Sunday reading: 17 May 2015

Jarrett Walker, “Abundant Access: a map of the community’s transit choices, and a possible goal of transit“, Human Transit:

The goal of abundant access has several kinds of appeal.

First, it can be measured objectively without recourse to psychology or culture.  Ridership estimates are based heavily on travel times that approximate the notion of abundant access, but they also add psychological factors that are less stable, such as observed preferences for particular technologies.  These factors may be emotionally vivid, but like many emotional factors they are likely to change with time and especially with generations — just as emotional attitudes toward cars are changing now.  Abundance access measures a fact that is entirely objective — travel times.  Unlike emotional reactions to technologies, the value of access has been constant across millennia of human experience.

Second, abundance of access is literally a quantification of freedom, in the sense that matters to us in transportation.  Isochrone maps like Mapnificent’s, in particular, show us our freedom in a very immediate way: here is where you are free to go, now.  Abundant access measures the transportation element of opportunity of all kinds, which is one of the main reasons people have moved to cities since their invention.

The concept of freedom is sadly undervalued in much urbanist discourse, and I am always looking for ways to reintroduce it.  Much urbanist writing, for example, is blatantly prescriptive (“you should want this kind of community”), which feeds conservative stereotypes of urbanism as manipulative or coercive.  We need to be able to talk not just about ideal communities but about freedom and personal responsibility, a frame in which all the great urbanist ideas — and all the urgent environmental imperatives — can be stated equally well.  In that frame, the key idea is not “the good” but “choice,” where freedom of choices also implies responsiblity for your choices.

David Hembrow, “The Grid: the most important enabler of mass cycling“, A View From the Cycle Path:

An individual cycle-path is only as useful as the rest of the grid of routes to which it connects. Even exceptional pieces of bicycle infrastructure are almost entirely useless on their own. They only reach their potential when they are part of a very finely spaced grid of routes which connects to all destinations. To be suitable for all people, this must provide a high quality level of service to all of those destinations. The average quality of service experienced by cyclists dictates how many people will cycle.

Example of a real, successful, cycling grid

Primary (red) and secondary (blue) bicycle routes in Assen. Grey lines are mainly residential streets almost completely free of motor traffic, green are recreational routes. Primary routes are never more than 750 m apart, but note that all the space between them is also available by bike. There are no real gaps in this grid and it leads right from villages outside the city to the city centre. Total map width approximately 6.5 km.

To summarise: Assen’s cycling grid goes everywhere, it has many high quality cycle-paths, but no “sharrows” and very few routes marked by relatively in-effective painted on-road cycle-lanes. Inferior junction designs such as advanced stop lines (aka bike boxes), central cycle-lanes and multi stage turns have been eliminated, while good roundabout and traffic light junction designs are common. Many one-way restrictions help to prevent drivers from using residential streets as through routes, but none of them apply to cyclists. Note that average speeds for cyclists are relatively high because stops are infrequent. Due to cyclists being unravelled from motorists they are often directed around large and time consuming junctions because they are needed only on motor routes.

Assen’s grid is successful. More than 40% of all trips are made by bicycle here.

Bernard Hickey, “Why Auckland landlords will be celebrating… and everyone else will be grinding their teeth“, Interest.co.nz:

By the end of the week rental property investors were sitting pretty at the fireside.

They would have smiled on Monday when Mr Key downplayed again the prospect of any Australian-style restrictions on foreign buyers or any Victoria-style taxes on foreign buyers.

They would have grinned from ear to ear as the Governments responsible for encouraging new house building squabbled on Tuesday over how to pay for pipes and roads while the shortage of 25,000 dwellings grew ever larger.

Later on Tuesday, landlords would have given a little fist pump on hearing Labour Leader Andrew Little give his strongest opposition yet to any suggestion of a capital gains tax. Fresh from 20% rise in prices, those landlords who bought a NZ$600,000 rental with a 60% mortgage a year ago are sitting on a tax-free gain of 50% on their equity and are newly confident that, even with a change of Government, that they will not have that gain taxed.

Joseph Stromburg, “The real story behind the demise of America’s once-mighty streetcars“, Vox:

“There’s this widespread conspiracy theory that the streetcars were bought up by a company National City Lines, which was effectively controlled by GM, so that they could be torn up and converted into bus lines,” says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia and author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City.

But that’s not actually the full story, he says. “By the time National City Lines was buying up these streetcar companies, they were already in bankruptcy.”

