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By Mr Anderson, on January 10th, 2013 A new report out of the USA supports a hypothesis that we’ve been talking about for quite a while on this blog: that traffic growth is stagnating across the world for a variety of reasons – and this has a compelling long term impact on our transport policies.
Some of the key findings from the report are outlined below:
From World War II until just a few years ago, the number of miles driven annually on America’s roads steadily increased. Then, at the turn of the century, something changed: Americans began driving less. By 2011, the average American was driving 6 percent fewer miles per year than in 2004.
The trend away from driving has been led by young people. From 2001 to 2009, the average annual number of vehicle miles traveled by young people (16 to 34-year-olds) decreased from 10,300 miles to 7,900 miles per capita—a drop of 23 percent. The trend away from steady growth in driving is likely to be long-lasting—even once the economy recovers.
Young people are driving less for a host of reasons—higher gas prices, new licensing laws, improvements in technology that support alternative transportation, and changes in Generation Y’s values and preferences—all factors that are likely to have an impact for years to come.
Federal and local governments have historically made massive investments in new highway capacity on the assumption that driving will continue to increase at a rapid and steady pace. The changing transportation preferences of young people—and Americans overall—throw those assumptions into doubt. The time has come for transportation policy to reflect the needs and desires of today’s Americans—not the worn-out conventional wisdom from days gone by.
Some of the statistics are pretty amazing: a 23% fall in the average vehicle miles travelled by young people in only eight years! Per capita travel peaked in 2004, well before the economic difficulties of the past few years:
 There are other supporting statistics which make for interesting reading too:
- In 2009, 16 to 34-year-olds as a whole took 24 percent more bike trips than they took in 2001, despite the age group actually shrinking in size by 2 percent.
- In 2009, 16 to 34-year-olds walked to destinations 16 percent more frequently than did 16 to 34-yearolds living in 2001.
- From 2001 to 2009, the number of passenger-miles traveled by 16 to 34-year-olds on public transit increased by 40 percent.
- According to Federal Highway Administration, from 2000 to 2010, the share of 14 to 34-year-olds without a driver’s license increased from 21 percent to 26 percent.
What the report helpfully does is then delve into some of the reasons behind the pretty dramatic changes: looking at things like higher fuel prices, the toughening up of licensing, improvements in technology, a changing culture and so on.
As always, the critical question is whether these statistics are just a ‘blip’ caused by the recession and slow economic recovery, or whether they are likely to indicate a long-term change. This is a really important question because it determines the extent to which we really do need to change our longer-term transport policies. Of course the only proper answer is to say that “we just don’t know for sure”, but there are some interesting suggestions in the report that the trends are here to stay:
The recession has played a role in reducing the miles driven in America, especially by young people. People who are unemployed or underemployed have difficulty affording cars, commute to work less frequently if at all, and have less disposable income to spend on traveling for vacation and other entertainment. The trend toward reduced driving, however, has occurred even among young people who are employed and/or are doing well financially.
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The average young person (age 16-34) with a job drove 10,700 miles in 2009, compared with 12,800 miles in 2001.
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From 2001 to 2009, young people (16 to 34-years-old) who lived in households with annual incomes of over $70,000 increased their use of public transit by 100 percent, biking by 122 percent, and walking by 37 percent.
For Auckland, what will be interesting is to see whether reductions in per capita driving are swamped by the massive population growth anticipated over the next 30 years or not. If not, then pretty much every new roading project planned for over the next 30 or so years may not actually be necessary.
By Peter M, on July 15th, 2012 The indoor shopping mall turns 60 this year, but an Atlantic Cities article questions whether it’s dying:
At the mall’s peak popularity, in 1990, America opened 19 of them. But we haven’t cut the ribbon on a new one since 2006, for reasons that go beyond the recession.
Not a single new mall in the whole of the USA opened since 2006. That’s quite amazing. And by the sounds of it many of the existing malls are struggling to survive too:
By Dunham-Jones’ count, today about a third of our existing malls are “dead” or dying. That’s not to say they’re mostly vacant. But they have dreadful sales per square foot. High-end dress stores have moved out, and tattoo parlors have replaced them – “things,” Dunham-Jones says, “that would normally be considered way too déclassé for a mall.”
About a third of our malls are still thriving, and those are the biggest, newest ones. But America is no longer building many new highways, which means we’ve stopped creating prime new locations for mall development. Some of the earliest amenities of the enclosed mall – air-conditioning! – no longer impress us. And the demographics of suburbia have changed dramatically. Malls draw the largest share of their customers from teenagers, and the baby boomers who largely populate suburbia no longer have teenagers at home.
So what’s replacing these malls? Well, often it seems that we’re seeing something of a return to traditional style “main street” shopping, but within more mixed-use developments known as “lifestyle centres”. The article goes on:
… the suburban mall of Gruen’s plan appears to be victim of more than just the recession. Dunham-Jones, who has tracked this trend in her book Retrofitting Suburbia, estimates that more than 40 malls nationwide have been targeted for significant redevelopment. And she can count 29 that have already been repurposed, or that have construction underway.
