just have one or two pedestrians, inching their way through this field full of unpredictable cars.
Is this field just as safe for pedestrians as a ‘typical’ campsite? If safety was only about the absence of regulation, then it must be – but I don’t think that is true. You wouldn’t feel as comfortable letting your child run around in a field full of cars driving around unpredictably as you would be for them to do so in a field that was like a genuine campsite; likewise an ordinary ice rink is very different from, say, an ice hockey game. There are seven foot Kazahks wearing body armour, whizzing about. Even if they’re being careful, that, again, is a very different environment to introduce your child into.
My point is that power relations are an important component of safety; even if we assume that all those drivers moving their vehicles around the field are experts, or the giant ice hockey players will be more than capable of avoiding your offspring, there is an unequal distribution of risk, that will quite obviously affect how the more vulnerable parties will behave in that environment.
So once again we see the point that numbers (of both pedestrians and vehicles) really does matter here. For the space to feel like it’s properly giving pedestrians equal status to vehicles, we need to ensure the number of vehicles does not dwarf the number of pedestrians. Some analysis done to inform the development of the Exhibition Road shared space in London highlighted the importance of keeping traffic volumes low – saying the following:
…if vehicle flows are greater than 100 per hour, pedestrians will not use the vehicle zone as a shared space
Another study, by Transport for London, made a similar conclusion:
A study undertaken by TRL in 2003 for TfL’s Bus Priority Team indicated the limits to which pedestrians in London may be prepared to share a surface with traffic. This study found that below flows of 90 vehicles per hour pedestrians were prepared to mingle with traffic. When flows reached 110 vehicles per hour pedestrians used the width between frontages as if it were a traditional road, that is the majority of pedestrians remained on the equivalent of the footway and left the carriageway clear for vehicles.
The blog post probably takes a more negative view of shared spaces generally than I do (perhaps because of a fear they’re being introduced in inappropriate places) but overall I think the point is very well made. An extremely important part of making shared spaces work is to limit traffic volumes – so that the ‘balance of power’ between pedestrians and motorists gets tipped further towards the pedestrian. I don’t necessarily think that the vehicle per hour numbers are a fixed rule though, as surely that depends on the concentration of pedestrians. If you have an extremely busy pedestrian street (like Queen Street, for example) then pedestrians are still going to dominate the space, even if you had more vehicles than the seemingly magic “100 per hour”. As we see more shared streets rolled out across Auckland in future years, I’m hopeful that these issues are taken into account – to ensure that all shared streets can be as successful as Elliott Street is.
The blog post goes on to talk about how the ‘balance of power’ between pedestrians and cars in their ‘unregulated interaction’ on a shared street is very important:
I must admit to being quite a map geek, or perhaps more accurately, a geography geek in general. Which is why one of my favourite Christmas presents this year was the excellent bookMaphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks, by Ken Jennings. The book is fantastic, running through many oddities about the wonderful world of maps.
The book talks about this amazing Youtube video, for example:
One of the other fascinating things the book discusses, is the little town of Baarle-Nassau – sitting in the Netherlands (or Belgium, we’ll come to that). Zoomed out, there doesn’t seem to be too much that is strange about the town, sitting near the borders of the two countries: However, if you zoom in, you see a weird mess of grey lines (indicating national borders):
The book Maphead describes the situation:
It’s made up of no fewer than twenty-six separate pieces of Belgium sitting, thanks to a complicated series of medieval treaties between two warring dukes, in the middle of the Netherlands. Some of these little bits of Belgium have little bits of the Netherlands inside them, leading to an impossibly intricate border that divides some village homes in half between the two nations. Your nationality depends on where your front door is, and residents have been known to ‘emigrate’ by moving their door every time the tax laws change. When bars and restaurants in the Netherlands close, landlords just move their tables onto the Belgian side of their establishment and keep on serving.
An aerial photograph of the area (yellow lines show borders) highlights just how weird the situation is. Little bits of some fields fall into a different country than the remainder of that field:
There are some other strange borders, perhaps most notably the Northwest Angle and Point Roberts, but I think this is the weirdest. And most interesting.
Last week I was invited to appear on the Asian Radio Show on RadioLIVE to discuss the topic of what New Zealand can learn from public transport in Asia. Having spent a large part of this year travelling across Asia by public transport I guess I can now consider myself something of an instant expert on the topic, or at least I’ve had plenty of experiences to curry an opinion on the topic. This post summarises and expands on the panel’s discussion, but if you’re interested the original segment can be heard here:
Asia has some fantastic examples of efficient metros, high speed lines, mega bus systems, and even maglevs. I could write pages and pages about some of the great systems I’ve tried that we could try to emulate here. While these are obviously a lot different to what we have in New Zealand, the really key differences are at a strategic level. So what are the differences between transport here and in Asia, and what we could learn or do differently as a result?
