I came across a bit of a “think-piece” written by Chris Harris (the public transport advocate, not the cricketer) that is simply too good and interesting not to share. I won’t quote all of what he wrote verbatim, because it relates to a submission on a policy plan, but there are some fascinating tracts.
An important contributor to quality of life, particularly relevant to urban areas and the policy variable that I would like to focus on here, is the quality of urban public space, the quality of ‘life between buildings’ in other words, as Professor Jan Gehl of Copenhagen has put it. This space is also known, in English-speaking countries, as the ‘public room’.
It is perhaps a characteristic of property-owning democracies such as New Zealand that, while considerable attention has been paid to the improvement of private real estate, we have tended to neglect the public room, even though this often rebounds negatively on the value of the buildings and land adjoining it.
This quality of the public room is determined by the balance of positive factors, such as the beautiful adjoining buildings that we notice when visiting old European or Asian towns, and negative factors, which can generally be described as ‘stressors’.
Such stressors in the public room include, but are not limited to:
- Traffic noise
- Local air pollution from traffic
- Traffic congestion, including delays to motorists in the public room
- Lack of safe and easy street crossings
- Ugly buildings
- Graffiti, broken windows and evidence of crime
- Visual clutter (signs, overhead wires, etc)
- Absence of trees and greenery
- Absence of other pedestrians
If traffic is too heavy within the public room, other contributors to its quality will be neglected and it will generally deteriorate. Pedestrians will vanish, and with them the quality of ‘passive surveillance’ that controls graffiti and broken windows. There will be little point in spending extra money to make buildings look nice if the view of them is to be forever blocked by car roofs. Signs may become obtrusive precisely because they are so hard for motorists to see. Trees will go, when the road is widened; and nobody will care too much about overhead wires and noise. Even a buildup of fumes will be accepted, since everyone is just passing through.
In effect, traffic blights the public room. For that reason, the qualities of the public room require strict limitation of the volume of traffic, and its relegation to ‘corridors’ between the public rooms. These corridors are effectively sacrificed in quality of life terms—purposefully ‘blighted’—in order to spare the rooms.
The most extreme examples of such corridors are urban motorways. Railways, too, can cause a similar blight if the trains are noisy and smoky, though railway blight is less of a problem in New Zealand. A less extreme example of a blighted corridor would be a limited-access arterial road with back fences along most of its length.
Though these ideas are most clearly associated with a town planning tradition that dates back to Professor Colin Buchanan in the 1960s, it is important to note that the engineers’ roading hierarchy is based on a similar logic.
In both systems, that of the planners and that of the engineers, at one extreme there are roads which focus on movement through a given place, while at the other extreme are streets which focus on circulation within the place. Both systems explicitly distinguish between the thundering road and the café, bookshop and park-lined street. Large trucks go on the former, bicyclists on the latter.
However, a problem arises in the operationalising of these principles. In brief, the maintenance or preservation of the corridor-room distinction requires that road traffic be positively limited within the urban room. Steps must be taken to keep traffic from leaking out of the corridors and into the rooms.
The other day, in the dark depths of some comments thread, I said something along the lines of “we perhaps focus too much on getting from A to B and not enough on what A and B are actually like, or what it’s like on the way between A and B”. This relates strongly to what Chris is saying, that there needs to be a balance struck between the need to shift people around the urban environment, and ensuring that the urban environment is not unduly degraded as a result of that. This is a conundrum that I think public transport is potentially far more effective at solving than private transport.
Chris goes on, to talk about Auckland more specifically:
A good example of this problem of leakage is the relationship between the Auckland CBD and the surrounding Central Motorway Junction, more popularly known as ‘Spaghetti Junction’. The Central Motorway Junction was first proposed in the 1940s as a device for keeping traffic out of the downtown area that it enclosed.
But in practice, traffic has been allowed to leak out of the CMJ and onto the six lane, one-way arterial roads of Nelson Street and Hobson Street, as well as a larger number of two-way, four and six-lane arterial roads.
Downtown Auckland is thus ‘all corridor, no room’. Not surprisingly it is also a townscape of ugly buildings and a general absence of civic pride. An effort has been made to render Queen Street at least less awful than it was before, but this is very much against the tide, an exercise in ‘bailing’ traffic out of a public room into which it continually percolates.
In practice, the only way to prevent leakage of traffic out of the corridors and into the rooms is by means of countervailing transport investment. This chiefly means public transport. There has been an underinvestment in public transport in New Zealand, relative to the objective of the public room. But also, we have tended to invest in forms of public transport that are themselves more suited to the corridors than to the rooms of the city.
