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By Matt L, on April 14th, 2012 I popped down to Manukau today to have a look through the station with the open day that AT held, here are my thoughts and some photos.
The main entrance is through a few shipping containers, not the most elegant but understandable considering there is a building being built over the station at the moment.
There are currently two ways to get down to the platform, as you can see everything is still very much a work in progress compared to what it should eventually look like on the right.
And here’s another view from the platform level, the escalators must be going in at a later date (the free sausage sizzle was nice although sadly I don’t think that it is a permanent feature)
Here is a view from the other end of the platform looking back towards the main set of stairs. One thing I was pleased with was that the shelters extended almost all of the way down the platform, only the part in the foreground of the right image was uncovered. A train was also put on doing runs back and forth along the line to Puhinui Station but one thing I couldn’t understand was why they put on they did it with one of the oldest and noisiest trains in the fleet, surely an SA set would have been a better look.
Now for my criticisms, as the picture below shows, at the bottom of the stairs there is an open area similar to Britomart. This means that if we ever woke up to idea of extending the line towards Botany we would probably be prevented from doing so due to the station design, at the very least it would be incredibly costly to fix this issue meaning it is likely to never be able to happen.
The other main concern is something I have raised before and that is the location, this is the image that greets people when they exit the station, a sea of carparks. Those carparks should eventually be redeveloped but who knows how many years away that will be.
While out there I also popped up the road to the other major AT project happening in the area at the moment, something I have heard described as the biggest PT project after the electrification works. This is the first of two multi story carparks that are being built which is intended to allow for the land in the image above to be released for development. I can understand the strategy and agree that it is better in a building than spread out at ground level but I am concerned that if the ground level parking is not removed as soon as this opens it will become expected that this is just in addition to what exists now. The problem would be than when redevelopment occurs locals will expect even more parking to be replaced. AT have also talked about some of the space in this building being used as a Park n Ride and setting aside the issue of having a Park n Ride in a built up area like this, the building is about 250m away from the station. While not that far to walk, that time has to be added to the rest of the journey time which would probably make it easier just to stay in the car and drive all of the way.
And here is an image which shows the car park in relation to the station.
By Patrick Reynolds, on April 12th, 2012 Aotea is the original name of Great Barrier Island, Motu Aotea, and the name of one of the Maori Great Waka and the harbour where it first landed. It is also the name given to the what is likely to become the most important station on Auckland’s metro system.
Anyone who has followed the arguments for the City Rail Link here will be used to us stressing the importance of a decentalised network. How a key benefit of the CRL is that it will liberate the system from its current structural focus on Britomart and all the limitations that this network shape causes. How the through-routing and the new services and stations of the CRL will unlock the existing spare capacity in the rail network that is currently dormant. These are the main ways in which this project will be transformational of Auckland’s very shape.
So it may seem a little strange to see me picking out another station as the prima donna. Well bear with me, because I don’t see how it can avoid becoming so prominent, and I don’t see this as a problem. But I am concerned that whatever we build here doesn’t limit its great potential as the primary place for people from all over the entire region to enter the CBD. In other words this station needs to be designed to be able to grow with the network.
Here is a description of the CRL station as currently planned; on this previous post. You can see it will be the most centrally sited station, the closest to the middle of town, the Universities, to the restaurants and other ‘delights’ of Sky City, Aotea Square and its cinemas and and of course all the employment and business in the heart of the CBD. So I am picking it to quickly rival Britomart for patronage from the existing lines and the next planned line to the airport. All will have direct services passing through here. It’s going to be mad busy, will flood these city streets with people and life and will therefore be an interesting design challenge.
But it is looking a little further ahead where we can see the dangers of underestimating the sheer numbers who could be using this station.
Here is the latest plan for Wynyard Quarter by Architectus. The east west spine of this plan opened last year to enthusiastic reception. Many people drove down there and parked on the currently empty sites to use the new promenade. The first of the new office buildings is currently under construction; a new headquarters for the ASB Bank.
 Wynyard-Quarter All of those new buildings and streets are planned to contain little or no car parking. Many of these sites right now are carparks, and will steadily be replaced by buildings. There is no chance at all that this new area as well as the rest of the expected growth of the city can be served by growing the numbers of cars entering into the city, as there is just nowhere for any additional roading to absorb this growth. Nor will the streets be able to take the vast numbers of extra buses that this kind of development would require if we try to rely on that mode alone either.
This area in particular is really an island cut off on its southern boundary by the extremely busy Fanshaw Street, and with nowhere to add any new road capacity. Now, we’ve got a bit of time to get this right but the fact remains that the only plausible answer to meeting this area’s needs and making the whole scheme viable is to provide the kind of system that can move thousands of people around the clock without adding further to the already full streets.
Luckily there is a plan: A new line from the North Shore to an underground station in the heart of Wynyard Quarter possibly running north/south under Daldy St, that then heads on to, you guessed it; Aotea Station.
There are various options for this line, where it stops on the Shore, what kind of train it should be. But almost all schemes call for it to meet the CRL on separate platforms running perpendicular and below the proposed CRL Aotea platforms, probably under Wellesley St. So Aotea is not only likely to be the busiest CRL Station but also to be the main point where North Shore users access the city side of their own line as well as a very busy point of transfer between lines.
