There’s a lot of talk in transport and land-use planning circles about changing mindsets, that to get people using public transport more often (or to get people living in higher density housing if we’re talking about land-use planning) we need to change their mindsets, to overcome decades of habit and somehow create a giant “culture change” in the way that people live and move around urban areas. Unsurprisingly, that seems to be a pretty insurmountable problem at times, and also can freak some people out into thinking that it’s social engineering. I don’t buy the social engineering argument, but I also don’t buy the argument that your average commuter (or home buyer) is primarily driven by habit/tradition/culture/etc. in the decisions that they make about the kind of house they want to live in or the kind of way they want to get around. Sure, a certain proportion of the population probably do want a standalone house even if it means they’ll have to live on the edge of the city and drive everywhere, and a certain proportion of the population will continue to choose to drive – even if it does cost them more, is slower and less convenient than some alternative – such as public transport. But I don’t think that proportion of the population is as big as some people think.
Ultimately, my point is that the decisions people make are logical. People choose standalone houses because the alternatives are seen as pretty pathetic – leaky, noisy apartments without any outdoor space. Similarly, people overwhelming ‘choose’ to drive because the alternatives are so poor – not only in terms of the quality of the public transport system but also the quality and structure of the city itself, which puts so much emphasis on squeezing as many cars through it and so little emphasis on the effect that has on the quality of the urban environment itself. So I would argue that if we want more people to choose to live more ‘intensively’ – which is critical if we want to avoid Auckland continuing to sprawl – then we need to make intensive housing options far more attractive. Building crap-loads of high quality terraced housing seems a fairly obvious step in that direction. And once again, similarly for transport if we want more people to use public transport, walking and cycling – and less people to drive – then we damn well need to tilt the balance in that direction so that it’s a logical choice for them to make.
So in terms of changing mindsets, I don’t think the mindsets that need changing are those of the general population. So whose mindsets am I talking about then? Well, as I mentioned in a recent post, ultimately it needs to be the decision makers, from politicians (who are generally quite happy to change their mindsets if it means they’ll be re-elected, so they’re often less of a problem) through to officials and other players who together help drive the form and function of our urban areas (councils, property developers, real estate agents etc. etc.) Auckland’s history seems littered with examples of situations where the public will to improve public transport and reduce the auto-dependency of the city existed, but for one reason or another it never happened, and even today with the best of intentions among regional and local politicians (though unfortunately not central government) we still see the vast majority of transport funding being ploughed into motorway and other roading projects that further entrench our auto-dependency. The disconnect between the high-level will to shift Auckland to a city with a more balanced transportation system, and the on the ground outcomes, which more often than not seem to be working in the complete other direction, has to have a reason. There seems to be some blockage in the system that is preventing the fancy words of “yes we really need to have the primary focus of improving public transport” from becoming a reality. But what is it?
A paper entitled “Discursive barriers to sustainable urban transport in Auckland”, written by Massey University’s Muhammed Imran and Lee Matthews and presented at the 2010 Planning Conference that I attended a few weeks back, explores these barriers that seem to exist within the system that make it difficult for us to drive change. Here’s the introduction:
The Ministry of Transport quote in the first paragraph is quite interesting, as it effectively states that all the measures proposed to fix a problem will fail at that task, but somehow it’s still worth spending billions of dollars on them. I’m quite fond of asking the question “when did widening a motorway ever actually reduce congestion along it in the long term?” Most of Auckland’s widest stretches of motorway appear to be the busiest stretches of motorway, supporting the concept of induced demand that providing more road space just leads to more cars travelling along that roadspace. A concept that traffic engineers (at least the more unenlightened of them) appear utterly incapable of understanding.
After spending quite a bit of time talking about discourses, which is a word that always confused the heck out of me at university but appears to effectively mean a way of thinking that drive the decision making process, both of individuals and institutions, the paper looks at two particular discourses that are applied to urban transportation:
As I explained at the start of this post, I don’t buy the argument that auto-dependency has occurred out of choice, at least not on behalf of the general public. There is also plenty of evidence to show that investing in widening roads doesn’t actually fix congestion, yet the money keeps on being thrown at that – the question is “why”?
The authors of the paper argue that a series of “storylines” can be found in transport plans and strategies over the past 60 years that help explain the almost exclusive focus on road-building as the solution to our transport problems: storylines about economic growth, improved mobility, improved safety and consumer choice that were used to justify the choices made. There’s nothing wrong with this per se, as obviously we want to boost economic growth, make it easier and safer for people to get around and give people good transport choices – the point is that most people agree that Auckland’s transport system doesn’t work very well, yet these same “storylines” are still used to justify a transport direction that clearly hasn’t worked over the past 50 years.
Ultimately, there’s something going on within the various agencies who make decisions about Auckland’s transport that makes it extraordinarily difficult for real change to happen. Whether it’s transport engineers who just can’t get their heads around induced demand, politicians misreading reports and believing that building motorways generates economic growth or whatever else, there seems to be a huge inertia in those who make important decisions about transport.
