You would think that calculating, and analysing, the density of a city would be a fairly perfunctory mathematical task, and would tell us useful information about the nature of that city. As I noted in this previous blog post, perhaps the most challenging aspect of calculating a city’s ‘average density’ is working out where its boundaries are. For Auckland, there are a variety of boundaries and therefore a variety of average densities. But even that approach can lead to some surprising results – as pointed out in Paul Mees’s book “Transport for Suburbia”, New York and Los Angeles have a similar density, so do Vancouver and Las Vegas. Yet each city has a significantly different level of public transport usage. Mees puts this down to the quality of public transport provision being more important than density when it comes to ridership, although equally one could also start asking questions about how we’ve measured density – especially as saying Los Angeles and New York have the same density just seems to be so incorrect.
The issue of density is looked at in detail in this excellent article by Eric Eidlin, a community planner and Sustainable Communities Partnership Liaison for the Federal Transit Administration in San Francisco. He questions whether average density over the whole metropolitan area is really a particularly useful figure when assessing how ‘dense’ or ‘sprawled’ in reality an urban area is. He presents the conundrum we face when looking at density:
Many people …tend to think of “sprawling” cities as places where people make most of their trips by car, and non-sprawling cities as places where people are more likely to walk, cycle, or take transit. This is why Los Angeles, which has more vehicles per square mile than any other urbanized area, and where transit accounts for only two percent of the region’s overall trips, is considered sprawling, while the New York urbanized area is not. We also know (or think we know) that places where people frequently walk, cycle, or take transit tend to have high population densities, and for this reason we tend to view low density as a proxy for sprawl. But as it turns out, the Los Angeles urbanized area—which in both myth and fact is very car-oriented—is also very dense. In fact, Los Angeles has been the densest urbanized area in the United States since the 1980s, denser even than New York and San Francisco.
These facts present a bit of a mystery. If one were to measure sprawl by measuring a region’s average level of Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT), Los Angeles would certainly qualify as sprawling. But if we measure sprawl by population density, LA would not sprawl at all. In fact, it would be the least sprawling urbanized area in the country. How can Los Angeles be so dense and yet also exhibit so many characteristics associated with sprawl, including high levels of car travel (both in per capita and absolute terms) and low rates of walking, bicycling and transit ridership?
A useful way we can start deconstructing the issue of density is to think of two A4 pieces of paper, each with 100 dots on it. On one piece of paper each dot is equally spaced, while on the other piece of paper the dots cluster together in places and are very widely spaced in other places.
Overall, both pieces of paper have the same average density of dots. But really, their distribution is very different. If each dot was to represent 100 people and the paper represented a city, you would have vastly different cities even though their overall density is the same. This is explained in the article:
Sprawl is a regional attribute, so when observers point out that LA is denser than New York, they are not talking about the cities of Los Angeles and New York. Rather they are talking about the urbanized area, which is essentially the combined area of the cities and their suburbs. The other part of the answer is that density by itself—the simple ratio of population to square mile—is not a very useful way to measure sprawl. What matters is the distribution of density, or how evenly or unevenly an area’s population is spread out across its geographic area. If we look at the density distribution in Los Angeles, we notice that its suburbs are much denser than those of other large U.S. cities, such as New York, San Francisco or Chicago. These high-density suburbs compensate for the comparatively low density of LA’s urban core, and, in so doing, increase the average density of the area as a whole. In other words, Los Angeles has both a relatively high density and a relatively even distribution of density throughout its urbanized area.
So, if we continue to use our “dots on a piece of paper” example, Los Angeles would be much closer to the evenly spaced dots example, whereas New York has a huge concentration of dots in its inner area (Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn and parts of Queens in particular) and then quite widely spaced dots further out (outer Long Island, north into New York state and west into New Jersey).
It’s pretty clear then that ‘average density’ over a whole urban area doesn’t really tell us too much about the characteristics of that urban area. But how might we examine density in a more helpful way? The article, thankfully, provides us with some options:
One approach is to measure the extent to which the population density varies across an urban area. Using a statistical tool called the Gini coefficient, we can get a sense of the degree of variation for different urban areas. The Gini coefficient is based on the Lorenz curve, a cumulative frequency curve that compares the distribution of a specific variable (in this case, population density) with a uniform distribution that represents perfect equality.
Using such a measure to compare Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco gives us the following results:
You can see, in particular, how much more of New York and San Francisco’s population is concentrated in a small proportion of land area than in the case for Los Angeles. This is detailed further:
In Los Angeles, 40 percent of the population live on the most densely settled 10 percent of land. By way of comparison, roughly 66 percent of New York’s population, and 67 percent of San Francisco’s, live on the most densely settled ten percent of the land. By looking even further to the right of the graph, one finds that 25 percent of the population in Los Angeles lives on the densest 5 percent of the land. By contrast, 46 percent of San Francisco’s population, and more than 50 percent of New York’s, live on the densest 5 percent of the land. The overwhelming majority of New York and San Francisco’s residents live on a very small portion of their urbanized areas’ land. But this is much less the case in LA.