Normalcy
Chinese high speed rail
In Asia public transport is an immediately accessible and functional part of life and used by a large proportion of the population (together with walking and cycling) for daily transport, in same way that driving is considered completely normal here in New Zealand. Public transport is usually the normal way to get around in Asia, rather than something that is reluctantly provided to those who are too unfortunate to drive. Surely ‘normalising’ public transport as something used by regular people is the first thing we can learn from Asia.
Cost efficiency
In general Asian countries have to deal with either limited wealth per capita, large population pressures, or in many cases a combination of the two. This means that out of necessity Asia must adopt transport and planning outcomes that are efficient in terms of money and resources, unlike Europe which perhaps has the luxury of more money to spend per person. While New Zealand has a small population and relatively high wealth, our transport costs are among the highest per person in the world.
Should we be squandering such a large proportion of our wealth just to get around each day? The good point was made that maybe we should look to Aisa rather than Europe for future transport cues. Given the current state of New Zealand’s economy, perhaps we could take a page out of Asia’s book and look to efficient and cost effective public transport to lower the drain on our economy that comes from expensive and wasteful transport policy.
Ideology and politics
One very important point brought up in the panel was the somewhat peculiar fact that public transport in New Zealand is weighted with political ideology, while in Asia there is no such partisan division. In Asia public transport is politically neutral, it is accepted by all political groups in the same non-ideological way that we in New Zealand treat other infrastructure such as stormwater drainage or electricity supply.
Yet in New Zealand public transport is always framed in terms of leftist ideology and aligned with socialist, authoritarian thinking, while private transport is the domain of right wing capitalists. It is simply wrong that in our country the Minister of Transport writes an editorial response to his detractors and speaks in terms of ideology, ‘freedom’ and how good honest Kiwis chose to live their lives in “the real world”. It must be perplexing for a business visitor from Singapore or Hong Kong to discover that in New Zealand buses and trains are only for jobless sandal wearing hippies, while wasting time and petrol on a congested publicly-funded motorway is the domain of successful freedom loving capitalists!
Anyway, before we descend further into the black hole of partisan politics I will suggest the number one thing New Zealand could learn from Asian transport is to drop the ideological vitriol and accept that public transport can be just as useful to the right wing as the left.
Labour costs and regulation
One thing not touched on in the radio discussion is the issue of labour costs and regulation, I would like to discuss it here because operating and compliance costs can create critical differences which we need to bear in mind when making comparisons between countries. In most of Asia the labour market is so broadly spread you still have things like pedicabs and jitneys, where one operator can move only one or a few people at a time and still make a living (albeit a poor one). To be blunt, most Asian public transport can afford to be highly labour intensive because there is a large, poor working class who are willing to work long hours for a pittance to make ends meet. In New Zealand we have a high standard of living, a high minimum wage and consequently high labour costs. Even on minimum wage a bus driver in Auckland would make more in a day than a Chinese driver makes in a week, or a Cambodian driver makes in a month.
A Thai Songthaew
The other issue is the lack of regulation around operation and safety standards. While not quite the case in the more developed economies of east Asia, in the developing nations basically anything (and everything) that moves is employed as public transport. Not long ago I took a ‘public bus’ across the northern part of Bali that consisted of a large van with no side window glass, no passenger side door at all and a hole in the floor big enough to lose a daypack in! Obviously here they are happy to trade safety and security for low maintenance costs, but we cannot do the same in New Zealand.
I’m really making this point because one often hears the opinion from neo-liberal commentators that we should follow the example of the jitneys and songthaews of Asia in the western world. What they propose is we dump our expensive regulated buses and trains and replace them with a loose network of small privately run transport vehicles operating a flexible, demand responsive transport service that picks people up from anywhere and take them more or less directly to their destination, a sort of shared taxi-van system.
I guess that kind of thing is attractive to a card carrying free-marketeer because it requires no regulation or co-ordination from local government, it provides a ‘flexible freedom’ of travel according to the passengers needs, and it is in the spirit of private capitalism. However what such commentators quietly glaze over is the issue of labour and operational costs. In parts of Asia you can have a small ute with a few wooden benches in the back operating a profitable private transport service (assuming the driver works twelve hours a day, seven days a week of course!). But in New Zealand such a service could never be vaguely profitable for a private operator if they were required to maintain our vehicle safety standards and labour conditions.Also I have found if you’re not going close to where the driver is headed you don’t get a lift! This means that in practice these types of services end up operating a pretty regular route anyway, sending the argument of flexibility and demand responsiveness out the window.
So how to make the change?
To finish up one final question was posed to me in the radio panel: the supposedly difficult question of how to shift people out of their ‘Kiwi’ cars and into more efficient ‘Asian’ public transport? To me this needn’t be a difficult question at all because the answer lies in simple logic: people will generally use the transport that is easiest for them; they will do whatever is cheap, convenient and actually gets them where they need to be on time.
