I meet up with quite a few people in person as a result of this blog. Sometimes they’re people in official capacities – at Auckland Transport or wherever, other times they’re just interested readers who have contacted me via email to have a chat about transport stuff. I really enjoy catching up with people in person and having a good yarn about transport over lunch, often I learn quite a bit about different experiences or different insights – and I use that knowledge to help inform future blog posts.

One thing that’s really interesting though is how often I’m asked the question “how come you’re so interested in transport?” I guess I mange to rattle off a blog post pretty much every night – and they’re often up to 1500-2000 words long (a reasonable undergrad university essay length) so I must be pretty interested in transport. My answer is always pretty much the same: “I’ve always been interested in making Auckland a better city, and over the past few years I’ve come to the ultimate realisation that the place you have to start is with its transport system.” In essence, I’m not so much interested in transport itself, but more in the impact and effects different transport decisions, policies, projects and actions will have on the quality of Auckland as a city to live, work and play in.

Auckland certainly has a lot going for it: fantastic natural setting, some of the world’s best late-19th and early-20th century wooden housing, a pretty good climate, nice beaches, great parks and so forth. But often the aspects of Auckland that seem to struggle relate very much to its transport system: by international standards the public transport is extremely poor, many of the more recently built parts of the city come across as soulless, uninviting and dull – largely because they’ve been designed with the car in mind, rather than people. The central city has great bits to it, but then there are horrible places too – like Hobson & Nelson streets, like the corner of Mayoral Drive and Cook Street, like the Lower Hobson Street viaduct, like Quay Street. Typically, the parts of Auckland that don’t seem to be as good are those parts where we’ve historically given too much priority to shifting cars.

Yet everyone still has to get around, as efficiently and quickly as possible. We still need to shift freight around the city and we still need to ensure people can get to work easily. Hence public transport as the potential “win-win”: the means of transportation that ensures we can get around the city easily without destroying the city.

The key point here is that this is all about the interactions and the connections between transport and ‘the city’. It’s all about how what’s next to our roads and railways influences what happens on those roads and railways, but perhaps more importantly it’s about the reverse: how the placement, size and design of those roads (most particularly) and railways affect what goes on outside the area dedicated to “shifting people”. This happens at a variety of “levels”, from regional development patterns down to the individual site level – how a different kind of road may influence a different kind of use of a site adjacent (or near) that road.

Every little decision made as part of ‘land-use planning’ (which I might roughly translate as policy decisions relating to what should happen to land outside the road corridor) and ‘transport planning’ (decisions made about where transport corridors should go and what their nature should be) has an effect on the other. There is an incredibly strong interdependency between transport and land-use planning that I simply don’t think has been appreciated. This is evident in the decision made recently on the expansion of the St Lukes shopping centre – where the commissioners had this to say about public transport:
While at a basic level what is said is true – the plan change cannot determine public transport service levels – the point it completely misses is the bigger picture. St Lukes isn’t next to a train station; it isn’t along any major bus routes. All the buses that serve St Lukes have to detour off their quickest route to get there: it’s just in the wrong place. The above paragraph was noted by the commissioners not as a reason to decline the plan change, but rather as a reason to allow Westfield a very generous amount of on-site parking: so they can clog up the surrounding road network.

Nobody asked Auckland Transport (or ARTA at the time) what impact providing more public transport services would have on the efficiency of the network, whether the area is well placed to be served by public transport or anything like this. Transport planning and land-use planning just talked straight past each other: once again.

I’ve been reading a very good book lately: Car Sick: solutions for our car addicted culture. One of the best things about the book is that it doesn’t propose grandiose solutions for auto-dependency like building massive railway lines, completely changing the structure of the city or embarking on other extremely expensive projects. It talks about the effectiveness of relatively cheap and small measures: marketing public transport better, making cycling safer and more attractive, encouraging employers to reimburse their employees with cash instead of providing them with free parking – and so on. An excellent chapter in the book also looks at the importance of integrating our land-use and transport decisions – with the clear message being outlined below:

The moral is simple. There is little point in trying to entice people out of their cars, through persuasion and information and marketing, if we continue to build offices, homes and shops according to the car city blueprint. Of course, it is possible to walk to the shops from a house in a suburban cul-de-sac, but mostly, people will be disinclined to do it. Equally, employers moving to a new business park on the ring road can have some influence on their employees’ travel decision is they install bike parking and offer cut-price bus passes, but really it would be better not to move out to the ring road at all.

The book argues that each little decision we make, in either transport planning or land-use planning, can shift us either further along the auto-dependent, car-based pattern of development that has dominated over the past 60 years, or it can shift us in the other direction away from this outcome. The natural polar opposites in terms of which way we go are Phoenix and Copenhagen – with Phoenix being the car city in its ‘purest form’.