A second way of measuring density more helpfully is through what’s called ‘perceived density’. This weights the density of an area by the proportion of the area’s population that lives there, effectively measuring the average number of people around each resident of the city. The method of calculation is helpfully described by the example of the fictional city of Metropolis:
Metropolis has a central core of 100,000 residents who live on ten square miles of land and a suburb with 10,000 residents who live on 100 square miles of land. The standard density of Metropolis is 1,000 people per square mile. However, since 90 percent of the population—those who inhabit the core—live in a very dense environment, this standard density number has little bearing on the way most residents experience their city. By giving the core’s density a weight of 90 percent and the suburb’s density a weight of 10 percent—weights that are equal to the respective proportions of the city’s residents that inhabit each part—we get an adjusted density of 9,100 people per square mile, a number that more closely approximates the density at which the average resident of Metropolis lives.
Comparing the different US cities under this ‘perceived density’ measure gives the following results: Under this measurement system we see New York really standing out from any other city in the USA. Los Angeles is still fairly high up there though, in third place. And our comparison with public transport and walking – while better than average density – still doesn’t exactly align up perfectly.
A third measurement system is also included in the table above, the density gradient index. This is described below:
Bradford pushed the concept of perceived density a step further by developing the density gradient index. The density gradient index, which is the ratio of perceived density to standard density, is an indication of the unevenness of population distribution—or, to use Bradford’s terminology—a measure of “clumpiness.” Table 2 also shows the density gradient index for each urbanized area.
Overall, when comparing the different measurements of density with public transport use, we get the following:
Bradford did a regression analysis to analyze the relationship between perceived density and commute mode (the final two columns of Table 2). He found virtually no association between standard density and the percentage of workers commuting by public transit or walking, but a strong association between perceived density and commuting by transit or foot, and an even stronger association between the density gradient index and the percentage of workers commuting by transit or by foot.
What does that mean for Auckland? Well, until we can analyse our population distribution, perceived density and density gradient index, who knows whether we’re really at the same urban density as Sydney – like the average density statistics will tell us. The best graph I have seen so far is included below, and suggests that perhaps Auckland’s density is a little bit “Los Angeles” compared to Sydney’s “New York”. It would seem that if we’re thinking about land-use policies to boost public transport, walking (and presumably cycling) use, then it may be useful for the “lumpiness” of Auckland’s population density to increase – obviously particularly around our rapid transit network. Fortunately, that’s what most of our plans seem to propose.
As I noted last week, there was a “Smart Transport Conference” held at parliament jointly by the Green and Labour parties. Below are three videos showing talks from that conference.
Green Party MP Gareth Hughes:
Transport Consultant (and parking guru) Julie-Anne Genter:
I went to see Australian transport academic Paul Mees talk on Friday night about transport policy issues, in particular focusing on debunking the various arguments used against Auckland having a better public transport system. He was in Auckland after giving a presentation in Wellington at the Smart Transport conference that I discussed in this post. With the huge interest in transport matters in Auckland in particular, his visit has generated quite a bit of media activity. Including this article in today’s Herald:
Auckland has been lambasted by an Australian transport expert as one of the world’s most “car-biased” cities.
Paul Mees, who for 10 years has portrayed Auckland to his students at Melbourne universities as having worst-practice transport systems, said the city would rank top of a world league table for motorways.
“But if you compare its public transport with the best in the world, it’s right down the bottom, even with the improvements that have already happened,” he said from Wellington, where he spoke to a conference sponsored by the Labour and Green Parties.
“The area which should have priority for improvement is where there is the biggest gap between the current situation and global leaders.”
I’ve read both of Paul Mees’s books over the past few years: A Very Public Solution and Transport for Suburbia. Transport for Suburbia in particular gives a really detailed assessment of Auckland’s transport history – which I have touched upon in various previous posts. The key point to note from Auckland’s transport history is how our car dependency was very much a policy decision, not a natural outcome.
“For half a century Auckland has pursued the most car-based transport policy of just about any city in the developed world, so it would be amazing if the car didn’t dominate the travel patterns of Aucklanders,” he said.
“But if you asked Aucklanders if they are happy that they have to drive everywhere as public transport is not really an option, they will tell you they are not happy.”
He said most people in his “pin-up” Swiss city of Zurich once travelled to work by car, but they now had superior public transport.
“The question is not what people are doing when they haven’t really got a choice – the evidence is that the very modest public transport upgradings that have happened already in Auckland have been flooded by passengers.”
At Friday’s talk Mees said that if the only thing you ever do as a Government is simply provide for existing patterns, no matter whether they’re desirable or not, then really what’s the point of bothering with being involved in politics? I thought this was a pretty good point.
The Herald article has an amusing end to it though:
The National Road Carriers have, meanwhile, greeted Friday’s Waterview announcement with a call for other projects such as an east-west corridor between East Tamaki and Onehunga to be accelerated.
“Waterview’s completion cannot come fast enough, but other critical road projects also need to be moved along as fast, if not faster,” said executive director David Aitken.
He said completing the western ring route, in which Waterview will be the final link, would see far more freight travelling on local roads between the Southern Motorway at Mt Wellington and State Highway 20 at Onehunga.
I see already that plenty of different organisations are becoming terrified of the prospect of the Waterview Connection being seen as the completion of the motorway network. Sigh.