While in my opinion Auckland’s CBD isn’t ‘that bad’, it could certainly be better – and the fact that it veers towards being too much of a ‘corridor’ and too little of a ‘room’ is probably one of the main contributing factors to this. Certainly, when I was in Wellington within the last couple of weeks I felt that the downtown area there – particularly the waterfront – was a much more inviting environment to linger in and enjoy. It wasn’t just a place to get through in order to be somewhere else. In Auckland, the main street remains a four-lane highway, much of the waterfront remains locked off, and as a result it’s a far less inviting place.
Chris then goes on to talk about how different kinds of transport – even different kinds of public transport – can have a hugely varying effect on the quality of our urban environment. I know this will ‘fan the flames’ of the buses versus trams debate, but it is another interesting aspect of that debate:
All too often, in New Zealand, we have opted to make do with noisy, smoky Diesel buses or trains because they are cheaper than electric ones, in a narrow, trucking-company sense that combines immediate cost to the operator with a steep discount rate while neglecting wider considerations. The electric vehicles last twice as long as the Diesel ones, but particularly at the past discount rate of ten per cent, that did not count against Diesel.
Nor was it taken into account that Diesel actually put off many potential public transport users. Nor, that Diesel stimulated furious objection from property owners behind nearly every proposed new bus stop. Thus has ‘corridor thinking’, appropriate to a trucking company, been mistakenly applied to infrastructure for the city’s sensitive transport rooms.
In a similar vein, buses have been preferred over more expensive trams or streetcars—though the cost differential is often exaggerated, and sensitive to discount rates and patronage assumptions—because it has not been taken into account that trams or streetcars are far more compatible with the pedestrian.
There is always slight uncertainty as to where the bus is headed; the bus routinely overswings the footpath; and it does not have the tram’s built in protections against running people over. The latter has traditionally included ‘cowcatcher’ devices, which staff at museums such as Auckland’s MOTAT are happy to demonstrate. Modern low-floor trams are too low to run people over in any case, and are thus the most pedestrian friendly form of public transport that it is possible to have.
Nowhere, to this writer’s knowledge, has the issue of relative pedestrian-friendliness been raised or taken into account in New Zealand transport planning evaluations. Yet it is basic to the tram-versus-bus choice, particularly nowadays. Once again, ‘corridor thinking’ has been applied, this time in terms of a universal preference for the bus, which is really only appropriate to outer suburban areas and for feeder service to rail-based downtown systems.
An interesting image from Portland shows the kind of urban spaces, or ‘rooms’ that high quality public transport can create:
There is a good argument that from a transport perspective, trams are rarely worth the extra expense when compared to buses. The flexibility you can get from a bus, the extra cost of the tram, means that when you plug all the numbers in it is more likely that the bus option will come out as the more economically sensible. However, that misses the effect on urban environments – it misses the economic value that the bigger picture of a great city to live, work and play in, might bring. Not only is that aspect ignored in the evaluation of a project, it is also ignored in terms of how transport projects should be funded – with our focus on ‘corridor thinking’, of public spaces simply being for movement through them. Chris looks at this aspect next:
What drives corridor thinking? The answer to that question may lie in the funding arrangements that have applied to transport in New Zealand since the early 1950s. This has consisted of variations on a theme of the full hypothecation of motoring taxes to roads, or to a roads-plus-public transport combination. This kind of funding system produces an automatic emphasis on corridors to move cars, at the expense of rooms, which generate no automobile revenue.
The alternative is a room-focused funding system for transport; not necessarily to replace the corridor-focused road tax system, but, if we are to speak of necessity, as a complement to it. It was noted earlier on that proximity to busy roads often damages property values, even if roads are needed to get to the property in the first place. This conflict is avoided if a room-friendly public transport system is installed, meaning high quality, electrified, railed public transport. But by the same token, the latter does not generate a flow of funds comparable to motoring taxes. Instead, it will usually make a loss on tickets.
The secret to grasping the economics of such quality public transport is that the loss on tickets is made up by the land revaluation of the public rooms. In an important theorem by William S. Vickrey—a Nobel economics laureate, like several members of the French President’s Commission—the revaluation of land under public rooms will normally cover the fixed costs of any rail-like public transport system, leaving only the marginal costs to be covered by tickets.
