Every week we read more than we can write about on the blog. To avoid letting good commentary and research fall by the wayside, we’re going to publish weekly excerpts from what we’ve been reading. This week is a bit more eclectic than usual…
Lewis Lehe, “Gridlock vs. Bottlenecks: A visual explanation“, Setosa blog:
Bottlenecks explain “standard” congestion: when more people want to use some facility (e.g., bridge, off-ramp) than it can handle at once, cars form a queue (a line)…
Gridlock occurs when a queue from one bottleneck makes a new bottleneck in another direction, and so on in a vicious cycle.
Lehe’s got some really neat interactive explanations – go have a play!
Rashiq Fataar interview with Timo Hämäläinen, “Why young urbanists made their own urban plan for Helsinki“, Future Cape Town:
RF: Why did you choose this approach to lobby for change rather than alternatives e.g. protests or advocacy?
TH: Our alternative plan for Pikku Huopalahti received positive feedback from local residents. We also noticed that we were able to challenge business-as-usual planning concepts. This was the case as the consulting offices that were officially invited to draft visions for the area were careful not to introduce ideas that would make their plans seem “unrealistic” in the eyes of the City Planning Department.
So essentially, we drew our conclusions that this kind of planning activism can really have an impact on the way we discuss cities and established planning concepts. In February 2014 we decided to scale up and draw an alternative general plan for the entire city of Helsinki as the City Planning Department was in the process of drafting an official plan. We were also inspired by an alternative general plan that like-minded planning activists had published in Stockholm in 2012 (Lindhagenplanen 2.0). They created an alternative plan using an urban plan from the 19th century as the visual and ideological example behind their new proposal. We did the same and named our alternative vision Pro Helsinki 2.0 after Eliel Saarinen’s grand vision Pro Helsingfors from 1918 to transform Helsinki into a world city.
RF: What were some of the reasons change was needed?
TH: We decided to lobby for change because we felt that the needs of those who favor urban lifestyles have been neglected for too long. For example housing prices in the inner city of Helsinki have skyrocketed due to a) continuously increasing demand, and b) because Helsinki hasn’t expanded the inner city for decades (but expanded the suburbs). So we want to give some concrete examples of how to develop the city in a manner that would speak to us urbanists.
Aaron Schiff, “Rented dwellings by type of landlord: Census challenge 12“:
First, here is a chart of the proportion of all rented dwellings where the landlord is in the “social” category that I defined above. There’s variation across regions, from under 10% in Tasman to around 25% in Gisborne, and all regions show a decline in this proportion from 2001 to 2013.
Timothy B. Lee, “The Bay Area economy is booming. So why aren’t more people moving there?” Vox:
Google, Apple, Facebook, and other internet giants are growing fast, and they’re desperate to hire more engineers. The Bay Area should be comfortably topping the population-growth charts among large metropolitan areas. And the rising wealth of the region’s technology elite should be boosting demand for schoolteachers, doctors, chefs, barbers, landscapers, nannies, and others in service jobs. That, in turn, should trigger a massive building boom, creating jobs for construction workers. Hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — of people outside of high-tech should be benefiting from the boom.
But that hasn’t really happened. Strict building regulations have made it impossible to significantly increase the Bay Area’s housing stock. So rising tech industry wealth is mostly translating into higher housing costs. Middle-class people outside the tech sector are finding it harder to pay the rent and impossible to buy a house.
Daniel Davies, “The World is Squared: Episode 6 – Summer in Midwinter” Crooked Timber:
The key to understanding the economy of New Zealand is that it’s an industry cluster, and the industry in question is agriculture. Or, and this might be a bit more controversial, the industry in question is agriculture marketing, the most perfect example of which being the way in which the Chinese gooseberry was renamed the “kiwifruit” and production ramped up exponentially to meet US and European demand. At some point, if they can transport them without bruising, I’d guess that they’ll have a go at doing the same thing with the Feijoa, a kind of South American guava that’s very popular domestically. Marketing isn’t looked down on as a frivolous activity for people not clever enough to do science in New Zealand, as far as I can see – farmers, if they want to enjoy middle-class incomes, have to be very aware about the difference between the stuff that comes out of the ground or off the animal, and the sort of thing that people want to see in their shops.