Nick argued here for this line to be a Light Metro system like the extremely successful Vancouver Sky Train, because this will be by far the most cost effective system to both build and to run, especially as it would need only minor changes [and some track] to run on the existing Busway. There are ways to stage the construction of this line, first going to a bus Interchange Station at Akoranga and ideally Takapuna, later extending it up the spine of the Shore from Akoranga replacing the busway with faster trains that slip under the harbour to leave the bridge to car and trucks. Here’s one example that Josh put together last year:
 First stage of a North Shore Line: Takapuna to Aotea There are many fantastic advantages for Shore residents and the whole city with this plan. The speed and certainty that people will be able to move between these places and then onto further destinations on the rest of the network or by switching to buses will be revolutionary for Auckland. The constantly growing busway already shows that the demand is there from the Shore and the development of Wynyard Quarter and the location of Aotea Station mean that there will be no lack of demand from the city side either.
Of course crossing the harbour will be expensive but with this technology it will considerably cheaper than building any kind of new road crossing and of greater benefit because there is just no chance to accommodate any additional vehicles in the city or the local roads of the Shore.
It may seem that I am looking too far ahead. Not even the current North Shore Councillor appears to believe this is possible or desirable, let alone all the big men in Wellington. But I am certain that once the new trains and especially the CRL has transformed Auckland into a true metro city the disinterest of many in areas not currently served by rail will change to a desire to have their own access to the system too.
Really looking further ahead there is the option of extending the line out of Aotea Station and across the city under the University to link up with the Eastern Line at the old railway yards and then even out to the car jammed neighbourhoods of Pakuranga and the rest of southeast Auckland across the Tamaki River [another of Nick's suggestions]. Here’s a map with a whole range of potential options for Auckland just to show what we could do if change our priorities. The black lines may remain bus routes, and the Blue Line out west is more likely to be a busway for a good while too. While it is not clear what we will choose to do in the future it is important not to close off those choices by assuming that the conditions of today are permanent.
“]  Future Auckland Metro Map [by Josh A One thing is pretty clear and that is that Aotea Station has the potential to be very very busy and very very useful. Best not to undercook it from the start.
By Matt L, on March 19th, 2012 We do give the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) quite a bit of stick on this blog for their (predominant) roads-focus when it comes to transport matters – so it’s worth pointing out the (unfortunately, somewhat rare) occasions where they come up with some really good work. A hysterically titled article in the Dominion Post notes that NZTA have done some excellent (in my opinion) research on the massive subsidy of free parking and are suggesting a few clever tax changes to better reflect the fact that employer-provided parking should be seen as a fringe benefit.
A report prepared for the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) is recommending the government investigate changing the fringe benefit tax to include employer-subsidised parking because of concerns employers are undermining attempts to ”encourage more efficient commuting behaviour”.
More than half the country’s workforce are estimated to have access to free parks provided by their employer.
”The [tax] exemption of employer-provided parking is a widespread benefit that has a significant impact on transport choices,” the NZTA report says.
It calculates the value of employer-provided car parking in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch at around $2700 per employee and suggests the untaxed benefits total at least $675m annually.
”The availability of ‘free’ employer-provided parking in the CBDs of New Zealand’s main cities provides a direct incentive to drive to the very destinations that are most congested and best served by public transport,” the report says.
”There is a major focus on reducing congestion and increasing the use of public transport in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, yet parking provided on premises by employers is tax-free and at no cost to employees.”
It seems rather perverse that a broad-minded employer who wants to provide their staff with free public transport passes would need to pay a fringe-benefit tax, but can escape paying such a tax for providing parking – even though the real cost of providing that parking might be much much higher than the PT passes.
Such taxes are pretty common overseas:
In Australia, employer-provided car parking is taxed as a benefit but employers only have to pay it if there is a commercial car park within 1km of their business which charges more than $7 for all-day parking. That $7 threshold has been set so as to isolate the tax to urban areas where parking is valuable, congestion problems exist, and public transport alternatives are available.
”A similar amendment to New Zealand tax law would assist in aligning Australian and New Zealand tax law, and reduce the significant tax revenue loss that this untaxed benefit currently represents,” the NZTA report says.
It’s heartening to see this kind of thinking happening, and it would be great if subsidised parking was no longer a tax loophole – not so much for the additional revenue as to instead encourage employers to think a bit more laterally about how they might assist their workers in getting to and from work: levelling the playing field and perhaps leading to more employers providing public transport passes at part of remuneration packages – especially once the “real HOP Card” rolls out and the same card can be used for travel anywhere in Auckland.
You can read the whole NZTA report here.
By Stu Donovan, on March 19th, 2012 In last week’s tirade I somewhat rashly called for a boycott of NZ’s two major supermarkets. My primary issue is that they favour drivers over other users. People who drive to the supermarket get free parking and fuel discount vouchers; people who choose other transport modes get diddly squat.
A number of insightful comments (thanks to everyone who took the time!) were made, which I have tried to summarize below:
- Simon observed that the supermarkets’ transport policies would favour the wealthy, who are more likely to drive to the supermarket, over low-income households, who are more likely to find other ways to get there. And I agree – by subsidizing drivers our major supermarkets are (albeit unintentionally) taking from the poor and giving to the rich.
- Obi suggested that the reason supermarket’s subsidize drivers is because they spend more and hence result in “economies of scale”. While this seems reasonable at first glance it falls down in practise; if supermarkets did indeed benefit from “economies of scale” then why would you not offer discounts to any visitor who spent up large, rather than indirectly targeting only a proportion of them (i.e. drivers)? Stated differently, free parking and fuel vouchers seem to be an extremely poor way of targeting lucrative, big-spending customers.