Car Sick looks at Phoenix in a bit more detail to see what kind of result this pure adherence to car-dependency has generated:

Construction of Phoenix’s many miles of highways has come at a price. In the early 1990s, Jeff Kenworthy estimated the cost was roughly $400 per year for every man, woman and child in the city, which puts Phoenix at the top of the world’s league of big highway spenders. In a country that prides itself on its low taxation, that is quite a lot of tax. You might hope that this huge price tag would at least mean Phoenix’s residents were happy with their road system, but in fact a community attitude survey carried out by the city’s government found that the two issues people were most likely to see as major problems in their neighbourhood were air pollution and traffic congestion.

Similar analysis in Auckland comparing different future growth options have come to similar outcomes: the low-density sprawl is the most expensive and generates the worst outcomes. But we mustn’t take that message only at a region-wide level: we must think about the impact of each little transport and planning decision we make. What are the transport effects of this planning decision? What are the land-use effects of this transport decision? Is this decision leading to Auckland being more like Phoenix or more like Copenhagen?

If Auckland’s ever going to dramatically improve as a city to live, work and play in – and if we’re ever going to sort out “the transport problem” – we must consider these questions all the time. What are the land-use effects of different solutions for Dominion Road? How might the CBD Rail Tunnel transform Auckland’s future growth form? Do we really want to let this office park develop nowhere near public transport? Should we really approve Auckland’s biggest shopping mall when it’s not on any decent public transport routes? If we can do this, then I absolutely think Auckland can be the best city in the world.

Share this

17 comments

  1. And then there is all the nonsense about making St Lukes a “town centre” under the regional planning documents. I have heard this was also used as an excuse to allow the mall expansion. A retail mall is not a town centre.

  2. Two points.

    1. The Copenhagen-Phoenix dichotomy is interesting, particularly if you switch off your transport hat and think of other matters, like living space.

    Would people in Phoenix prefer to live in apartment blocks on top of one another without backyards, having to consider the noise implications of their neighbours in evenings and all of the other negatives high density living brings?

    I’d ask the same question of Aucklanders. From a transport policy point of view, the arguments about higher density are arguments about travelling a little less and making public transport more viable. However from a living standard point of view most people want more room, prefer to have a detached house on a section (no adjoining walls), some outdoor space with privacy and enough room to have bedrooms for all of their children, a spare bedroom and the rest. This is the lifestyle advantage that people seek when they move from Europe (and Asia) to the New World.

    The cost of that is travelling time and the higher need to have a car to go places.

    I am neutral about it all, because people make tradeoffs, like I do in London. London is a special city, as is Paris, so one puts up with extortionate property prices for very compromised living space. However, Auckland is not a special city, in fact neither are most US cities with perhaps the exception of New York.

    So planning needs to go beyond managing externalities and transport, and be more holistic. If people want to live on a big section on the urban periphery, who cares, as long as the pay for it. Why the Corbusier like desire to force people to live closer together?

    Related to this are the sceptics who point out that the high density living doesn’t actually deliver on the lower air pollution, lower congestion targets. Most high density cities have severe congestion, the ones in the US that have pursued it are not better off congestion wise than those that have not. Why? Because people still want cars, and more people in the same space means more cars, even if more trips are done by other modes, the intensive road use remains because most non-commute trips are not substitutable on other modes. This doesn’t even include what it does to property prices by increasing scarcity of supply, and a net reduction in green space per person. It’s an appallingly blunt tool to resolve a problem that is far better resolved directly. Would you expect the main challenges in health care and education to be addressed by land use planning? Of course not, so why transport?

    2. I’d argue the problem is just economics. Using land use planning to resolve a transport problem is inefficient, but moreover results in unintended consequences. The road congestion issue is demand vs supply, price can ration demand and help dictate new supply when it is efficient to do so. Time, distance, place based road charging would do far more to resolve congestion than planning laws, because sprawl would cost in terms of commuting. So the more you travel, the more it costs. It would also significantly enhance the viability of public transport (particularly buses which would gain free flowing roads), make roads more desirable for cyclists and pedestrians, and enable a more comprehensive shift towards less travel.

    1. I think part of the reason why people in NZ (and probably the US and AUS as well) have not been that keen to live in higher density developments is that we have tended to build them poorly with little thought to liveability. During the rush of building apartments in the late 90’s and early 00’s most apartments we designed as a way for the developer to maximise their profits by building soulless chicken coups for the student market and that is still what most people associate with higher density living.

