Car and van mileage has fallen over the past four years, mainly because of the economic slump. Yet this comes atop a longer-run trend: for around 15 years, Britons have been making fewer journeys. According to the Department for Transport, the average person now goes on only slightly more trips than he did in the early 1970s, mostly by car. Between the mid-1990s and 2010 individuals made 19% fewer shopping outings. Jaunts to see friends dropped by fully 22%, thanks to a fall in visits to private homes.
The article is accompanied by a couple of really useful charts which start to break down the difference between trip numbers and distance travelled, and then looks at which types of trips are increasing and decreasing the most: The decline in trip numbers is discussed at length in the article, which looks at long term cultural changes such as people grouping together shopping trips much more, a general reduction in “Couch and kitchen socialising”, the rise of the internet and higher petrol prices making think twice about ‘discretionary’ trips. Yet the article also argues this does not mean Britain is turning into a country of hermits:
A rise in hours spent staring at computer screens and televisions—and a concurrent decline in journeys to see friends at home—does not necessarily mean that Britain is becoming a nation of hermits. Mr Gershuny argues that those who engage with friends online also tend to see them more in person, even controlling for age. The internet may make socialising more “efficient” and diverse—people can research and plan where they are going, or what they want to buy, eat or do when they are out. In fact, many trips to visit friends at home are being replaced by jaunts out with friends, reckons Oriel Sullivan of Oxford University.
The ONS’s national well-being survey suggests that socialising with friends is still one of the most popular pastimes. People spend more time chatting on the phone too. Yet the travel data may obscure such engagement because socialising is increasingly combined with another activity. The number of trips to meet friends outside their homes has held steady. Other types of outing have become more popular, such as what the ONS describes as “entertainment or public activity” and “day trips”, all of which are likely to include friends or family. For many people, work is also a social encounter.
Retail travel also follows this trend. Despite the decline of the high street, there are more grocery shops at transport hubs such as railway stations, which makes buying fresh food possible without a special outing. “Multitasking” has become a popular shorthand for the predicament of modern workers. It may increasingly apply to their leisure time too.
There is an interesting debate to be had, I think, around the extent to which we might expect trends like these to continue into the future. I do wonder whether there’s a risk of us over-building transport infrastructure – particularly new roads where volumes are very much static (unlike booming PT patronage) – because our future projects are based on past assumptions which simply no longer hold true.
I feel the real test will be what happens to travel patterns and traffic volumes once economic growth properly returns (assuming it will do so).
We’ve spoken a lot about traffic volumes over the past few weeks on this blog – and for good reason too: there are some strange things going on with traffic volumes on state highways now static for around seven years and vehicle kilometres travelled on both state highways and local roads in the Auckland area increasing at a much slower rate than population growth over the past five years. Needless to say, these trends are pretty much unheard of previously – in that for close to a century traffic volumes have just gone up, up and up (world wars excluded, I imagine).
The trend is not just limited to New Zealand though, here’s a graph showing the 12 month rolling total of vehicle miles travelled in the USA since 1970:
Showing a comparison with times of recession is useful because often when you point out to people that traffic volumes aren’t increasing, the first response is “but that’s just due to the recession”. Looking at the above graph you can see that in a recession it’s normal for volumes to flat-line or even decrease. Yet outside recessionary times there’s almost always an increase in volumes – aside from what looks like a time period which coincided the 1979 energy crisis.
That is until recently. While obviously the world’s recovery from the 2008 global financial crisis has been slow, having VMT flat-line and then quite sharply decline in very recent times, outside a recessionary period, is quite unprecedented. Something very different is happening here, a big reduction in traffic volumes even when the economy is growing. It would be interesting to run a comparison for New Zealand – something that the Ministry of Transport should be doing but I suspect aren’t because their heads are stuck in the sand just as much as the Minister’s.
VKT, or “vehicle kilometres traveled”, is perhaps the most accurate way to measure – in aggregate – whether traffic volumes are going up or down. It’s perhaps not quite as critical as ‘peak flows’ in determining whether and where our infrastructure is at capacity, but it gives us an overall picture that most other measurements can only hint at.