While government transport policies over the past few years have been nothing short of utterly depressing, what has been a lot more promising has been the thought opposition parties have put into creating smarter transport policies. An example of this is a conference put together by the Greens and Labour, related to smarter transport outcomes, that will be on later this week in Wellington. A full agenda of the conference can be read here, and is outlined below: For those who can’t make it down to Wellington, Paul Mees will be speaking in Auckland on Friday evening, details below:
Come and hear Dr Paul Mees, author of ‘Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age’ and Senior Lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University talk about our public transport future.
That should be quite interesting. I wonder what Mees thinks of the GPS?
I have recently got hold of (for the second time) Paul Mees’s first book: A Very Public Solution. While it has many similarities with his most recent book, Transport for Suburbia, there are early parts in A Very Public Solution which give a good overview of the “transport situation”, setting the scene for why we need better public transport and – the main focus of the book – what better public transport might actually entail. One thing that Mees discusses, and which fits well into quite a few thoughts I’ve had recently about the way we assess transport projects, is our obsession with doing everything we can to fix congestion – and how that might not actually be the best approach to smart transport policy. This paragraph sets the scene quite nicely:
…congestion remains the focus of most professional transport planners. This focus is reflected in the cost-benefit analyses used to justify new transport infrastructure, which assess benefits almost exclusively in terms of travel time reductions. Even when transport planners attempt to consider other factors, their traditional training often constrains the results. The Environmental Protection Authority in Victoria commissioned a study of ‘transport externalities’ in 1994. The consultant road engineers who conducted the study estimated the annual cost of congestion in Melbourne as $2031 million, compared with $86 million for road noise and $45 million for cancers caused by vehicle emissions.
While cost benefit analyses here in New Zealand are slowly being tweaked to reflect more wide-ranging issues than just travel time savings, this obsession with making it quicker (or at least attempting to) for people to travel from A to B still provides the bulk of the justification for most transport projects. If your project doesn’t generate significant travel time savings, then it’s unlikely to fare well in its cost-effectiveness assessment. Indeed, Mees points out that congestion may actually have benefits for a number of people:
It may actually improve the lot of some residents, since slow-moving traffic makes less noise and is less intimidating for pedestrians and cyclists. And although there may be more accidents on congested roads, they will be less severe, owing to lower speeds.
My fundamental interest in transport comes from its interaction with our urban form. Generally the greater priority we give to shifting vehicles through a place, the more we degrade that place. Obviously we can’t have every street in the city being pedestrianised, or a shared space, so we need to find a balance between the “through” and the “in” – but the fundamental flaw of our current way of measuring transport projects is that we only look at one side of this equation: the “through”.
If we think of a project like turning Nelson and Hobson streets back into two-way streets, we would be tilting the balance away from shifting traffic through these streets and focusing more on making the western part of Auckland’s city centre a nicer place to live, work and generally be in. A careful analysis of whether this project was “worth it” would look at the general ‘urban benefits’ of two-waying the streets, analyse the impact on traffic (whether positive or negative, my assumption is that it would probably be slightly negative), then see whether the net gain is worth the cost of undertaking the works necessary to implement such a change. The problem is that our current cost-benefit analysis process – because it focuses solely on reducing congestion – would only look at one side of the issue (the impact on traffic flows) while ignoring everything else. Which means it’s fairly unlikely we’ll see this project proceed until this issue has been resolved.
In short, focusing too much on reducing congestion can kill our city through the never-ending obsession with making cars move faster and faster – inevitably degrading the urban environment to a greater and greater extent.
The other issue with focusing too much on congestion is that actually eliminating this “unspeakable evil” is nigh on impossible – and certainly impractical. Mees discusses this further:
The Victorian Transport Externalities Study defines congestion as: ‘the difference in resource costs between the road network operating under current traffic conditions, and the road network operating under ideal conditions where delays have been eliminated and traffic is able to proceed at the maximum safe speed.’
Martin Mogridge’s book Travel in Towns describes these ‘ideal conditions’ as ‘patently absurd conditions’, since in large cities they apply only in the dead of night. Delays due to other traffic are unavoidable in an urban area: congestion-free motoring is possible at all times on the Nullarbor Plain or Death Valley, but only because almost nobody lives there. Mogridge concludes that ‘the cost of congestion’ is therefore an invalid concept in an urban area’.
It is often quoted that congestion in Auckland costs our economy $1 billion a year. The NZ Council for Infrastructure Development highlighted the numbers behind such a figure in one of their recent presentations:
There are plenty of flaws in the way this has been calculated but the most obvious is the issue of “what are we comparing it with?” A roading system completely free of any delays?
Mees picks up on this point:
…congestion is usually at its worst only on part of the road system and for only part of each day. People accept congestion at theatres, holiday resorts and supermarket checkouts at times of peak demand, because they know it is wasteful to build capacity that sits under-utilised most of the time. A simple example is provided by a sandwich bar, which is quiet most of the day but crowded at lunch time. Lunch time patrons queue to be served: they do not expect simply to arrive at the busiest time of the day and be attended to without delay. Why should roads be different?
Another way to manage peak demand is obviously through some sort of pricing mechanism that relates to the time of day, but the main point is that it’s utterly stupid to try to eliminate congestion – because in order to do so you would have to build a level of capacity that is completely over the top for all other times of the day. That’s just a waste of money and a hugely unnecessary negative effect on the quality of our cities: as inevitably providing more vehicle capacity will adversely effect the quality of our urban environment through which that road passes.
