Several months back, I took a look at the way we’re designing street networks and neighbourhoods in greenfield subdivisions. It’s not a pretty picture. The reigning assumption seems to be that places on the edge of the city are car-dependent now and will be car-dependent forever. As a result, developers and planners build places where it’s difficult to walk, cycle, or take a bus.
In my view, this ignores the reality that today’s fringe suburbs are tomorrow’s urban fabric. That’s nicely illustrated in this map from the Auckland Plan, which shows how the city has expanded since 1840. Suburbs built in the 1950s and 1960s are now firmly in the midst of the city.
In other words, urban growth wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that it is often pathological from a transport perspective – i.e. a developer goes to the edge of town and builds a bunch of cul-de-sacs, single use suburbs, and non-connective street networks, under the assumption that it will be a car-based place forever. Then somebody else comes along and develops the next paddock, and before long you’ve got this unworkable mess in the middle of an urban fabric.
In my previous post on the topic, I took a look at some research into how we can transform car-dependent suburbs into workable urban places. Here’s one such design from Galina Tachieva’s Sprawl Repair Manual. It’s a great idea, but it would require the purchase and demolition of 5-10% of the houses in the neighbourhood. The end result would be a net increase in dwellings as sites are redeveloped, but I can’t imagine it would be easy to implement.
Wouldn’t it be better to simply do it right the first time?
Now, I’m no urban designer, but it seems like there could be a role for strengthened structure planning in greenfield areas. This could entail, for example, local governments establishing (and rigorously enforcing) structure plans for street networks and street designs in new developments. The aim would be to ensure that streets functioned well for all modes of transport, rather than just cars, and that they didn’t create any “holes” in the urban fabric that would be difficult to travel through later on.
There are a number of great examples from the Netherlands, but I figured that it would be good to highlight some local examples where people are taking steps in the right direction. I haven’t comprehensively surveyed new developments, so I can’s say how representative these examples are.
First, here’s the development plan for Hobsonville Point. Hobsonville’s quite interesting as it’s conceived as a mixed-density, mixed-use place with a ferry connection. Here’s the plan for the street network at the Point itself:
The street cross-sections seem to be designed in emulation of the city’s most successful urban/suburban places – with street trees and relatively narrow lanes (by Auckland standards, at least). The two “boulevard” sections (red lines on the above map) are designed with 1.8 metre cycle lanes. It would obviously be better to have safe, separated cycleways, but hey, it’s a start:
A bit further west, at a Special Housing Area site in Whenuapai, they seem to be going one step further and installing separated cycle lanes on two major streets from the get-go. (All images are from the plan change released by Auckland Council the other week.) Although Whenuapai is following the classic “boxes in a paddock” model of suburban development in Auckland, it seems to be aspiring to something a bit different on the transport front. Here’s the map of the development:
It’s a bit difficult to understand how all of this will fit together without knowing more about proposed street networks for surrounding areas. The streets within the SHA seem like they may be quite wide, without consistent cycle provision. But take a look at the street cross-sections for the main arterials, Brigham Creek Rd and Totara Rd. They will have safe separated cycleways from the start:
Of course, a few cycleways in new subdivisions will not compensate for the street design mistakes made in previous developments. If you start riding the Brigham Creek Rd cycleway, you’re probably going to be mixing it up with traffic on some pretty inhospitable roads before long. That will take time to fix. But I’m hopeful that these projects are an indicator that we are in the process of overcoming our pathological approach to street design in new subdivisions.
Lastly, I’m aware that I’ve mainly talked about cycle design here, and omitted public transport. That’s because safe cycle facilities are particularly easy to install in advance, and challenging to retrofit. (Once people have moved in, adding cycle lanes means taking away their essential human right to free on-street parking – cue uproar!) But we also need to ensure that the area is served with good rapid transit choices, as proposed in the Congestion Free Network.
Given the growth out near Hobsonville and Whenuapai, perhaps we should be talking about accelerating the installation of busways on state highways 16 and 18? I honestly can’t see those areas working, long-term, without congestion free transport options:
What do you think about street design in new subdivisions? How could we do things better?