Which is why I’m really interested in the answers to a couple of written questions Labour Transport Spokesperson Phil Twyford has put to Minister Gerry Brownlee over the past few weeks. One on state highway VKT over the past five years in Auckland and one on local road VKT over the same time period. They show, with a little bit of fluctuation, pretty small annual increases in both figures: Both totals have, on average, increased by around 1% a year. But that’s not really the complete story because we would expect VKT to increase as population increases – what’s really interesting is whether each person is driving more or less each year. Using Statistics NZ population estimates for each of the past five years we can start to develop some ‘per capita’ numbers: What the table above shows is that in 2006/2007 your average Aucklander travelled 2,931 kilometres on the state highway network and 5,572 kilometres on the local road network. By 2010/2011 both numbers had dropped: state highway travel dropping by 49 kilometres per person, local road travel by 144 kilometres per person and therefore a total of 193 less kilometres travelled per person in 2010/2011 compared to 2006/2007. That’s around 3.7 kilometres less per person per week – not an insignificant number.
More important than the level of decrease is the fact that per capita travel is decreasing at all. And remember, this is only travel within Auckland so explanations such as long-distance driving shifting to air travel or people taking fewer domestic holidays probably doesn’t make as much difference in Auckland as it would elsewhere.
It would certainly be quite helpful to see whether this trend is something that started around 2006 or whether it’s a longer lasting trend. I was certainly under the impression that traffic levels have typically increased at a faster rate than population growth (obviously, until recently). If per capita travel on the roading network continues to decline in the future, that has some pretty major implications for our future transport planning – specifically that we really might not need many of the roading projects that have been justified based on an assumption that per capita travel would at least stay constant, if not continue the longer historical trend of actually increasing.
Those promoting a transport and urban outcome based around smart growth, a compact city, a more balanced transport policy and more investment in public transport, walking and cycling – instead of on road capacity – have long based their arguments on the need for change. This had some logic to it as the general trend the world was heading seemed to be towards more urban sprawl and more car dependency – which has some serious negative consequences for the economy, society and the environment. The paradigm could be summarised as follows:
The market is delivering more sprawl and more car dependency, which is collectively a bad thing, so we must intervene in the market for the common good
Pretty much everything is couched on this world-view: from both sides of the argument actually. On the side of smart growth and a balanced transport policy we still hear much about the need to “change behaviour”, the need to “curb urban sprawl”, the need to “get people out of their cars” and so on. On the ‘other side’ of the argument, we hear a lot of criticism about planners engaging in “social engineering”, about public transport advocates wanting to “force people” out of their cars. Essentially both sides of the debate are making the same assumption: that the market (being the aggregated wants and needs of the population) wants to deliver car-based urban sprawl. They only differ in whether this outcome should be allowed or discouraged.
One of the key things that various posts on this site over the past month or two have tried to emphasise is that this paradigm has changed. Increasingly, the evidence is pointing towards the market making a pretty radical departure from its general trends of most of the last century, with a new and thoroughly different paradigm emerging – the market actually wants less sprawl and less car dependency. People actually want to catch public transport because it makes sense for them. People want to live in central parts of the city, not on the urban periphery. People are smart enough to realise that what Auckland needs is not a whole pile more roads, but a world-class public transport system to complement our existing roading network. In short, those promoting this new paradigm no longer need to couch their arguments in terms of the need for change or the need for intervention, increasingly they can simply focus on allowing and enabling this shift to happen.
There are two key pieces of evidence in relation to this paradigm shift: traffic volumes compared to public transport patronage growth being the first and the location of housing demand (highlighted most clearly through house prices) being the other. Let’s start with traffic volumes compared to PT patronage.
Stu’s twoposts a few weeks back really highlighted that the current ‘flat-lining’ of traffic growth is not only a pretty dramatic shift from constant increases over much of the last century, but also that this flat-lining has been going on now for quite a long time: seven whole years. Furthermore, a ‘de-coupling’ of traffic growth and economic growth has been going on for around 14 years now, meaning that for the first time we’re able to grow the economy without a similar level of growth in traffic volumes. And in more recent years we’ve been growing the population quite significantly but once again without a commensurate increase in traffic volumes:
The idea that traffic volumes won’t continue to increase, or at least that they might increase at a slower rate than population growth (as each person travels less) is a complete anathema to the “old paradigm”. Under that old paradigm volumes always increase by around 3-4% a year and always would. With most roading projects justified by forecasts of increasing traffic in the future (and the horrors if a road is not widened or added to cope with that increase), the huge dip in per capita travel over the past five years is utterly devastating to the business case for pretty much every new roading project. If our system for assessing such projects actually recognised this fundamental shift, which it doesn’t.