- Andrew ironically observed that both of Auckland’s new central city walk-in supermarkets (Countdown on Victoria Street and New World Metro on Queen Street) offer fuel discount vouchers. He quite reasonably suggested that coffee vouchers would be more attractive (although I’d suggest that the discount would need to be more than 4c/litre).
- Nick R wondered out loud about why the major supermarkets don’t see home delivery as an opportunity to cut significant costs from their business. Home delivery, he observed, can be operated from relatively low-cost distribution centres, rather the prime commercial locations required for normal supermarkets. They would also avoid the need for so many in-store staff and check-out equipment.
- George D somewhat rightly noted that supermarkets provide oodles of free parking in order to comply with the minimum parking requirements imposed by local councils. This is true, although I don’t see supermarkets pushing councils to remove these requirements either. Until they do I’d suggest that they’re at least guilty by implication.
- Geoff suggested that home delivery may cause more driving in situations where the number of distribution points is small and the density of deliveries is low. This is true, but is simply a question of scale, rather than an inherent inefficiency to home delivery. I’m fairly confident that if the number of home deliveries grew then it would be more efficient than everyone driving their own car to the supermarket and home again.
- Sean tried to inject a modicum of calmness into the boycott. He observed that fuel discount vouchers are but one of the “tricks of the trade”. He also suggested that the density of deliveries is important, and that these densities are only achieved in Singapore and Hong Kong. Interestingly he suggests that these countries have another advantage aside from density: Many people in these countries employ service staff who are on-hand during the day to receive the deliveries..
Towards the end of the comments thread Patrick posted a wonderful photo (he’s got a lot of them) of a billboard that is advertising a new supermarket opening in Ponsonby, which I’ve re-posted below simply because it seems to perfectly capture the sentiment that motivated my original post.
I want to finish but standing up to the idea that fuel discount vouchers are a somewhat trivial issue. My reason for harping on about this is simply that some things are worth fighting for because of the sentiment they embody, rather than because they are in themselves extremely important. That’s also why I strongly resist drivers who run red lights and who park on footpaths; and that’s why I’m angry about fuel vouchers. I’m fighting to change the supermarkets’ “default setting” from one where they assume everyone drives, and thus needs free parking and fuel discount vouchers, to one where the recognize that many of their valued customers don’t drive. (NB: “Default settings” is an importance theme in the field of behavioural economics. For an excellent and highly readable introduction to this way of thinking try the book “Nudge“, by Thaler and Sunstein).
The other reason I think it’s worth persisting with a supermarket boycott is that there is often value in setting objectives that are difficult but that can be worked towards incrementally. It’s for this reason I did not feel guilty going to the supermarket this morning. It’s also why I stopped at the fruit and vege store on the way to the supermarket, so that I minimize the amount of money I spent at the latter; take that Pak n Save. Aside from trying to avoid supermarkets altogether, you could also try the following actions:
- Shopping at the new downtown supermarkets that do not provide free parking. Thus you are voting with your feet insofar as you are avoiding car-friendly stores; and
- Emailing the supermarket operators to let them know that you don’t appreciate free parking/fuel vouchers.
On that note, here’s some links to online feedback forms for Foodstuffs and Countdown. Best of luck with your own little “consumer resistance movements” – may they blossom and grow in whatever way you wish.
By Stu Donovan, on March 11th, 2012 Over the last few years I have become increasingly frustrated by the attitude of NZ’s major supermarkets to transport issues.
Right now Progressives and Foodstuffs are spending big money on free parking, fuel discounts etc for people who drive to their stores. Meanwhile, those people who arrive by any other transport mode get absolutely nothing. Nada, zilch, etc. Even worse, you know that the cost of parking and fuel discount vouchers are being partly picked up by people who don’t drive.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not looking for any particular favours; all I want is for the supermarkets to stop using my money to subsidise the economically, socially, and environmentally damaging travel choices of drivers. If they can’t do that then yes, I am looking for some favours.
Here’s an email exchange I recently had with someone at Pak n Save, let’s call him “Stickman”, on the related issue of home delivery – which went along these lines:
Stuart: Is Pak n Save planning to introduce an online shopping/home delivery service anytime soon? I live in Parnell, don’t own a car, and can’t easily get to a PnS store by public transport so I end up shopping at Countdown more than I would like. If you offered online shopping/home delivery then I would definitely use it.
Stickman: The PAK’nSAVE mantra is to bring you the lowest food prices in NZ. This is achieved by improving operating cost efficiencies so we can pass savings on to our customers. The (stick)man-power that would need to go into maintaining a database of all of our products online would ultimately result in a higher average cost of groceries for our customers.For this reason, we don’t currently offer an online shopping service. While the service would be handy, ultimately we think it’s more important to keep our prices as low as possible and we hope you agree  .
