Sustainable transport

Yesterday I was invited to speak on Sustainable Transport, as part of the “Friday forum” which is run by the Sustainability Society. My fellow speakers were David Warburton – CEO of Auckland Transport, and Julie-Anne Genter – transport consultant and (on currently polling) likely to be a Green Party MP after the upcoming election.

A PDF version of my presentation can be found here, while the presentations given by David and Julie should be available online in the not too distant future here. I won’t run through the entire presentation in this post, but rather just touch on some key points that I tried to make about sustainability and transport, and how we might seek to change things in order to make transport more sustainable: economically, socially and environmentally. This is working out how transport fits into the traditional “three overlapping circles” definition of sustainability – which I tried to have a quick go at:
There are obviously many ways we can make transport more sustainable in all three areas, but I chose what I think are three key factors we would want to focus on:

• Reducing the adverse environmental impact of transport (construction impacts, impacts of faster traffic on urban quality, ongoing environmental effects like CO2 emissions and so forth).
• Reducing what I’ve called “transport poverty” which I think of as situations where people have to pay so much to get around they struggle to pay other bills – or transport is so expensive they can’t effectively participate in society.
• Ensuring we have cost-effective investment in transport that thinks long term.

A lot of focus generally goes on environmental matters when we discuss sustainability, but the two slides I think are perhaps most worth sharing relate to the social and economic aspects of sustainability. I don’t quite think we’ve really got our head around the social impact of different transport policy options in the past – you just need to travel around the poorer parts of Auckland and see all the cars to recognise how much income must go into transport out of people who are probably struggling to put food on the table each week. It’s not just petrol prices, but also the cost of owning that second car which is considered so essential. The map below shows an interesting overlay of both PT accessibility and social deprivation – quite nicely highlighting the parts of the city you would probably want to focus on if you were improving public transport for social reasons: I’m not quite sure how “PT access” was defined by ARTA (who put together this map) because I struggle to believe that Papatoetoe and a part of Mangere have vastly better public transport than Bayswater, but putting aside the details the map is overall quite interesting.

In terms of economic sustainability, a key factor I highlighted was the need for us to think long-term in our decision making processes about which projects should be funded. Many projects do have a very quick return, and that’s fine in some circumstances, but I think we need to be aware of whether the way we measure our projects’ benefits locks out long-term thinking. Here’s a graph I have referred to in earlier posts, comparing the cost-benefit analysis of the City Rail Link under the UK and New Zealand systems: Another “economic sustainability” matter that I referred to is ensuring that we focus on changing trends rather than simply proceeding with something because we’ve always thought that it’ll be needed at some stage. The particular project which falls into this category is another harbour crossing, which has historically seemed like something Auckland would always need to do, but when you look more recently has falling traffic volumes, an increased proportion of its users on public transport and may actually suffice for quite a long longer.

With “sustainable” being the crossover of taking social, economic and environmental matters into strong consideration, I wondered whether the key transport target for increasing sustainability is to reduce car dependency:There’s quite a lot more in the full presentation, particularly about Auckland’s transport history, where we sit now and where we may go in the future. Sustainability is a concept that I studied a lot at university and has probably become a highly overused word in helping to justify pretty much anything in recent years. But it is still a valid concept, the question of how we can ensure we don’t take out more than we put back in (to society, the environment and the economy). With transport having such a vast impact on sustainability, I think it is essential that we do develop a better understanding of this issue. I certainly don’t have all the answers, but it’s an issue which probably needs a lot more discussion.

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