In many ways it is those people who this blog is aimed at. They are the ones whose mindsets need to be dragged out of the 1960s. The general public will make logical transport decisions based on what options are available – it s the job of politicians, officials and other decision-makers to have the vision to drive Auckland towards a better transport future. To not just do what we’ve always done, because quite simply it hasn’t worked. So, as members of the general public, perhaps the most important thing we can do to shift Auckland to a better transport future is to put some pressure on those decision-makers to wake up to the fact that it’s 2010, to see what other cities around the world are doing and to close the gap between the visionary statements about reducing Auckland’s car-dependency and what is actually done on the ground.
Considering that around $1.6 billion a year is spent on transport in the Auckland region, I think it’s pretty damn important that we make the right decisions about where the money goes. I’m not convinced that we make good decisions about where that money goes, and I think that quite a few mindsets probably do need to be changed if that money is to be invested better. This is not because I have all the answers (clearly I don’t), but rather because there are so many aspects of transport planning that are contradictory (widening motorways to induce demand, lengthening motorways to promote sprawl) that there really do seem to be some huge discursive barriers to creating a more sustainable transport system in Auckland. And I think some pretty big mindset changes are needed to break down those barriers.
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I don’t think they is the need to change the mindset of the public too much, polls show they support PT over new roads and the massive increases in train and busway patronage show that when good options are provided the public will use them…
As for changing the politicians mindset I think that falls to us to give the public a political option they can vote for…
Your notion that people are behaving logically rather than as an expression of their culture is supported by the psychologists’s notion of “Fundamental Attribution Error” which I discussed here: http://www.humantransit.org/2010/03/the-most-important-blog-post-youll-read-this-year-.html
But of course that argues against defining the problem as “mindset,” which may be almost as misleading as defining the problem as “culture.”
Suppose you wrote an editorial saying: “Look, the Ministry defines Auckland’s problem as traffic congestion. This implies that people who are trying to use inadequate transit — waiting for infrequent trains, say — simply don’t matter, because they’re not experiencing traffic congestion. We need to redefine the problem as ‘people’s inability to get where they’re going.’ No city in the world has ‘solved’ congestion, but many cities are better than we are at getting people where they’re going.” That sort of thing needs to be said over and over.
That’s a rational argument, and people want to seem rational. Nobody wants to be told that you’re trying to change their mindset. So don’t tell them that.
May I gently suggest that it is important to use neutral language in this field. Auto-dependency implies people don’t like car and never have liked using cars. People abandoned local authority and central government provided public transport networks in droves, resulting in a cycle of reduced capital investment in what they didn’t want (trams and railways), and increased investment in what they did want (road space). It was exacerbated by public transport run by politically driven organisations with other priorities and little interest in treating passengers as customers.
That was what happened from the 1930s to the 1950s (and really on started to be addressed in the 1990s). Politicians responded by giving people what they wanted expressed by their own mode shift. It worked delightfully until the 1970s when demand started to seriously exceed supply more and more often. Now people did not ever face the costs of their transport use decisions on any modes, so the distortions of that decision making became obvious. The capital costs of motorways were effectively written off, as were the capital costs of railways.
Today people still don’t face those costs, and wont until road pricing can relate supply to demand, followed by public transport doing the same. Parking has its own issues which also need to be similarly addressed.
That is the fundamental urban transport problem – price. The problem essentially doesn’t exist in smaller centres because congestion is light and public transport is really only about an alternative for the carless. The price problem gets worse the bigger the city, and the main trend the subsidisation of underpriced urban transport promotes is peak commuting. It encourages overconsumption of transport at certain times.
Imagine how much less capital investment you’d ever make on transport in Auckland if demand was at a constant level throughout the day around about interpeak levels. You wouldn’t dream about most major road capacity increases, nor would you need to do anything about rail capacity either. The big question is whether the peak commute is worth it for the economy to be so heavily subsidised for capital than spends most of its time being underutilised. If so, who should pay?
Liberty, but if you look at the 1930s to 1950s those were the glory days of PT patronage in Auckland. We were cracking 100 million trips a year. In the 1990s we hit rock bottom for patronage so I don’t see your point.
In terms of how to deal with peak hour congestion, I have just started reading the book “Still stuck in traffic” by Anthony Downs. It looks very interesting.
Jarrett, yes I agree the focus needs to shift from reducing congestion to improving accessibility. I tend to think that better accessibility is the goal, and all other stuff (mobility gains, reduced congestion, land use changes etc) are all possible means to that ends.
Well Liberty is just repeating the myth there Jarbury in 1950 over 60% of trips were made by PT, walking and cycling… So funding pouring into roads after that hardly reflected funding chasing the reality of who was using what…
Auckland’s an interesting case, because we switched to motorways very early on, and to a very extreme extent, the whole “but they were just giving the people what they wanted” argument doesn’t work very well.