Surprisingly, though, streetcars didn’t solely go bankrupt because people chose cars over rail. The real reasons for the streetcar’s demise are much less nefarious than a GM-driven conspiracy — they include gridlock and city rules that kept fares artificially low — but they’re fascinating in their own right, and if you’re a transit fan, they’re even more frustrating.

Mike Ives, “New Zealand property boom attracts overseas migrants“, NY Times:

Auckland’s beaches, clean air and environmentally friendly image are clear selling points for foreign property investors, analysts said. And New Zealand’s property investment laws — which do not include a stamp duty or a capital gains tax — are seen as more welcoming than those of Singapore, Hong Kong and other global investment hubs.

“Offshore investors are having an effect” at all levels of the residential market, said Layne Harwood, country head for New Zealand at the global property consulting firm Knight Frank. “They’re here for security of capital.”

By the way, if you click on the article, notice who took the pictures the NYT used…

Chris Parker, “No, Mike, house crisis is not our fault“, NZ Herald:

Action is needed on several fronts.

The most fundamental challenge is how to balance what communities judge is best for them with what is best for Auckland and the country. There is a need to relax regulatory controls on height and density, while retaining provisions for quality urban design. That will allow more dwellings per unit of land, more choice, and improve housing affordability.

We need better tools, such as road pricing and congestion charging, to raise revenue from the value created by infrastructure.

For construction productivity, many changes are needed. Particularly, I would like to see the Productivity Commission make an inquiry into how to get a 25 per cent productivity gain in residential construction within 10 to 15 years.

Bored Panda, “Anonymous artist ‘Wanksy’ draws penises on UK potholes to make government fix them“:

After another cyclist friend was injured by potholes, Wanksy, an artist from Greater Manchester, England, decided to act. He used washable paint to draw penises around potholes in his neighborhood, and suddenly, they were repaired in 48 hours.

“People will drive over the same pothole and forget about it,” Wanksy said in an interview. “Suddenly you draw something amusing around it, everyone sees it and it either gets reported or fixed.” A Bury Council spokesman disagreed: “Painting obscenities around potholes will not get them repaired any quicker, but simply waste valuable time and resources.”

Bored Panda journalists found that using the Manchester City Council website, it took 5 clicks, 1 form, 1 survey, and a minimum of 5 days just to get a pothole inspected.

Emily Badger, “The myth of the American love affair with cars“, Washington Post Wonkblog:

This isn’t to say that there aren’t people who love their cars. The phenomenon of sports cars, weekend cars and collector cars is real. So, too, is the allure for many people of road trips, scenic highways or weekend drives through the country. Rather, the story Norton disputes, which he has written about in the book “Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City,” is the history that says that we’ve built car-dependent cities and suburbs because that’s what Americans wanted, the story that says all our surface parking lots and spaghetti interchanges are a pure product of American preferences.

“When I actually looked into the history record, documents from the time, I found just the opposite,” Norton says. “What Americans in cities wanted in the ‘20s was to get the cars out.”

Bob Dey, “Council approves budget in debate where policy and action get mixed“, Bob Dey Property Report:

Transport is the leading edge of the debate on the council’s core role: providing the infrastructure for a society to function smoothly. As usual, the infrastructure you don’t see until it breaks, like sewers & waterpipes, attracted no attention.

Government intransigence on funding methods meant the council couldn’t use either of the options it had proposed in lengthy consultation, a fuel tax or tolling motorways. If the council was going to fund any of a list of capital projects deemed necessary, not just desirable, something else had to be thought up. The short-term levy – $99 for every residential property, $159 for business properties, both + gst to make the levies in practice $114 & $159 – is in place for 3 years.

Opponents argued the levy hadn’t been consulted on, and it hadn’t, but what to do? Abandon hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure work or get on with it?

Ami Sedghi and George Arnett, “How does commuting affect wellbeing?” The Guardian:

Commuters are more likely to be anxious, dissatisfied and have the sense that their daily activities lack meaning than those who don’t have to travel to work even if they are paid more. Those were the findings of a study by the Office for National Statistics looking at commuting and personal wellbeing…

It found that each additional minute of commuting time made you feel slightly worse up to a certain point. However, strangely, once a commute hit three hours then the negative effects dropped off.

If we designed our houses the way we designed our downtowns. pic.twitter.com/2bMJyoQDyk

— Jim Ivey (@stpauljim) May 9, 2015

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