Obviously we can’t ignore congestion in our transport policies. We need to be able to get around our cities relatively easily in order for them to function well. But I like Mees’s conclusion on the issue:
It may well be that the best approach to congestion is to relax. There will always be congestion in large cities, but at least in cities with well-developed alternative transport modes people will be able to choose whether or not to endure it…
…The challenge for planners is not to eliminate congestion but to plan for an optimal level of congestion, bearing in mind environmental, economic and social goals.
Next time you’re stuck in a traffic jam on the motorway, have a think about whether you think Auckland would really be better off with that motorway (and every other motorway in the region to avoid bottlenecks) being twice its current width, as well as how much that would cost to construct. I think you’d take the few minutes of delay.
At the talk I gave on public transport in Auckland on Tuesday night, I took a look back at Auckland’s transport history – in particular how in the mid 20th century we went from having some of the highest levels of PT use in the world to having some of the lowest. Perhaps most interestingly, this was not the result of any natural process, but rather occurred because of deliberate policy decisions.
Immediately after the Second World War, the Ministry of Works produced a reasonably balanced transport vision for Auckland – a mixture of new motorways around the edge of the city and railway lines to serve the centre. This is shown in the map below: red lines indicating motorways and green lines indicating proposed railway lines (including the Morningside Deviation, a precursor to the City Rail Link, and the Avondale-Southdown Line):
Reasonable chunks of the motorways section of this plan were built, though obviously not all of them. Interestingly the idea of a Harbour Bridge was not on the radar at the time, as it was thought (quite sensibly) that motorways should go around the city, not through it. None of the rail projects were ever built, and by the 1960s our transport plans had changed to being very much more “single minded” with their focus on building motorways:
The most important step in this change was actually the transport plan that came before the De Leuw Cather report – the 1955 Master Transportation Plan for Auckland (which I must remember to get out of the library some time). An academic article by Paul Mees and Jago Dodson provides a good description of the effect of that transport plan:
You can see the patronage plummet in the graph below:
A really detailed “blow by blow” account of what led to the 1955 Master Transportation Plan, put together by Chris Harris, can be read here. What really stands out to me, reading through the details of what was happening at the time, and some of the details of the plan, was that the decision to shift Auckland’s transport focus was very much not done through strong public support of such a change (after all, Aucklanders were huge PT users at the time) but rather because a fairly small number of people thought this was the way of the future, that Auckland was too “low density” for public transport (once again based on dodgy calculations) and as part of the deal which led to the construction of the Harbour Bridge.
A critical part of the process is outlined below (from Chris Harris’s article):
The Master Transportation Plan was produced in 1955 and printed for large-scale public distribution in 1956. The plan recommended that a dramatic acceleration of motorway construction at the expense of rail. The Plan’s rationale was that low density of population, and the possibility of using the motorways for buses (ARPA, 1956, p. 26, pp. 42-3, p. 48), made rail both infeasible and unnecessary. However, motorway bus stations were uncosted and were never built, and Auckland City excluded inbound buses from its former tramway mall Queen Street until 1967, even though the last tram ran in 1956 (Bush, 1971, pp. 371-3).
The Master Transportation Plan tacitly replaced an earlier, multimodal Outline Development Plan for Auckland (AMPO, 1951) produced by the same technical committee only four years before, when it was still assumed that Auckland would develop along the same lines as Wellington. The 1951 Plan used a ‘density diagram’ approach (Mees and Dodson, 2002) to estimate Auckland’s built up area at 30,000 acres (120 square kilometres); the Master Transportation Plan divided Auckland’s population by the entire planning area of 113,000 acres (450 square kilometres) to arrive at a much lower density of population, which formed a significant rationale for the Master Transportation Plan’s argument that Auckland should follow American motorway practice (AMPO, 1951, pp. 20, 34; ARPA, 1956, pp. 18, 31, 77). This alteration has remained obscure, and the replacement tacit, because the Master Transportation Plan did not refer to the earlier plan in text or index. Nor did the Master Transportation Plan discuss the growth in patronage on Wellington’s railway system, from suburbs of similar density to Auckland’s.
What is really interesting looking back at Auckland’s transport history, and what these article reinforce, is something I touched on in this earlier post – the huge difference between transport decisions that Aucklanders seem to want, compared to what we end up getting. This it touched on in the Mees & Dodson article: We see this issue again in the 1970s, when Dove-Myer Robinson proposed a rapid-rail scheme. Even though the system never happened, Robinson goes down as one of Auckland’s best known local politicians – he has a statue in Aotea Square. While some of the recognition is for getting raw sewerage out of the Waitemata Harbour, “Robby” is often best known for his fight to get Auckland a world-class rail system.
Overall, it’s hard to know whether to be depressed or enthused by Auckland’s transport history. On the plus side, it seems that there’s a good case for arguing that Aucklanders have generally always wanted a bigger focus on improving our public transport system – and it’s surely only a matter of time before politicians wake up to realise that (at central government level, I think they’re well and truly awake to it in local government). On the down-side, it is obvious that Auckland could have, and should have, ended up with a far more balanced transport system throughout the latter part of the 20th century – if it wasn’t for “technical” decisions made by a few people, based on information that was pretty dicey. It doesn’t say much for democracy in Auckland over the last 60 years.