Are Pak n Save for real? Can they seriously preach about needing “operating cost efficiencies” to keep prices as low as possible, while at the same time passing on the costs of free parking and stupid fuel discount vouchers to all users, irrespective of how they travel? Are cost-inefficiencies and higher prices OK so long as they flow from drivers to non-drivers? Indeed, Pak n Save seems to be saying exactly that. As you might imagine my response to this was reasonably curt; paraphrasing as follows:
Stuart: Thanks for your reply. I don’t agree with your position for two reasons. First, Pak n Save can charge for home delivery (in various ways) to recoup the costs from users, rather than pass them onto other shoppers. Countdown, for example, charge a $15 home delivery fee (which reduces the more you buy). Pak and Save could also try charging higher prices for online items, so as to internalise the online processing costs you mention. I’m sure there are other business models through which Pak n Save could recoup the costs of online shopping from users. The second, more important, reason is this: Pak n Save already cross-subsidises people who drive, by providing free car-parking and fuel discount vouchers. Thus, the company is already taking on higher costs on behalf of drivers that must be covered by people who use other transport modes (such as walking, public transport) to access your stores. So your stated commitment to keeping prices as low as possible (by not cross-subsidising online shopping) does not seem to wash given the way that drivers are treated. From where I’m sitting it seems hypocritical, especially given that the value (in terms of opportunity cost) of car-parking is not insignificant.
To their credit, Pak n Save did respond to my second email and in the process noted that their owner-managed structure made online shopping tricky, which I’m sure it does. But that does not explain why drivers should get a free ride at my expense. Note to Pak n Save: How about picking up the cost of people’s bus/train fares etc when they buy stuff at your stores? If you’re prepared to give a little to drivers, then it’s only fair to give a little to non-drivers. We’re people too.
My long-running encounters with these irrational and intransigent supermarkets has prompted me to act: I’m calling for everyone who reads this blog and who cares about sustainable transport outcomes to boycott the major supermarkets. I know it’s going to be difficult – but all I’m suggesting is that you spend as much money as possible at stores that don’t seek to subsidise drivers for their travel choices. Maybe then the big supermarket chains will get the message that they need to treat non-drivers fairly.
And the best way to get that message across is to vote with you feet; literally.
By Patrick Reynolds, on February 16th, 2012 If ever you make the mistake of reading the comment stream on the average Herald article about Auckland you will find this kind of thought from people like Rodney of Howick who states:
For some reason [Mayor] Len Brown seems convinced that there will be more businesses started in the CBD and more people wanting to live there. Sorry Len, but cities grow outward and not inward.
Well Rodney is wrong both in general about cities and in particular about Auckland over the last decade or so. Cities grow in all sorts of ways and recently Auckland has been growing inward and upward [a direction that Rodney seems to be ignorant of] and hasn’t it been fantastic. I recently covered the issue of inner city living in Auckland so in this post I want to illustrate some of the great changes that we have seen in Auckland’s public and commercial world in order to both contradict this kind of thinking and to celebrate these changes.
 Auckland Art Gallery But I also want to make an additional claim about Rodney’s opinion. He’s right. Well, he was right. Auckland, like almost every other city in the western world grew outward in the second half of the last century away from its old centre. There was a consistent and unstoppable move away from inner-city areas for both habitation and commerce throughout this period. The very terms urban and inner-city came to freight negative connotations and lower value was given to the existing structures of the old city centres,
‘Clapham? Surely not! I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s terribly urban, so urban,’ with her feelings centred on the word urban. I wondered if I had mistaken the meaning of urban, if it now meant more than ‘of the city’.
-Janet Frame Angel At My Table p282 original emphasis.
Of course some cities suffered from this phase more than others. Auckland’s inner suburbs were bisected for motorways to feed these new suburbs and the city itself very nearly completely expired through flight and separation. This transformation was the result of public policy, especially as expressed in transport decisions, but that in turn did reflect the spirit of the times [although it was not universally supported- see Paul Mees Transport for Suburbia for good coverage of this]. The move to the suburbs was in, and the destruction of the old city was consistent with the brave new world of modernism which had an exhilarating commitment to the bold fresh start on a blank canvas. And why not, after the appalling wars that seemed to be the culmination of the old world order.
 Detail of the new Auckland Art Gallery by FMJT + Archimedia The most affected cities of this phase have become know as ‘doughnut cities’ because they now have a hole instead of a centre. Detroit is the poster child for this, but Christchurch is another good example. A weak centre ringed by low density suburbs with busy shopping malls sitting in a sea of carparking. The surviving examples of its Gothic Revival past made the old centre like a fairly lifeless full size museum. Of course it now has bigger problems and in fact the chance to fix this imbalance, but it is not clear that it will.
 Takutai Square above Britomart Station Auckland’s centre was largely saved by the failure of those that wanted the University to leave town for a poorly connected greenfields site at Tamaki. Unlike the Christchurch CBD which lost its University, it was largely the growth of the University along with AUT through the barren years of the 1980s that just kept the city going until the tide changed.
 North Wharf by Fearon Hay Architects And a tide it is. We are now in a new phase with a complete new set of economic, social, environmental, and spatial imperatives. Which are in the process of transforming our lives in ways that are just as profound as the one that began with the Great Depression and wasn’t really in full flight until the 1950s. [See Richard Florida's The Great Reset for more on this]. Although these changes are not evenly spread nor always obvious in the midst of them happening.
 Ironbank by RTA Central to understanding the postwar revolution is the rise of the car and huge spatial changes that we made to accommodate it. Likewise it seems that we are currently in an age where the penetration of the auto-centric life has reached its limits and a new order with different patterns of movement are beginning to assert themselves. I am not claiming that we will suddenly abandon all driving but rather its centrality to our lives and the dominant role it has in shaping our communities and routines will diminish. This will take time and like the last big shift will require effort and investment in alternatives, and of course will be contested by those who benefit from the old way, or just identify with it.
