How do you actually integrate land-use and transport?

It seems these days that just about every transport policy document and every land-use planning document talks about the need to integrate the two. I have discussed the importance of integrating land-use planning and transport on many occasions before myself, but I do worry that we are starting to bandy about this integration in a somewhat meaningless way. At the same time, in terms of actually integrating land-use and transport on the ground, I worry that the separation of transport into the Auckland Transport CCO might actually take us a step backwards at the very time the policy documents are repeating the need for integration over and over again.

Another document that looks at the links between planning and transport is to be released by Auckland City Council in the near future, as part of the work they are doing to guide the development of future planning documents in the Auckland region – what they’re calling the “Future Planning Framework“. I have actually been really impressed by the thinking that has gone into the Future Planning Framework, and I hope that this model for planning does end up being extended to the rest of Auckland. The most recent part of this work involves a number of “Planning Position Papers“, the recommendations from which have been put together into this document (a very large 17 MB file!) There are some very interesting recommendations around urban design and planning, which I think are worth a future blog post, but it is the transport section that I will talk about in this post – or more particularly how it looks at the vexed question of “how do we really integrate land-use and transport planning?”

One useful diagram from this study that I think explains the need to balance the “through” aspects of transport with the “in” aspects of what road corridors contribute to our urban environment is included below:
I think a critical part of truly integrating land-use and transport policy is to think more about our roads being part of the urban fabric, and less simply as “through-spaces”. I remember talking to an urban designer last year, and he mentioned the very interesting point that most of the work he felt urban designers needed to do was in the transport corridors – because they are the public spaces of our cities.

The paper has the obligatory recommendation for better alignment between land-use and planning resources: A lot of this recommendation is completely true, and it’s almost impossible to disagree with. But I guess my question once again is “how do we actually make this happen?” As Auckland City Council wrote this plan, they also gave resource consent for a supermarket to shift from Panmure town centre out to Lunn Ave, completely undermining efforts to encourage businesses and people to locate in transit-oriented centres just like Panmure. The level of disconnect between this high-level policy-talk and what happens on the ground is immense.

A second recommendation does recognise the need to focus more on what’s happening on the ground and start thinking about what provisions can be tweaked to encourage development in certain areas and to discourage development from other areas. Before I move on, I must have a bit of a chuckle about AMETI being mentioned in the same paragraph as recommendations for good alignment between land-use and transport policy. The whole reason why we are in the horrible transport situation that AMETI is meant to improve is because of the biggest mistake in the history of Auckland’s urban development: allowing such a huge number of people to live east of the Tamaki River while not providing a good quality railway link to southeast Auckland.

But anyway, moving along – most of the recommendation above is typical policy “fluff” talk, although it is interesting that the term “incentives” is used. I think that a big part of trying to make development happen where we want it to (and to not happen where we don’t want it) is to tweak our incentives, which generally will mean messing around with the system of development contributions: which developers pay to council to offset the increased demand on council services that the particular development will generate. At the moment these contributions are calculated in a horribly crude manner, generally on a “per-unit basis” – which illogically assumes that a studio apartment a town centre will have the same impact on infrastructure as a 6 bedroom McMansion in Flat Bush.

To actually incentivise development in places like the CBD, Newmarket, New Lynn, Henderson and other places along the Rapid Transit Network – to truly align land-use and transport planning – clearly the rules need to be tweaked so that it makes the most financial sense for developers to focus in those areas. That may mean giving them the most development potential in those areas, but it also might mean waiving development contributions there but raising them elsewhere in “non-aligned” areas to both offset the reduced revenue, but also to discourage development from those other areas. It would also reflect the fact that development located outside town centres and other nominated growth areas is generally very very expensive to service, particularly in terms of transport.

So, getting back to my overall point of this post – how do we really integrate land-use and transport? Well I think there are a few key points:

We must ensure alignment at the citywide scale. There would be little point in investing all the money in the rail network that we are doing if our land-use plans weren’t designed around encouraging growth in areas around train stations. Similarly, there is little point trying to focus development on areas already urbanised if our transport projects undermine this by encouraging sprawl.
We must consider the transport network for how it contributes to the urban environment as well as how it provides for people to travel around the city.
We must tweak our incentives (including development contributions) to make it logical for development to happen in areas where we want it.
We must ensure that “at the coalface” land-use and transport planners are talking to each other all the time about their work. This is going to get a lot more difficult thanks to the Super City and the splitting off of Auckland Transport.

Until I see developments declined resource consent (or Plan Change requests rejected) because they integrate poorly with the transport network, or development contribution policies being fine-tuned and tweaked to incentivise intensification, or see urban designers in top positions at Auckland Transport, I will find it difficult to believe that all this talk of “integration” and “alignment” between transport and land-use planning is more than just “feel good fluff” that keeps policy planners busy.