In 2010, Columbus, Ohio, tore down the dead mall in its downtown for a park. Voorhees, New Jersey, demolished half of its dead mall, built a new main street and relocated its city hall into the remaining building. In Denver, eight of the area’s 13 regional malls now have plans for redevelopment. One of them, in suburban Lakewood, was converted from a 100-acre super block into 22 walkable blocks with retail and residences.
“It’s the downtown that Lakewood never had before,” Dunham-Jones says. Ironically, this is what Gruen had been aiming for. “Except that now it’s open-air.”
Americans haven’t particularly outgrown the consumer impulse that Gruen detected. We still love to flock to dense agglomerations of Body Shops and Cinnabuns and Brookstones. But now those places look increasingly like open-air “lifestyle centers,” with condos above or offices next door. Some of these places are just the old mall in a new Main Street disguise. But when you add residences, and cut Gruen’s mega-block into what actually looks like a downtown street grid, that begins to change things.
“You’ve got to get a mix of uses, but the connectivity is probably even more important,” Dunham-Jones says. “The uses will come and go over time, but if you can establish a walkable network of streets, that’s when you’re really going to establish a ripple effect in changing suburban patterns.”
Of course the City Rail Link project means that Westfield’s downtown shopping mall will need to be demolished. This is great as the mall is a pretty hideous building on one of Auckland’s best pieces of land. But elsewhere in Auckland it doesn’t really seem as though we’re following the USA’s trend. Within the land few years we’ve seen Sylvia Park and Albany malls open, two of Auckland’s biggest, while big redevelopments of both 277 Newmarket and St Lukes are on the cards to occur in the next couple of years.
I suppose this begs the question of whether Auckland’s fundamental retail environment differs from the USA, or whether they’re just a little ahead of us in the trend and it’s an inevitability that we’ll start to see a “post mall” retail environment. I certainly hope so, as long as it’s something better than the “mega centres” we often see sprouting up around shopping malls (yes I’m looking at you Wagener Place, St Lukes!)
By Peter M, on May 11th, 2012 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.
By Peter M, on April 9th, 2012 A couple of excellent posts by Stu Donovan over the last couple of weeks have highlighted a fundamental change in transportation trends across not just New Zealand, but many developed world countries: we’re not driving more - in fact, on a per capita basis, we’re driving a lot less. After a century of almost uninterrupted increases in the use of private vehicles, this is a pretty enormous change – something far too challenging for the small minds at the Ministry of Transport or NZTA, for example.
But this is not the only fundamental change that’s occurring. Just as we have always assumed traffic volumes will increase, we have also always assumed that the land-use development market wants to sprawl. Limiting urban sprawl has been seen as an important planning ideal for a long time (for a variety of reasons), but it has always been pitched as a battle between planners (who want to contain it) and ‘the market’ (which supposedly wants to sprawl). This simplistic situation dominates discussion in Auckland, for example, about how the city should grow. Allowing most development to occur through intensification is seen as “unrealistic”, “contrary to market forces” or even “authoritarian” – based on the assumption that it’s working against a natural desire of people to want large sections on the edge of the city.
Until relatively recently, this simplistic approach may well have been true. If you look at the USA, population change in 2006 showed a huge amount of growth (shown in red) taking place in suburban and rural areas (map from here): 
However, if we look at 2011 the pattern is quite different: So generally a lot less growth in the larger rural/suburban counties that show up clearest in the map above. But the US population is still growing, suggesting that a lot more of the growth must be concentrated in urban centres that don’t show up as obviously in the map (because they’re geographically much smaller). The USA Today article that put together these maps discusses this:
Almost three years after the official end of a recession that kept people from moving and devastated new suburban subdivisions, people continue to avoid counties on the farthest edge of metropolitan areas, according to Census estimates out today.
The financial and foreclosure crisis forced more people to rent. Soaring gas prices made long commutes less appealing. And high unemployment drew more people to big job centers. As the nation crawls out of the downturn, cities and older suburbs are leading the way.
Population growth in fringe counties nearly screeched to a halt in the year that ended July 1, 2011. By comparison, counties at the core of metro areas are growing faster than the nation as a whole.
A bit of analysis of where growth is actually happening:
All but two of the 39 counties with 1 million-plus people — Michigan’s Wayne (Detroit) and Ohio’s Cuyahoga (Cleveland) — grew from 2010 to 2011.
Twenty-eight of the big counties gained faster than the nation, which grew at the slowest rate since the Great Depression (0.73%). The counties’ median growth rate was 1.3% (half grew faster, half slower).
Those 28 — including California’s Alameda and Contra Costa counties, Florida’s Broward and Hillsborough, Texas’ Harris and Dallas — generated more than a third of the USA’s growth. Before the recession and housing bust, when people flocked to new development on farmland, they contributed just 27%…
…Central metro counties accounted for 94% of U.S. growth, compared with 85% just before the recession.
And some further discussion:
“This could be the end of the exurb as a place where people aspire to go when they’re starting their families,” says William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution. “So many people have been burned by this. … First-time home buyers, immigrants and minorities took a real big hit.”
During the ’70s gas shortage and the ’80s savings and loan industry crisis, some predicted the end of suburban sprawl. It didn’t happen then, but current trends could change the nation’s growth patterns permanently.