There’s a fascinating ongoing debate in planning circles about the question of how important density is to the likelihood of people using public transport (or a form of active transport, like walking and cycling). I’ve blogged about the issue a number of times before – particularly in terms of the argument put forward by Melbourne-based transport academic Paul Mees: that there are plenty of low density places in the world with good public transport, so we should focus on improving the PT and worry less about increasing density.
This argument seems to be supported by a basic look at the population density of various cities, and how that compares to the public transport usage in those same cities. The table below is an extract from data in Mees’s book: Transport for Suburbia (which, by in large, is excellent).
One limitation of the data above is how it looks only at the entire cities. Inevitably, one then gets into difficult situations working out where a particular city begins and where another one ends. Furthermore, the cities shown above have particular characteristics – aside from their density – that may play a particularly important role in explaining the relationship between their density and their PT use:
Los Angeles has very dispersed employment patterns, and spent very little on improving public transport post World War II until relatively recently.
New York’s employment is massively concentrated, plus benefits from a huge legacy rail network – almost exclusively constructed in the first half of the 20th century.
Las Vegas has mainly grown in the past few decades, with much of its high density residences being in ‘gated communities’ isolated from the rest of the city.
Vancouver made a deliberate policy decision many decades ago to not construct any freeways near its inner city.
Data that would perhaps be more useful than comparing the density and PT use between cities would be data that looks at different parts of the same city, and then analysed how the PT use in more dense parts of a city would compare with PT use in less dense areas. This work has, very helpfully, been done for a number of cities in NZ and in North America by Keith Hall – former CEO of the New Zealand Planning Institute. He has kindly emailed to me the presentation he gave at the NZPI conference the week before last (though it is a 21 MB document). A smaller version of the presentation, with all the words and numbers but without the pretty pictures, can be viewed here.
The first step in making such an analysis is splitting up the city into various ‘areas types’, depending on their level of employment/residential density. A table of how this division has been undertaken in an upgrade to New Zealand’s subdivision standards is shown below (modified further by Keith into sub-categories to provide a more fine-grained result):
When you start to overlay the level of PT use and active transport with the measure of land-use intensity, at least in Auckland there seems to be a fairly obvious connection between the two: It’s interesting to note that the above table is based on 2001 census data. With the big upswing in PT usage over the past few years – particularly in ‘Rapid Transit’ usage (the train system and the Northern Express), which often serves outer areas particularly well – it could be quite fascinating to see whether these trends have changed at all.
Looking at detailed data for Toronto, one can see the same trends emerging – although generally at a higher level of PT use all around. Interestingly, it is employment density that seems to be related to PT use to an even greater extent than population density: One particularly useful thing Keith does with this data is make a number of comparisons across cities – which not only shows that there seems a relationship between PT use/active transport and the percentage of the population living in relatively high densities, but also gives a really good indication of ‘over-performing’ and ‘under-performing’ cities in terms of their PT use and active-transport use. As can be seen in the graph below, Auckland is (or was at least) quite clearly an under-performing city. Clearly a result of the near complete lack of investment in public transport for nearly 60 years following World War II:
It’s promising to see Wellington performing so extremely well – for a given level of density it seems that Wellingtonians are much more likely – on average – to take public transport, walk or cycle to work than most other cities.
Ultimately, my feeling is that density does matter when it comes to PT use – particularly employment density. However, in the case of Auckland this doesn’t mean the “city is too spread out for PT to work” – as is often the claim. The graph above clearly shows that Auckland under-performs (or at least did when the data collection was done) in terms of PT and active transport modeshare for its density. In other words, we can achieve a lot without having to up our density – but if we really want to increase PT use significantly, one of the best ways to do that is to have more of the city (particularly more of the employment) in areas that have a density much higher than what most of Auckland has now.
Reading through NZTA’s completely mental motorway plans the other day got me thinking about a phrase that often comes to mind when dealing with NZTA: and that is “Public Transport-wash”, or PT-wash. It’s a phrase that I think I came up with last year – playing off the term “greenwash” – to describe the process by which NZTA (or other agencies) emphasises the minuscule public transport aspects of a largely roading project, or a transport policy document, in order for it to gain wider support.
The Northwest Motorway widening is a classic example of PT-wash, with an enormous amount of the “talk” about the project relating to the shoulder bus lanes (even though they’re hopelessly inadequate, stopping and starting again at all motorway ramps), diverting attention away from the $800 million being spent on pointlessly widening this motorway. While certainly I wouldn’t want to see PT improvements disappear out of motorway projects, I think that NZTA need to be held accountable for the fact that the improvements they provide to public transport users are often pretty negligible (and the PT improvements are also usually a pretty negligible portion of the project’s cost) compared to the amount they “sell” these benefits.