In contrast, public transport patronage in Auckland most particularly has grown in leaps and bounds over this same period – up by around a third since 2006: Comparing the trends of traffic growth and PT patronage growth, the way to structure arguments for a shift in funding becomes clear: it’s not about what modes we should spend the money on for broader reasons (although those arguments are still valid), but a much simpler “people are using PT a lot more, people are driving less, we need to reflect that in our funding balance”. By the way, the current government funding plan spends about $27 on state highways for every dollar spent on PT infrastructure – about as ignorant of these trends as practically possible.
The second paradigm shift relates to that vexed issue of “how should Auckland grow?” The common assumption is that “the market” wants to grow through urban expansion or sprawl, and that planning intervention is required to encourage/force people to live more intensively and ‘save’ the rural hinterland. Yet again, both sides of the debate accept the paradigm that everyone wants to live on the urban edge, in a “quarter acre paradise”. However, a series of posts – this time mainly by Patrick – have highlighted that the reality these days is actually quite different.
Patrick has noted a series of articles in the NZ Herald and other overseaspublications over the past few months which consistently say the same thing: house prices in the inner suburbs are soaring while (especially in the USA) they are still falling on the urban periphery. There are a wide variety of reasons given for this phenomenon, things like higher fuel prices, changing demographics, smaller household sizes, cultural shifts and so forth – all of which are interestingly similar to many of the causes that might be behind the stagnation in traffic volumes over the past seven years.
So the paradigm of “allowing sprawl or forcing/encouraging intensification” really may not be valid anymore, just like the “providing for vehicle growth or encouraging/forcing people onto public transport” is now outdated. People are changing their habits already. The trick now is to ensure that policy decisions, especially when it comes to decisions over where transport money is spent, reflect this new reality. We plan for the future, both in land-use decisions (whether to expand urban boundaries or make intensification easier) and in transport decisions (whether to spend money on holiday highways or city rail links) – let’s ensure that our decisions reflect the new reality of what people actually are doing and what people want. Not an outdated, old paradigm, version of that.
We don’t have to force change anymore, let’s allow it to happen.
Fantastic aerials of the the biggest urban motorway junction in Australasia under construction. From the Whites Aviation collection at the National Library:
1968, Dominion Rd flyover in the foreground
Auckland City used to just flow into its surrounding inner suburbs. Weirdly, as seen above they started with arguably the daftest part of the whole plan: The massively over engineered Dominion Rd/New North Rd flyover. Some engineer was allowed to get more that a little carried away that day. Ah: Brave New World.
1966. Newton. George Courts on K'd on the Left
Site clearance already beginning; anticipating SH1 being shoved right through town. You can see why K’Rd was such a successful shopping precinct; direct connection with its community. Plus of course being at the heart of the well used tram network.
1967. Domion Rd flyovers, looking west
Unusual view. Western Line on the left. Easy to see how out of scale the Dom Rd flyover is, and needlessly complicated. The scar of the pointless destruction of community that is to become dumb little mini-me motorway of Ian McKinnion Drive on the right.
1969. Symonds St in centre. work starting on SH1 through the city
Work begins. Check out the on-street parking. They’ve got to go somewhere if this is the mode you invest in. A big additional but uncalculated cost of the auto-dependent choice.
Not sure of the date 1970s. The full CMJ sandpit.
Fantastic print. Whites clearly invested in some better kit by this stage. A Hasselblad maybe; looks like it could be the great 40mm Distagon, or possibly the 38mm Biogon on the SWC, developed by Zeiss and Hasselblad as an aerial reconnaissance camera for the Luftwaffe in the 1940s! [A fact you don't see in their advertising]. And still great. Happy to be corrected, if anyone knows. Forgive me for indulging my inner camera nerd.
CMJ, with gardening
Severance at its best; no way across to K’rd now, hey guess what?, it’s never recovered commercially.
CMJ_lost street pattern
1950s "Master Transport Focal Point"
And how they sold it. Doesn’t look like much does it? A few little lines, nothing that’ll totally cut the CBD from its inner suburbs and nearly kill it for example. The text talks of tunnels. Yeah well that would have been much better, human life could have continued so much better if the surface hadn’t been reduced to a few car dominated bridges.
