Marquette University, “Humanity’s Greatest Invention? Face-to-face with Edward Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City“, Medium. I encourage you to go and read the entire interview – it covers a very wide range of topics:
Density matters because we’re a social species geared to learn from people around us. We come out of the womb with this remarkable ability to pick up information from our parents, from our peers, from our siblings, even occasionally from our teachers. Cities enable that to happen. It’s remarkable when you think how the cyber seers and techno prophets 30 years ago predicted that all this technology we have would mean the death of distance, the death of face-to-face contact and the death of cities, yet that hasn’t come to pass.
I think they radically underestimated how much richer face-to-face contact is as a means of communication than, you know, Skyping. Skyping is great. I mean, if you’ve got to be on the other side of the world, it’s wonderful to be able to see your children and to say “Hi.” But it’s no comparison with actually being in the same room. And the more important an idea is, the more important it is to communicate it face to face.
[…]
I think probably the low-hanging fruit in transportation policy in Milwaukee is the buses. There’s an old line that 40 years of transportation economics at Harvard can be boiled down to four words: “Bus good, train bad.” So it shouldn’t be seen as being an intrinsic problem that you don’t have a train system. Buses are flexible. They’re cost effective. They in principle can be socially programmed… But we tend to see buses as the ugly stepchild of American transportation. That’s really unfortunate.
I (suggest) actually embracing a pro-bus agenda to make buses cool. Spend modest amounts upgrading the buses. You don’t necessarily put in streetcars, just paint your buses to make them look better, figure out how to put in a little more personnel so they feel more safe, figure out if you can do social programming — chat rooms in buses. Run trivia contests for the kids, just purely experimental, low-cost interventions that attempt to make the buses exciting. That’s a cheap public transport agenda that could potentially yield big returns — for a lot less than $5 billion or whatever they are spending on highways. My guess is $5 million would go pretty far with buses.
Steve S, “Northcote Safe Cycle Route update – a pragmatic win“, CAA:
It’s a sad fact of life for engineers designing cycling infrastructure that the sacred cow of on-street parking frequently frustrates good design. We see vociferous opposition from residents and businesses to the loss of car parking everywhere we turn – from Carlton Gore Rd to Franklin Rd to Westhaven Drive/Beaumont St to of course Queen St in Northcote. For some, the storage of private vehicles, often at no cost, is more important than moving people safely and efficiently along a roadway. We don’t yet live in enlightened times like our European cousins in the Netherlands and Denmark.
[…]
So how have AT handled this, particularly when heavyweight politicians like Jonathan Coleman MP and Councillor George Wood sided with the objections of some of the local residents?
Rather well, actually, particularly if your advocacy is tempered with pragmatism and budgeting realities…
Daniel Hertz, “Undercounting the transit constituency“, City Observatory:
By far the most common way to measure transit use is “commute mode share,” or the percentage of workers who use transit to get to their job. For the most part, this is a measure of convenience: it’s the most direct way the Census asks about transportation, which means it’s the easiest way to get consistent data from any city or metropolitan area in the country.
But it also has a lot of problems. For one, the vast majority of trips – about 84% – aren’t simple home-to-work commutes. And it’s not just that people who work also go to the grocery store, restaurants, or friends’ homes. Lots of people don’t work at all, and those people – largely students, the elderly, or people with disabilities – are disproportionately likely to use transit for all or almost all of their trips. Finally, plenty of people who do work might drive three or four days a week and take transit the other one or two. But since the Census only asks about what they do most of the time, they’ll show up as “drivers.” All of these things will tend to undercount a place’s reliance on public transit.
[…]
City Observatory would like to offer our own measures of transit use, based on data from the Census’ American Housing Survey. (The 2013 AHS includes just 25 metropolitan areas, which is why many larger cities are left out of our list below.) And these measures suggest that, indeed, commuting mode share dramatically understates Americans’ reliance on transit.
Andrew Geddis, “A tangata whenua shaped elephant on the path“, Pundit. Geddis has written two interesting posts on the potential for legal challenges to the Government’s plan to sell Crown-owned land for housing:
It may be a reflection of just how quickly the Government’s recently announced plans to free up some 500 acres of land for housing in and around Auckland were developed, but it looks like no-one stopped to ask themselves “can we actually do this?” before embarking on the exercise.
Because, as is now belatedly becoming obvious, there’s as pretty big tangata whenua shaped elephant standing in the Government’s path in the form of the Ngā Mana Whenua o Tāmaki Makaurau Collective Redress Act 2014.