This is a comforting conclusion, because it is normally this need for upfront commitment, and certainty of losses on tickets thereafter (if they have to also cover build costs), that normally stops investment in rail or trams. And this in turn leads to the relentless leakage of car traffic into the city’s public rooms until, like a leaky building, they fall apart. The car has its place in rural areas and on urban roads, properly understood. But heavy traffic is not desirable everywhere and that is the problem.
He then, quite importantly in my opinion, looks briefly at analysing what the value of a more ‘rooms-based’ approach to transportation is, and bring it back to how varying transport policies can have varying effects on quality of life. This directly addresses that ‘bigger picture’, that perhaps in some situations the more expensive, and seemingly less cost-effective transport project might actually make more sense, because of the wider positive effects it has on the urban environment. If those wider effects outweigh the additional cost, then something we previously thought didn’t make economic sense, might be seen in a different light:
Although Auckland scores highly in international quality-of-life comparisons, these scores are skewed by Auckland’s attractive natural setting, the ‘playground’ of the Hauraki Gulf. At street level, the city that we have built is often far less attractive, especially the parts that we have built since the dawn of urban mass motoring, that is to say around 1950 in New Zealand. If these trends continue, Auckland risks falling behind competitor cities that are investing more positively in the quality of their built environments, by means that include room-supportive public transport.
Thus, every one of the following English-speaking, Pacific-rim cities of roughly Auckland’s size has an affordable public transport pass that is usable on most services; at least one electrified rail or tram service; and large fleets of low-emission buses that are advertised as such:
- Perth
- Vancouver
- Seattle
- Adelaide
- Portland
- Sacramento
- San Diego
- Calgary
- San Francisco (City)
- Brisbane
The exception, on all these scores, is Auckland. Though investment in Auckland metro public transport is improving, it is from a low base, that does not yet include electrification, an affordable integrated ticket, anything in the way of trams (MOTAT excepted), or low-emission buses comparable to international best practice levels. This leaves Auckland vulnerable to a pitch from rival cities, whether in terms of the slogan ‘In Adelaide you’d be home by now’, or Seattle’s ‘No traffic jams on the Sounder’, the latter a selling-point for apartments 20 km from the downtown.
It is possible for the modern person to use a laptop, Ipod or Wi-Fi on the train, for work or pleasure. This, in itself, is a huge technological shift; it is the car on the motorway, not the railway, that now looks like yesterday’s technology. And the housing at the end of the congestion-free line is affordable; and it doesn’t leak.
Finally, because the transport system is room-friendly, all these cities are far more attractive and lively in their downtown areas and secondary town centres than Auckland.
The lesson for Auckland is obvious.
Indeed. In an age where there is huge international competition to attract highly-skilled workers I think it’s imperative, from an economic perspective as well as any other perspective, to look to be creating top-quality urban environments. Getting the right mix of transport is a critical part of that – and our current auto-centricity just doesn’t cut the mustard in terms of creating people friendly urban environments. Maybe our economic evaluation models of transport projects need a bit of updating to reflect this better?
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On a recent trip to Melbourne I had a good look at Bourke St in particular.
I realised it looked exactly how I imagined Queen St would look if it were closed to cars and we had trams. It was a very pleasant street, and it’s the kind of environment that would make you *want* to go to the CBD.
Photos are on the Wikipedia article here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourke_Street,_Melbourne
This is a good example of what Queen St would look like if it were redeveloped with the “room-based” thinking as your source describes.
Who in their right mind would not want this?
Wow, hadn’t necessarily given a great deal of thought to the cause and effect relationship between cleaner and faster PT, and the ‘public room.’ Very insightful and interesting stuff. Boy do our city planners need a kick in the ass. I agree that our natural setting is so good, it kind of blinds people to how bad the urban design is in Auckland, and the CBD in particular.
I agree. Whether a place is enjoyable to be and live in and is often a deciding factor for people choosing a city. Auckland is definitely losing out – I’ve talked to numerous people who won’t even consider moving here simply because of the woeful public transport and unlovely inner city.
Unquantifables such as the buzz of a city, and hidden factors such as lost potential migration don’t get factored into costings.
Jeremy,AC, I totally agree. I am a member of a large Aucklander expat community living in Melbourne. I personally know a good 40 odd people roughly my age who grew up in Auckland, went on some form of OE and could not fathom going back there after seeing what good public transport and urban design was actually like, so returned to Melbourne instead of going back home.
