Vancouver in Canada is a city that Auckland can learn a lot from in terms of improving our transport system and the general quality of our urban environment. Vancouver has many similarities to Auckland, a constrained geography, a similar density and a similarly low proportion of jobs in its central city. Yet your average Vancouverite takes 135 public transport trips a year whereas your average Aucklander takes only 40 public transport trips per year – it’s a startling difference given our otherwise similar urban form. Furthermore, Vancouver hasn’t achieved this high level of public transport use through having a massive legacy rail system from the early 1900s – in fact its rail system is relatively small: just two and a half proper railway lines and a commuter service the only offers a few trains each way a day.
So how does Vancouver manage to do so much better than Auckland? It has a superb bus system, it has an extremely clever rail system with driverless trains allowing high frequencies at all times, but most of all it’s just really smart. Land-use planning has been integrated with the rail system so we see transit-oriented developments around SkyTrain stations, plus Vancouver has a superb way of selling public transport as something for everyone to use – as providing greater transport choices – rather than Auckland’s general attitude of public transport being for the poor who can’t afford to drive.
The most recent Vancouver initiative that I’ve come across is what’s known as “Travel Smart” – and is briefly outlined in the video below:
Looking at how this works in a bit more detail, it’s really fantastic how you can easily get good information on what your travel options are. Furthermore, if you’re looking for a place to live you can quickly and easily get an idea about the quality of the public transport – and the walkability – of that area so you can factor these in to your decision-making process. Let’s have a look at an example of their map system:
Anywhere you click on the map you can an updated “Walk score” and “Transit score” telling you about the quality of the public transport and the walkability of the area. You get information on bus routes (this spot has 13 nearby bus routes and 2 train routes) and if you click around a bit you can see where the city’s cycleways are all located.
This is the type of information that Auckland Transport should be putting together. Working on their marketing to hammer home the message that better public transport gives people more options for travel and that in many situations it might actually make more sense (time wise, health wise, financial wise) to leave the car at home and walk, cycle or take public transport to work or school. The best thing about the TravelSmart website as a whole though is that everything is put together in the one place to make the process of giving it a go easy. As I noted a couple of days ago, I think a lot of people are put off using public transport because it’s simply too hard. We could achieve a lot through services like TravelSmart that are designed to make travel alternatives to the private car easier to understand and use.
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I lived in Vancouver for 6 months last year. The skytrain is absolutely fantastic, and their integrated ticketing system (it was paper based last year!!!) means that transfers are something “normal” and it’s very “efficient”… You don’t get penalised for changing buses as long as you’re going from A to B… Their B-Lines actually work similarly to our Northern Express, except they ride on main arterials in the city, where normal buses stop on every stop and the B-Line only stops on major ones. I can see this work very well on Dominion Rd, but that requires integrated ticketing. I really hope that there will be ONE, SINGLE integrated ticket for all public transport, and there will be no options to “lock into” one operator (like NZ Bus), as that will completely kill the integrity of the integrated ticketing. Let’s wait and see. In regards to skytrain, we will never see it here in NZ, because people are afraid of “ugly” concrete structures blocking their views. Instead people are genuinely excited talking about a tram from Wynyard point to the Zoo. Are we kidding ourselves?
I think rather than appealing to people’s sense of good community spirit, marketing should be focused on what’s in it for the individual. People want a service that is fast and frequent. Advertising the (good) frequency is a good idea IMHO because many people base their perceptions on notions of bad public transport (this may have to do with poor legibility of the service too).
Others may have a different opinion but Speed, Frequency, Bypassing Congestion are way above green, “car is bad”, carbon emissions, calorie burning and even costs. Sorry, but motherhood statements don’t seem to appeal to me. These are “nice to haves”.
Public Transport is not going to increase mode share by trying to make cars look bad. People are smarter than that. Public Transport needs to make a case on it’s own two feet as to why people should choose it over say bicycle or car. That means a quality service has to be in place. Just like you can’t sell a car with no wheels, you can’t sell public transport that doesn’t have frequent service.
Every 15 minutes, 6am-11pm, 7 days! Say’s it all.