I was reading through a piece put together by Paul Mees yesterday, on the difference between Melbourne and Toronto, and he says quite a bit about this issue being prevalent in Melbourne too (although he doesn’t call it PT-wash). The Melbourne 2030 transport plan was a prime example of trying to sell a plan as being balanced and promoting sustainable transport options, when in actual fact the vast majority of the funds get spent on roading: This is absolutely the case in Auckland too. If you look at public opinion on what Auckland needs to do to improve transport, you see massive support for public transport. Similarly, if you read our transport plans and strategies you would be convinced that we’re spending up large on improving public transport. Just look at the dominant projects detailed in the 2009 ARTA Auckland Transport Plan:
Out of these three projects you have five that are clearly for the benefit of sustainable transport options (electrification, CBD tunnel, New Lynn rail trench, integrated ticketing and walking & cycling improvements). There’s only one project that is for the total benefit of cars: the Western Ring Route. Even for a project like AMETI, you can see the “PT-wash” coming through in the massive emphasis of PT in a project that was – at that time – largely about building more roads.
Looking at the 2009 ARTA Auckland Transport Plan you’d be convinced that the bulk of Auckand’s transport spending over the next 10 years would be on public transport improvements. Yet when you take the time to look at the actual funding proposals it’s quite a different story: I’ve simplified the table down a bit to compare spending on new roads and new public transport infrastructure:
While this plan is somewhat out of date, I don’t necessarily think the numbers have changed too much since 2009. As you can see above, in the last four years of the Auckland Transport Plan (2015-2019) almost $1.4 billion was proposed to be spent on new roads, compared to just under $100 million on new public transport capital projects (this did exclude electrification).
At best, the mismatch between the rhetoric of the Auckland Transport Plan was misleading. At worst, it was downright devious – convincing the general public that it was a balanced, sustainable, multi-modal strategy while behind the scenes continuing the plough the vast majority of money into new roads.
It is worth being aware of “PT-washing”. In particular, beware of projects that make a huge noise about relatively minor public transport benefits – sure, they’re better than nothing but if the PT benefits are being “over-sold” it’s probably a sign that the agency promoting the project is trying to sneak through a project that will actually continue to make us more aut0-dependent. Similarly, beware of transport plans, policies and strategies that go on and on about how balanced, sustainable and public-transport friendly they are – but when you look at the funding, once again the vast majority is proposed for new, or widened, roads. The main reason I supported the 2010-2040 Regional Land Transport Strategy so much was because, for once, the pretty words were actually backed up by a balanced funding proposal: roughly a 50/50 split between spending on roads, and spending on other transport modes.
At least we know that PT-washing isn’t just an Auckland disease. For some reason it afflicts transport planners, policymakers and decision-makers in Melbourne too (and probably also in other cities). While they know, in their heart of hearts, that the public actually wants better public transport before widened roads – for some reason they can’t actually do it. But they recognise this mismatch and therefore try to deceive the public through over-playing minor PT benefits of huge roading projects and over-emphasising the PT aspects of transport plans and strategies, while continuing to spend up large on roads.
As I mentioned in a post a few days ago, I’m reading the excellent book “Car Sick: solutions for our car addicted culture“. One thing that the book points out quite clearly is that we don’t need to spend more money to improve our transport situation, rather we need to spend the money we have in smarter ways. The book describes three main causes of the ‘transport problem’ (ever-growing congestion and ever-increasing adverse effects from traffic):
The affliction of ‘grand-projectitis‘. This is the classic situation of politicians liking to seem as though they’re doing something big to solve the big problem of traffic congestion. Politicians – whether local or national – want to be associated with grand projects: building bypasses, bridges, train line or whatever. The ‘behind the scenes’ small-scale stuff like simplifying bus routes, encouraging cycleways, focusing on workplace travel-plans and so forth just aren’t perceived as winning votes. Both sides of the political spectrum are probably guilty of this: Puhoi-Wellsford is a classic example of ‘grand-projectitis’, but then again probably so is North Shore rail.
Inflexible funding rules. In the UK, as well as in New Zealand, the funding rules make it easier to get money for large and expensive roading projects. When NZTA is distributing money it can only weigh up the cycleways against other cycleways to see whether they serve money from the cycling budget, while state highway projects only need to be compared against other state highway projects to see whether they can be funded. Nobody’s able to analyse whether the Puhoi-Wellsford road or the CBD Rail Tunnel would be a better use of let’s say $1 billion of NZTA funding – because stupidly the funding comes from two separate pools.
A lack of strategic co-ordination. This is the one I’m particularly going to focus on in this post – the ability to have a co-ordinating transport agency with the power to actually make things works.
The book defines strategic co-ordination further:
Strategic co-ordination sounds boring, but it is essential. It means making sure that train and buses are run as one synchronised system, so that they connect smoothly with each other. It enables bus lanes to be built from one side of a large city to the other, so that the whole bus network becomes reliable. It means being able to plan where new housing and office development happens, as in Copenhagen, so that it can be well served by public transport.
The advent of Auckland Transport provides a good opportunity for Auckland to enjoy greater strategic co-ordination – in that now the same agency which funds and manages the bus system is also the agency responsible for operating the roads – so if they want to put a bus lane in to assist in making their buses go faster, they can. This is a huge step in the right direction when it comes to improving strategic co-ordination.