Speaking generally, people drive for transport in New Zealand because we have spent the last seven decades or so focussing our transport policy and funding almost entirely on providing for private road transport, while all but disassembling the public transport system and marginalising walking and cycling in favour of cars. Auckland used to be world leaders in public transport use, but we then planned and funded an all but completely car based transport system and have got exactly what we asked for: an almost entirely car dependent city.
The point here is these isn’t any innate cultural or genetic reason why Kiwis drive all the time and Asians don’t, it is simply people doing what is easiest in light of the conditions and options they have. In my opinion the idea that New Zealanders have a ‘love affair’ with cars is more of a justification than a cause. In reality the relationship is ironically closer to that Asian institiution of arranged marriage.
Indeed, to force New Zealand drivers out of their cars would be quite a task when (in most cases) driving is the only realistic option and public transport is in relation difficult, expensive and ineffective. Now I’m not suggesting that driving is inherently better, but rather that New Zealand public transport is usually so poor and marginalised that taking the car is the lesser evil (despite traffic, fuel costs, parking and all). The fact that half the commuters to the Auckland CBD each weekday get there without driving shows that Kiwis will happily take public transport when it works for them.
So the answer is of course that we don’t have to ‘force’ drivers into public transport at all. If we continue to change the planning and funding of our transport system in a way that makes transit an effective and realistic option, then car drivers will make the shift themselves… regardless of whether they are Kiwi, Asian or whatever.
Right now, several U.S. cities are scheming to shut down major freeways — permanently. In the push to take back cities from cars, this is what you’d call throwing down the gauntlet.
The drive to tear down the huge freeways that many blame for the inner-city blight of the ’60s and ’70s is one of the most dramatic signs of the new urban order. Proponents of such efforts have data to show that freeway removal is not at all bizarre, that we can return to human-size streets without causing a gridlock apocalypse. And that may be true. But pulling down these shrines to the automobile also feels like a bold rewriting of America’s 20th-century urban script: Revenge of the Pedestrian. This time it’s personal.
Quite a few freeways have been removed from American cities: typically through a process by which the original one was so badly maintained (or of relatively poor design) that it fell down (or was pushed by an earthquake or other natural disaster), and the best thing agreed upon to do was to simply not rebuild it. The Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco is a classic example of this:
Few urban design initiatives can instantly transform a large swath of a city like building (or unbuilding) a freeway. San Francisco saw this in 1991, when, ahead of the tear-down trend, the city demolished the bay-adjacent double-decker Embarcadero Freeway after it was damaged in an earthquake. Today, the area where the Embarcadero once stood has evolved from a forbidding dead zone to a bustling waterfront and tourist magnet. Standing there now, you’d never guess it was once the site of 16 lanes of through-traffic.
However, it seems that increasingly the option of removing freeways is being given closer examination – even when they haven’t been damaged by natural disasters or fallen down for one reason or another.
Now, other cities want their own Embarcadero miracle. Tony Ortiz lives in Crotona Park East, the Bronx neighborhood made famous when President Carter visited its burned-out ruins in the ’70s. Ortiz, an 84-year-old, white-haired bantam rooster of a man, moved here from Puerto Rico in 1946, and remembers life before the Sheridan Expressway. The sidewalks were “busier with people,” he says, standing in front of his six-story building a block from the expressway. He and his friends boxed in the streets, where he once proudly knocked one of them out cold. But after the Sheridan was built, Ortiz mainly remembers a neighborhood in decline and the stench of arson.
Today, the area, while still poor, has bounced back considerably. And now, New York is studying plans to tear down the Sheridan, which runs along the Bronx River right past Ortiz’s window, and replace it with a stretch of waterfront parkland. It could include swimming pools, soccer fields, a 30,000-square-foot recreation center and housing similar to that which was bulldozed to make way for the freeway back in 1958.
“But what about the congestion?” - I hear you all cry. Well that wasn’t a problem for the Embarcadero because it was a half-finished and not fully connected structure anyway. But it seems that many US cities have found they completely overbuilt roads in the mid 20th century, many of which aren’t used particularly much at all these days, even in huge cities like New York.