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On designing in PT, I’ve thought this from Calgary is a good example. It’s in the northwest at the end on one of their light rail lines and as you can see space has clearly been left to be able to easily extend it when they develop the next set of paddocks.
This is a good example of how simple street design can make PT work amazing, or stop it from ever being effective.
Take the Calgary example, assume its just a simple bus for now. Here the bus can move through the neighbourhood in a straight line through a couple of intersections, stop once in the middle and be within a few minutes easy walk of some 500 homes.
If this was an Auckland style new suburb with the bus routes “painted on afterwards: the bus would need to work its way through a few roads and wiggle around the place. It would have to have maybe three bus stops dotted around the meandering cul de sacs to cover the area and be within an easy walk of everyone, it will have to make several ‘give way’ turns at intersections and traffic lights, and it might have to pull in and out of a strip mall style shopping centre.
In the latter case you have to spend three times as much on bus stops and infrastructure up front, then spend three times as much on operations because your bus has to travel three times as far to work its way around the neighbourhood. Then because your bus is going three times as far it costs three times as much to operate, yet the travel time is three times as long.
So same neighbourhood of 500 homes at the same density and area… but the bad design means buses are three times as expensive only to be three times as slow… end result is eternally high operating costs, slow and useless trips and few passengers. I.e. you either spend three times as much to get good frequency, or you run 1/3 frequency for the same money.
One thing is for certain people here are usually not concerned for people not in vehicles. In the Philippines it is the same but we are not afraid to walk in the middle of the road. Even if theres a car and sings saying dont walk on the road we still will coz we are the dominant people. Overtake us at your own risk and beware we will cross anywhere and disembark from the bus anytime convenient. Even in the middle of a free flowing 60kph since our jeepney drivers stop and go anywhere and anytime. they go thru all the roads making it easy to catch a ride
Yes I do think New Zealander pedestrians have a cowering respect for the car not seen in many other countries. For example, there’s all this talk about the need to make High St a shared space, quite rightly. But it does always surprise me that people just aren’t taking it over more as it currently stands. It’s a narrow little street with slow moving traffic and small pavements. If this was London or Rome people would be freely walking around on the road itself, inconveniencing drivers. But not in Auckland, where people must know their place, and doff their caps to the drivers, those who have truly made it.
We seem to have a critical flaw in our planning methods in Auckland. This kind of stuff can be done by a landowner- eg Hobsonville- but there are lots of limitations and risks to that model, and IMHO it should really be a Council role to lead this stuff, especially if we want corridors like the one at Calgary.
Where is the Council when you need it most? How did we draw maps saying “future urban” across extensive areas and NOT think through how to stitch them together with the existing urban fabric?
Road design in SHAs or new development is already *strongly* influenced by Council. It’s just that in the past, Council planners either didn’t care or didn’t know about how their policies made everything car-centric.
Another major flaw of the RMA in allowing private plan changes without any real restrictions. Upzoning an urban site is one thing, planning greenfields quite another. Unfortunately this has put Councils into reactive mode responding to private plan changes rather than proactively structure planning new areas
Another thing Calgary does right: they extend the rapid transit network promptly in response to development, rather than waiting for the situation to become desperate. When I lived there 6 years ago, Dalhousie was the last NW C-Train station and they were building the Crowfoot extension. Now there’s another one beyond that.
Of course, it would be even better if the stations were built to coincide with development, but imagine if AT took Calgary’s approach to the Northern Busway and the future developments along the Southern Line?
Auckland could take quite a few leaves out of Calgary’s book when it comes to managing transport. Despite its reputation, I found it easy to get along without a car even while living on the NW fringe – a lot easier than it would be in an equivalent suburb in Auckland. Limiting car access to downtown is a big part of its success, and they certainly aren’t proposing to spend umpty billion dollars on new ways to pour cars into downtown. So is a functional rapid transit spine, extended as needed to serve new suburbs and served by feeder buses. They also charge appropriately for park’n’ride.
Yes there’s a lot of useful things to learn from Calgary
I still don’t understand the love of the flush medians. They create a wide road that is unpleasant to cross for pedestrians. Complete rubbish.