They are really very snappy about working out what the world wants and how to give it to them. Australian wine starts selling in the UK? Bang – New Zealand plants a load of vines. The Marlborough region develops a brand premium for Sauvignon? Bish bosh, ship truckloads of chardonnay grapes from Hawke’s Bay down to Marlborough and you can sell Marlborough Chardonnay too. Craft beer, did someone say? New Zealand agriculture is on the case, digging up the less successful vineyards and ramping up on a dozen new specialty varieties of hops. It is one of the few agricultural industries in the world which has basically no subsidies or tariff protections, and as a result they are just so much sharper and more responsive; it’s a perfect example for anyone wanting to talk about X-inefficiency in their economics class.
What’s interesting is that the general level of awareness of agricultural matters, and of the trends and fashions in global foodstuffs, is very widespread and very detailed. Over a barbecue, my brother-in-law asked me why I thought it might be that Europeans were prepared to pay such big money for manuka honey these days, and mentioned that a friend of a friend had been putting in more beehives. He had no real personal interest in apiary as far as I could see – he has a good job helping to keep the dairy giant Fonterra’s vast logistics chain of tanker trucks moving. It’s just the sort of thing that one makes conversation about in New Zealand, same as I might, six months earlier, have asked someone at a similar party what they thought about house prices. House prices are a common topic of conversation too, by the way, it’s not a totally alien culture.
Stephen Smith, “Community Control is Destroying America’s Cities“, New York YIMBY:
The movement toward local control in planning made sense two generations ago, when higher powers were raining highways and urban renewal onto declining cities. But now that urban fortunes have turned so dramatically, the effect of local control has turned sinister.
It’s not obvious why – perhaps people are just better at telling others that they should be accepting new housing than they are at taking their own advice? – but higher level planning seems to yield more development, and community control tends towards much more conservative outcomes.
In New York and Chicago, you can see divergent attitudes towards development at different levels of government even within the current structure. The cities’ mayors – whether Bloomberg, de Blasio or the Daleys – are more pro-development than council members and community groups. The push to rezone for growth almost always comes from the mayor and his planning department, while local council members tend to want to scale back plans, or restrict development through downzonings.
Anne Gibson, “$1 reserve – $125k sale for $1.57m Grammar zone home“, NZ Herald. In my view, the Herald buried the lead on this story:
Hundreds of new small dwellings are springing up across Auckland.
James Wilson, QV homevalue Auckland valuer, said that in the past 12 to 18 months, valuers had noticed a big jump in the number of smaller new places being built on sites which previously had only one house.
“The construction of minor household units is becoming increasingly popular as people look to capitalise on strong demand for rental properties,” he said.
Owners of properties in south and west Auckland showed the biggest appetite for the activity.
“It’s generally done to increase the return or help with mortgage repayments on an owner-occupied property. There is strong demand for home and income properties which provide multiple units of income, increasing returns for investors or aiding owner-occupiers with mortgage repayments,” he said.
Jarrett Walker, “Vancouver: Yes, you have a cost-effective transit agency!” Human Transit:
The numbers confirm that Metro Vancouver is getting excellent value for its transit dollar. Todd Litman of Victoria Transport Policy Institute recently put these numbers together.
First, subsidy per passenger-kilometre (one passenger moving one km on transit). What do regional taxpayers pay to move the massive numbers of people they move every day? Less than 20 cents per passenger-km, which is right on the Canadian average and far better than what’s achieved in the US, Australia, or New Zealand.
And what do Metro Vancouver taxpayers get for these 20 cents per ride? Quite simply, a network that makes the regional economy possible, by allowing economic activity to grow despite the limits of the road network.
One measure of this is passenger-kilometers per capita. How much personal transit does Vancouver provide? How many people can travel, and how far, to access jobs and opportunities without contributing to traffic congestion?
Incidentally, those two charts show how Auckland’s gotten it wrong on public transport. We’re not spending very much per passenger-kilometre, when compared with the high cost, low ridership US cities, but we’re also far behind the Canadian cities on per-capita ridership. Remember, Auckland could have a transport system that performed like Vancouver if we chose to invest in it.
Brad Plumer, “California just imposed mandatory water restrictions for the first time in history“, Vox. This is a bit terrifying. California’s a big food producer, and it looks like it will be suffering Dust Bowl like conditions. And remember: if we don’t address global warming now, we will see many more of these stories in the future:
California has now suffered four straight years of brutal drought. Reservoirs have shriveled. Crops are wilting in the fields. Cattle herds are thinning out. Hydropower dams are generating less electricity.
And, rather than getting better, things actually seem to have taken a turn for the worse this winter. […]
As the low snowpack became clear, California started to take further action. On March 17, the state directed urban agencies to set new restrictions on how frequently residents could water their yards. On March 19, Jerry Brown announced $1 billion in new spending for short-term relief — including emergency drinking water — as well as accelerating some of those water-bond projects for recycling and desalination.
Now Brown is announcing the first-ever mandatory restrictions, mostly for urban water usage. […]
Of course, these rationing measures don’t apply to California agricultural users, who, again, uses about four times as much water as urban users. (That’s even though farming accounts for just 2.1 percent of the state’s GDP.)
Finally, anyone writing, reading, or commenting on blogs may enjoy watching this video. It certainly explains a lot…
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If (when?) the Vancouver plebiscite returns with a ‘no’ vote it will be a huge wake up call to a lot of cities (or even if it passes, because of the complete clusterfuck it’s become) – people are irrational, short sighted, angry and will punish their future selves for some sense of misplaced justice around ‘government waste’. I’ve not seen any evidence that New Zealand is above this, and I hope that our politicians never succumb to these politically convenient methods of governance (oh you’re unhappy that the buses are all late? That’s not on *ME* – we put it to a vote, remember? Democracy, yay!. By the way don’t forget to vote for me next week!)
The residents of the city of Vancouver, that place so many cities aspire to, think they have an expensive, poorly run, developing world level transit system and are out for blood from Translink. No matter how many different ways you present the facts, it’s still this emotional view that the city needs more roads, more highways, more bridges and less bike lanes. It seems that most of this comes form people in the exosuburbs – far flung Burnaby, Coquitlam, Richmond, Surrey, Maple Ridge. These are the Albanys, SIlverdales, Hendersons, Papakuras etc of Vancouver. These are the people that stand to gain a lot – light rail in Surrey, extensions of skytrain lines, more bridges across the Fraser. The North Shore gets nothing (not that anything would ever get them out of their cars). Downtown gets nothing, perhaps some bike lanes – and that’s ok, because less cars coming in is good for downtown – the Dunsmuir and Georgia viaducts will come down soon enough.
I think, in the end, no matter how good you make transit, as long as you have outer suburbs where large portions are living, or are forced to live due to costs (try finding a sub million freestanding house in Vancouver of Burnaby these days), you’re going to have this pushback. The design of these suburbs makes it impossible to do anything BUT drive – extremely difficult to support with transit, so you’re always going to have this fight. We need to limit sprawl, but we also need to design our suburbs better. I’ll accept growing Auckland’s borders if the suburbs are built on grids around transit – exactly the opposite of what we’re doing now. Why are we still doing this to ourselves?
I went to an auction around two years ago to bid on a rental. One of the many properties I didn’t bid on was a Cornwall Park leasehold. A beautiful bungalow on a good site you would never get to actually own. I worked out on my calculator that given the magnitude of the annual lease payments and what the house was actually worth to rent from someone that the correct bid was around minus $60,000. No body bid on it.
My theory is that the problem with Cornwall Park is the leaseholds are calculated as a fixed percentage of the property value (5% or something) which would be a fair return on the value of the property.
However since we are currently in a bubble the value of land is in excess of the market return from rents.
So imagine it compared to a house across the street. They both rent for say $25,000 per year which would normally suggest a value of say $400-$500 thousand for the land. Since the land is worth $1 million in the current market the lease is calculated at $50k/year. However property across the road still rents for $25k/year since that is what the owner can rent it for (and they just made $500k in profits over the last 10 years on rising value so they don’t care too much).
Simplied numbers, lease != rent etc , but you get the picture.
I think it is the impact of an expected future increase in land values that skews these leases. The property price isn’t just a rental divided by interest rate calculation, it reflects peoples expectations of future value. But if you are leasing future value is a cost not a benefit yet the owner still expects you to pay 5% of that value. The market responds to that by walking away.
It amazes me that there are still people willing to sign up for leasehold. Despite evidence that land values will increase and building values will decrease. Must be an example of the greater fool theory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory
That’s probably a market signal that it’s time to bowl the bungalows and construct something with a bit more density. The same pressures exist for freehold properties, but the immediate financial imperative to do so is probably somewhat muted due to the fact that owners take the capital gains.
Just a heads up to those living in Auckland. I haven’t been following the blog as much lately but recalled you had posted a couple of times last year (In January and May on Charles Montgomery’s – Happy City.
Auckland Council’s series of free lectures, Auckland Conversations will have him as guest speaker on April 15th, at the ASB theatre in Aotea Centre. Starts at 5.45pm.
You can visit the events schedule and register here.
The gridlock vs bottleneck thing brought up something I’ve thought of for a long time: we have sufficient roads for our car numbers – the problem is driver incompetence.
Watch any intersection when the lights turn green. There is immense inefficiency as the first car delays its start, as the second car delays further, and the whole concertina ever-so-slowly makes its way through. This is worsened by wide spacing (if cars are stationary, they should be stacked as close together as is possible). Huge inefficiencies that we solve by widening roads instead of teaching drivers to drive.
Then watch motorway onramps. Drivers merging on do not match/exceed speeds, forcing motorway drivers to slow down, which then has follow-on snowball effects back down the chain. A problem we solve by closing onramps (e.g. that one in town) or by… adding lanes to the motorway.
Same with double lane roads. The RC states the RH lane is for overtaking. It isn’t used for that. So a perfectly adequate 2 lane becomes 3 lane because drivers can’t drive. We keep widening and widening to allow for incompetent drivers. The end result is immense capital expenditure that could be solved by more efficient driver behaviour.
No more gridlock, no more bottlenecks (or at least they would be greatly alleviated – imagine how much quicker the Kopu queues might have been if cars were more closely stacked going through!).
Ah the old “If everybody drove as well I I did” argument.
Recently updated to “When we have driverless cars everyone will drive as well as I do”
I am saying why spend billions in capex when the roads are fine.
So the answer to cars getting flowing and merging quickly onto a motorway, is obviously like a Grand Prix start – everyone should accelerate at the same time, hence no lag. It works that way in a garden hose – water molecules all push against each other and move at the same pace.
Interestingly, when you constrict a garden hose, reducing its effective width, the water speeds up, instead of slowing down as we do in cars. If only people in cars acted as water molecules do – when traffic is constricted from 2 lanes down to 1 lane, the answer, according to Lord Maths impeccable logic, is for people to go twice as fast through the constructed area,so that the traffic does not slow down.
If only cars and people didn’t mind getting a bit squashed up and jostly in the traffic stream. You can’t bruise water. But you can bruise people…
Or don’t have many situations where 2 goes to 1. Keep it single all the way, or 2 all the way. Easy peasy.
I agree though, the front person can often be way too slow moving off on a green, especially after long waits (I have been guilty of it too, you drift off and start fiddling with the radio or something). Apparently in Taiwan they have a countdown at red lights so drivers can be ready, and I suspect less frustrated when you have no idea how long the wait will be.
Malaysia has some of these “countdown” traffic signals. Great for boy racers! I suspect people talking on the phone is a major reason so many are slow of the mark when the light turns green.
“There is immense inefficiency as the first car delays its start, as the second car delays further”
You can’t avoid this delay. Imagine for a second all cars would start driving at the same time. After a short while those cars are doing 50km/h (or whatever the speed limit is) with just 2 meter leading distance between cars. That’s impossible. When driving you need a safe leading distance to the car in front of you (usually referred to as the ‘2 second rule’). You have to wait for a second after the car in front of you starts driving to have a safe leading distance.
And wide spacing to the car in front of you doesn’t matter, it just means you can start driving a bit sooner after the car in front of you starts driving.
“Then watch motorway onramps…” That’s a good observation, but it’s a consequence of poor road design. Motorways in Europe always have a short auxiliary lane after an on ramp, precisely to give drivers some time to match their speed.
By far the best way to maximise the efficiency and ultiliy of our extensive and lavish road network is to invest away from it. Reduce out near total dependence on it, give people choice to use it or not, essentially remove reluctant users from it, leaving it for its more efficient users, freight and trade, and its fans; those fabled car ‘lovers’.
Absolutely, we have HEAPS of roads. But surely we should invest in driver education programmes to maximise what we do have, right?
Imagine if we costed “unnecessary” congestion e.g. we posit a perfectly efficient driver and then calculate the gap between that driver and other drivers.
The only education that sticks the one given by the road the driver is using, it is a form of reality unlike programmes and exhortations to get people to not be idiots behind the wheel.
Alternatively, we could invest in making it safe and normal for children to make their own way to school, as it once was.
There is no traffic…it’s school holidays. Imagine if it was like that all the time.