      Medium and higher density living can be attractive if designed correctly. We used to have an apartment in town that was actually pretty good, it had a decent floor plan, large rooms, a good layout, had the carparks underground so no space was wasted by asphalt and on the ground floor there were shops providing a useful amenity. About the only thing I really wish they had done differently was designed the roof as a courtyard/garden/BBQ area.

  3. I’ve been reading a very good book lately: Car Sick: solutions for our car addicted culture. One of the best things about the book is that it doesn’t propose grandiose solutions for auto-dependency like building massive railway lines, completely changing the structure of the city or embarking on other extremely expensive projects. It talks about the effectiveness of relatively cheap and small measures: marketing public transport better, making cycling safer and more attractive, encouraging employers to reimburse their employees with cash instead of providing them with free parking – and so on.

    Finally! A proper solution that is cheap, quick to implement and achievable. I am always extremely critical of proposals to put metro stations on every street corner and blanket the entire city with metro stations or light rail everywhere down every street in the entire city “just like Europe” or rebuilding the entire city at Hong Kong densities.

    That would cost billions upon billions and take forever to do and be highly contraversial. This is not to say that these modes or densification can’t be part of the picture, but sometimes I really think we focus too much on what is happening in 100 years, rather than achievable goals that can be done now. Things like getting trains to run every 15 minutes, all day 7 days a week, buying cans of paint to paint T2 transit lanes that operate only in peak hour, like frequent buses that run not just on weekdays, but every day and all day 7 days a week, things like this.

  4. I’d ask the same question of Aucklanders. From a transport policy point of view, the arguments about higher density are arguments about travelling a little less and making public transport more viable. However from a living standard point of view most people want more room, prefer to have a detached house on a section (no adjoining walls), some outdoor space with privacy and enough room to have bedrooms for all of their children, a spare bedroom and the rest. This is the lifestyle advantage that people seek when they move from Europe (and Asia) to the New World.

    I actually disagree with this. I wouldn’t mind living in an apartment in the inner city, it has services and amenities, you can walk everywhere. I’ve observed that people get riled up about any development near them. Just today in Brisbane some bushland place with 500 people out in the middle of nowhere is slated for massive new development, and everyone who lives out that way doesn’t want people living near them. Its the same in the inner city too- why do people despise anyone living near them?

    There needs to be something for everyone, and I think that is possible. There is a market appetite for TODs, this is a market driven thing that is facilitated (note the word facilitated, not forced) by government (as they control the air space above the stations etc). In Brisbane we’ve had plans for a skyscraper style development over a rail station- so there is certainly demand for this kind of thing.

    High density has a bad name because people immediately think “skyscrapers”, tall buildings, slums, overcrowding and so on. It’s quite possible to have high density and low-medium height buildings- what’s important is site coverage, not necessarily height. Paris and Barcelona have high density, but it doesn’t look anything like Hong Kong.

  5. 1. The Copenhagen-Phoenix dichotomy is interesting, particularly if you switch off your transport hat and think of other matters, like living space.
    Would people in Phoenix prefer to live in apartment blocks on top of one another without backyards, having to consider the noise implications of their neighbours in evenings and all of the other negatives high density living brings?

    Obviously from a person who has never been to Copenhagen or he should know that Danes in their capital live in small-rise (5 storey max) buildings in most of the inner city, with enough common green spaces, pedestrianised areas, access to efficient public transport and priority given to cyclists. City design elements now being adopted by other cities such as London to make them more liveable. Now if we only could get Auckland Councillors to visit Copenhagen…

    Photos: http://lh6.ggpht.com/_CbUhZvU2xSs/SM41qyCgaiI/AAAAAAAAERA/ZeeUT0YbE-E/IMG_3184.JPG
    http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2482/3980752551_7740d1b366.jpg

  6. PHX has like what, 4 million people, in its metro area, and 2 or 3 blocks of Mill Ave, Tempe is just about the only area in all of that area where you’d possibly consider walking down the side of a street for pleasure. Everywhere else you’d drive. Downtown Phoenix lacks any character. Downtown Scottsdale is hardly walkable. Downtown Mesa would hardly see another pedestrian. Phoenix has it’s nice parts like Papago Park, Camelback Mountain, the Indian Bend Wash cycleway. The freeway system is congested. Within days of completing the Loop 101, north of Shea Blvd it was critically congested.

    Heaven help Auckland if it chooses more freeways over a human scale urban form.

  7. @liberty you seem to be only forgetting about a large section of the population when talking about ‘everyone wants to live in big houses on big sections’.
    Many people without kids are very happy living in apartments, especially people under about 35.
    This doesn’t always mean tower blocks, but medium density (5 stories or so) blocks.
    Many young professionals head overseas and very much like this sort of lifestyle that is available.
    However financing of these developments seems to be an issue, and many dodgy developers have been involved.