The UK is a great case study for analysing the effect of strategic co-ordination – because in London such co-ordination has been possible whereas outside London it hasn’t, through the deregulation of public transport and the lack of over-arching regional agencies. The situation in London is described below:
…the Mayor, through Transport for London which he chairs, can decide what bus services should be provided, and how often they should run, across all 33 London boroughs. The Mayor decides what level bus and tube fares will be set at, and Transport for London operates a single ticketing system across all buses (run by about 15 different companies) and the tube. Transport for London also has the power to plan and improve the bus network, for example by installing bus priority lanes wherever they are needed along an entire bus route passing through several boroughs. Transport for London officers must consult with the boroughs, but they have a great deal of clout to make sure that strategically important projects, like a bus lane at a key pinchpoint, get done. Without these strategic powers, it would be impossible to boost public transport travel in London. With them, bus travel went up 40 per cent in just five years, so that Londoners made half a billion more bus trips in 2004 than they did in 1999.
In Paul Mees’s book, Transport for Suburbia, he analysed bus patronage in London against patronage in the rest of the UK over the past 20 and a bit years. This is shown in the table below (scanned from his book, so not the best quality I’m sorry): The top row shows bus patronage in 1985/1986, with the fourth row down showing patronage in 2007/2008. You can see in the bottom row the incredible difference between what happened to bus patronage in London over this 20 year period – which has almost doubled, and bus patronage elsewhere in the UK, which pretty much halved.
What holds Auckland back from being more like London and less like the rest of the UK when it comes to our bus system is the lack of influence Auckland Transport has over the running over the buses. London proves that it’s not necessarily critical for the public agency to own the buses, but it’s critical for them to have the ability to strategically co-ordinate how the system works. It’s critical for the transport agency to be able to design bus routes to operate as a system so they complement, rather than compete with the train network, so that they’re put together in an efficient manner but one that can still respond to the variety of what we need in a public transport system.
The Public Transport Management Act (PTMA) was supposed to bring this strategic co-ordination, but ARTA never had the guts to actually implement the powers that the PTMA provided, plus now it seems as though a new operating model is being established that will perhaps completely take away the public agency’s role of strategic co-ordination – a very bad outcome for our bus network if we go by the example of the UK outside London.
The details of the new operating model for Auckland’s bus network is nowhere near as exciting for politicians as advancing big railway projects, but I would think that getting strategic co-ordination right for Auckland’s public transport system might actually be the single most important element in getting anywhere near achieving the 150 million public transport trips that Len Brown wants by 2021.
It’s always fun having debates about city densities and public transport. A post by Jarrett Walker at Humantransit.org makes an excellent contribution to the debate – as we seek to answer the age old question of “does density matter when it comes to the viability of public transport?” As I noted in a blog post a while back, there’s an ugly myth that perpetuates thinking in Auckland, the myth being that we are one of the lowest density cities in the world, and therefore public transport won’t work.
In that particular post, I had a good dig through a very detailed set of statistics on city sizes, both in terms of area and population (and therefore obviously in terms of density). Some of the results were probably quite surprising for some. Here’s the list of selected cities by density: While obviously Auckland’s density is well below many of the large developing world cities like Mumbia and Dhaka, somewhat surprisingly our density is higher than Sydney, Vancouver, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and even that of greater New York. Yet all of these cities have public transport systems that function far better than Auckland’s and are far more popular – even Brisbane with its population density of less than half of Auckland’s.
Melbourne based transport academic Paul Mees used this data in his excellent book Transport for Suburbia to argue that “density is not destiny”. I wrote a blog post on that matter earlier this year outlining Mees’s argument that, while population density might have some effect on public transport use at the extreme ends of the scale (in that it’s utterly essential for somewhere like Hong Kong to function, and damn near impossible to operate effectively somewhere like Atlanta), in the middle where most cities are other factors – such as the simple quality of the public transport system – are likely to have far greater impact on whether or not people use the system than density will.
While one could be negative about such a finding, wondering whether it removes one of the big arguments for trying to contain sprawl, there’s also the big potentially positive point-of-view that “we can still have a great public transport system, even when our city isn’t enormously dense“. This is basically why Mees has written Transport for Suburbia, to show cities like Auckland that we shouldn’t wait around for another 50 years, hoping that our city will end up looking like a dense European city, before finally getting around to properly improving our public transport system. I fully agree with this and it annoys the heck out of me when people like John Banks continue to go on about Auckland being the “second most spread out city in the world” (presumably Los Angeles in the first, even though the statistics actually show LA is the densest city in the USA) to help justify why we need to complete the road network before getting around to focusing on the public transport system.
However, there’s also something in the “density is not destiny” argument that doesn’t quite feel right. Visiting one of the densest places on earth, Manhattan, and seeing the tremendous number of public transport users such an urban environment generates (due to lack of space for parking, building roads and so forth) does make it difficult to believe that the relationship between population density and public transport use isn’t significant. But if that’s the case, why do we get such weird numbers like this: Looking at those numbers, one would just about have to conclude that there seems to be absolutely zilch relationship between density and transit mode share for work trips. Yet that seems illogical – so what’s going on here?
This is where Jarrett’s post comes in to make some excellent points – including asking some very necessary questions.
But emotions often hide inside things that look like facts, and density “facts” are a great example. In transit arguments, people say things like “the net density of Toronto is ###/hectare,” because this sounds like a fact and therefore conveys some authority to their argument. In reality, though, there are several possible meanings of “density” in that sentence, as well as several possible definitions of “net” and ”Toronto.” Briefly:
“Density” in an urban planning context is always some kind of quantified human presence divided by some kind of land area, but it can be residential density (residents or homes per acre) or it can be total development density — including homes, businesses, schools etc – or it can be an economic density such as the number of jobs in an area.