Aging Baby Boomers, who have begun to retire, and Millennials, who are mostly in their teens and 20s, are more inclined to live in urban areas, McIlwain says.
“I’m not sure we’re going to see outward sprawl even if the urge to sprawl continues,” he says. “Counties are getting to the point that they don’t have the money to maintain the roads, water, sewer. … This is a century of urbanization.”
Demographic change really is the ‘elephant in the room’ when it comes to predicting future trends. While it’s early days for us to make completely confident pronouncements over the future of urban sprawl, just as changing trends relating to traffic volumes require us to fundamentally rethink much of what we’ve previously taken as gospel, changing demand patterns for urban development need to be given serious consideration. Perhaps the real urban development debate is not so much about the market wanting sprawl and planners trying to fight the market; but rather more about the market wanting different housing types in inner urban areas and our planning system being unable to cope with how to provide these in an attractive yet affordable manner.
By Patrick Reynolds, on March 6th, 2012 The housing affordability dimension to the urban sprawl versus intensification argument is a messy debate. While limiting land supply through measures such as urban limits is likely to have a significant impact on land prices around the limit itself, it’s hard to know for sure what the impact of opening up land on the urban edge would have on prices throughout the majority of the city – particularly in the inner areas where it seems people most want to live.
 Albany 2011 Another complicating matter is fairly obvious – the further out people are, the more they’re likely to spend on transportation costs. Potentially this additional expense could counter any affordability gain we get (should that even exist) from opening up new land on the periphery. A recent Atlantic Cities article picks up on this matter:
Housing policymakers have long lamented the trend of home-buyers who “drive to qualify.” If they can’t find anything affordable in the city, house hunters wander farther and father out in search of a mortgage or a rent payment that matches their pocketbook. But of course, there’s a serious flaw in this thinking: The farther you go in search of cheaper housing, the more expensive your transportation costs become.
Scott Bernstein of the Center for Neighborhood Technology calls this “the hidden cost of housing location,” and CNT has for several years been trying to illustrate the tradeoff for homeowners and government officials who may not realize gallons of gas add up almost as fast as mortgage payments do. The Chicago-based organization maintains a massive, geo-coded database of location-specific information on average housing costs, driving rates, transportation costs, and transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions. The online, interactive index is both highly useful in allowing comparisons of typical household costs in different locations and highly revealing as it illuminates the benefits of close-in, walkable neighborhoods in bringing those costs down.
Remember we’re only talking about the cost to individuals here. The vastly increased costs of providing infrastructure to urban sprawl is in addition to this. So what kind of results do we get from taking a more holistic point of view of affordability – taking into account transport and housing costs.
Analyzing all this data in aggregate, CNT found that, between 2000 and 2009, U.S. transportation and housing costs increased at nearly twice the rate of incomes. But the good news, the organization reports, is that people living in “location efficient” neighborhoods—those with good access to transit, jobs, and amenities—experienced only half the increase in transportation costs ($1,400/year) of those living in car-dependent places ($3,900/year). This means more expensive housing may actually be the more affordable option, if that housing exists in the right place.
Suddenly New York City, with its notoriously high housing costs, looks a little more affordable with the nation’s lowest average annual transportation costs for a big metro region. Households around seemingly more affordable Birmingham, on the other hand, spend on average nearly $5,000 a year more than those in the New York region do just to get around.
It’s worth keeping in mind that transportation costs also have the ability to go up really quickly too – as we saw in 2008 most particularly. The article also goes on to highlight that places in the USA with the highest rates of mortgage foreclosure have also been places where transportation costs are really high:
CNT’s index reveals, for example, that high transportation costs are highly correlated with foreclosure rates. This isn’t surprising given that transportation typically represents a family’s second biggest expense.
On one location on the south side of Rapid City, South Dakota, for instance, the index shows that an average home costs 26 percent of median income. But, given average driving rates for the location, the costs of housing and transportation considered together balloon to 56 percent of median income. The Index also shows that the average household in the vicinity generates more than 8.6 tons per year of greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. Average emissions per household in the most accessible neighborhoods on CNT’s map are between 5.1 and 6.5 tons per year.
 Albany 2011 I really worry that these Greenfield areas the Auckland Plan proposes to open up could become future slums when petrol prices spike in the future, making it unaffordable in a transport sense to live in such a peripheral location. Especially as right now despite the persistent highs of oil on the international market price at the pump in NZ has remained relatively calm because of the steadily rising NZD . This could change very quickly; $3 or $4 per litre is not unlikely, all it would take is the NZD to return to its historical average levels and oil to continue its steady march upward ["It's highly likely that the Reserve Bank will make some strongly worded comments against the currency's strength."Herald 5 March]. Either way the ‘suburbanisation of poverty’ that is noticeable in the US looks like it is heading to Auckland, with the poor priced off the road and subject to another American expression: ‘No transit: No job’.