A fine monument to central planning. South Seas Soviet style. This whole effort was planned and built by government apparatchiks in Wellington immune to any input from the locals, including the local elected officials.
Well there you go: How modern Auckland was made by a city engineer with the phrase: “It’s a technical matter”. Never let the pricks get away with that one again.
Edit: Just added the accreditation for the photos
Auckland motorways, Dominion Road interchange. Whites Aviation Ltd : Photographs. Ref: WA-67442-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23121284
Newton, Auckland with motorway construction on right of Grafton Bridge. Whites Aviation Ltd : Photographs. Ref: WA-66170-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23119567
Auckland City, including Southern Motorway and Eden Crescent. Whites Aviation Ltd : Photographs. Ref: WA-67026-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22595451
Motorway junction, Symonds Street, Auckland. Whites Aviation Ltd : Photographs. Ref: WA-68574-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22792353
Auckland motorway construction, Newton, with ‘spaghetti junction’ roads. Whites Aviation Ltd : Photographs. Ref: WA-74702-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22722332
Stuart’s twoposts on traffic volumes in the last couple of weeks have highlighted the indisputable fact that we’re driving less, that we’ve been driving less for quite some time now and perhaps most interestingly, that us driving less is actually not a bad thing for the economy. The best data available is for state highway traffic volumes, where we can see three distinct phases of traffic growth/decline since 2008:
The data is from NZTA, and I have just overlaid the red lines and text separating out the phases. The key coloured line is the pink one, which shows the three month rolling average for all vehicles compared to the previous year. It tracks the green line, which is for light-vehicles, quite closely.
Phase 1 is pretty much 2008, and starts with a dramatic decline in volumes in the earlier part of the year – with the rolling average for all vehicles in July bottoming out at around an 8% decline from the same months in 2007. In the later months of 2008 the decline reversed, but it took until 2009 before we saw ‘month on month’ positive growth rates re-emerge.
Phase 2 is 2009 and is pretty much the only time when we actually saw higher traffic volumes compared to the same month the year before. However, a key reason for this is obviously because it was recovering from the massive declines in 2008. And in actual fact, many of the 2009 increases weren’t big enough to offset the 2008 declines. For example, traffic growth in June 2009 was 2.5%, but the decline in June 2008 had been 6.6%, meaning the 2009 numbers were still 4.3% below 2007 levels. Overall, only January and December 2009 had higher traffic volumes than the same months in 2007 – the rest were lower.
Phase 3, which I think we’re still in, covers all of the last two years and is actually pretty boring really, showing pretty much no increase in volumes, although the decreases are not as dramatic as in 2008. After the huge fluctuations in 2008 and 2009 it has been a calmer period, but certainly has not reverted to the long-running trend of pretty constant growth in volumes that had occurred up until 2008.
Before I get onto the cause of these trends, I think it’s worth noting the differences between heavy vehicle trends and the general trend. Heavy vehicle volumes held up a bit better in 2008 (although the trend was downwards) than for general vehicles, but didn’t recover until much much later in 2009. In phase 3, heavy vehicle volumes have increased significantly more than general vehicles, although even they have tailed off in the last few months.
There are likely to be multiple causes for these trends. Stuart’s posts highlight changing demographics, changing cultural attitudes towards cars, technological change, transport saturation, ongoing urbanisation and rising transport prices as all contributing to this fundamental shift – which on a per capita basis has actually been quite a significant decline in the amount we’re driving. It’s hard to get good data on most of those contributing factors, except for one that I think has had perhaps the most immediate impact over the past few years: fuel prices. Using the handy AA Petrolwatch information, we can see how the price of 91 Octane fuel has fluctuated over the past four years (not adjusted for inflation by the way – something I probably should do for future posts): We all know the story: in the first half of 2008 oil prices spiked, sending petrol in New Zealand over $2 a litre for the first time. Then in September 2008 the global economy tanked and oil prices crashed – with petrol hitting a low of $1.33 a litre in December 2008. Prices held relatively steady (though generally increasing) throughout much of 2009 and 2010, before increasing in early 2011 (Libyan crisis?) and have stayed above $2 a litre ever since – most recently propped up by concerns over Iran and a slowly recovering global economy.
