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.
Stephen Moss, “End of the car age: How cities are outgrowing the automobile“, The Guardian:
Stephen Bayley, who has written several books on car design, is convinced the age of the car is coming to an end. “It’s five minutes to midnight for the private car,” he says. “It’s no longer rational to use cars in cities like London.” Cars were invented as agents of freedom, but to drive (and, worse, to have to park) one in a city is tantamount to punishment.
Bayley also believes the arrival of driverless cars will further undermine the driving experience. Sex, beauty, status, freedom – all the words which advertisers have tried to associate with cars over the past 50 years – have been replaced by mere functionality.
“There was some research a year or so ago which interviewed people in their 20s and 30s,” he says. “The great majority said they would rather give up their car than their smartphone, and in their list of cool brands, no car manufacturer appeared in the top 20. That’s a very significant change. Twenty years ago, if you’d asked young people, BMW and other car brands would certainly have featured.”
Greg Dixon, “How to make Auckland livable in 10 steps“, NZ Herald:
The European settlement of New Zealand actually began with the creations of cities, rather than rural settlements, and we are now one of the most urbanised societies in the world – 87 per cent of us live in cities, a higher proportion than even the Dutch or the Japanese. Yet, says [urban designer Garth] Falconer, there is a yawning gap in the information about how we got to where we are today.
“We have this continual run of overseas experts coming in to pontificate about how we should be living and we try to cherry-pick the best ideas and make them work. What I’m saying is ‘listen we’ve got a really rich and specific history [of our own].’
“I wanted this book to fill a void, a big gap, because right now we’re making really important decisions about the rebuild of Christchurch and about [the spending] of $1 billion a year on transportation for Auckland for the next 10 years. That’s what we’re arguing about right now. And we have people with TB in South Auckland and crappy houses that leak: we have major issues and we’ve got virutally no information.”
For Falconer the Mangere poo ponds, or rather how they came to be back in the mid-1950s, are a great example of what modern Auckland should be striving for too: public participation, environmental concern, good leadership and state of the art technology leading to the best in urban design…
Dumpark, “Mapping hours of direct sunlight in Wellington City“:
Ever wondered where to find the sunniest spots in your city? This interactive map shows the yearly average number of hours of direct sunlight received in a day and a breakdown for mornings and afternoons in Wellington City.
For a day, the average hours of direct sunlight range from 0 (dark) to 12h (light yellow).
Bernard Hickey, “Land tax the fairest option“, NZ Herald:
With Capital Gains Tax off the table, what’s the next idea boffins and politicians will turn to in the attempt to reduce tax incentives for rental property investors?
The 2010 Tax Working Group looked at a land tax. Arthur Grimes, a former Reserve Bank chairman, proposed it.
It is simple, clean, and he estimated a 1 per cent tax on the value of land would raise $460 million a year and cut land prices by 17 per cent if it was introduced up front.
It would prompt more intense development of land and also encourage land bankers to build, something the Reserve Bank and the Government say they want.
Farmers and iwi would not be thrilled, but it would be the sort of broad-based and low rate tax that works best.
Twisted Sifter, “8 homes built out of spite“. Spite houses are possibly my favourite architectural phenomenon. They say so much about human nature:
Nothing says ‘screw you’ like building a house out of pure spite. Wikipedia defines a spite house as:
A building constructed or modified to irritate neighbors or other parties with land stakes. Spite houses often serve as obstructions, blocking out light or access to neighboring buildings, or as flamboyant symbols of defiance. Because long-term occupation is at best a secondary consideration, spite houses frequently sport strange and impractical structures.
Below you will find eight real-world examples of people who took their conflict to the next level.
The Freeport Spite House:
Spiteful Developer vs ‘The Grid’ in Freeport, New York 1800s
Also in the 19th century, a Freeport, New York developer who opposed all of Freeport being laid out in a grid, put up a Victorian house virtually overnight on a triangular plot at the corner of Lena Avenue and Wilson Place to spite the grid designers. The Freeport Spite House is still standing and occupied to this day. [Source]
Robert Litan, “Economists: Don’t leave home without one“, McKinsey Quarterly:
The Internet economy we know today would not have been possible, in scale or in speed of adoption, without an extremely important policy development of the 1970s and 1980s—the deregulation of transportation—in which economists played an important role…
Had the transportation industry not been deregulated in the 1970s and early 1980s, and had the much more efficient and flexible systems built by companies such as UPS not emerged in response to competition, it is difficult to see how Internet retailers like Amazon, which came along roughly two decades later, would have been able to get started or succeed. Amazon would have had to begin with its own fleet of trucks or even planes to escape the strictures of the pre-1980 regulatory regime, a barrier to entry that almost certainly would have been impossible for new retailers to overcome.
Aaron Renn, “What’s the perfect size for a city?“, The Guardian:
Fragmentation affects a whole range of things, including the economy. The OECD estimates that for regions of equal population, doubling the number of governments reduces productivity by 6%. It recommends reducing this effect with a regional coordinating body, which can also reduce sprawl, increase public transport satisfaction (by 14 percentage points, apparently) and improve air quality…
[But] as the Toronto example shows, amalgamation – bringing fragmented government regions together – comes with downsides of its own. Of course, you can put people in the same governmental box, but that won’t necessarily create common ground – instead, it can create a zero-sum, winner-takes-all dynamic. People in living in cities and those in their suburbs often have different values, priorities and even a different culture…
Clearly, transport has to be designed and implemented on a regional basis, at least for major infrastructure. New York’s Port Authority arguably went off the rails in the late 1960s when it expanded beyond transportation and got into the real estate business by building the World Trade Centre.
So the best way to start charting a middle ground between fragmentation and amalgamation might be for cities to look for ways to better regionalise transport governance. It won’t be easy, not least because of the common fighting over territory, both geographical and bureaucratic. London’s success with the GLA, compared with how amalgamation set Toronto’s transport planning back a decade or more, shows that creating a regional entity is only half the battle. The real drive is to create regional agreement and consensus.
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How about Spite Flyovers then? As the car age ends we seem to be getting Spite Motorways too….
Isn’t the action of the NYPA in getting into property development an example of funding transit investment through development of land now made a lot more valuable by the improve transit offerings. Something AT should be doing in Auckland in places like Panmure, rather than sitting idly at the side waiting for a private developer to make all the profit off redevelopment, much as the Hong Kong transit authority does.
Personally as a 20-30 year old I think tesla is a very cool brand, but more due to the innovation that they put out. …
Re “End of the car age” piece.
Like this quote from Reetta Keisanen, Helsinki’s city’s cycling coordinator about cyclists behaviour:
” I [Stephen Moss, author of the article] suggest to her that not all cyclists behave well – I am thinking of the ones I see in London who whizz along pavements and go in the wrong direction down one-way streets – but she has a good answer.
“Cities get the cyclists they deserve. If you have good infrastructure, you will get good cyclists. It’s the same with drivers and pedestrians.”
So, if cities respect cyclists and pedestrians with your infrastructure, then they’ll [mostly] respect you back.
And drivers – they behave exactly in the way you have taught them too. Drivers here behave like they do because they get messages from AT and its planners all the time by the things it says and does about how important “traffic flow” is above everything else.
Makes perfect sense to me that if you build proper infrastructure you’ll get good behaviour from those who use it and if you build shit infrastructure then people will behave badly as they go into “self preservation mode” – to the detriment of all.
“Cities get the cyclists they deserve. If you have good infrastructure, you will get good cyclists. It’s the same with drivers and pedestrians.”
Conversely, you could also say that to drivers. If you reduce the number of carparks and reduce traffic lanes, you get worse and more aggressive drivers. It kinda reminds me of the La Trobe St bike lanes in Melbourne. Before the Copenhagen style bike lanes, drivers seemed to behave alright and gave cyclists space. Now that the City Of Melbourne removed two traffic lanes, rather than the parking coz parking makes money for the council, the drivers on that road are behaving like absolute nutjobs and there is now congestion on that road all day rather than just during peak hour.
That doesn’t invalidate the argument, it merely reinforces the suggestion that traffic planners making decisions can have a lot of intended and unintended consequences.
It may be that Melbourne wants to cut the number of cars on this street down which is why they left parking in place and removed traffic lanes, but hasn’t yet provided the alternatives to car use beforehand – so the drivers are behaving like frustrated rats.
[to my mind they probably should have made the parking lanes PT priority lanes – and maybe they have], to further indicate cars are not so welcome.
And how much money do 2 lanes of on street parking really make for the city?
On La Trobe St, there always has been pt priority as there are two tram tracks running down the middle of it.
In my mind, they should have put narrower ‘buffer zone’ for cyclists so there could be a clearway during peak hours mainly because most vehicles are single occupant vehicles.
On street parking is $5.50 per hour in Melbourne. Assuming each space is occupied for eight hours per day, that is $44 per day per space. I believe there are around 150-200 parking spaces there, so it generates around $7000 per day, which equals $1.75 million per year assuming 250 “paying days”.
For those living in the north western and western suburbs, transport IS rubbish (probably worse than AK actually). You’ve got a choice of stupidly overcrowded and unreliable trains or the congested West Gate Bridge.
While I see the point you’re making, I don’t think you’re considering things in context.
Simply put, driving recklessly is far more dangerous than cycling carelessly. If you hit someone with a tonne of steel at speed, they’re likely to die. So while I can understand that drivers may also get frustrated, I firmly believe that they have a much higher obligation to be careful.
An analogy: I do a bit of woodworking from time to time. I’m pretty casual with some of my tools – the electric drill, for example. I don’t usually wear eye protection when using a drill, and I sometimes run it with one hand or do other mildly dangerous things.
On the other hand, when I’m using a plunge router, which has a fantastic amount of torque and several exposed blades, I wouldn’t dream of being that careless. If I were to lose control of the router, I could easily put myself in hospital. So I wear eye and ear protection and keep both hands firmly on the thing at all times.
Bikes are like electric drills. Cars are plunge routers. There’s a big difference in how you should handle them.
Bikes are more like hand drills.
And cars more like cnc machines!
there was a lovely restored pink and green house in Wellington’s Thorndon; apparently the Thorndon Society members had turned up at the door with “how lovely that you’re restoring your house, here are example of our approved colour schemes”
If I was the owner of that house I would piss off the Thorndon Society by repainting the walls fluorescent yellow, have red window sills, pink doors and a bright blue roof! Hope that colour scheme is ‘approved’.
Here’s a late addition. That [non-existant] business case for the Holiday Highway just got a whole lot worse:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/northern-advocate/news/article.cfm?c_id=1503450&objectid=11441655
Houston we have a dichoctomy!
I see this quote from the Northport chair as follows:
“This [container port] would be beneficial and divert a fair amount of trucks off of SH1. It will also be cheaper for Northland companies to ship items, rather than transport them by truck.”
Time and again we are told by all and sundry that Northport will never work for Auckland cargo or for any Northland export cargo because double handling of cargo even in containers and using transshipping from or via Northport is “too expensive” relative to trucking costs.
Yet here we are, the chair of Northport, who presumably knows his own ports business and costs better than anyone, says it will be cost competitive to use the port.
Certainly if 40,000 “south bound” containers can be railed or shipped instead of trucked for less cost that removes a lot of the rationale (if ever there was one) for the Holiday highway.
The very same highway that doesn’t currently even get halfway to Northport – or even reach the borders of Northland province – even under the most ambitious plans.
For 20km of railway track and further improvements on the North Auckland Line we could realistically use Northport for both Northlands and some of Aucklands cargo needs.
Ministers Joyce, Bridges & POAL et al, you’ve all got a lot of some ‘splaining’ to do.
So shouldn’t we be a little smarter about what we subsidise? RoNSing AKL-Whangarei is an appalling cost next to a couple of cranes for the port and bit of a hard stand.
But roads, eh? Somehow they’re always the answer whatever the question.
As a supporter of *most* of the RONS projects, the P2W is an absolute waste of money. You could spend 300 mill on median barriers, more passing lanes and rumble strips all the way to Whangarei and it’ll have more benefits than P2W.
Time connect Marsden to the rail network, then.
Assuming it shouldn’t be a problem to fit freighters between 10min services on the western line. Roll them steadily to keep pace with the EMUs stoping and going? Newmarket could be a problem, was always undertracked. Avoid the peaks I guess is the first thing…. Others will understand this better.
Yep, first step is to link the port to existing rail, then you have a reason to use the North Auckland Line going forward.
Isn’t that what Avondale – Southdown was supposed to allow?
Resilience in the rail network, bypass of the bottlenecks.
Yeah lets get the existing line working first, before we spend lots of money on new lines.
Once the traffic builds, then yes, the corridor is there to reduce the need to route via Newmarket.
“Assuming it shouldn’t be a problem to fit freighters between 10min services on the western line.”
Challenging but not impossible. In order to cope with the grades and the need to accelerate from signals It will need a very good power to weight ratio – short trains or multiple locomotives. One solution would be to operate a banker set through the metro area; 3 locomotives, 2 of which would detach and return light.
Makes sense.
Only issue is that you can’t enter the port area from Newmarket line as the track is missing and the turn is too tight. So you have to enter via the eastern portal under the Tamaki Drive overbridge that faces towards Orakei.
But if the freights are routing down to the Wiri inland port area, not a problem going that way.
Easier still…run the freight trains off peak and at night. Container trains connecting with ships at Marsden Point won’t be super time sensitive enough to need to upset western rail line timekeeping. May actually work best with an inland port at Kumeu, with truck access onto the motorway network (any urgent stuff) and rail connections south (non-urgent).
The bigger challenge is persuading the govt that investment in rail freight is worthwhile.
I bet that’s the same guy who owns a lot of land round there (and a piece of the Port)?
He’s always saying that for some reason….
Like he is the only one with a vested interest here?
So “wanting to make yourself unbelievably rich” and “wanting trucks off the road for environmental and efficiency reasons” is the same thing? Or am I misreading you?
He is not suggesting rail to port – Winston Peters is and has been doing so for a long long time.
So on the surface the Northport chair won’t make a cent from encouraging more freight ot use “his” port, for his private land holdings, whatever and whereever they might be.
As for conflating “wanting to make yourself unbelievably rich” and “wanting trucks off the road for environmental and efficiency reasons”.
Well someone is already doing exactly that/still dong it by encouraging more and more trucks on roads. Roads we can’t afford to build, but are at the expense of everything else.
And I don’t think its this guy doing that do you?
Yes we do need to get trucks off the roads where there are better alternatives – “better” in this case means for NZ Inc, not for the road lobby.
Bernard Hickey had another story in the Herald today, titled “Who pays the pipes” (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11442305)
And looks at the issue of who, between Auckland Council and Central Government needs to stump up to pay for all the underground infrastructure e.g. pipes (3 waters etc) these new SHAs and greenfield development areas need to become buildable and so contribute to reducing the housing shortage.
As he rightly points out Auckland Council can’t fund these big ticket items on its own any more, no matter what Nick Smith wishes.
Smith reckons since government is “building the motorways”, its “done enough for a Mellowpuff”.
The current downward trend in housing consents which aren’t even keeping up with migration induced demand, let alone tackling the backlog of house shortages, suggest that approach won’t deliver.
Hickey suggests that its time for Central Government to stump up, but given their reluctance to fund even half of the CRL anytime soon, the chances of this seem to be very remote.
However, they do have this “Future investment fund” which is supposed to be used for these big, long term, with decade or more payback times, “infrastructure development”.
Either that or all these developers actually pay the true costs of getting the infrastructure to their greenfields land in the first place?
I believe the future investment fund is more or less spent.
Nick Smith is opposed to developer contributions and wants them reduced. I’d love to hear how he proposes the council fund all this infrastructure. If he believes it should be current ratepayers he needs to make that clear do they have the chance to comment on this idea.
He made it clear on TV3’s “The Nation” this weekend that he considers it “Auckland Councils problem”, not Central Governments to “fix” the infrastructure issue.
Technically he is right, it is, but since (by the ministers own words) 50% of all inbound migrants stay in Auckland, you’d think they’d at least acknowledge their part in the problem.
I think Auckland Council can deal with it by simply making the developers pay the full costs of providing the infra. they need to sell the houses they build on their greenfields sites.
Yes, the developer will simply front load that onto their prices so the person who ends up paying it is the owner of the house. But isn’t that “user pays”.
You chose to buy a McMansions at the end of the motorway, so you should pay the costs of allowing you to do so.
I personally support the idea that the developer and therefore ultimately the house buyer pays the reasonable cost of new infrastructure through development levies. The minister seems to think on the one hand that this outrageous but on the other hand wants councils to pay.
This leads me to believe that he wants existing ratepayers to subsidise new development, though is choosing to avoid counching it like that.
He wants the exact opposite of user pays – he wants all Auckland ratepayers to subsidise a chosen fewto make their houses cheaper than they otherwise would be.
I get a strong sense of “all hat, no cattle” when I look at the investments and policy changes that the Government has promised to address housing issues.
The “Future Investment Fund” seems like it was just a PR exercise / slush fund for election promises. I can’t think of anything very useful that’s come out of it.
The Special Housing Areas, while a decent idea, have failed to fire. This seems to be in part because they’re mostly not located in areas where people want to live. And, as you noted, the Government doesn’t have any plan to provide them with sufficient infrastructure.
Meanwhile, some of the Government’s other policies have done much more harm than good. Their Kiwisaver subsidies for first home buyers are likely to have inflated prices further, as has their decision to loosen “investor migrant” policies to open the door to anyone with a few mil.
For all the strong words from Ministers English and Smith, their actual policy record doesn’t suggest that they are taking housing affordability very seriously.
“Developers paying the true cost of their greenfield development” doesn’t seem like a great recipe for making housing more affordable or any incentive for them to build entry level housing.
So where do you believe funding should come from?
It depends on what they build, and where.
They can still build affordable homes, but they can’t if they’re all stand alone 4+ bedroom houses on postage stamp sections, with 2 car garages – even in the arse-end of nowhere.
GST on 20,000 houses (roughly the amount built last year) at say an average build cost of $500,000 is $1.5 billion. Roughly 1/3 of those houses were in Auckland -so that is $500 million that one could argue belongs in Auckland. That is a lot of infrastructure and that is just a small part of the economic activity and taxes that development generates.
The problem is not that NZ or Auckland cannot afford infrastructure. The problem is that Central government prioritises the spending elsewhere.
I’ll accept a land tax if the government pays it on all their property.
Makes sense. Local and central governments are significant land-owners, including in transport. They should probably face the same incentives to use its land efficiently as anyone else.
yes actually charging rates on central government property would provide at least some incentive for them to manage their physical footprint in efficient ways. Can’t imagine the road network being so over-sized if NZTA actually had to pay rates on it.
They other giant property loophole is churches. Why they don’t pay rates only God knows …
You could also get Churches to start paying their fare share of rates too. Some of the Churches in Auckland are sitting on huge plots of undeveloped land and aren’t paying a cent.
Hear, hear.
Carlisle House on Richmond Rd, (the former Costley Institute) has been rotting for years. The Council is trying to buy it from the church next door- but when you pay $300 a year rates for the building and a lot of land why would you give two shits?
AC needs to learn two words “incentivising” and “dis-incentivising”. I know schoolchildren who could run this town more competently…
I believe that from next rating year that is changing. The church will still be rates free, but the land and buildings next door will be fully rated on its cv of $4.7m. If you look on the council GIS viewer you’ll see the property is now split in 2.
Thanks Conan. It’s always been two titles, and they only pay $242 each a year in rates. Not bad for nearly an acre of prime Grey Lynn. Maybe L Ron was onto something?
The note on both parts say “2014 capital value for 2015/16 rates” on both of them though, so the Church would be paying a lot more too.
You can thank me for that. I suggested to the local board that the only way to get the owners there to get real about moving on before they have completely destroyed the building is to ‘incentivise’ them with something approaching a cost of holding valuable property through rates. Nothing against the Tongan Church, when I lived across the road I loved the singing, but their ‘stewardship’ of that property is, shall we say, suboptimal. Would make a great hotel. You’re welcome.
Thank you Patrick!
Yes well done. Here’s hoping they think about wise uses for the site. The Chamberlain St side is (subject to planning laws etc, NIMBYs and the like) is crying out for a nice medium density development, the profits from which could then be used to restore the main building, which could then be well rented for commerical businesses, providing ongoing income for the Church.
Garth’s step of relocating the port is a good one but I favour a new port in the Firth of Thames. To be competitive POA doesn’t have to be in Auckland it just has to be closer than the other ports. A firth of Thames port would also be closest to the Waikato giving a huge advantage for winning the dairy export trade.
The Firth of Thames? That’d require one hell of a lot of dredging, it’s only a few metres deep. https://data.linz.govt.nz/layer/1278-chart-nz-533-firth-of-thames/
Orere Point would be dead easy or further south with dredging and a bloody big pier. So long as you miss the birds at Kaiaua. I think Bruce Howe had a proposal a while back. In terms of location it would beat all of the others and not waste land in Auckland. As for the benefits, they would still be there.
Apart from the complete lack of decent roads and rail at all.
Yes if only we ken how to build roads and railway lines. Never mind.
I’m guessing from that comment you haven’t driven that route. Makes Dome Valley look simple to fix.
No I have been star gazing there heaps. A nice dark sky at the moment. My point is it doesn’t have to be the best place for a port. Just better than the competitors. Imagine a big causeway straight out from Waitakaruru to a new reclaimed port! It would be heaps better than Tauranga for imports to Auckland and exports from the Waikato.
Garth’s idea of industrialising the Kaipara is horrible in my view. Additionally with our industrial and warehousing base in South Auckland, sending the port north means then trying to feed everything through the city which also looks daft.
How about relying more on Tauranga and Marsden and a controlled level at Auckland. Tauranga is already directly connected to south Auckalnd and the Waikato, esp via rail, the upgrading of which is a tiny cost compared to moving the port. PoT is a huge export port and could do with balancing with some of PoAL’s imports.
Daft to have competing companies for strategic infra. It’s not like we have separate road companies vying for traffic with duplicate networks, eh? Need a ports’ strategy.
Of course PoAL are cunningly claiming they need the extensions to fit in the big cuddly cruise ships. This is bollocks, of course. They could fit in at Wynyard, or alternatively remove Captain Cook wharf and fit them alongside Bledisloe (or just install a dolphin extension).
The real reason for the extension is for more car storage (until car imports dry up, which must inevitably happen in the long term) and to maintain their market share vs other ports.
Which all goes to show that the basic problem here is the absurd competitive model of port ownership in NZ
It amazes me how the port company runs rings around this Council. I was discussing it with a former ARC manager last week who pointed out that if Phil Warren were in charge he would have been down there and stopped them in their tracks, even if he didn’t have the authority to! I don’t get whey they don’t simply tell them one port director will be removed for every pile that gets built.
Maybe, and you need to consider this unemotionally, the majority of Aucklander’s really don’t care. The protest turnouts (latest being last weekend estimated 1200 people) were hardly sensational. Not saying I agree or disagree, just that there’s a lot of noise and few who probably really care. And the Port Company knows that. If 100,000 marched down Queen St the Mayor and the Ports might pay attention, but 1200? The composition of Auckland’s population makeup is changing too, whether we like it or not, and a lot of business oriented people from countries where $$ is king are now resident, and they would probably not be bothered by port expansions.
Even Key’s Ponytailgate got more press coverage and incurred more social outrage.