By Joshua Arbury, on January 11th, 2012 My Amazon book purchases with Christmas money have all arrived in the past few days, leaving me with an exciting – but somewhat daunting – reading list over the next few weeks:
Typically, I’ve started somewhat madly by reading through the first few pages of each book. But generally it seems like I’ll be digging through Human Transit and Edge City first. While I’ve only read the first couple of chapters of Edge City, it has thrown up some interesting thoughts – particularly as it’s written from a perspective that’s fairly different to mine and, given it was written in 1992, gives us some perspective in the way that things might have changed over the past 20 years.
An Amazon review give us a reasonably good overview of what the book is about:
This book explores what has become of the suburbs. Garreau’s argues that certain suburbs have developed into a new kind of city, a city without a traditional downtown. He believes that such “edge cities”, are the cities of the future. Garreau’s criteria for an “edge city” are:
–5 million square feet or more of office space
–600,000 square feet or more of retail space
–more jobs than bedrooms
–perceived as one place by the population
–developed within the last 30 years
With these criteria in mind, Garreau sets off across the US to study our major edge cities. He explores edge cities in New Jersey, Texas, Southern California, and the areas around Boston, Detroit, Atlanta, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. In each area that he visits, Garreau takes up an edge city theme. For instance, in Detroit he discusses cars and the role they play in edge cities, and in Atlanta he discusses questions of race and class in edge cities.
At the end of the book is a list of US cities that qualified for edge city status in 1992. This is followed by a glossary of words used by edge city developers and a set of “laws” about how edge cities work. These “laws” are statistical observations about human behavior relevant for city planning, such as “the furthest distance an American will willing walk before getting into a car is 600 feet.” Finally, there is an annotated list of suggested readings, endnotes, and an index.
Garreau is neither for nor against edge cities. He tries instead to understand how they work, and why they have popped up so rapidly across the country. He strives to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, coming across more like Jane Jacobs than Lewis Mumford, who argued so stridently for regional planning. Garreau points out that edge cities are being built by developers who are in the business to make money. In other words, they build what they believe will sell, and given the fact that the developments sell so well, a lot of Americans are making the conscious decision that they want to live in edge city developments. Through interviews with developers, employers, and residents, Garreau explores the factors that make edge cities so popular.
He writes “Maybe it worked like this. The force that drove the creation of Edge City was our search deep inside ourselves for a new balance of individualism and freedom. We wanted to build a world in which we could live in one place, work in another, and play in a third, in unlimited combination, as a way to nurture our human potential. This demanded transportation that would allow us to go where we wanted, when we wanted. That enshrined the individual transportation system, the automobile, in our lives. And that led us to build our market meeting places in the fashion of today’s malls.” Cars are key elements in this phenomenon. They make it possible for people to separate their workplaces from the residences, and they define the distances which are considered commutable. They make it possible for people to live spread out enough from each other that everyone can have a front yard, yet at the same time, for the development to be dense enough to support large employers and sophisticated shopping options.
While it’s correct to say that the book doesn’t come out strongly for or against the Edge City, the strong message that I’ve got from it so far is how inevitable the process of further decentralisation, auto-dependency and further creation of more Edge Cities seems to be. Places like Tysons Corner near Washington DC:  Garreau describes, rather than promotes, the ‘fact’ that these type of places appear to clearly be the future of urban environments throughout the USA (and presumably, eventually the rest of the ‘new’ developed world). But there’s a sense of inevitability to the whole process, a surety that the future is more of the image above:
Americans are creating the biggest change in a hundred years in how we build cities. Every single American city that is growing, is growing in the fashion of Los Angeles, with multiple urban cores.
These new hearths of our civilisation – in which the majority of metropolitan Americans now work and around which we live – look not at all like our old downtowns. Buildings rarely rise shoulder to shoulder, as in Chicago’s Loop. Instead, their broad, low outlines dot the landscape like mushrooms, separated by greensward and parking lots. Their office towers, frequently guarded by trees, gaze at one another from respectful distances through bands of glass that mirror in the sun in blue or silver or gold or green, like antique drawings of “the city of the future”…
…Our new city centres are tied together no by locomotives and subways, but by jetways, freeways, and rooftop satellite dishes thirty feet across. Their characteristic monument is not a horse-mounted hero, but the atria reaching for the sun and shielding trees perpetually in leaf at the cores of corporate headquarters, fitness centres and shopping plazas. These new urban areas are marked not by the penthouses of the old urban rich or the tenements of the old urban poor. Instead, their landmark structure is the celebrated single-family detached dwelling, the suburban home with grass all around the made America the best-housed civilisation the world has ever known.
You kind of see where the book is heading (although not in an uninteresting way). The supposed inevitability of further decentralisation, based around a car-centric transport system, also comes through in many of the more recent critiques of projects such as the City Rail Link, or in critiques of the metropolitan urban limit. Planning is thought to be working against natural processes of decentralisation, investment in public transport projects (other than a thoughtless “but buses can use roads too” slogan) is seen to be ignorant of changes to urban form, ignorant of a decreased role for the city centre in the future, and therefore just a waste of money.
The book’s observations are backed up by some quite interesting facts (remember, from 1992):
Already, two-thirds of all American office facilities are in Edge Cities, and 80 percent of them have materialised in only the last two decades. By the mid-1980s, there was far more office space in Edge Cities around America’s largest metropolis, New York, than there was at its heart – midtown Manhattan. Even before Wall Street faltered in the late 1980s there was less office space there, in New York’s downtown, that there was in the Edge Cities of New Jersey alone.