It is a very common topic of conversation at the pub or over coffee and the conclusions are always the same. Auckland is a fairly uninviting/unexciting place, particularly the CBD. Combine that with woeful public transport and horrific road congestion abd that makes it hard to live in.
Indeed, I can’t wait to get out of Auckland and get back to London. Now I would say Auckland has a far superior natural environment than London, and some Greater London boroughs have their fare share of ugly areas. But London, what a city! I know its hard to compare these things what with London being over 1000 years old and having so much history etc etc, but we should be able to learn from the best!
As far as natural attractiveness, and great urban design and historical areas and great PT combined, I reckon Stockholm’s up near the very top.
It is an interesting factor that might well make a significant contribution to our ‘brain drain’ that simply has not been looked at.
I think you guys have hit the nail on the head this is a major reason people choose to live in cities overseas rather than here. Sadly most polititions do not realise this and think it’s purely down to the size of the salary you can earn and the amount of tax you pay.
What an irony when you compare Wellington to Auckland. Wellington has many of the qualities you mention whereas Auckland has errr Spaghetti junction and a very quiet CBD. You would expect Wellington politicians then to show some interest in giving Auckland the same benefits and qulaities that they enjoy in Wellington then?
Somehow I suspect Stephen Joyce would not agree.
There are a number of projects underway to improve Auckland’s CBD, like the various shared spaces being planned. But in general it is clear that the car is king in this city.
For me that was true Cam. The income/tax thing didn’t really come into it, more the quality of life and transport time/costs in particular.
Especially the fact I can buy a $29 ticket by eftpos once a week for all my travel, basically anytime anywhere. Back in Auckland I had to keep a big jar of change on the table just to get the bus to work, and I had to keep a car in the driveway for pretty much anything else.
When planning anything, the first question should be: What do we want to maximise?
Always, one should go back to first principles. Unfortunately, this is as rare in transport planning as in anything else.
@TopCat – agree about the difference between Welly and Orc’s, but I don’t think I would go as far as saying Auckland CBD is quiet. The pedestrian phases at many of the traffic lights on Queen Street are double cycled just to clear the volume of pedestrians. This is something that ACC wouldn’t even consider 5 years ago (I know, I pushed for it!). I’ve been really surprised at the increase in activity – day and night – in the CBD. The shared streets, the double cycled ped phases, closure of Grafton Bridge to traffic 7am – 7pm – there are a few positive signs of place building in the CBD. However, at this stage I restrain my positivity to the immediate CBD area only. The rest of Auckland still looks like lil’ LA.
It was a shock coming back to Auckland and realising how much money I would have to spend just to get from A to B. And it would still take about an hour. It was a very big reason for not doing undergraduate in Auckland, and doing post-graduate studies abroad.
The fact that things like the shared streets and the central connector are actually happening makes me optimistic, if a little surprised. I really think the place will have turned itself around and become a ‘world city’ within twenty years or so, but that is still too long for me to wait around.
George, I think you are right there. The first question should be ‘what do we want to achieve’ and the second ‘what are *all* the possible ways to achieve it, and the third ‘which is the best one of those options’.
Too often planning wags the dog, they start with a solution like a new highway or a rail line, then they go back and try to justify it, istead of starting with a problem and working out the best solution.
I also agree that both PT’s positive urban environment effect and Auckland car reliance pushing people overseas are both woefully under estimated…
”PT’s positive urban environment effect and Auckland car reliance pushing people overseas are both woefully under estimated…”
Yup, huge reason why my wife and I decided we will never live in Auckland again. If we ever come back to NZ to stay we could live in Wellington maybe, but Auckland? No.
Life is just too short to sit in traffic surrounded by uninspiring urban areas.
Well, I’m an Aucklander and there have been members of my family living here since 1840. I have a PhD, not that it’s particularly useful at the moment. I left NZ in the 80s and have lived and worked subsequently in Sydney, London, Brussels and Copenhagen. Attracted, inter alia, by Labour’s knowledge nation idea (I’m not entirely naive) and nostalgia for an extraordinary natural landscape (fast being destroyed), I came back briefly in the early 00s but the reality of living here, including the lack of effective public transport, was a key problematic (as indeed is the whole autodependency thing), so I moved back to London. Unfortunately, due to family circumstances, I had to return last year. I’ll be leaving again as soon as I’m able. I don’t think the likes of Steven Joyce care one way or the other about brain drains: New Zealand for them is all about financial opportunity and the possibilities of profit and personal gain; that’s not my country.