“Net,” as opposed to “gross,” means that the human presence is being divided by a smaller unit of area instead of a larger one. In calculating the area, for example, you might take out undevelopable land, and bodies of water, and the land taken up by streets and highways — or you might not. There are arguments for or against excluding each of these things from “net density,” and an opinion about each of them is hiding inside the word “net.”
“Toronto,” of course, can be the City of Toronto, or the Toronto Transit Commission area, or the whole urban mass of greater Toronto. These obviously have utterly different average densities.
So the statement “the net density of Toronto is ###/hectare” is really as subjective as the statement “I think that cities should have more open space, narrower streets, and should have single governments covering the entire urban area.” Because each of those opinions can affect how you choose to define “net,” “density,” and “Toronto,” which in turn determines the number that you declare, with cold factual authority, to be the net density of Toronto.
So really how do we know whether we’re comparing apples with apples? This is a point that Mees makes quite strongly in his book though, that many of the past analysis of population density have been flawed through inconsistent measurements. He has certainly tried very hard to make sure his statistics don’t fall into the same trap, but it just goes to show something seemingly as simple as calculating the population density of the a city is actually very complex indeed. A corollary to this of course is the question of “how much does the density of outer outer New York really matter when assessing the city as a whole’s suitability for public transport? Isn’t the fact that it has hugely dense inner suburbs vastly more important?
This leads on to the question of whether the reason we’re getting such weird results is actually because we’re using the completely wrong measuring stick – in the form of average density. This is what Jarrett argues:
To me, Mees’s table proves that average density over a whole urban area is the wrong kind of density for understanding transit. The impression you probably have of the densities of these cities is actually closer to the kind of density that matters.
Transit reacts mainly with the density right around its stations. It is in the nature of transit to serve an area very unevenly, providing a concentrated value around its stops and stations and less value elsewhere. So what matters for transit is the density right where the transit is, not the aggregate density of the whole urban area.
Of course, what matters even more precisely is how much stuff is within walking distance of a station, so it’s not just density (the amount of stuff in a fixed radius) but the completeness of the pedestrian network. A poor connected pedestrian network can ensure that much of the stuff that’s within a 400m radius is not in a 400m walk. Consider Las Vegas, which Mees finds to be denser than highrise Vancouver. The Las Vegas economy is based on hospitality and entertainment, labor-intensive industries with low average wages. So the city needs a lot of housing suited for lower incomes. The Las Vegas way is to build utterly car-dependent apartment buildings on a vast scale, achieving all of the disadvantages of density with none of its benefits.
I completely agree. What matters is not what the density of a city is, but it’s how that density is structured. Do we have higher areas of density clumped around train stations – like you see in Canadian cities such as Toronto and Vancouver – or do we see the uniform densities of Auckland and Los Angeles? Furthermore, how conducive to public transport are our street patterns? What is the environment like for someone wanting to walk to public transport from their house? It is highly arguable that all of these issues matter far more to the success or failure of public transport in a city, than average density does.
So, returning to Mees’s question – is density destiny? I would certainly argue that average density has nothing to do with our public transport destiny: just compare New York and Los Angeles for your answer there. However, urban densities around public transport – particularly around rail – will determine the success or failure, the destiny, of that public transport system. Park and rides, feeder buses and so forth can all help in making public transport work better in low density areas, but ultimately if you want a situation where people don’t feel as though they have to own a car to live a meaningful life – I really do think you’re going to need some density.
But even that approach can lead to some surprising results – as pointed out in Paul Mees’s book “Transport for Suburbia”, New York and Los Angeles have a similar density, so do Vancouver and Las Vegas. Yet each city has a significantly different level of public transport usage. Mees puts this down to the quality of public transport provision being more important than density when it comes to ridership, although equally one could also start asking questions about how we’ve measured density – especially as saying Los Angeles and New York have the same density just seems to be so incorrect.
You can see, in particular, how much more of New York and San Francisco’s population is concentrated in a small proportion of land area than in the case for Los Angeles. This is detailed further:
Under this measurement system we see New York really standing out from any other city in the USA. Los Angeles is still fairly high up there though, in third place. And our comparison with public transport and walking – while better than average density – still doesn’t exactly align up perfectly.
It would seem that if we’re thinking about land-use policies to boost public transport, walking (and presumably cycling) use, then it may be useful for the “lumpiness” of Auckland’s population density to increase – obviously particularly around our rapid transit network. Fortunately, that’s what most of our plans seem to propose.
Out of these three projects you have five that are clearly for the benefit of sustainable transport options (electrification, CBD tunnel, New Lynn rail trench, integrated ticketing and walking & cycling improvements). There’s only one project that is for the total benefit of cars: the Western Ring Route. Even for a project like AMETI, you can see the “PT-wash” coming through in the massive emphasis of PT in a project that was – 
I’ve simplified the table down a bit to compare spending on new roads and new public transport infrastructure:
While obviously Auckland’s density is well below many of the large developing world cities like Mumbia and Dhaka, somewhat surprisingly our density is higher than Sydney, Vancouver, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and even that of greater New York. Yet all of these cities have public transport systems that function far better than Auckland’s and are far more popular – even Brisbane with its population density of less than half of Auckland’s.
Recent Comments