While Edge Cities continued to grow and multiply after 1992, over the past decade I think things have changed and seem likely to change further in the future. If we look at Auckland, the city centre is probably a more vibrant, thriving and dominant place than it has been for 20 years. If we look internationally, we see some trends of ‘recentralisation’ , particularly of residents but perhaps also of businesses too. This recent New York Times article was very interesting, when analysing the issue:
By now, nearly five years after the housing crash, most Americans understand that a mortgage meltdown was the catalyst for the Great Recession, facilitated by underregulation of finance and reckless risk-taking. Less understood is the divergence between center cities and inner-ring suburbs on one hand, and the suburban fringe on the other.
It was predominantly the collapse of the car-dependent suburban fringe that caused the mortgage collapse.
In the late 1990s, high-end outer suburbs contained most of the expensive housing in the United States, as measured by price per square foot, according to data I analyzed from the Zillow real estate database. Today, the most expensive housing is in the high-density, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods of the center city and inner suburbs. Some of the most expensive neighborhoods in their metropolitan areas are Capitol Hill in Seattle; Virginia Highland in Atlanta; German Village in Columbus, Ohio, and Logan Circle in Washington. Considered slums as recently as 30 years ago, they have been transformed by gentrification.
Simply put, there has been a profound structural shift — a reversal of what took place in the 1950s, when drivable suburbs boomed and flourished as center cities emptied and withered.
The shift is durable and lasting because of a major demographic event: the convergence of the two largest generations in American history, the baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) and the millennials (born between 1979 and 1996), which today represent half of the total population.
Many boomers are now empty nesters and approaching retirement. Generally this means that they will downsize their housing in the near future. Boomers want to live in a walkable urban downtown, a suburban town center or a small town, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Realtors.
This is quite a different vision for the future, and quite a different analysis of the current situation, to what we saw in 1992′s “Edge City”. Interestingly, in this more recent look at centralisation versus decentralisation, we see the “what does the market want” being flipped on its head:
Over all, only 12 percent of future homebuyers want the drivable suburban-fringe houses that are in such oversupply, according to the Realtors survey. This lack of demand all but guarantees continued price declines. Boomers selling their fringe housing will only add to the glut. Nothing the federal government can do will reverse this.
Many drivable-fringe house prices are now below replacement value, meaning the land under the house has no value and the sticks and bricks are worth less than they would cost to replace. This means there is no financial incentive to maintain the house; the next dollar invested will not be recouped upon resale. Many of these houses will be converted to rentals, which are rarely as well maintained as owner-occupied housing. Add the fact that the houses were built with cheap materials and methods to begin with, and you see why many fringe suburbs are turning into slums, with abandoned housing and rising crime.
The good news is that there is great pent-up demand for walkable, centrally located neighborhoods in cities like Portland, Denver, Philadelphia and Chattanooga, Tenn. The transformation of suburbia can be seen in places like Arlington County, Va., Bellevue, Wash., and Pasadena, Calif., where strip malls have been bulldozed and replaced by higher-density mixed-use developments with good transit connections.
It’s too early to tell for sure, but certainly my thinking is that while Edge City was very much correct in predicting what would happen for the rest of the 1990s, it wasn’t correct in thinking that dramatic decentralisation was going to continue forever. What will perhaps tell us most clearly which ways things are headed, in terms of the ‘decentralisation versus recentralisation debate’, is where new office space is constructed over the next 10-20 years. Auckland has seen a decentralisation of its office space to places like Albany, Smales Farm, Highbrook and Ellerslie over the past 20 years, but this trend seems to have ceased in more recent times.
Only time will tell us for sure whether ‘Edge City’ is the future, or whether it was a late 20th century aberration. Looking at the kind of urban environments it creates, I’m kind of hoping for the latter.
By Joshua Arbury, on December 27th, 2011 Another article has highlighted that Auckland’s traffic volumes aren’t growing anymore – rather stagnating and even falling slightly:
More Aucklanders are leaving their cars at home for the commute to work as high petrol prices bite.
New figures show almost 900 fewer cars a week travelled over the Auckland Harbour Bridge this year compared with last year.
The drop corresponds with a fall in petrol sales in the city and an increase in public transport patronage.
NZTA figures show 1,684,601 cars crossed the bridge in the year to December, 44,545 fewer than last year.
Figures provided by New Zealand-owned petrol retailer Gull from local authority levies on petrol sales in the Auckland region showed 19 million fewer litres of petrol were sold in the year to June – a two per cent drop on the previous year.
The change in volumes over the harbour bridge is very slight (and the above article is wrong with its yearly total as around 160,000 vehicles cross the bridge a day, meaning you’d get to 1.6 million in just over a week, not in a whole year) but the change in petrol sales is perhaps most interesting, highlighting a reduction in driving throughout Auckland, not just a shifting of traffic away from some roads and towards others.