Interesting thoughts – perhaps someone needs to really push this “bigger picture” approach and recognise the economic value of “place quality” (for lack of a better phrase).
Yes Christopher i think that is correct. Which is why the likes of Joyce don’t give a rat’s arse about public transport and how it would benefit the majority of people. You can put as many rational arguments and all the data in the world in front of Stephen Joyce and it won’t make one bit of difference. He’s not interested in anything you can’t directly make a buck off.
Yes top quality urban environments are all very positive, but this article seems to imply that the significant differences in cost between light rail and low emission buses is somehow made up by increased property values. Where is the evidence of this? If it is so, why are property developers and owners not queuing up to make contributions towards light rail?
Bear in mind that of the list of cities given, Perth only has electric heavy rail (which Auckland will soon have), Vancouver has trolley buses (the monorail can’t really count), Seattle has light rail and trolley buses, Adelaide has a single legacy tram line (but a guided busway), Portland, Sacramento, San Diego and Calgary all have light rail, San Francisco has light rail, trolley buses, BART and cable cars and Brisbane heavy electric rail (and busways).
So you don’t need light rail, some use trolley buses and some have just heavy rail.
I think the main reason people leave NZ to live overseas is employment and travel opportunities that simply don’t exist in NZ. NZ is a small country far far away, and if you to make something of yourself and meet a far bigger range of people, and have a far more diverse range of social and cultural experiences, living in Australia, London or the USA beats any NZ city hands down. After all, Invercargill has done a lot to make it more attractive, but it isn’t exactly growing is it? By contrast, despite the naysayers, Auckland remains the fastest growing city in NZ, closely followed by Tauranga. Wellington with its more ample public transport and quite attractive downtown doesn’t. Similarly Sheffield has had a fortune poured into it, including light rail, but it doesn’t attract people or businesses.
So while good quality urban environments help, this can be vastly overblown.
Bearing in mind that never in your wildest dreams will public transport “benefit the majority” of people. It will only ever carry a small minority of trips, even in the ARC’s most optimistic forecasts. I’m still intrigued by how so many commenting here don’t acknowledge that for most Aucklanders, a fixed rail public transport system wont be remotely near their jobs, let alone where they live. So much attention to try to attract another 8% of commutes to public transport.
Liberty, the thing is that public transport caters for those trips that are most harmful to the urban environment – those in the inner city and those that all happen at the same time. Driving from Sandringham to Avondale does not stuff thing up like driving from Takapuna to Greenlane or from Howick to the city.
Are you serioius, why are developers not queing up to make a contribution to light rail? Probably for the same reason they would not willingly que up to make a contribution to the cost or sewage and roads or schools for new developments.
Also Liberty, your assertation that public transport will only ever carry a small minority of trips is based on what? What’s your 8% based on? Which forecast is this? If you could perhaps elaborate a bit with you ststistics it would allow us better to assess what if what you are saying is correct. My understanding is that the ARC’s target is 100 million passenger trips which is double the current number.
Also the fact that employment is dispersed is why the land use planning strategy from the ARC is about creating higher densities around our various CBDs. So that over time this will change.Plus you do know they can build new lines right? And before you say it yes they are expensive but so are roads. NZ will never adopt your rigid user pays system so the reality it all transport modes will continue to contain some degree of subsidy.
I think you are partially correct about why people leave NZ. But we were talking about why so many are reluctant to come back. My assertation was based on many people i have spoken to. Auckland is a multi cultural city nearly 40% of it’s inhabitants are foreign born.Which is more than any other Australaisian city. Why could Auckland not offer a range of “cultural and social experiences” that at least match their Australian counterparts?
Forgot to post this. My source for the amount of foreign born residents in Auckland. In case anyone was curious.
http://gstudynet.org/gum/Publications/Immigration%20and%20World%20Cities.pdf
I’d argue we already do Cam… Over a single weekend I can go to two world class museums, a top zoo, a world first aquarium, an excellent art gallery (or when it soon re-opens it will be), a first world ballet or orchestra, entertainment at the Casino or Vector Arena, excellent sporting events at one of 3 or so stadiums, the only problem is that to get to these world class events I have to take a car because of our crappy un-integrated PT…
Fair enough good point Jezza, there have been enormous improvemnents in the range activities available to Aucklanders in the last decade or so there are also the various ethnic festivals we have now – The lantern festival, Festival of lights which we did not have in the past. The city itself is still hard to get around and ugly (not the natural environment) and it’s suburbs seem disconnected from one another because you have to drive everywhere. These things combined make the city lack a certain vibrancy that cities overseas have which i guess is more what i had in mind.
