There have been a few posts recently that make comparisons between Auckland and Vancouver – and I’m planning to really focus on this comparison over the coming weeks, which begs the question of “why compare with Vancouver?” At a broad level, I think making comparisons with Vancouver is useful because it’s a relatively similar city to Auckland (in terms of population density, geographic constraints, ethnic diversity and to an extent, size).
But more particularly, I think Vancouver is a really useful comparison because, if we do a lot of things right over the next 20-30 years (and learn from a few of Vancouver’s mistakes) then Vancouver is a pretty good model for where we might want Auckland to be. Even population wise, with around 2.3 million people in Greater Vancouver – there’s a great comparison with what Auckland’s population is likely to be in around 20-30 years.
Importantly – in terms of the desire to make Auckland the ‘world’s most liveable city’ – Vancouver is generally a city that Auckland competes with regularly in the various liveable city survey results that get bandied around every year. In 2011 Auckland did rank higher than Vancouver (3rd compared to equal 5th) in the Mercer survey, but we were below Vancouver in the Economist survey (10th compared to 3rd). Most relevantly, Auckland’s excellent results in some parts of the survey (political environment, schools and education, health and sanitation, natural environment and recreation) are let down by our performance in that key issue of most interest to this blog: transportation.
Vancouver has a really interesting transport history – making a decision in the 1960s to not allow motorway construction within the City of Vancouver. Even today, there are remarkably few motorway/freeway type roads within the boundaries of Metro Vancouver:
Instead of spending vast amounts of money on road-building, Vancouver has developed an incredibly effective public transport system over the past 30 years – particularly since the opening of the first Skytrain Line in late 1985. From zero passenger rail trips prior to Skytrain opening, there were 25 million trips four years later and then big increases right through to the present day, with over 122 million rail trips (3 million on the West Coast Express, the remainder on the Skytrain system including the new Canada Line). The graph below shows patronage growth over that time, compared to population growth (in 2001 there was a very lengthy strike which caused the dip):
Data from here: http://www.metrovancouver.org/about/statistics/Pages/KeyFacts.aspx
To get a better idea about how well Vancouver has done over the past 20-odd years in growing ridership, it’s worth making the inevitable comparison with Auckland:
Interestingly, while Vancouver’s PT patronage is so much higher than Auckland’s and while Vancouver has been far more successful than Auckland at integrating land-use and transport policies (most notably through places like Metrotown, as discussed in my previous post), overall Auckland actually has a higher average population density than Vancouver – when you look at the population and size of their respective urban areas (rather than arbitrary administrative boundaries). 
Data from here: http://www.demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf
Of course average population density is misleading in a number of ways (after all, it suggests that Los Angeles is higher density than New York City), but it gives us the general picture that Vancouver’s vastly better PT patronage it not due to it being a vastly higher density place.
Vancouver is also interesting to compare Auckland with because they have somewhat similar urban development aspirations. Let’s compare the development strategy from the Auckland Plan with Vancouver’s regional growth strategy:
Both cities want to contain sprawl. Both cities want to focus intensification centres and around the PT network. Both cities need to protect industrial land that’s becoming a scarce resource. Both cities are concerned about their effect on polluting the natural environment. Both cities continue to grow quickly and face significant housing affordability issues.
While Vancouver’s no absolute urban utopia for us to copy mindlessly, I think it’s a city that Auckland can learn a huge amount from. Over the next few weeks I’m going to really try to look at Vancouver in a bit more detail to be able to tell the story about how it’s turned into the kind of city that can be a model for Auckland (to an extent), and apply the learnings from Vancouver to see what might be key decisions the city needs to make over the next 30 years – particularly in relation to transport.
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I lived in Vancouver most of last year and being without a car either rode a bicycle or used public transport. For the most part it is an incredibly efficient system. One advantage that Vancouver does have is that the whole city and surrounding suburbs are laid out in a grid fashion. Every 10 or so streets are a main road with quiet suburban streets in between that are perfect for cycle ways. Auckland doesn’t have that layout and so a safe cycle network will be much harder to implement.
While Melbourne shows us how NOT to do it in the outer suburbs http://theage.domain.com.au/home-buying-tips/dont-rely-on-the-glossy-brochure-20120427-1xojy.html
Google Maps on Doreen, Victoria showed the disconnectedness of outer suburban sprawl growth going horridly wrong over there while Vancouver shows a “better-way” as we embark on building 400,00 new residential dwellings and supporting employment and civic centres.