This legislation gives force to a collective settlement reached between the Crown and a bunch of iwi and hapū that have overlapping Treaty claims in the Auckland region…
Under the Government’s current proposal, they want developers to build houses on its land, with title then being transferred once the development is completed. But how’s that going to work if, once the development is done, the body representing the various iwi and hapū then gets a peremptory right to purchase the land in question? What sort of developer is going to enter into the house building game under that cloud of uncertainty?
The second post adds some further detail:
When the Ngā Mana Whenua o Tāmaki Makaurau Collective Redress Deed was signed back in 2012, it contained a “Property Redress Schedule” (you can see it in PDF here, from p.21 on). And that Schedule contained a specific “Department of Building and Housing Protocol”, which is at p.46 of that document.
Under that Protocol, the Crown agreed that:
If the Crown intends to:
7.1.1 develop land it owns that is subject to the [right of first refusal] RFR to achieve, or assist in achieving, the Crown’s social objectives in relation to housing or services related to housing; and
7.1.2 involve a party other than the Crown (including a private buyer or Crown body) in that development,
the Department [of Building and Housing] shall first provide the [iwi and hapū’s] limited partnership the opportunity to be the developer, subject to meeting the intended Crown social objectives in relation to housing or services related to housing, and on such terms as might be offered to the private sector.
Which the Department just hasn’t done. So, on the face of it, the Government’s announced plans are a breach of the agreement it made in its settlement deed with the Tāmaki Makaurau Collective only three years ago…
David Thorpe, “Which city has the world’s worst traffic jams“, World Economic Forum:
Indonesia’s capital Jakarta has the world’s worst traffic jams according to a new survey by Castrol, its 2014 Magnatec Stop-Start Index. Have sympathy for the city’s drivers, who were recorded as suffering 33,240 stop-starts per year, meaning they spent 27.22% of their total travel time going nowehere.
The index uses data shared anonymously by millions of TomTom navigation users around the world and covers 78 countries. The next worst city was Istanbul, with drivers spending nearly 29% of their travel time stationary.
[…]
Europe contains 8 of the 10 cities with the lowest number of stops-starts, the winner being Tampere, Finland:
1. Tampere, Finland (6,240 stops-stars per car per year)
2. Rotterdam, The Netherlands (6,360)
3-4. Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (6,840)
3-4. Bratislava, Slovakia (6,840)
5. Brisbane, Australia (6,960)
6. Antwerp, Belgium (7,080)
7. Porto, Portugal (7,200)
8. Brno, Czech Republic (7,320)
9. Copenhagen, Denmark (7,440)
10. Kosice, Slovakia (7,440)[…]
Worldwide, over $100 trillion in public and private spending could be saved between now and 2050 if the world were to expand public transportation, walking and bicycling in cities, according to a report by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and the University of California, Davis. Additionally, reductions in carbon dioxide emissions reaching 1,700 megatons per year in 2050 could be achieved.
The Economist, “Rus in urbe redux“:
Cities lose people because of two processes, which often happen at the same time. The first is migration—whether from a city in one country to a city in another, from city to city within a country, or from city to suburb. The cause is often industrial decline. Khulna, a city of more than 1m in Bangladesh, has contracted along with its jute industry. Middlesbrough, in England, has not recovered from the loss of shipbuilding. In many cases, workers do not move far. Detroit is surrounded by successful suburban cities; the overall population of the metropolis has changed little over the past few decades. Seoul has probably lost people to the burgeoning aerotropolis of Incheon, 30 miles (48km) away.
The second cause is demographic change. Though increased life expectancy can delay the moment of reckoning, once a country is largely urbanised, its cities will contract unless it can attract enough immigrants or deliver enough babies to counterbalance the number of deaths. Japan and Russia are already failing to do this, and South Korea is approaching the edge. Japanese women have 1.4 children each, on average; though South Korea’s population is younger, its women have just 1.2. Neither country wants mass immigration. Successful cities in such countries will be able to grow by poaching inhabitants from unsuccessful ones. But as the total population falls it will become clear that they are playing a national game of demographic musical chairs, competing for an ever-shrinking number of people. China will soon be doing this, too: the UN reckons its urban population will be declining by 2050.
Anthony Flint, “What Millennials Want – And Why Cities are Right to Pay Them So Much Attention“, CityLab:
Two public opinion polls came out in the last month suggesting the kinds of places Millennials like. Spoiler alert: it’s Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, as well as communities such as—I’m inclined to say once again, of course—Boulder and Austin. The key characteristics seem to be walkability, good schools and parks, and the availability of multiple transportation options.
The first survey was released by The Rockefeller Foundation and Transportation for America, the arm of Smart Growth America that focuses on transportation as the key element of land use.