This isn’t just an Auckland phenomenon either, with a more enlightened than average traffic engineer in the USA pointing out that traffic projections may need to be fundamentally changed from how things have been done in the past. He notes:
I’m working on a traffic study where the reviewing agencies asked us to prepare 20 year forecasts in addition to looking at the build out year. Typically, we look at data trendlines on nearby roads and throughout the county to determine a “typical growth rate” for traffic in the area. This has historically been an annual growth rate of 1 to 3%. This often leads us to factoring traffic up 50% or more over 20 years and then layering on the traffic from the proposed development. Factoring existing traffic volumes up approximately 50% is also how traffic forecasts are often prepared for road design projects.
I’m strongly reconsidering this approach. Consider Figure 1 below from the Federal Highway Administration’s Office of Highway Policy Information website. From 1986 to 2006, traffic on all of our highways did fit the model of growing by about 2 to 3% a year (or 50% to 60% over the 20 years). But since 2005, we’ve had a significant drop in traffic and the trendline sure makes it look like traffic growth has plateaued.
Here’s that figure one: Further analysis from the famous “Texas Transport Institute Urban Mobility Report” highlights that congestion has remained roughly the same over the past decade, once again reversing a long-term trend of ever-worsening congestion: Mike Spack, who wrote the blog post, makes the obvious – but incredibly important – conclusion from the above data (and a pile of other data he quotes in his post:
Based on national and local trends, my conclusion is that it is very reasonable to think traffic growth has plateaued. The punchline for traffic impact studies: the “no-build” traffic forecasts should be the same as the existing traffic volumes. We don’t need to do opening day forecasts and 20 year forecasts because they can reasonably be expected to be similar.
And given our huge budget shortfalls, this should also mean a policy of fixing the infrastructure we have. NOT expanding our transportation system to add capacity.
There are some excellent points made in the comments too. This one in particular is very relevant to our debates here in Auckland:
As always, this can be tied back to money. As long as outside funding sources (e.g. state, federal) continue to reward agencies with inflated no-build volumes, there is little benefit to agencies for projecting more realistic no-build volumes.
In addition, many agencies rely on inflated no-build volumes to justify the “need” for a project as required by federal environmental documents.
I suspect that the cost-benefit ratios of most of our proposed roading projects would plummet if we shifted to a “no growth” assumption for traffic volumes. Most projects derive their ‘benefits’ from projecting how utterly terrible things will be 20-30 years down the track if the project in question isn’t built (the increased ‘no-build’ volumes), then highlighting how the project in question will ensure that scenario does not occur. If things aren’t going to get worse in the future, when it comes to congestion and car volumes, then the justification for so many projects just disappears.
By Joshua Arbury, on November 29th, 2011 A fascinating article in the New York Times looks at how changing demographics and the housing crash the USA has experienced over the past five years is changing the future form of their cities – away from car dependent urban sprawl and towards higher-density walkable urban areas.
Drive through any number of outer-ring suburbs in America, and you’ll see boarded-up and vacant strip malls, surrounded by vast seas of empty parking spaces. These forlorn monuments to the real estate crash are not going to come back to life, even when the economy recovers. And that’s because the demand for the housing that once supported commercial activity in many exurbs isn’t coming back, either…
… It was predominantly the collapse of the car-dependent suburban fringe that caused the mortgage collapse.
In the late 1990s, high-end outer suburbs contained most of the expensive housing in the United States, as measured by price per square foot, according to data I analyzed from the Zillow real estate database. Today, the most expensive housing is in the high-density, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods of the center city and inner suburbs. Some of the most expensive neighborhoods in their metropolitan areas are Capitol Hill in Seattle; Virginia Highland in Atlanta; German Village in Columbus, Ohio, and Logan Circle in Washington. Considered slums as recently as 30 years ago, they have been transformed by gentrification.
Simply put, there has been a profound structural shift — a reversal of what took place in the 1950s, when drivable suburbs boomed and flourished as center cities emptied and withered.
Certainly in Auckland we have seen some of the same process happening over the past 20-30 years. Parts of the inner-city, like Ponsonby and Freemans Bay, that were verging on being slums in the 1960s and 1970s are now some of the most sought-after places to live. We have also seen, over the past 15 years, a dramatic increase in the number of people living in the city centre.
What we haven’t seen so much is the real estate crash the USA has experienced, the vast empty parking lots (except for Manukau City of course), vacant strip malls, empty houses and so forth. I suspect that this is largely due to our urban limits – which made ‘over-building’ during the boom years that much more difficult.
An interesting question is how these trends might continue into the future, and here’s where demographic change becomes important:
The shift is durable and lasting because of a major demographic event: the convergence of the two largest generations in American history, the baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) and the millennials (born between 1979 and 1996), which today represent half of the total population.
Many boomers are now empty nesters and approaching retirement. Generally this means that they will downsize their housing in the near future. Boomers want to live in a walkable urban downtown, a suburban town center or a small town, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Realtors.
The millennials are just now beginning to emerge from the nest — at least those who can afford to live on their own. This coming-of-age cohort also favors urban downtowns and suburban town centers — for lifestyle reasons and the convenience of not having to own cars.
Over all, only 12 percent of future homebuyers want the drivable suburban-fringe houses that are in such oversupply, according to the Realtors survey.