So a good comparison there between two contrasting situations (and thanks Peter on the Vancouver article here 🙂 )
Lessons for Auckland Council (and Central Government) when we start.
Your graph PT patronage Vancouver vs Auckland is not a good way to make a comparison of growth. You should look at percentage increase from a baseline (eg 1989 = 100 for both cities).
Otherwise, since Auckland starts from a much lower level, even if it had higher growth than Vancouver, Vancouver’s rate of increase could look greater the way you display it here. For example, suppose Auckland had tripled its 50m boardings in 1989 to 150m by 2011 while Vancouver had a 75% increase from 200m to 350m. On your graph, =it would look like Vancouver was doing better and the gap was widening between the two
David I disagree. The absolute numbers tell a more important story because even though it started from a higher base, Vancouver have been able to grow their patronage more rapidly than Auckland. And the slope of the lines basically answers your question about relative growth: Vancouver is steeper, therefore it had grown relatively more.
Perhaps a more interesting question is: How much has per capita PT trip rates grown in this period? And how do the trends compare between the two cities? My gut knowledge of these cities is that Vancouver’s has been steady or grown slightly, whereas Auckland was falling up until recently but is now growing more rapidly than Vancouver.
But it would be interested to see the numbers …
I do have those numbers somewhere. From memory it puts Vancouver as increasing from around 100 trips per capita to 150 trips per capita over the time period with steady growth except for the 2001 anomaly, while Auckland dipped down into the 30s in the 1990s, but hit 47 in 2011. So once again a big win for Vancouver.
Stu, if you consider my example, you’ll see that the slopes don’t give you the answer — remember that slope is change in y/change in x. Since both have the same change in x, all that matters in the change in y. Starting from different bases, the same percentage increase in y leads to different absolute increases in y. So you can get a case where the gap in absolute numbers is widening even if the relative difference is narrowing.
It’s definitely worth looking at absolute numbers but you can only improve on what you have. Unfortunately, it’s clear that Auckland started from a poor base and has still grown more slowly than Vancouver…
It’s the lost decade of the 90s that did the damage though. Auckland made not progress at all from 1989 until 2002, while Vancouver’s patronage increased by around a third over that period.
Since then, even though the lines on the charts diverge (for the reasons David has mentioned) both have seen growth of around 40%. Vancouver’s numbers were about 5 times Auckland’s in 1989 and they still are ‘only’ 5 times Auckland’s.
To see this a base 100 map would work better – but you’d make it 100 in 2002 or thereabouts. But that would hide the difference in the absolute numbers which is important too.
All statistical visualisation issues aside, Auckland looks pretty crappy by comparison, and the reason is simple, they stopped building roads, and we didn’t (and we spent a lot of the time actively wrecking the PT system one way or another as well, just to add to the joy).
Why the huge dip in Vancouver’s PT in 2001? The effects of 9/11? If so, that’s quite dramatic.
There was a transit worker strike, which I believe lasted for quite a long time.
Interesting. I wonder how people got around then? Did they all have cars that they just didn’t regularly use? Because it picks straight back up the next year.
Just don’t forget the relevance of the Winter Olympics: Not only did it cause a surge in patronage in of itself, but it also was (as far as I know) the catalyst for an extension to the Sky Train system. These two related events would be primarily responsible for the noticeable surge in patronage observed in Vancouver during the last few years; you would not expect Vancouver to continue to grow at these rates, so Auckland has at least a shot of closing the gap.
What I would like to see is the total kilometres travelled by PT per year.
I would suspect , for Auckland, this would make rail more as people probably catch rail longer distances than bus. Also comparing to old data we may not be as far behind as we think.Either way this does give another way of thinking about the data.
Yes passenger kms would be a superior statistic, but one that’s unfortunately rarely reported on in much detail. Vancouver might have a longer average trip than Auckland though – as it’s pushing 120 million odd rail trips a year, a much higher proportion of PT than in Auckland.
I lived in Vancouver for five years and used the PT system extensively (including some truly heroic commutes from downtown Vancouver to various far-flung corners of Surrey) so I’m looking forward to contributing to the discussions. As far as traffic congestion goes, almost every issue I observed could be tied back to a bottle-neck at a water crossing – as you can see from the maps, the greater Vancouver area is lousy with rivers and inlets.
I think the Canada line between downtown Vancouver and Richmond would have always been built eventually, but the Olympics proved a convenient excuse to get it built within a certain time-frame (just as the Rugby World Cup was used to justify various infrastructure projects here). The next extension to the Skytrain will be the Evergreen line, located east of the existing Sytrain lines.