 North Wharf at Wynyard Quarter An important driver of this change, and also a result of it, is the desire for a more livable and human-centred spatial order, and perhaps ironically, one better connected to its constituent parts, its suburbs. While the centre is crucial to this dynamic change [See Ed Glaeser's The Triumph of the City], it isn’t at the expense of the hinterland but rather it is a transformation and an intensification of everywhere. It should mean the triumph of the local, a rise in difference, as well as in interconnectedness. And a world where the word urban has reverted to its older connotations, more likely to imply sophistication and growth than decline and despair.
 The Imperial by Fearon Hay Architects  The Imperial Except for our friend Rodney, or others like him whose views were formed last century and are stuck there. Or others living eslewhere in the country for whom Auckland is a distant or unwelcome thought. And this is the world view that the current government holds and is determined to force on us all. That they are clearly fighting against the new zeitgeist that is, like the last one, both global and probably irresistible is cause for optimism. But it also underlines how frustrating it is when we at last have a Council that speaks for the whole city and that ‘gets it’ only to have yesterdays world view being clung to by a dominating authority.
 from Fort Lane, one of the new shared spaces; until recently only used for parking vehicles and trash My photographs here are intended to show that the transformation of Auckland is well underway and not just a theory or the dream of some urban designers at the Council. But a real phenomenon being invested in by companies and public bodies and being successfully occupied by a full range of businesses, institutions, and individuals for all of our benefit.
 A great example of successful transformation: The Auckland Art Gallery These are the amenities and pleasures, business and work opportunities, that are the fruits of intensification and improved interconnection. This is the city we can have if we invest in new forms of movement and liberate the city from being so dominated by the demands of the car. Maybe even Rodney may come to town on occasion and see that ‘up and in’ is the 21st century way and for the simple reason that growth in these directions will help make us happier, healthier, and indeed wealthier.
 New or improved uses for old building are the best way to be able to keep them. Better than a new car park?  Adding exciting new layers to the city can only be afforded through more intense use
 New and old businesses co-existing in new ways: Making the city one big shared space
By Patrick Reynolds, on January 30th, 2012 A plainly daft piece on the proposed Auckland Plan by Bill Ralston recently appeared in the NZ Listener. In it he claims, completely without any reason, that the plan sets out to demolish where he lives, as well as every other desirable part of Auckland in the name of instensification. This is simply untrue. It is true that the Plan hopes to encourage Auckland to continue to become a more intensive city, but not by demolishing the very best bits, or even very much of it at all. In fact it is decidedly half-hearted about containing the spread outwards, even proposing 140,000 new detached houses be built in the next 30 years under one scenario. All on what is currently productive and attractive distant countryside, and all to be served by endlessly and expensively rolling out new services: From the current 385,000 detached houses to 526,000! Did you actually read the thing, Bill?
In any case, intensification is clearly a matter of degree and the areas proposed for the kind of high density high rise growth that so alarms dear old Bill [but of course not everyone], is all carefully allotted to currently empty or underused commercial ‘brownfields’ sites on transport corridors in areas like the CBD, Glen Innes, and New Lynn. Not Bill’s neck of the woods. Other areas are intended to be encouraged to move from low to medium density. Bill’s place isn’t on this list either.
Ironically, in light of this reaction, the type of intensification that would go a long way to both accommodating Auckland’s growth and greatly improving our quality of life is about trying to help more of Auckland more closely resemble Bill’s very own suburb. His suburb is, in fact, a role model for how much of Auckland ideally could be. But that isn’t by repeating the thing that Bill thinks his ‘burb is all about, the appearance of the buildings, but rather about how they are organised. Not architectural design, but urban design. Really, how?
Freemans Bay is, along with St Mary’s Bay, Herne Bay, Parnell, Devonport, Northcote, Ponsonby, Grey Lynn, and Mt Eden, a highly sought after and therefore expensive bit of old Auckland. So it is worth asking what is so good about it?
Well most of the buildings are old. That’s it isn’t it? Most people love old houses, with their mature trees, and in Auckland that means Victorian and Edwardian houses, usually detached wooden dwellings. Unlike Sydney, Auckland isn’t old enough to have Georgian buildings and also unlike Sydney or Dunedin there wasn’t the resource of stone or even much brick to compete with the pillage of the native forests that our forebears felt so entitled to use so completely. Furthermore, in a reversal of the trend of the second half of the last century we have recently been rediscovering the advantages of these close-in old suburbs. So instead of looking on these areas as slums and bulldozing them wholesale in order to build motorways as we did from the 1960s we have recently been turning houses like this one: More and more into houses like this one:
But that isn’t the whole story is it? Properly understood three factors make Freemans Bay such a great place to live, and only one of them is the irreplaceable age of the structures. And this is important because while we can’t time-travel and build real Victorian houses again we can take the best urban design features from these areas to improve what we build next, and even fix other parts of the existing city with these ideas too. The three essential features, in no particular order, that make Freemans Bay so desirable are:
1. Physical Heritage
2. Proximity to the centre
3. Population density
All the things that you may like about Freemans Bay flow from these; for example, great cafés and shops? They are a function of the quantity of people around and the desirability of the place, which in turn is because of the density of the housing and the proximity to the centre of town. Retail businesses need enough customers, and specialised ones need an even higher number going by because their appeal is, by definition, narrow.
But hang on, waddaymean population density?, this is just a suburb with detached houses and some shops isn’t it?, same as Dannemora or Botany? Well it isn’t high density but it is medium density and is considerably higher than most more recent suburbs. And here’s how: As this post by Admin shows, when looked at in detail you can see that the narrow streets and painted shiplap conceal a clever spatial order that maximises private space yet retains public charm. It is in fact this spatial order, and its resultant density of population that sustains the local businesses and other amenities all at close proximity.
Of course old buildings add texture and charm, but it is important urban design features and not architectural ones that make the real structural differences. Let’s look at Bill’s favourite café, mentioned in his article: Agnes Curran. Yes it is in a building pleasingly made of plastered brick and the door to the rooms above are surrounded by Georgian style decoration, lovely. But let’s look at everything else that makes this a really successful streetscape and business. The café occupies a tiny space about the size of two car parks, it is right up to the generous footpath, a footpath separated from the traffic by mature Plane trees [with a new one recently added on the right], the trees also accommodate a limited number of on-street car parks. A small apartment building to the left of the shot is smack up the boundary with the cafe and the footpath, and there are other levels of accommodation above retail spaces on the main road. Thus there is an extremely tight integration of the residential and commercial functions of this neighbourhood; so everyone walks, no need to drive when your destination is already right there. Here it is from above: The cafe is in the alley between the grey and reddish rooves at bottom left. Occupying the space that would have to be given over to off-street parking were this a new building- by current council regulation. Note that the houses are closer than is currently allowed in new subdivisions, and that their garden space is all together in one piece at the rear of each house. Small, but all usable, and private. And Ponsonby Rd is, by Auckland standards, relatively well served by public transport, especially in the form of the frequent new Inner Link bus service, connecting this place to the CBD, the universities, the hospital, everything really. It is easy to see that this is quite an intensely built place, but also pleasantly leafy, and is in fact at the intersection of two pretty busy roads; Ponsonby and Franklin. How can it be of such density but still be so pleasant, it must be the design of the buildings? Well that is of course important, but how much they appeal to you is really a matter of personal taste, no, it has much more to do with what is not visible in this picture. To show what that is lets have a look at a cafe in a more recent part of town: Dunkin Donuts at Botany Downs courtesy of Google [sorry but I'm not going there]. And from above: Well in fact there’s a whole lot of food outlets on in this image, a KFC, a seafood place, as well as Dunkin Donuts. And yup they are all pretty nasty new buildings, built to a price and without any conviction that they mean to stay. But also note there are no houses or apartments of any kind here and no one walking. But there is the one amenity that is almost entirely absent from the earlier scene. This is a place rich in carparking. Viewed from above or from street level it is clear that this is a place entirely made for the movement and storage of cars. Yes you can argue that that what most distinguishes the natures of these two places is the age and design of the structures, but it is also clear that the spatial organisation is at least as important a difference. Put simply the first is designed for people and the second for cars. The first has a higher density of humans and the second of machines. The first, of course, commands much higher values and is where Bill wants to live. And the first, while more expensive to buy into, is actually cheaper to live in, because the intensity of the place means the costs of movement are much lower. It is a place that you can easily function without a car at all for example [As local resident, Bill, says in this article].
But of course the people living Freemans Bay do still use cars, but unlike those that live in the these new areas, they don’t have to use them just to get to their local café or other common local amenity, like schools, workplaces, or bars. They walk more and they use public transport more. Why? not because they are cleverer than the people in Dannemora but because their area was designed for those choices to be the most obvious, most productive, and most enjoyable things to do. And we can spread more of this simple genius to other parts of our city, even Botany, if can just reverse the insane auto-centric planning priorities of the last fifty years. This means putting people at the centre of the spatial organisation of places. It means repealing the rules that insist that the car must be catered for first. And it means for many of our primarily residential areas mixing the living and working and playing in the kind of intense proximity that Bill enjoys in Freemans Bay.
And it also means that we must provide systems of movement that do not devalue the very places they are meant to serve. Which of course means fast, frequent, smart, public transit. Something lacking in the newer suburb.
Furthermore, if we can get those planning settings right and are able to encourage the kind of spatial organisation that Bill enjoys so unconsciously in Freemans Bay, it is highly likely that we will see the design of the individual buildings in these places improve significantly, because increased intensity of humans also means increased intensity of economic activity. And, of course, because it involves unlocking the land and the resources currently tied up so unproductively in providing so much amenity for vehicles.
We can have Freemans Bay’s qualities of urban design in other places with contemporary design and technologies, after all Freemans Bay isn’t all old buildings and is all the better for it. It isn’t a museum. Here are two quite different and award winning recent detached houses there, The first by Marsh Cook: And the second by Malcolm Walker: Freemans Bay also has contemporary buildings by Mitchell + Stout, Stevens Lawson, Fearon Hay, Andrew Patterson, and more. Along with council pensioner flats, town houses, and apartment buildings.
And remember, while The Plan doesn’t envisage the core of Freemans Bay changing much at all, it does for some other underperforming areas of Auckland. And as the picture below of Freemans Bay in 1877 shows change is always possible, and can be a very good thing indeed……… Anyway, why shouldn’t more Aucklanders get the chance to enjoy their neighbourhood as much as our friend Bill Ralston enjoys his?
By Matt L, on January 25th, 2012 This post is a little different in that I don’t have a solution to the problem so am throwing it out to the readers to get their thoughts.
In the last few days there has been a bit of a stoush played out on the front of the NZ Herald between a man that was towed and the towing company. The story on Monday was about how he parked in a carpark that was clearly marked as a towaway zone, got towed and managed to get his money back but that isn’t the reason for this post, I wanted to look at why he got towed in the first place.
Here is what he himself had to say about it:
Dan Dwyer, a lawyer, saw the warning signs when he pulled into an empty parking lot on Dominion Rd but figured he’d take the risk given it was 9pm and he was ducking into a video store for just a few minutes.
“I thought about towing at the time but thought I’d only be 10 minutes … I thought we’d get away with it.”
But, when he returned with his movies, he found the Toyota Corolla he had borrowed from his flatmate was gone.
The story then goes on to explain about how he got his money back and he has this to say:
This was nine o’clock at night and there’s not a car in the yard … I don’t know why you can’t park there and nip in quickly.
As the title of the post asks, what can we do to change peoples attitudes to parking, why is it that people feel they can park their vehicle where ever there is an open space and how do we change it. We have seen similar issues with the new shared spaces as well as the Wynyard Quarter that has led to there often having to be staff patrolling the area to prevent this from happening.
On Tuesday we heard back from the boss of the towing company with a very similar response (note: I had intended to write this post before I had seen the response from the towing company)
Mr Burrows, also general manager of the First Recovery tow-truck firm, said it was frustrating some motorists felt they should get a pat on the back for the lack of respect they showed for others’ private property.
“At the end of the day, people shouldn’t even have had to put a sign up to say you shouldn’t park here.
“It’s always someone else’s fault. There was a sign there; he [Mr Dwyer] chose to take the risk. For every time he’s been caught, there’s 500 times he hasn’t.
“Why do people expect to park at someone else’s property and not pay for it?”
So what can we do?
By admin, on January 17th, 2012 I noted a few posts back that I’m reading the book “Edge Cities: life on the new frontier” by Joel Garreau, at the moment. The book is broken up into chapters that focus on a particular place, although within each chapter is a wide variety of information about how edge cities function, why they exist and details on particular examples of them.
Of particular interest in the chapter on Detroit is an explanation of how key a role parking plays in the structure and shape of edge cities. In fact, parking seems to be the driver for pretty much everything about how the Edge City is shaped and how it functions – interesting to note when you consider how planning generally ignores parking to a large degree (aside from making stupid rules that are backed by little logic).
The developer’s rule of thumb is that in Edge City, there must be one parking space per every worker. Because one employee uses about 250 square feet of work space and each car requires four hundred square feet to be parked, there has to be about one and a half times as much space to park the cars as there is to nurture the drivers.
If the developer does not provide that much parking, he will have grave difficulty getting bank financing. His project will not be judged commercially viable. In fact, in many Edge City jurisdictions, the developer is required by law to provide that much parking. The lawmakers don’t’ want people to park on streets and lawns, either. Their experience, too, has led them to believe that one worker will equal one parking space.
Essentially, with the ‘everyone will drive to work and therefore everyone needs a parking space’ motto that defines the Edge City (and Auckland’s parking policies) we find ourselves in the rather bizarre situation of providing 50% more space to the storage of vehicles than we provide for the actual undertaking of economic activity which occurs within these places. The ratios seem to hold true in recently developed commercial centres in Auckland, like Manukau, Botany Town Centre and Albany. In these places, parking is the dominant urban feature – presumably because both our planning rules have required it to be and there is the feeling that each worker must be provided with a parking space (for retail areas, I’m guessing this is translated into each shopper).
Given the assumptions above, if we provide parking through multi-level structures or underground, we can increase our densities – but this comes at a pretty high cost. Auckland Transport is effectively trying out this approach in Manukau, by building parking structures to encourage the freeing up of surface parking for development – at an enormous cost.
The book continues:
…the cheapest option a developer has is this. Build a one-story building. Let it cover 40 percent of the ground. That leaves 60 percent of the land to be covered with a simple parking lot. No grass or trees or sidewalks. But the right ratios at the least expense. Which explains why an awful lot of cheap development looks the way it does.
This kind of construction guarantees that all buildings and people will be about as far away from each other as physically possible, surrounded by fields of asphalt. This in turn guarantees that the area so built will be an aesthetic and functional sump.
Places like Westgate, Smales Farm, Apollo Drive (near Constellation Drive) as well as the usual suspects listed above come to mind when you read out this description. The developers have simply followed the parking requirements and created what makes most financial sense. All other planning rules have become effectively irrelevant and you end up with this:
But not every Edge City follows this simple formula – cheapest isn’t always best:
That level of development is only the cheapest kind, not necessarily the most profitable. Buildings laid out like that do not command much rent. If the land in that Edge City is expensive, and the developer puts a small, cheap building on it, he will go bankrupt.
So he may decide he needs to bring in more revenue. To do that, he would want to build more office space on the land. This would require him to make his building wider or taller or both.
This sounds easy, but it present a serious problem. More building kicks all his cost calculations into a new orbit. He needs more parking to match the increased amount of office space. But he has run out of land. Therefore, he must build a multilevel parking “structure”. That will cost more than twice as much per parking space as his initial calculations. That levitates his cost, which requires that he build his building larger still – in order to break even. This, in turn, requires more parking, and so the spiral goes.
What all of this means is that to get a floor-area-ratio (FAR) of more than 0.4 (which, in urban areas and particularly town centres, is very low) life gets really tricky for developers if they are reliant on providing every single person who travels to the area with a dedicated parking space. Look at most of the new retail and office areas of Auckland and you can see the effect of this: more space dedicated to storing cars than to actual buildings. Relatively low employment densities. Poor agglomeration economics. And so forth.