I’d strongly argue that Auckland is rated number 4 in the world DESPITE it’s transport as pointed out above and I think that that rating might be too high…
We have a fantastic place to build a city, two wonderful natural harbours, a native rainforest on one side, offshore islands and many other great natural features, we do have good attractions and experiences (unused too much by Aucklanders I think as I take advantage of living in the city by utulising them regularly and many people I talk have never been to the Maritime Museum or Art Gallery for example) we’ve just stuffed it up since 1950 by using land poorly and filling up the space inbetween with motor cars…
There is a logic that we have not bothered much to create a great city because we are spoilt by the location. Comparing Sydney and Melbourne is a classic example of this too.
An interesting point, Melbourne’s natural environment is fairly limited, a few good beaches and parkland in the city, but you really have to get out into the Dandenong ranges or down the coast for a spectacular natural environment. maybe that is why Melbourne is such a good city, if you ask people what makes it ‘marvellous’ they would say things like the trams, the laneways, the cafe culture, the sports facilities, galleries and museums. All urban.
Ask about Sydney, you might get a mention of the bridge and the opera house, but more likely you’ll hear about the harbour and the beaches…
Jezza, maybe those factilites are unused because they are hard to get too. If you are in a car you are insulated from the urban environment, if you are on foot and public transport you are part of it.
I’d argue that Auckland’s urban fabric exhibited a relatively high quality environment at least for the first half of the twentieth century. Until about 1960 is was still recognisably a Victorian provincial city: low rise (2-3 storey) constructions, except along Queen Street, which had developed into a processional route; intimate areas not unlike the Melbourne lanes, eg Swanson Street, Fort Street, etc; ease of access via frequent and plentiful trams, etc. In fact, we weren’t too dissimilar from Sydney at the time. The problems happened when we dumped the trams and opted to Americanise our city without having the restraint of a stable pre-existing infrastructure. Sydney did similar things (bridge, Cahill Expressway, etc) bit was saved from disgrace both by a stable urban grid and by the opera house which, as an example of intelligent planning, focussed the city’s attention away from the hinterland and back on to the harbour. We did nothing like that; to the contrary we isolated the inner city by making cars the principal mode of transport (Sydney retained its trains), cut it off from its natural hinterland via spaghetti junction, etc, while at the same time ruining what remained of the city by demolishing key heritage elements, allowing and even encouraging the construction of buildings exhibiting the most meretricious standards of architecture and ruined the streetscape by constructing above ground multi-storey car parks (seen any of those in inner city Sydney or Melbourne?) which we still allow to be built (see the disgraceful Scene apartments on Beach Road). I could go on but the point I’m making is that we had it, we lost it and most of us don’t even know about it.
“(seen any of those in inner city Sydney or Melbourne?)”
There are plenty in inner city Melbourne, however the key difference is they all have retail or commercial frontages along the street edge, and many are quite hidden behind facades of non-parking uses. For the most part you would not know you were standing in front of a multi story carpark unless you looked up to the upper floors. Some you’d have no idea unless you spottend the vehicular entrance.
In Auckland, the equivalent sites don’t feature any street level use or edge activity, they are just utilitarian concrete structures used only to store empty vehicles.
Exactly Nick, I think our pretty good public facilities would be utilised much more if we developed a culture where the value if PT was recognised (and as they are trying very hard, quite successfully I might add, to do in Beijing with their metro extensions, make it cool to use)… Although the more the facilities are used the more the council will have to pay subsidies on institutions like the museum…
It’s funny you mention the Scene Apartments Chris, when they were building that I thought “good it’s about time we had a new hospital ward in the city”..! Imagine my disgust when I realised they were to be apartments… The worst part is I’ve been to a few burglary scenes in there and they are quite nice on the inside…
An interesting note on the Scene apartments is that the developer blames the council for the final urban design and form. Apparently they wanted a pair of less slab-like towers but the coubcil wouldn’t give them a plan departure, so they were compelled to produce the current building in order to maximise their floor area.
Whether their alternate plan to maiximise profitibility would have been better for the urban environment is unknown, but the moral of the story is that the building was built to code and plan and approved by the council. Maybe the council needs stronger powers to control urban design, I think that is something they are working on at the moment, no?
I hope so, I can see a point in twenty years when living conditions and crime get so bad in areas around the horrible apartments on Hobson and Nelson Sts that there will be pressure to pull them down…
I can’t fathom why people are aloud to build apartments less than 40 sq/m or with more than 1 carpark…
Actually, from an historical perspective, one of the crimes of the Scene 1 apartment building is that it blocked one of the great historical vistas of Auckland: the one that looked from the end of Princes Street (in Felton Matthew’s original plan of Auckland, the official and administrative heart of the new city) over the harbour. It was the connecting link between the colony and the empire because from there it was possible through the oversight of shipping and visual connection with the flagstaff on North Head that telegraphed the arrival and departure of ships to regulate and control links between Auckland and the outer world. OK Fort Britomart has long been demolished and its land erased but that (phatic) visual corridor was one of the defining moments of the city. Unfortunately, the ACC planning department has absolutely no sense of history and, I suspect, scant understanding of what makes a city work (surely some of them have read Jane Jacobs on the necessity of surveillance?) so this particular visual grab was obliterated.
I really should get around to buying “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” by Jane Jacobs – it’s kind of “the bible” for urban planning.
Chris Harris, my inspiration for this blog post, sent me the following email with a few interesting links:”
I wrote a little rant the other day on Auckland’s chronic autodependency for a French architectural journal, Criticat (http://www.criticat.fr). Not exactly original in its argument but certainly heartfelt. The article’s not on-line, yet, and I’m not certain if any NZ library subscribes to the publication but I do intend sending Mr Key a copy and I’ll make an English transcription available on the site. It was written in response to his suggestion, as minister of tourism, that we should write and tell our friends about New Zealand, so I did. Maybe M Sarkozy has already read it?? Unlikely.
Feel free to email me an English translation if you want me to post it or extracts from it, Christopher.
Cam: Developers do pay for new roads to access developments, they also pay for extensions of reticulated networks like sewers, water and telecommunications. They also contribute to intersection upgrades when these are primarily due to increased traffic due to such developments. Indeed, the scope to allow more of this has increased in recent years, which is good.
The proportion of trips in Auckland is fairly clear. 12% of jobs are in the CBD. This is the source for mode share http://www.arta.co.nz/assets/arta%20publications/publications%20page/Auckland%20Transport%20Plan%20June%202007%20-%20section%202.pdf 7% of all trips in 2006. This Treasury press release notes the goal of reaching 15% by 2051. http://www.treasury.govt.nz/publications/media-speeches/media/20apr07-at
The goal is 200 million annual trips. This is remarkably ambitious, significant but still relatively minor. The previous census indicated 17% of trips in Auckland were by foot. Note I don’t think there is necessarily a “good” in someone taking a trip that would otherwise not have taken (rather than shift from car to public transport), if it is subsidised.
So YOU believe this is about moving employment from its dispersed locations to the Auckland CBD – nice for those in the CBD, not so nice for those currently closer to their jobs. There are some winners and many losers in this, but few seem to care about the impact of that besides the holy grail “intensification is good”.
Having said that, there is a vast wealth of useful comment here about how cities develop, and what planners have required or foisted upon Auckland over the years. More people living downtown would be a major positive for Auckland, but I am unclear whether rail based public transport encourages that or the opposite, as it makes it easier to live outside the city and commute, rather than avoid the hassle of commuting in the first place.
Liberty, the big question is “how do we get people around the city without killing the city?” It seems to me as though Auckland’s getting the balance wrong here, and that better public transport is a crucial part of improving that balance.
Of course, it’s unlikely that PT will ever have the majority of trips. Even in cities with amazing public transport, the majority of trips are still made via car. However, when you look at peak-time trips along certain high-intensity corridors that percentage increases dramatically. It is those trips that are most damaging for the city if they’re taken by car, which is what I tried to explain in an earlier comment.
“Cam: Developers do pay for new roads to access developments, they also pay for extensions of reticulated networks like sewers, water and telecommunications. They also contribute to intersection upgrades when these are primarily due to increased traffic due to such developments. Indeed, the scope to allow more of this has increased in recent years, which is good”
And they do this voluntarily?
Also you are being a little misleading here about the CBD or you did not read what i posted properly. Britomart is a central interchange not a terminus. You can go into Britomart and change to a bus, ferry or another train to go to another part of Auckland. This is why integrated ticketing is important. You need to read what i posted properly, i did not say it was about moving all employment to the CBD so please don’t put words in my mouth. What i said was the strategy is about moving more employment to our various CBDs. ie: Henderson, Albany and other major urban town centres around the city. Rather than as it now dispersed even away from these areas.