Where do these grand plans leave the lowly car commuter? In pretty good shape, as it turns out. In case you haven’t been on an urban freeway lately, allow me to blow your mind: They don’t work like they’re supposed to. They’re quick to deteriorate, clogged at all the wrong times and offer little versatility when problems arise — one collision can make 10,000 people late for work. In fact, the dirty secret of freeways is that they don’t reduce traffic, they create it. Ask any urban planner: Give people more roads, and more of them will drive. Studies show that, in most cases, removing a freeway adds only a few extra minutes to commute times. At the same time, most of the freeways currently on the chopping block are underused anyway. (The day I drove to the Bronx to meet Tony Ortiz, the Sheridan was empty enough to walk across.) The drivers-versus-transit-riders stereotype doesn’t hold, either: A study by Renne’s students found that in New Orleans, the vast majority of locals want the Claiborne Expressway gone — including 50 percent of the drivers who use it regularly. “No one’s advocating for putting [the freeway] back” in Milwaukee now that it’s gone, says Norquist, and getting rid of it “killed forever the idea of putting a freeway around the downtown.”
This is a classic case of induced demand, and I do with that any urban planner would be able to understand this concept. From my experience both planners and (most particularly) traffic engineers struggle to understand the concept of induced demand. Traffic modelling systems don’t seem to be able to comprehend its existence and the cost-benefit analysis process presumably ignores it because it’s too difficult.
There doesn’t seem to be too many prime candidates for demolishing motorways in Auckland, somewhat unfortunately. However, the proposals to remove the Lower Hobson Street viaduct would have many similarities – although on a much smaller scale. Step by step, hopefully we can follow what enlightened US cities are doing and start to claw back a bit more of our city from the car.
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.
This blog post has some excellent comparisons of public transport patronage across New Zealand and Australian cities. While all the cities looked at are of vastly different sizes (and therefore have vastly different patronage numbers), through comparing growth rates and per capita patronage, we can really have quite a good look at how Auckland stacks up against these other places. This is particularly of note when we think about the recent comparator city study, which showed how poorly Auckland does perform when compared to other relatively similar cities. While we know that, what’s perhaps most interesting is to see whether we’re improving, whether we’re improving at a rate faster or slower than these other cities and in what parts of the system are we doing well (or not so well).
Looking at overall patronage growth, you can see that Southeast Queensland (SEQ), Perth and Melbourne have had the biggest increases, when compared to their 2001/2002 levels. This is particularly impressive for Melbourne, which is a very large city and has a slower growing population (in percentage terms) compared to Perth and SEQ.
Auckland comes out of this pretty well, having increased public transport patronage by close to 50% over the past 10 years. Christchurch was also doing pretty well, up until the earthquake hit.
Comparing rail patronage growth of the different cities has the complication of Auckland coming off an extremely low base 10 years ago, which means that we pretty much head “off the chart” in percentage terms: Perth has done well here, but perhaps the standout performer is Melbourne, which has added nearly 80% patronage over the past decade. This is extremely impressive because it was not coming off a low base, with well over 200 million trips a year being carried on their rail network.
Southeast Queensland is the standout performer for increasing bus patronage over the past decade. I’m guessing that Brisbane’s busway has a significant role in this statistic, but it would be interesting to know a bit more about why they’ve out-performed everyone else to such a great extent: Auckland has done fairly ‘middling’ on this count, although given the big 20% increase in the very first year, it’s disappointing that over the next 8 years we only managed another 10% increase in bus patronage. I must say overall I’m surprised as how poorly most of the cities have done with increasing bus patronage.
While total patronage levels are important to a degree, increases can just reflect population growth, which means that a certain proportion of the increases is just “standing still”, and is unlikely to provide the benefits that we might hope from increasing the number of people using public transport. This is why per capita data is so important, and it’s interesting to see how the various cities have performed on a per capita basis over the past decade:
Auckland’s figures are a bit hidden amongst those for Christchurch and Canberra, but show a slow but steady increase from just under 40 trips per person in 2000/2001 to what looks like nearly 50 trips per person in 2010/2011. Trips per capita is also twisted a bit by how you define the population of the area you’re talking about (should we really use the whole of the Auckland region’s population when much of it isn’t really served by PT at all?) But it seems that a consistent measure has been used over time, so the trends rather than the actual numbers can be thought of as the important aspects.
Yet again Melbourne stands out as being particularly impressive, especially as it already had pretty high figures. Perth’s numbers took a big jump two or three years ago when the Mandurah Line opened.
Finally a couple of interesting historic graphs show how all Australasian cities patronage levels, and per capita levels, have followed fairly similar patterns over the past century:Auckland’s historic figures are pretty similar to these.
Overall, I think we can take a little bit of heart from the figures, which show that Auckland has enjoyed patronage trends over the past decade that are generally in line with increases in other Australasian cities – aside from the very high rail growth in percentage terms (due to the extremely low base). That said, I think there are hopefully some things we can learn from Melbourne, which has managed to significantly boost its per capita patronage, and from Brisbane which has had a big bus patronage increase.
A key part of the shared space philosophy is to reduce the amount of signage and general “road clutter” that normal streets have in spades. Obviously, the distinction between the footpath and the street is also removed, so that all users of the street are put much more on a “level pegging”, having to think and negotiate their way through the space.
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