The book doesn’t make this conclusion, but I think that the numbers above highlight the importance of improving public transport – so we can grow our employment numbers and density without ending up in the ugly spiral of parking costs and building size. If we can get more and more people to town centres via ways other than driving, perhaps the biggest benefit we create is through the freeing up of land for more productive uses than car storage. Of course our parking rules need to change as well, because even now we generally force an over-provision of parking (partly by requiring each individual use to provide for its own parking requirement and not allowing the sharing of facilities).
I wonder if the economic benefit of reduced land requirement for parking is measured in the cost-benefit analysis of public transport projects? Similarly, one wonders whether the economic disbenefit of roading projects which encourage more people to drive to an area and park in it, are captured. With parking at the crossroads between land-use and transport policies, it seems to be utterly critical in shaping our urban form.
By Stu Donovan, on January 14th, 2012 Matt L has just dissected AT’s recent announcement regarding the expansion of the Albany Park and Ride.
Park and ride is a vexed transport planning issue: It’s very popular with middle-class commuters and as a result tends to receive a lot of public/political support. On the other hand, P&R’s merits are often not well understood. Is P&R really the boon it is made out to be?
Let’s consider the arguments usually put forward in discussions on P&R; turning first to the downsides:
- P&R requires considerable tracts of land. For this reason it tends to be very, very expensive to provide within the urban area, unless opportunistic (read CHEAP) land parcels are identified (more on this later). Given the cost of land and the general constraints on PT funding in Auckland, it is quite reasonable to ask whether P&R in urban locations represent value for money – compared to other possible PT improvements.
- The second issue is a logical extension of the first: Because P&R requires so much land it squeezes out opportunities for intensive land use development, often in the very locations that have good PT access. This second issue is very important, because it means that P&R may actually generate relatively few *additional* trips per sqm, above and beyond what would be generated by the intensive land uses that would exist in the absence of the P&R.
- The third major issue with P&R is that it competes with other modes to provide access to PT stations. Surveys of the Northern Busway have shown that approximately 50% of users previously used local buses. The message is that providing free P&R can encourage people to drive down the road and park, when they previously waited for a local bus (which is typically going to run anyway, i.e. relatively low marginal economic costs).
- The final major issue with P&R is that it concentrates vehicles on what are often strategic locations in the road network. In the case of Albany, the provision of 1,100 car-parks within the town centre itself represents about one full lane of traffic. By concentrating vehicle volumes at these locations, large amounts of P&R may soak up capacity in the surrounding road network and cause localised congestion.
Just to re-cap the points made above: 1) P&R can be expensive to provide (because of the land that it occupies); 2) may generate little additional patronage (above and beyond what we would get anyway); 3) tends to compete with other modes of access to PT stations (which are often more cost-effective); and 4) can cause localised congestion.
Given these issues you might reasonably ask under what circumstances would you ever want to develop P&R? The answer is that P&R can be useful where:
- Alternative means of PT access (primarily local bus services) are ineffective. In these situations P&R can help to focus PT demands to a level that supports a modicum of PT service. This tends to be outside the main urban area, where land is cheaper to provide (especially where you can identify opportunistic land parcels, such as sites beneath high-voltage power lines or in flood prone areas, as is done for some P&R sites in Vancouver).
- It is priced appropriately. Charging people to use P&R generates revenue from users and mitigates two of the issues noted above. Namely, the cost (or subsidy) of providing P&R goes down, while also reducing the degree to which P&R competes with other (substitutable) modes of access. Pricing P&R really just levels the playing field with other possible ways of getting to the PT station. It can also reduce the congestion caused by P&R.
- The PT station has been provided in advance of more intensive land use development. Here P&R simply becomes an interim land use, until such time as development is ready to occur. At this point the land on which the P&R sits can be sold and the costs recovered. This practise of “landbanking” is not a bad strategy, especially where the interim P&R allows PT services to build to the point where they support relatively intensive development.
Given these pros and cons, as well as the general public/political pressure, it is perhaps not unsurprising that PT agencies struggle to find an appropriate role for P&R. In my experience most cities have relatively ad-hoc approaches to the development P&R.
So where to from here? Well, I thought I’d round out this post with a few takeaway P&R messages that I’ve collected during my years working as a transport consultant working in New Zealand and Australia:
- The party rarely lasts – P&R is usually an interim activity. P&R should be viewed less as a permanent feature of the PT network and more as an interim activity that is redeveloped at some point in the future. Rose-tinted press-releases (such as that released for Albany) create the illusion of a never-ending feast of free P&R and build a public rod to beat the backs of future decision-makers (as an aside, there is a general need for transport agencies to better manage public/political expectations).
- Ain’t no party like a policy party – the development of P&R should be governed by policy. Experiences in cities overseas has highlighted the issues that may arise with ad-hoc P&R development. In San Francisco, the (private) operators of BART had a pig of a time trying to redevelop and/or charge for P&R decades after the development of the system, even though the land on which the P&R sat was wholly privately owned.
- No party is that cool – P&R is just another form of PT investment. Ultimately, P&R is just another way of getting people onto the PT system. As such, any proposed investment should be compared against other possible uses of that money.
Following these three P&R ‘party rules’ can help ensure that investments in P&R are a boon, not a boondoggle.
*** Disclosure of interest: Stuart Donovan is manager of MRCagney’s Auckland Office, which provides transport and planning consulting services to public and private sector clients throughout the Asia-Pacific region. The views expressed in this article are his alone; they do not necessarily represent the views of MRCagney, its employees, and/or its clients. ***
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