So what happens if we overlay the graphs on each other? Well, to further iron out some fluctuations in traffic volumes I have taken a 6 month rolling average, then overlaid that onto the graph above (though the horizontal lines relate to the volumes to make it clear where zero is): What seems to correspond best, just glancing at the graph above, is the relationship between petrol prices and the slope of the traffic volumes graph. I guess that’s natural when you use rolling averages, because it takes some time for the impact to really show through.
I’m not much of a statistical whizz, but overall there does seem to be quite a clear link between the two – showing that higher fuel prices really are a significant contributor (in my opinion) to declines in traffic volumes. With the likelihood of fuel prices increasing in the future seeming higher than the likelihood of them decreasing, it seems a fairly safe assumption that the stagnation in traffic volumes isn’t going to end any time soon: terrible news for NZTA and the Ministry of Transport who are trying to justify the spending of billions on new motorways, but great news for the rest of us as chances are congestion isn’t going to increase much in the future.
For a couple of years we have been able to see traffic info and even webcams for Aucklands motorways care of the NZTA. The system is also tied into the message boards at motorway onramps to give indications as to travel times to certain destinations, the main routes to/from the airport were also added last year just before the RWC.
Now Google has gone a step further and launched their traffic layer a few weeks ago which overlays live traffic data on to the map and as you can see it has a lot more coverage. I’m not sure exactly where all of the information is coming from but I suspect it is from a variety of sources but regardless it is incredibly useful. It even lets you change the day and time of the data to an idea of what things look like at a certain times which is based off historical data, their aren’t as many routes shown you do select that but it is probably just a case of building up more data.
It would be great to if could publicly get real time information for our PT network the same way, even better would be to be able to compare the two bits of information when people want directions and to show people the fastest way of getting from A to B. Perhaps something for the smartphone app developers out there to do and also something I think routes like the Busway would do very well on:
The Department of Transport published last January, with no publicity, its latest National Road Traffic Forecasts. This is an output of the National Transport Model. Although traffic levels have levelled off in recent years, the projection is for a 44% increase by 2035, even though population growth is assumed to be only 18%.
Car traffic in London is projected to grow by 36% by 2035, even though the number of car trips (driver and passenger) has held constant at about 10m a day since 1993, according to data from Transport for London. This finding suggests that road capacity is limiting car use, taking account of the impact of parking restrictions, bus lanes, traffic signals and the congestion charging zone. So it is hard to see how the DfT projected traffic growth could be fitted in.
My view is that DfT, having built a national transport model at considerable effort, are reluctant to question the behavioural assumptions underlying the inputs and the face validity of the outputs. Doubtless it suites the Department to project substantial traffic growth when bidding for funding from the Treasury.
The last sentence is critical. I’m yet to work out whether this whole denial of stalled traffic volumes in both the UK and New Zealand is simply institutional inertia or whether it’s something far more sinister.
Gerry’s answers seem to be getting worse and worse. Now he seems to be saying that the party that sold itself as having sensible solutions to solve the economy shouldn’t get hung up on how well a project stacks up economically. He also seems to be saying that it isn’t them that chose the RoNs but that it came from the regions. That is interesting for a few reasons,
It indicates that the government didn’t do anything to check the wish list of the regions was a good idea
The Auckland council has now repeatedly named the CRL as their top transport project but the government ignores it (Gerry even claims that the CRL has an appalling BCR, I guess he only read the deeply flawed hatchet job the MOT did)
Everything else that the government is doing seems to be about taking power away from the regions and centralising it so this would go against that.
And Labours transport spokeperson has got in on the act focusing his efforts on Bill English
Stu has recently been raising the issue that traffic levels have been flat and even decreasing over a number of years and yesterday the Greens spokesperson, Julie Anne Genter raised the issue during question time in parliament. Here is the video of the exchange:
What this really confirms (as if we didn’t know it already) is that the government is really running with a build it and hope strategy which to me definitely isn’t what we should be doing when the costs are in the billions.\
Update
Here are some more videos on the topic from today, the first one is from TVNZ this morning (click on the picture)
And the second one is from Question time in parliament today where the topic was raised again
The decline in trip numbers is discussed at length in the article, which looks at long term cultural changes such as people grouping together shopping trips much more, a general reduction in “Couch and kitchen socialising”, the rise of the internet and higher petrol prices making think twice about ‘discretionary’ trips. Yet the article also argues this does not mean Britain is turning into a country of hermits:
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