If they regularly put an island in the median then they actually make the crossing task a lot easier for peds than trying to cross two lanes in one go. Also, if the median results in narrower traffic lanes then you are also likely to get slightly reduced traffic speeds – a safety benefit for everyone.
The main use for flush medians is of course to provide safe space for turning traffic. In Auckland I note a lot of roads with four undivided lanes wall-to-wall; if the inside lanes are largely being blocked by turning traffic waiting to go then you’re not getting much more capacity than a normal two-lane road. Better to “road diet” it by combining the central lanes into a flush median area – the bonus is that then you would have space to put bike lanes on the shoulders too.
I think in general perhaps the council should be the one that dictates the road/cycle/PT layout and then the developer works around that. Cul-de-sacs have their place (provided they have walk ways connecting through) however they should only be used in limited ways (i.e not longer than about 100m). Otherwise roads should be linked up (grid pattern is best so each grid would perhaps have 1 small cul-de-sac in it). Grids are much more PT friendly if done properly.
When the Bellfield SHA was first mooted the developer had an open house meeting,to show us all how wonderful the development was going to be. With fawning local board members and councilors on hand. It seemed obvious that no thought had been put into key questions like;
Where do the bus routes go
what about cycling infrastructure
where are the kids going to school
how are they going to get there
how do people get to work
Many of the answers from the planners and the local board members clearly showed a complete lack of thought and understanding of the local area.
For example when pressed “oh we will build a railway station.”
I am thinking yep behind Pukekohe park and ride, drury park and ride, Manuroa Rd level crossing,Spartan Rd level crossing etc.
At 7 am traffic pours down the Gt South Rd avoiding the motorway log jam at Papakura. And they want to feed all those extra vehicles into the clogged road system.
No thought at all
A Drury station and park and ride seems a no brainer to me. The fact that it doesn’t even seem to have any priority is madness.
We should follow the Japanese model and build significantly narrower streets. Arterials can remain the size the are, but residential streets could be reduced to 2 – 4 metres. With narrower streets, the street acts more as a shared space – speeds slow, and the result is safer for everyone. We don’t need dedicated use separation in residential streets which barely see any traffic. No one really needs to be able to drive at 50ks/per hour for the 200 – 500m they’re on a non-arterial street.
Money is saved (as we;re not paving 10 – 20m in asphalt), and resulting densities are significantly higher. The Tokyo suburb of Seijo, Setagaya has a density of 14,000 – 16,000 per square kilometre – far greater than the vast majority of places in Auckland, yet the majority of families live in Single Family Detached Residences. I would strongly recommend everyone to use google maps to street view Seijo and see for yourself the incredible place making, density and safety gains we could achieve by building narrower streets.
https://www.google.co.nz/maps/@35.646338,139.594851,3a,90y,360.05h,78.56t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sjM9BP_Xqobb9qviv6eXjBA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1
Interesting pictures from Seijo: long suburban local access streets that look to be about 6m wide between property boundaries. One car lane; no separate kerb or footpath – the ‘footpaths’ are separated from the central vehicle lane by white paint, and double as space for vehicles to squeeze past each other. Absolutely no on-street parking – it would block the road entirely.
The key message of this landscape is: ‘If you want to have a car, YOU are responsible for finding somewhere off-street to store it.’ To adapt that sort of landscape to a high-car-owning ANZ city, all you would need to do would be to scatter some small comunal parking lots for visitors and guests around the neighbourhood.
That’s exactly the solution Japan uses in more heavily car-owning areas: little neighbourhood parking lots of 3-10 spaces. It’s a particularly good solution as an alternative to on-street parking: if demand for parking drops, the carparks can be redeveloped. It’s surprisingly rare in New Zealand, especially in residential areas. It’s more used in commercial areas here: https://goo.gl/maps/KGz8Q (a Japanese version would fit the same number of cars in a smaller space).
Having on-street parking means that there’s communal parking always available, for visitors, deliveries, and flexibility in the number of cars a household owns over time. But that space can never realistically be re-used. Better for that flexible parking to be off-street.
NZ needs joined up thinking/processes between developers, planners and transport providers -NZTA. If NZTA is unable to do this then funding and decision making power should be given to local transport boards that can.