They found that 54 percent of Millennials surveyed would consider moving to another city if it had more or better options for getting around, and 66 percent said access to high quality transportation is one of the top three criteria they would weigh when deciding where to live.
[…]
The second survey was released last week by the American Planning Association, on the last day of the organization’s National Planning Conference in Atlanta, a gathering of some five thousand planners, elected officials and others. The report on the national poll, titled Investing in Place, compiled results of surveys of 1,040 Americans, roughly half Millennials, the other half baby boomers. Part of the message was that the two groups want many of the same things: better transportation options, walkable communities, technology-enabled cities, and housing that would allow “aging in place.”
Urban Kchoze, “Urban growth boundaries, mobility, and affordability“:
I must point out the inherent stupidity of many North American urban centers, the schizophrenic nature of public policy on urban developments.
On one hand, you have DOTs and Transport Ministries that seek to enable fast, uncongested travel in metropolitan areas. They will build new roads and widen existing ones to make sure that people can keep traveling around quickly, increasing mobility. They will do so with tax money and not with fees, because the unspoken idea in North America is that people are entitled to highways, to fast roads to get them where they want to go, and all of that without having to pay for it directly. Try denying someone highways or asking highways to be tolled and they will cry out that they are being treated as “second class citizens” (I know, one of my old friends used that line on me when I told him I opposed highway construction to the suburb he recently moved in).
On the other, you have State/provincial governments or city governments adopting green belt regulations to restrict sprawl and prevent it.
Do you see the problem? We are creating sprawl with our transport policy and investments, with public money, but then we turn around and say “sprawl is bad” and try to limit it. We are doing one thing and its opposite, spending a lot of money on both, not realizing that we are largely fighting against ourselves and wasting billions of dollars doing it! Using regulation to fight something that we created by other regulations and government intervention.
So urban growth boundaries are a bad reaction to a problem that we create with our choices of transport policy and investments. We don’t need them, what we need is to stop treating access to high-speed, toll-free roads as a human right and stop spending so much tax money on it. Make highway users bear the cost of highway construction and maintenance through tolls, impose congestion charges on vehicles accessing congested areas and do not build roads if they wouldn’t be profitable, and you won’t need urban growth boundaries as it will create incentives to avoid traveling high distances regularly. Of course, we also need to accept the fact that infill developments need to happen and that areas need to be able to change to accommodate higher demand.
Ultimately, yes, the result is higher housing costs per square foot. However, the cheap housing prices of sprawl is largely illusory, the result of hidden costs through higher transport costs for residents and higher infrastructure costs for governments. People should be free to live in the middle of nowhere if they want, to benefit from low land costs to have a big house, I am fine with that… as long as they don’t ask the rest of society to pick up the tab and build the infrastructure required to allow them to live in that way without all the inconveniences of distance.
Julia Belluz, “How the biggest fraud in political science nearly got missed“, Vox. Not related to transport at all, but it is a fantastic discussion of the gap between theory and practice in the scientific method:
Consider the problem of replication. One of the principles of the scientific method is that researchers should attempt to validate previous findings by replicating their experiments. This was how LaCour’s fraud was uncovered: another researcher, David Broockman, tried to repeat his study and found he couldn’t.
The problem, though, is that this kind of work is extremely rare. “The vast majority of scientific articles never get built upon at all,” explained Harvard’s Sheila Jasanoff, a critical theorist on science. Researchers are often discouraged from replicating the work of others — because it’s not considered as important or worthy as discovering new things.
[…]
This problem isn’t new; scientists have been talking about it for decades. For this reason, it’s now common to hear statements like this one from The Lancet editor Richard Horton: “Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”
Because sometimes u just need more protection: heres 2 our “new” #protectedbikelane design #Mondayfunnies pic.twitter.com/RkCu3ft4FC
— Toole Design Group (@tooledesign) June 1, 2015
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Great list as usual Peter. Here’s another to get y’all thinking, especially all you economists:
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-06-05/the-future-history-of-political-economy-part-1
How economists and especially politicians have got away with sweeping the externalities of our economic growth under the carpet for so long. Hint: it can’t go on as the high EROEI (Energy Returned On Energy Invested) fossil fuels are used up.
Urban Kchoze, hear hear! Central government and the council should take note.