    Then there is the issue of the ageing population, many people of retired age will like to downsize, however very few pensioner housing units seem to have been built in the last 20 years or so.
    In other words we have plenty of detached houses available, and no one is proposing to flatten them all.

    1. Indeed, my parents are screaming to get out of their big suburban family house and into something more manageable. They are sick of mowing lawns, tending a large garden, cleaning a huge house and living with two people in a five bedroom home of which two thirds goes empty. Sure it was great when we had our family of six living there, but not any more. They use one bedroom and bathroom, the kitchen, one living room and a study area. The other four bedrooms, two bathrooms and rumpus room go empty. But they are having a real hard time finding what they want on the Auckland market, presumably because people like Liberty assume that people only want to live in big houses away from their neighbours.

      Having said that, I think Liberty is pissing in the wind with arguments based around some mythical dichotomy between sprawling McMansion suburbian and chiken coop stalinist housing projects. For a start density has only a minor relationship with transport and land use, it is the design and arrangement of the land use that really matters. You can have mixed use suburbs with excellent public transport that don’t have a huge density. Indeed much of Melbourne’s dreaded Housing Comission high rise blocks have a lower population density than the terraces they replace.

      As another example, I live with three other people in a detached four bedroom house with a lawn and a two-car carport off the back lane, all on a nice quiet leafy street. Given that four of us live on a 400m2 section this would meet any definition of ‘high density’ as we are actually living at 100 people per hectare… however who cares what the gross density is if we have a large house, a bedroom each and all the garden, lawn and garage we need? Last night coming home from work I chatted with the lady next door who was sitting on the porch as her grand-children rode their bikes up and down the footpath. This is definitely not some situation of “living on top of each other without back yards and lots of noise”.

      However, no one in our house actually owns a car and I can’t justify buying one. Except when I borrow my brothers the carport is used to dry laundry. I have a strip of shops and a supermarket within two minutes walk, my gym is two blocks over, there is a cafe at the top of my street and a pub opposite it. Most of my daily needs are immediately at hand, I catch a train to my workplace in the suburbs or various other places, and I also have a choice of two frequent tram lines to get to the city or the next suburbs over.

      The point is density has very little to do with outcomes in terms of land use, public transport, private transport, housing type or whatever, we can more or less leave it out of the equation and we can certainly stop using it as some sort of rationale for doing this or the other.

      And as a final note, Le Corbusier designed some really fantasic furniture (his ‘resting machine’ chaise longue is amazing) but his concepts on housing and town planning were diabolical!

      1. Liberty also neglects to mention that the vast majority of planning rules are designed to lower urban density and actively promote auto-dependency. Planning is usually a battle between developers wanting to do more with their land (reflecting the market) and councils trying to force less.

        There’s no market vs forced urban dichotomy here. There are two outcomes that are both generated by policy decisions. It is a complete myth that the market will generate sprawl if left to its own devices.

        1. Yes- There are certain rules such as restricting the site coverage ratio or something similar like that, which forces buildings to become taller to accommodate more people.
          If the building were “fatter” it would not need to be taller, but still house the same number of people.

          The other classical regulation is the “you must have this many car parks for these number of residents”, each car park easily being $30 000 or $50 000 each.
          For large office buildings, perhaps there is merit in privatising the car park so that those who use it pay for it, and those from other buildings can use spare space
          if they need to.

          It is no accident it seems that the cheapest car park in Brisbane (King George Square) just so happens to be run by the City Council. Is this being supplied at market rates or not, I wonder?

        2. there could also be an issue of market inertia at work here. Its easy for developers to keep on doing what has been done for the last 40 years, and scary for them to do something different.
          It really is silly to build detached houses on tiny sections with no almost no backyard, which seems to be the trend now.

          Lots of little pockets of this style of terraced 3-5 storey housing would be good, adjacent to town centres like Mt Albert, New Lynn, Panmure etc.

  8. Why does everyone feel medium density equals high rise. Check out Le Corbusier’s designs of the 1920s. The buildings are separated by acres of space. Then they adapted the spaces for car parking. Parts of Glen Eden have higher density than that.

  9. I serious hope you aren’t endorsing Le Corbusier’s designs!
    Seems to have got the worst of both worlds. An inspired Architect he was, but his town planning was appalling.
    Any cities built along his designs are appalling in terms of traffic and social terms.

  10. It was Caecescu and some of the Eastern block communists that built his designs. Probably hastened the fall of communism by quite a few years.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *