Sunday Reading 28 June 2015

Gotta start with the local this week, as local news has been been interesting, and though not without struggle, generally very positive. Not that the coverage has been good, a notable exception is outgoing Metro Editor Simon Wilson’s summary here:

Councillors – the slimmest majority of them – have voted for long-term strategic planning, not short-term political expediency. Good on them. Theirs is just about the only example of such political bravery we’ve seen in this country for years.

Which, of course, is not how the New Zealand Herald sees it. You might think our local paper would campaign for a better deal for Auckland on issues like this. But no. Why bother, when it’s easier to rouse a rabble with invective against Len Brown and rates?

And, in a Sunday Reading first, here’s a plug for getting out of bed and nipping down to your cafe or magazine retailer to pick up a copy of the fresh-off-press latest Metro for my article on the history and possible future of Light Rail in Auckland:

For those who want to stay put, here’s a lesson for the NZ Herald from the Sydney version for how to cover good infrastructure projects, ‘Sydney’s Light Rail…’:

The Herald does not support any one mode of transport over another. In a metropolis like Sydney, trains, buses, the private car, light rail, cycling and walking all obviously have their role to play.

But the government should invest money in the mode of transport that fits the particular need of a particular space and of a particular travelling public.

This is an extremely important point. ‘Fitness’ in a Darwinian sense does not mean strength or stamina, it means appropriateness for a particular niche; how well a thing fits; its fitness. How well an organism fits in its ecological niche determines its success. So it is with transport modes, what a city needs will not be the same as what a provincial town needs, and even in certain parts of a city different options and services will be more appropriate than others. Getting the mix right will influence the performance of that place, its efficiency and productivity. In the competitive ecology of cities the ‘fitness’ of a place’s infrastructure and systems really does mean survival or not.

And on that issue of right mode for the job, here is this week’s summary of why more traffic lanes in urban areas simply leads to more driving and more congestion, via Grist:

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Adding more roads — and more lanes on those roads — does absolutely nothing for gridlock. It’s counterintuitive, perhaps, but it’s true: Five years, $1 billion, and at least one new traffic-hell moniker later (“Carmageddon”), L.A. drivers on the 405 freeway actually added a minute to their daily commutes, in spite (or because?) of a snazzy new carpool lane.

via Guardian Cities: Dublin becomes the latest city to see its future with fewer private vehicles dominating its streets:

A car-free Dublin?

As we recently explored, some cities, especially in Europe, are starting to discourage or even ban private car use. Now Dublin is poised to become the latest city to join the fray. Next City reports that Dublin’s City Council and Ireland’s National Transport Authority have proposed to ban private cars in sections of the city centre, in order to ease traffic problems and make Dublin a more pleasant place to live. The reduction of cars will also free up room for a new tram line, planned for 2017.

Returning to the local the Salvation Army has thoughtfully entered into the development discussion with a new report: Mixed Fortunes:

Geography matters in the real world, although it is often not that important in the worlds of economic theory and public policy. At the beginning of a seminal paper for economic geography Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman remarked that, ‘It seems fair to say that economic geography plays at best a marginal role in economic theory… On the face of it this neglect is surprising. The facts of economic geography are amongst the most striking features of real-world economies, at least to laymen’1.

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Based on current trends it is apparent that New Zealand is on a divergent growth path and that this path risks the creation of two New Zealands – Auckland and the rest. Recently released population forecasts suggest that over the next 25 to 30 years Auckland may account for over 60% of New Zealand’s population growth and that Aucklanders, in time, will make up about 40% of this population. In general, Aucklanders will be younger, wealthier, better skilled, and more ethnically diverse than the rest of New Zealand. Within such differences are the seeds for a growing divide in values and expectations.

One for the map and data nerds: Who owns the digital map of the world? asks Citylab:

Google Maps defines the way we navigate from A to B, for free, and it does so extremely well. It also sells its API to its a number of businesses. As of 2012, Apple, Foursquare, Craigslist, and Wikipedia (to name just a few) all built their maps using the Google Maps API.

But today, none of those companies are using Google—partly because of how much Google started to charge for its services and data, and because of the limitations it draws around what companies can do with them.

All four of the aforementioned companies moved to using OSM (partially, in Apple’s case) because it’s free, and often as good as Google. And because the value of proprietary map data is rapidly plummeting as OSM gets better and better.

On the subject of maps, here’s something I thought I’d never agree with: A New London Tube Map. Not just an update but a redesign, and by an amateur too. The rightly famous Harry Beck map from 1931 has been much updated and is unrivalled in the way it quickly came to symbolise the city itself. Now as London rides the global urban rail boom with a huge addition of new services, Beck’s model is coming under enormous strain. ‘SameBoat’, a Hong Kong resident, has made the best new iteration I have seen. Even if it does turn the famous bottle into more of a bed-flask:

Lastly, here’s a unique urban highway, also via Grist: Oslo builds a its bees a highway of flowers.

Oslo is transforming a strip through the city into a series of bee pastures — parks, and green roofs, and balcony flower beds — each a short flight from the next. I like to imagine that from the air you could look down and see ribbon of blossoms, stretching from one side of the city to the other.

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