A propos, I’ll repeat my recent comment on Westconnex, a $10 billion dinosaur motorway project now proposed for inner Sydney—
Why is it that road-building is the one area of infrastructure investment where many people seem happy to spend billions on megaprojects without having the faintest idea of what they’re trying to achieve, what success would look like, and how likely it is that success will be achieved. [note 1]
What would people say if the health department said: ‘Waiting lists are too long. We need to spend $10 billion on a new hospital. If we build the hospital, it might reduce waiting lists by two per cent now, and in ten years’ time they’ll be worse than ever.’ [note 2]
What would people say if the water department said: ‘There’s a water shortage. We need to spend $10 billion building a new dam. If we build the dam, in ten years’ time we’ll have—a water shortage!’
People would rightly wonder whether they were getting good value for money in spending such huge sums on temporary fixes. They would tell the authorities to go away and look for smarter solutions.
But in road-building, alone, anything goes. Many people seem to regard any and all road building as good by definition, without the slightest thought to whether it’s good value for money or what the alternatives are.
Concerning the Vox article on scientific fraud: I had an intuition that this is not at all irrelevant to transport planning debates. Confirmed when I got to: ‘People will sometimes lie and cheat, or simply push sloppy and incorrect findings through the publishing machine.’
The behaviour patterns have obvious analogies with our concerns about decision-making in transport and urban planning, and the spin machine that puts great effort into promoting poorly justified decisions.
A propos, my recent comment on Westconnex, a $10 billion dinosaur motorway project now proposed for inner Sydney: [to be continued, as my computer won’t allow comments of more than 10 lines]
Why is it that road-building is the one area of infrastructure investment where many people seem happy to spend billions on megaprojects without having the faintest idea of what success would look like and how likely it is that success will be achieved. [note 1]
What would people say if the health department said: ‘Waiting lists are too long. We need to spend $10 billion on a new hospital. If we build the hospital, it might reduce waiting lists by two per cent now, and in ten years’ time they’ll be worse than ever.’ [note 2]
What would people say if the water department said: ‘There’s a water shortage. We need to spend $10 billion building a new dam. If we build the dam, in ten years’ time we’ll have—a water shortage!’
People would rightly wonder whether they were getting good value for money in spending such huge sums on temporary fixes. They would tell the authorities to go away and look for smarter solutions. [to be continued]
But in road-building, alone, anything goes. Many people seem to regard any and all road building as good by definition, without the slightest thought to whether it’s good value for money or what the alternatives are.
Note 1. Knowing what success would look like: by defining your goals in advance *in enough detail* to enable you to go back ten years later and measure whether the goals have been achieved. In respect of motorway megaprojects, vague appeals to ‘reducing traffic congestion’ don’t cut it. Observing ten years later that congestion has reduced doesn’t cut it, if you did not originally set a goal that stated *how much* reduction would count as success. And if congestion has increased, saying ‘Imagine how much worse things would be without the new road’ particularly doesn’t cut it.
Note 2. Two per cent: An analogy for the impact that any individual road megaproject might have on a big city’s total traffic system.
I take issue with the piece by Steve S of CAA. It’s riddled with problematic assumptions that are helping to hold back people-friendly infrastructure development in Auckland — in just the quoted section alone.
For instance, Steve S suggests that, “It’s a sad fact of life for engineers designing cycling infrastructure that the sacred cow of on-street parking frequently frustrates good design”. But this is not the whole story. In addition to the existence of the sacred cow, there is the conspicuous absence of local-scale planning and high-engagement consultation with residents and other stakeholders. This ball is in AT’s court. It’s negligent to issue them a B+ grade for having failed to find a constituency for progressive public realm design in what is generally an ordinary, unremarkable Auckland suburb.
They go on to say, “We don’t yet live in enlightened times like our European cousins in the Netherlands and Denmark”. That is a fine statement of the problem, but they then overlook one key element of the solution: high-engagement consultation formats, which involve local people in inventing the very plan for change that AT repeatedly finds it cannot impose by itself. Involving locals has many benefits, from identifying problems that otherwise get missed, to empowering people and respecting a sense of community autonomy and self-determination. This is as opposed to surprising locals with a seemingly drastic change on a short timeline, and inviting “feedback” from a self-selecting segment of the population.
Finally, they qualify their conclusion with, “if your advocacy is tempered with pragmatism and budgeting realities…”. Well, it’s one thing for advocacy to be tempered with realistic constraints, and it’s another to temper it with AT’s current political and budgetary constraints. If we limit ourselves to the envelope defined a priori by AT, then advocacy is more or less redundant (and it shows — as in Northcote). The purpose of advocacy is to push the envelope beyond what AT is comfortable delivering today. So no, AT has not come out of this looking “[r]ather well”.