There still seems to be quite a lag in Auckland between our changing demographics and the types of housing which are being built. Even though an aging population means smaller and smaller household sizes, we continue to construct larger and larger houses. I’m guessing that it’s probably our planning rules at fault here, which prevent the splitting of existing houses into smaller units and generally discourage urban intensification. This is setting ourselves up for a huge imbalance in the future between the demand for smaller places and the supply of oversize houses.
The connections between these changes and transport shouldn’t be under-estimated. The article highlights that the transport decisions which will support our future urban form may be very different to those we have been making in the past. Critically, and I could not support this issue more, local government should have a greater say over how transport money is spent:
The cities and inner-ring suburbs that will be the foundation of the recovery require significant investment at a time of government retrenchment. Bus and light-rail systems, bike lanes and pedestrian improvements — what traffic engineers dismissively call “alternative transportation” — are vital. So is the repair of infrastructure like roads and bridges. Places as diverse as Los Angeles, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Dallas, Charlotte, Denver and Washington have recently voted to pay for “alternative transportation,” mindful of the dividends to be reaped. As Congress works to reauthorize highway and transit legislation, it must give metropolitan areas greater flexibility for financing transportation, rather than mandating that the vast bulk of the money can be used only for roads.
For too long, we over-invested in the wrong places. Those retail centers and subdivisions will never be worth what they cost to build. We have to stop throwing good money after bad. It is time to instead build what the market wants: mixed-income, walkable cities and suburbs that will support the knowledge economy, promote environmental sustainability and create jobs.
I really do hope the final version of the Auckland Plan takes these matters into consideration.
By Joshua Arbury, on November 15th, 2011 One of the most interesting things to note when it comes to transport trends over the past few years is the complete lack in growth of state highway traffic volumes since around 2005, with a little bumping around we actually find ourselves with the same level of traffic on our state highways in 2010 as we had in 2005: It’s perhaps a bit early to comprehensively know whether this is a short-term “bucking” of the long-term trend of inexorable growth – or something more permanent. Of course we have had a pretty major economic ‘situation’ over the past few years which is likely to have contributed to the flat-lining of traffic growth, but I tend to think that there’s something more long term at work here.
If you look at similar numbers in the USA, you can also see a pretty big anomaly to the long-term traffic growth rates over the past few years: There’s an obvious connection between the graph above and the one below, which shows a decline in the USA’s consumption of petroleum over the past few years: Along with the economic difficulties of the past few years I can’t help but think a core reason for these changes relates to the rising cost of fuel, which itself is fundamentally being caused by the increasing difficulty of finding more oil to pump. This is pretty obvious when you look at global oil supply levels over the past eight years: Perhaps the over-arching point to take from all these graphs is to ask the question about whether we really think it’s likely that we’ll return to the days of the 1990s and early 2000s when traffic grew consistently each year by a few percentage points – putting increasing pressure on the transport system and making the argument for building more and more roads. Or, alternatively, is the current situation part of a longer term trend, something we’re also seeing in overseas countries like the USA, caused by the inability to increase oil supply (and therefore increasing prices)? If the answer is the latter, then perhaps we need to truly fundamentally rethink our approach to transport, because if the number of cars on the road system isn’t increasing, then it’s pretty hard to argue that we need to increase the capacity of the road network.
By Joshua Arbury, on September 19th, 2011 I’m reading the fascinating book “Triumph of the City” by Edward Glaeser, at the moment. While I don’t find myself necessarily agreeing with everything in the book, its arguments are really well made – in a way that makes you take full consideration of them. In particular, there’s an interesting discussion of why Houston has become such a popular city for people to move to over the past decade or two, which has some useful lessons for Auckland (even if I really don’t want Auckland to follow the Houston model in all ways). But that particular issue is probably best left to a future post.
A section of the book that I find really fascinating focuses on the relationship between different types of urban environments and their environmental impact. It seems to have become broadly accepted that if you want to live a sustainable, ‘green’ lifestyle then the best thing you can do is head to the country, find a reasonably large piece of land and start growing your own food, generating your own power and collecting your own water. Cities are seen as polluting, consuming ‘anti-environment’ places. However, when you look at things in a bit more detail, the reality is quite different:
Using a gallon of gas produces about twenty-two pounds of carbon dioxide, if you factor in the carbon used in refining and distributing gasoline. An average family in the United States buys about a thousand gallons of gas a year, which is associated with about ten tons of carbon dioxide. It may be easier to imagine American families buying more fuel-efficient cars than giving up on car-based living altogether, but historically the bulk of variation in gas usage among various people over various periods of time comes from total miles travelled, not from fuel efficiency. Cars now get, on average, about 22 miles per gallon, and the big difference is whether you drive three hundred miles per year or thirty thousand, which depends on whether you live in a city or a suburb.
There’s an interesting paradox which results from improved efficiency not always leading to a reduction in use of the energy input – one might call it the ‘heat-pump paradox’ where the efficiency of a heat pump doesn’t mean reduced power bills, but rather that people use the heat pump more than they would use a conventional heater – leading to either the same amount of energy use or actually an increase in energy use than before. Over the past few decades we’ve seen the same thing happen with improvements in vehicle efficiency, which has either gone into more powerful cars or been eaten away by increased usage of vehicles. Of course that’s not to say that we shouldn’t bother improving efficiency, but rather than we perhaps shouldn’t completely rely on it.