Nobody here is said the whole city would be intensified what we are talking about is greater intensity around these town centres and transport hubs.
Cam makes a good point about it being the commute trips that are the most damaging.
The point here is that if road carriageways are widened in pursuit of congestion-free car commuting, they will become wide concrete / asphalt deserts the rest of the time, encouraging speeding and boy racers, and devouring space that could be used for parks, trees, cafes, broad footpaths and terraces.
If the road carriageways are widened and car commuting is still congested afterward, then the street will have been ruined for almost no benefit.
A city has to draw a line in the sand and say, only so much roadspace for car commuting and no more in its corridors, even as it continues to grow. This we have failed to do. We have also been slow to learn the lesson about ruining the street for no long term congestion benefit. Let alone, the sacrifices involved in building car parks instead of people parks in our various urban ‘rooms’.
How could we turn Auckland around at a stroke, to get away from all these problems?
What sort of visionary project might be appropriate as an alternative to the Roads of National Significance?
In my opinion a seamless, straight, high speed, high frequency electric rail or metro line running some 45 km from Albany to Papakura is worth investigation. It could be extended to Silverdale later on.
This would take a lot of pressure off Spaghetti Junction and solve half of our commuting and congestion problems at a stroke, especially once businesses shifted to be closer to this main rail corridor.
People might drive to the nearest station, especially at the extreme ends, but once there they would just go up and down the line to get to work, and also to conduct daily business within the corridor such as courier deliveries.
The line could be financed by land redevelopment in what might be termed a wider Metropolitan Development Corridor (the idea is not entirely original). This is roughly 90 square kilometres of real estate right now blighted by the motorways and used in the main only for low rise, big block uses outside the central isthmus and immedate town centres such as the Auckland CBD and Manukau.
If the corridor land had access to motorways and a really top-quality rapid transit system at the same time it would be worth more. It would be a business owner’s dream to have access to both modes. And an apartment builder’s as well.
A model for this perhaps is the linear high rise bus-road corridors of Curitiba; or Yonge Street in Toronto, which has an underground railway beneath it; or for that matter Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, conspicuously high rise as seen from the air, which has also has an underground railway beneath it.
Most of the space needed for the line is there already in the form of the railways and the Northern Busway, we just need to boost our level of investment in PT and make the whole line fast and seamless.
The sorts of figures that are being discussed for Roads of National Significance should easily suffice, and could be recovered if the project funded itself through land redevelopment.
This is not to deny that other transport investments still need to be made, above all to the Airport. But the idea of a linear Metropolitan Development Corridor based on “serious” PT between Albany and Papakura seems a potential game changer to me.
Interesting idea Chris. I think there’s a good debate to have between corridors of intensity and nodes of intensity. I think that Auckland City’s latest growth plans (the Future Planning Framework, which will probably drive the future Super-City’s District Plan) was focusing on both.
I think the Dominion Road corridor is an excellent oppotunity for much higher densities – complemented by light-rail. But for serious redevelopment, I agree a main corridor along SH1 – backed up by high-quality rail – seems logical. There are the signs that’s emerging anyway, but sadly as the rail option isn’t particularly high-quality there isn’t too much incentive for people to locate too close to the corridor (as the motorway puts them off getting too close).
Liberty…two questions: why is auckland employment locations all spread out all over the
place? If the city had decent zoning standards 1950-2000 we wouldn’t have this issue.
Your argument that heavy rail won’t work because of employment patterns in auckland
is chicken-egg stuff. The points you make are very wel reasoned and I don’t *disagree*
but if transport-landuse integration had happened the last 40 years employment wouldn’t
be so spread out.
A good example is Marua Rd in ellerslie area…this commercial stuff shouldn’t exist there.
there is a good industrial area around gleninnes this could have attached too.
I think for these rail ideas to truly take off some real hard demands are needed to be
asked of the council. If a transport authority can kick out people from their homes…
..why not business. I remember in 1994 walking down Mt eden rd impressed with some of the houses only to turn down a side street and see a paint factory.
MY request is that these kind of industrial premesis are all have to be penrose..
or east tamaki or wiri etc..
Anyway..that’s the past…the future:
govt gets back into the property market in a big way and builds intense housing around
“nodes” such as gleninnes..new lynn..etc and that will be a plus for everyone…except
landlords already rich getting richer.