We can easily build narrower streets but you t get them approved by AT. The design process involves listening to every twit at AT who is apparently only interested in the mode the represent. The bus ops require you to put in a wide traffic lane, the pedestrian dude wants 1.8m footpaths either side regardless of demand, the cycle lady wants separate cycle lanes and a buffer from any car doors, the planner wants onstreet parking and the engineer wants a flush median so the buses are not held up. Then the stormwater people want rain gardens or swales and the subdivision engineer demands berms for utilities so they dont have to dig up concrete or pavement. Dominion Road has a road reserve width of a 20.1m (or 1 chain) and it carries a huge number of people in all modes yet we have to build collector roads of 24m. Don’t blame the developer for the Council’s ridiculous internal structures.
Peter perhaps if the Council was required to buy the roads from developers rather than demand anything they want for free they might ask for a reasonable road rather than a road that has one of everything.
So you are in favour of short-termist thinking AND putting more of the development cost onto Council. Thank you for supporting even higher rates rises, and more developer profit.
As well as better street design, we need some better forward planning of transport at a regional scale, too. There’s no thinking ahead about expanding the RTN, which will be needed once greenfields areas develop. We’re always trying to expensively retrofit rail lines and busways into long-built-out suburbs.
What I’d like to see is a really long term plan for a comprehensive rail/busway network to serve these areas as we expand. You don’t need to build it: just reserve the right-of-way. We’ve done it for roads: the Kapiti Expressway follows a right-of-way that’s been reserved for a motorway since the 1940s, and we’ve still got the land for the Eastern Motorway here. Except for perhaps the Avondale-Southdown Line, it’s not something we’ve done for rail, though.
Rail lines are pretty skinny, and in the meantime make perfectly good parks. Especially down south, I’d like to see us reserve rights-of-way to connect to the existing rail for when, decades in the future, it’s time to expand the network. Likewise, you need to plan town centres near the eventual rail stations: much easier to make everything be in the right place at the start. Look at the disaster of rail to Manukau, which was simply built in the wrong place.
(That was not supposed to be a reply to Darius’s comment, just a comment on the article in general. Damn nested comments.)
So you are in favour of big wide streets that developers and residents didn’t want? When a Council builds a road they use a benefit cost analysis to make sure the cost is justified by benefits. Except at subdivision stage when they exploit their status as a consent authority to shake people down to extort unnecessary expenditure and make developers waste land or wide streets.
FFS the problem is too much involvement by the Council and its offspring CCO’s. We could solve this with some agreed standards and some training for council staff.
mfwic, you raise an important point that doesn’t only relate to transport infrastructure. The council does the same thing with other types of infrastructure paid for by developers (and ultimately home-buyers), demanding gold-plated stuff while the developers want the cheapest option possible. This disconnect needs to be addressed, otherwise we could end up with infrastructure overkill, making new sections unnecessarily expensive.
There’s one way we could address that, and also address land price inflation and land-banking: Have the council or government do it. Don’t allow large private subdivisions or private-sponsored rezoning at all.
Here’s how it would work. The council buys up greenfield land at rural prices – since it’s only competing with other rural purchasers, the price won’t be inflated by land-banking.
The council then pays for and builds all the needed infrastructure (financed with a loan), including planning out the streets, parks, utilities, facilities and so on. Then on-sells the vacant, ready-to-build sections to builders and the public, at a price that reflects the original purchase price for the land + the cost of servicing the infrastructure loan.
This way, there’s no incentive to land-bank – the council can pick the cheapest land to develop. Rural landowners can sell to someone else, or hang on to their land – but they can’t develop or rezone it, except through the council’s development scheme. The council controls the price of new sections, which should hold that price reasonably steady, addressing land price inflation. When the sections start to sell out, develop the next area, and so on. We maintain a steady supply of land at a reasonable price.
Great idea. Shame we havent had strong planning or govt since the 1980s and look where we find ourselves!
We haven’t had that kind of planning since pretty shortly after the war, and even then, it was pretty dire in Auckland: the government building lots of identical detached 3-bedroom state houses on 700-800sqm sections, and piles of motorways out into what were then the wop-wops.
The only real large-scale attempt to do development that was both transit-led and done by government was the settlement in the Hutt Valley in the 40s and 50s – even that was pretty average. At least the streets largely link up and you can walk to the train station, but if you want to go anywhere other than your office job in the Wellington CBD, you need to drive.
You raise some excellent points. I’m not as familiar with the developer/council interplay, or the details and nuances of the whole road development process, but it definitely sounds as though some things could be improved.
I’m not sure if it’s sensible for councils to pay for all new roads – after all, that opens the door to costly public subsidies, which are also inefficient – but there should be some kind of mechanism to avoid costly gold-plating.
When I worked in the UK road contractors had to hire the lanes they were going to close off to do a job. They tendered for the contract knowing the daily rate so they built that into the cost. But once they had the job they were then incentivised to close lanes for less time than they had estimated and not leave lanes closed off for no reason. It would be easy to devise a system like that for new roads in subdivisions, developers could fund local roads of say 12m reserve width with two lanes 7m wide and one footpath. Then let the Council pay for anything else they want. that way they would think carefully about what they actually need on every road rather than waste the applicant’s land, money and time. What ever system we use I can assure you the land owners don’t ever try to build wider roads than are needed.
That seems like it could be workable. Set a (low) minimum standard for the design and allow the Council to pay higher prices to get higher standards. I could see that being potentially applicable in a number of other areas as well.
The other component, however, is the overall layout of the street network. As Matt highlighted in the Calgary example, what seems to be needed there is straight arterials that connect shops etc, and a grid of lower-speed residential streets around them. We’re probably not going to get that without some sort of structure planning, but I don’t see why the plan for the street network has to dictate any particular lane width.
We have recent examples of subdivisions being designed and built then Central Govt changing the law regarding vehicle mass where a truck can be driven anywhere provided the road user charges are paid. Then recently built streets not being substantial enough for the loads or turning circles of the vehicles now using them. Maintenance being foisted onto the local rate payers. The close spacing of mutliaxled vehicles changing direction on the chip sealed surface screwing the chip out and culdesac radii being too tight for the speed at which the trucks want to negotiate them.
If we are doing truly greenfield we do not need to have co-mingling of cars and cycles.
We live in a harbour city. Have cycle lanes follow along side pre-existing waterways which radiate from the harbours. It’ll minimise the gradient for cyclists and preserve waterways as accessible to all.
The Swanson Post of a few days ago had a subdivision plan incorporated. How do the details of the proposed road infrastructure stack up?
There should be a town center with transport interchange connect to Rapid transit network. Town centre surrounded by mix used land (retail+food+office+apartment) with a minimum density of 3 stories. Then the next 400m along main road is zoned for terrance house, and futher zone for mix housing urban, and furthest zone for mix housing suburban.
Developers has to stick to a minimum density rules so they cant build a single level house near the town centre.
Streets in town center is pedestrian focused, with bus station along main route where the terrance building is.
I’m not seeing how this is leaving things up to the market, as has been often argued on this blog when it comes to house prices.
The market here clearly demands sprawl and doesn’t care about public transport. How is that any different from the market demanding that no native-born Kiwis can afford their own homes?
Would that be the market where apartment developments in the city centre are growing faster than anywhere else?
You can’t say the market demands sprawl when in 99% of Auckland it is illegal to build anything else, especially not where the other 1% is growing massively fast with non-sprawl.
If you want to see a market response, remove the laws that prevent a free market for housing types.
You can’t say the market wants expensive houses funded by overseas capital without also looking to the existing legal structure enabling *that*.
This seems too clever by half. One market for the whole globe, when that suits, and one market for the city, when that suits.
Three responses:
1. Streets are public infrastructure. They are largely funded by tax revenues, including rates, and made available to the public at no charge. Given this, it’s difficult/impossible to simply leave their design, maintenance, and operation to the market. By contrast, housing is much more of a private good – i.e. most of the costs and benefits of providing and using it are internalised by the owner/occupier.
2. As others (e.g. mfwic above) have pointed out, street layout and design is heavily influenced by public policies. The reason why we get wide, car-friendly streets is that governments have mandated those as standards. It’s not incoherent to argue that we should adopt a different standard.
3. Most importantly, we aren’t meeting current market demands for walkable, transit-friendly places. In the recent Housing We’d Choose study, 39% of people said that they’d like to live in walking distance of good public transport. The actual number of people who do seems to be smaller, which to me indicates that we’re not building enough transit-friendly places.
“1. Streets are public infrastructure. They are largely funded by tax revenues, including rates, and made available to the public at no charge. Given this, it’s difficult/impossible to simply leave their design, maintenance, and operation to the market. By contrast, housing is much more of a private good – i.e. most of the costs and benefits of providing and using it are internalised by the owner/occupier.”
That’s a rather tricky distinction to draw, don’t you think? Housing isn’t a public good? Maybe not according to current historical baggage, but just from a practical standpoint people need places to live just as sure as they need roads to travel on. It isn’t clear why the public goods distinction applies to roads but not houses.
Not only that, but opening up housing to the global market all but ensures that cheap money is going to keep building suburbs. That’s what the market wants, and that’s what the market is building. Roading policy can only be divorced from this to a point. So it seems there’s another point of tension: laissez-faire housing is incompatible with a “public goods” approach to transport.
“2. As others (e.g. mfwic above) have pointed out, street layout and design is heavily influenced by public policies. The reason why we get wide, car-friendly streets is that governments have mandated those as standards. It’s not incoherent to argue that we should adopt a different standard.”
No it isn’t incoherent, but it is pushing the limits of plausibility to suggest this strategy for roads while simultaneously pushing the line that it’s just fine and dandy for globalized markets to sort out where and how people can live. You need both for anything like a stable, socially cohesive city, and there are contradictions in pushing for market interventions but only in an uneven way without clear criteria. If housing is running the show, then transport will follow.
“3. Most importantly, we aren’t meeting current market demands for walkable, transit-friendly places. In the recent Housing We’d Choose study, 39% of people said that they’d like to live in walking distance of good public transport. The actual number of people who do seems to be smaller, which to me indicates that we’re not building enough transit-friendly places.”
How many smokers tell you that they plan to quit, and are still smoking 20 years later? The market doesn’t care about what people say on questionnaires, it cares about what they do and how they spend their money. What people are demanding is more sprawl and more roads. Granted they are only demanding this with their money, but the market only recognizes price signals.
The interesting question is how much of this demand is actually local, and how much is coming from overseas money and mass immigration. If it’s the latter, we can’t expect much concern for quality of life for the locals. It’s just the market doing its thing, and unfortunately roads and transport are going to reflect that, not the other way around.
This is very interesting. Future proofing is of course always wise. However, until local government in Auckland proves itself with investment in successful public transport (on a major scale and well thought out), too little confidence lies in this idea outside of those who have the vision. Secondly, enforcement as suggested (“local governments establishing (and rigorously enforcing) structure plans for street networks and street designs in new developments…”). Council planners are inconsistent, subjective and incapable (in my opinion) of creating such a policy/document, or enforcing it. In addition, over-regulation is already adding greatly to the cost for developers, so until this cost is reduced then why would developers not just pass this cost on to the consumer? And with those two points combined – it is my understanding that if this planning and enforcement is done through the District Plan, local government have a legal requirement to perform a Section 32 analysis of the economic analysis of their decisions, which should include housing affordability. I cannot see how something like this could come out as being of economic benefit without considering other areas of over-regulation to reduce costs for developers that they could then pass on to buyers. I wonder what Section 32 analyses of these areas has shown as changes have been made.
And a continuation of my point about developers passing on the cost of over-regulation to the consumer and considering Peter’s response regarding ‘we aren’t meeting current market demands for walkable, transit-friendly places’ ….
A simple analysis of house prices in Auckland tells us that proximity to public transport does not affect house price. Aucklanders don’t care about it and don’t factor it in as a selling point (or buying point). What an incredible failing! Developers should not be hiking up prices of their houses because they are passing on the costs of over-regulation. They should be forced to do it another way!…Building houses (maybe in the ‘sprawl’) and then pushing bus companies (trains are somewhat fixed) to extend their route. DEVELOPERS should be doing this work to make their houses more desirable and people should WANT to actually pay for that because it is worth something to them.