Fighting yesterday’s battles?

There’s an irony in urban planning that most planning rules fight against problems that existed 100 years ago, and in general no longer exist today. In particular, most planning rules seek to focus on separating uses – which is a legacy of the industrial revolution when smokestack factories ended up next to houses – and on limiting the density of development: once again a legacy of 100 years ago when densities were far too high for what was sanitary and healthy. Over-crowding and industry generated pollution were the two great “urban blights” of the nineteenth and early 20th centuries – and it was a damn good thing that urban planning emerged to control those two issues.

However, now we’re 100-odd years later and the problems that our cities face are in some respects the opposite. In cities such as Auckland there’s little manufacturing “heavy” industry left, and the density problem usually arises from densities being too low, rather than too high – leading to urban sprawl. We also face difficult issues about how to integrate land-use and transport planning properly, as well as creating more liveable and vibrant neighbourhoods: which generally means mixing different activities and uses together. In short, the ‘urban situation’ is enormously different to what it was 100 years ago – and in many respects our ‘cures’ were too successful to the problems of 100 years ago, and now we actually need to balance things up a bit after swinging too far in the opposite direction.

Ironically, most of our urban planning rules still haven’t caught up with the fact that it’s 2010 and not 1890. We still worry about maximum allowable densities, rather than minimums, we still try to separate land-uses at every possible opportunity (the zoning disease as I called it a few months back) – in short our current planning rules tend to generally be trying to achieve the exact thing that our overall strategies want to avoid: auto-dependent, low-density, single-use, sprawl. In short, urban planning is stuck in the past: it’s fighting yesterday’s battles and ignoring today’s ones. Urban planning is fighting against over-crowding and industrial pollution, even though there is hardly any now; and ignoring (or simply failing to address) what the real problems are: urban sprawl, auto-dependency, bland single-use developments and so forth.

The reason I mention all of this is that the declining traffic figures through Wellsford, across the Harbour Bridge and on State Highway 16 at Te Atatu that I commented on yesterday make me wonder whether we’re doing something similar when it comes to transport. While transport policy isn’t 100 years out of date like land-use planning is, I do think that in some ways it’s quite possibly 5-10 years out of date.

During the 1990s and early 2000s traffic growth is Auckland particularly was quite dramatic. This is shown in the graph below: But what is also obvious from the graph above is how things have changed since 2004. Basically, over the past five years traffic volumes have actually remained steady across the entire state highway network, obviously bumping around a bit.

There were many reasons for this dramatic increase in the late 90s and early 2000s: cars got cheaper when tariffs were removed, people got richer, the city continued to sprawl, the population grew quickly and public transport was ignored. At the same time, throughout the 1990s we saw a relatively low level of transport investment in Auckland, with (rightly or wrongly) the main areas of investment being safety improvements, and often rural road improvements during this time. As a result of unusually low levels of investment in roading (and pretty much nothing in public transport), coupled with high levels of traffic growth, unsurprisingly congestion got a lot worse. Levels of traffic growth were predicted to continue forever (and still are), and traffic modellers warned of ‘gridlock’, with a sense of panic about Auckland’s transport future setting in.

Whether that same situation still exists today is an interesting question. Slowly, but surely, the wheels of government (locally, regionally and centrally) began to grind into action – and Auckland got a lot of money for transport for the first time in a very long time. Over the past 10 years we’ve probably seen around a billion dollars spent on upgrading the rail system, and I’d guess a few billion spent on improving the state highway network. At the same time, we’ve seen petrol prices increase significantly – which in 2008 particularly resulted in big drops in the number of vehicles travelling along certain parts of the road corridor. And finally, some real effort has gone into improving public transport, giving people a more realistic alternative to driving than they’ve had in decades.

With higher fuel prices an inevitability in the future as oil supplies peak and then dwindle, which will be added to by the need to finally pay for the CO2 emissions from our vehicles, I wonder whether we’ve ‘moved on’ from the times of anticipating traffic growth to simply go up-and-up forever. I wonder whether our current transport policies – particularly the super-expensive roading projects like the Puhoi-Wellsford upgrade, another harbour crossing and widening SH16 – are actually a response to the transport situation of 5-10 years ago, rather than a response to where we find ourselves now.

And this is a real concern. Land-use planning’s utter failure to ‘keep with the times’ has had disastrous results as our cities – as we have continued to build sprawling messes like Flat Bush, even though we know it’s really stupid to put 40,000 people out in the middle of nowhere. Sprawl has been shown to be environmentally destructive and enormously economically wasteful, but because of a massive inertia in the planning system, we somehow keep creating rules that reinforce it. I worry that the same inertia is driving our transport policies, and actually we’re fighting yesterday’s battles. Do we really need to widen the northwest motorway to help fix the transport problems we face in 2010, or is that project intended to fix a problem that existed (or was anticipated to exist) back in 2003?

The same goes for so many of our roading projects, and I really really think that we need to ask the same question over and over again. Is this project solving a 2010 transport issue or a 2003 transport issue? Are we fighting today’s battles, or yesterday’s?

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