The book continues:
[Matthew] Kahn and I found that area density and distance to the city centre are both strongly associated with gasoline usage. The average household living in a census tract with more than ten thousand people per square mile uses 687 gallons of gas per year, while the average household living in an area with fewer than one thousand people per square mile (about one household per acre) uses 1,164 gallons of gas per year. The density of one’s home neighbourhood matters because most car trips aren’t commutes downtown. People drive millions of miles to buy groceries, to go out to eat, and to pick their children up at school. The density of stores and schools in an area determines the average distance of those trips. In a city, you often walk to a restaurant. In a low-density area, eating out might entail a twenty-five minute drive each way.
Generally the largest proportion of vehicular trips are for what tends to be termed ‘errands’. Picking up the kids from school, popping down to the store, heading to the shopping centre, visiting friends and relatives – and so forth. I suspect that even in low density cities with very good public transport systems – like Perth, outer New York City and Vancouver, the vast majority of these ‘errand’ trips are undertaken by private vehicle. I’ve had some long and detailed debates on this issue of density and transport choice and generally feel that, while not necessarily impossible, it is certainly very difficult to provide a public transport system that can be attractive for non-commuting trips in low density urban environments.
Indeed, in higher density urban environments even if we did continue to drive for many of our trips – at least those trips would be shorter, as the book goes on to explain:
Holding family income and size constant, gas consumption per family per year declines by 106 gallons as the number of residents per square mile doubles. These estimates suggest that if the average Northeastern household moved from living at one family per acre to five families per acre, then that family would consume 350 fewer gallons. These facts remind us that mass transit isn’t the only way to lower gas consumption. If people lived in denser areas, they’d travel far fewer miles and burn much less gas, even if they still drove to work.
Of course catching public transport is quite green too, particularly when the system is well used:
Public transportation emits carbon too, but most forms of public transit are a lot more energy efficient than driving vast distances in our own personal gas burners. For example, the New York City Transit system uses 42 million gallons of diesel fuel and 14.8 billion megawatts of electricity each year to deliver 2.6 billion trips to its riders. That works out to an average of 0.9 pounds of carbon dioxide per trip – a tenth as much as the nine pounds of carbon dioxide emitted in an average car trip.
New York’s public transport system is obviously incredibly well used, which means it’s very efficient. Along with ensuring we get good value for money from our spend on public transport, it’s also important from an environmental perspective to ensure we run an efficient system. Empty buses not only wastes money, it also unnecessarily pollutes our city and contributes to carbon emissions.
Comparing various cities in the USA highlights the relationship between urban density and carbon emissions:
On average, when population doubles, per-household carbon dioxide emissions due to driving decline by almost a ton per year. Southern cities have particularly high driving levels, and over 75 percent more gasoline usage than New York. Sunbelt cities like Greenville, South Carolina, Nashville, Tennessee and Oklahoma City were built at low densities and have widely dispersed employment, and their residents use more gas.
In almost every metropolitan area, city dwellers consume a lot less gas than suburbanites. Predictably, some of the biggest city-suburb gaps are in older areas, like New York, where the average urban family consumes more than three hundred fewer gallons of gas per year than its suburban counterpart. But some of the largest gaps between cities and suburbs also occur in places like Atlanta and Nashville. It isn’t that central Nashville or Atlanta has so little driving, but that people drive so much in their suburbs. These facts suggest that city density reduces carbon emissions in the older areas of the Northeast, but also in the newer areas that are growing fastest.
It’s not only in relation to transport that density makes a difference, but also when it comes to electricity usage. In the USA, where most power is generated by coal powerplants, reducing energy use in buildings makes a huge difference to carbon dioxide emissions.
Cities are also greener than suburbs because urbanites use less electricity. Electrical appliances account for two thirds of residential energy use. The main factor that explains the difference in energy use among various metropolitan areas is summer heat. Everybody runs refrigerators and appliances, but air conditioning really drives the differences from place to place. The rise of the American sunbelt in the postwar period owes much to the availability of cheap, cool air. Who would want to put up with Houston’s ninety-nine 90-degree days a year without air-conditioning?
Bigger, denser cities, where people own smaller homes, use less electricity. The average single-family detached home consumes 88 percent more electricity than the average apartment in a five-or-more-unit building. The average suburban household consumes 27 percent more electricity than the average urban household. When we standardise for income and family size, we find that central-city residents use less electricity in forty-four out of the forty-eight metropolitan areas that we analysed. More centralised metropolitan areas, such as New York, Boston, and even Las Vegas, use less electricity than more sprawling places, like Dallas or Phoenix.
In a way none of this should come as a surprise. In an apartment building you have more shared walls (ceilings and floor) than in a detached home, so your heating (or cooling) helps your neighbours (and vice-versa) rather than disappearing into the outside world. In terms of transport, it is also fairly logical that denser urban environments mean less travel and a greater likelihood of public transport being used for trips.
Which does make one wonder why the myth of low density semi-rural living being environmentally friendly has persisted.
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