Just a couple reactions. Auckland doesn’t do high-engagement consultation. Compared with the US where citizen participation was invented, Auckland’s is a rigid top-down process, bound up by rules that are enshrined in local and national legislation.
European cities may not have high-engagement-consultation (and I don’t know what their methods are) because government there as been much more accountable to the public good than, say the US. So they have a history of what we think of as progressive policy-making, thus high-speed rail, good public transport, bicycles, social services, etc. People have been getting pretty much what they want.
stevenz,
You’re right, of course, that Auckland doesn’t currently do high-engagement consultation. But do you mean that we cannot start doing it because of local and national laws? If so, I’d find that hard to buy. There is nothing to stop, for example, AT running design charrettes to devise a local mobility plan long before putting out notice for resource consent, etc. The tangible difference would be that by the time they arrive at the statutory consent feedback stage, there would be a strong, informed, organised constituency in favour of well-designed, locally-relevant change.
To say that the US generally does high-engagement consultation is a bit of a stretch. From the historical Bureau of Public Roads onwards, they mastered the art of circumventing public input in order to expand their highway networks and neglect public transit or people-friendly infrastructure. It took direct action from several constituencies — and not formal consultation — before more inclusive processes began to be reluctantly adopted. Even today, there is a patchwork of consultation practice across the country, varying from locality/borough to town/city to metro to county to state to the federal level. Some elements of their non-uniform planning landscape are better than ours, and yet many are worse.
And some European places do actually conduct formal public engagement better than either the US or NZ. Consider what the Dutch started doing in the 1970s — creating local-scale mobility plans, often involving children, resulting in in play streets, fine-grained bikeable street grids, and the rest. It’s true that the momentum came from grassroots direct action, but their energy quickly translated into effective planning processes. We can and should take lessons from these successes. After all, we too live in an open, democratic society, relatively low in corruption, so why shouldn’t we also get what we want, like enlightened European societies do?
As a proud alumnus of Marquette University, I highly recommend the Glaeser article!
I am absolutely outraged that at a time when we are finally getting somewhere with addressing Treaty grievances a government minister pops up and tries to create more. WTF? The whole point of the deal was that Ngati Whatua accepted a cents on the dollar redress but in exchange got dibs on surplus land. Now this twit thinks he can try and shaft them all over again and somehow that will be acceptable. In my view this is the most incompetent thing done by any Minister in generations.
And it is hard to see why he needs to. Ngati Whatua want to build dwellings, will pay market rate for the land, or pass on the opportunity. Where’s the problem? Has he promised it all to the developer fraternity, friends of the Party?
However having said all that, why sell the land at all? If the gov just kept it and charged a reasonable ground rent then the dwellings could be truly affordable. Take the land cost out of the equation by leasing it. It could be sold to occupiers later. The government used to do this, precisely in order to help people into housing.
Is Smith and his government really interested in supplying more affordable dwellings, or do they still consider such things ‘economic vandalism’ as the PM described the Hobonsville plan?
I have more faith in Ngai Tahu and Ngati Whatua being able to develop large tracts of land with decent affordable housing far more economically than some wannabe Australian house builder can manage.
And if the land cost is removed as you suggest, then its even more of a no brainer to do it that way. That way you have a half-way house of state owned land, with affordable housing that people can by into to get equity to step up to a larger dwelling when they can afford to. Keeping the housing for the next person to use the same way, without granting windfall profits to a select few.
As I’ve said before this is simply just yet more of Smith acting in the interests of the party not the country with his “crisis management technique” de-jour at the front.
As for why Australian developers can do a better job of it, we are constantly told that the cost of Australian an NZ building materials is the same on a like for like basis.
So why can some Australian house builder do a better job and cheaper than local developers like say Ngai Tahu?
Because they have better productivity? Ok, lets import that productivity into our building market and do everyone a favour with cheaper houses as a result.
But maybe (and more likely) its simply because they have large factories that can churn out cookie cutter houses
– but those factories are in Australia (if they exist at all), and can make and ship pre-assembled to NZ. But maybe that works economically, may be not.
Most Australian houses are not made of wood alone – they use brick and tile, so how can you cookie cutter a brick house and ship it over pre-assembled?
Or is the Australians just going to bring their factory over here and use local material (wood etc) to make the houses?
But we can do that already. Spanbuild and similar factories exist for this already, so the more you look at it, the more it smacks of friends of the party over the its good for NZ Inc.
I’d point out that Ngai Tahu went as far as considering sourcing Mexican cement for their local developments in Christchurch because they said local cement was too expensive, and they could buy Mexican made cement and import for a lot less cost than if they bought it locally. If that isn’t an indictment on the local building supplies market what is?