Thoughts on Land Use/Transport
As an urban planner, with a particular interest in transport matters, I find myself fascinated by the meeting point of land-use planning and transportation planning – the questions of whether land-use patterns drive transport or whether transport drives land-use patterns, whether it’s both, how they interact with each other and so forth.…
16 Comments Fighting yesterday’s battles?
There’s an irony in urban planning that most planning rules fight against problems that existed 100 years ago, and in general no longer exist today. In particular, most planning rules seek to focus on separating uses – which is a legacy of the industrial revolution when smokestack factories ended up next to houses – and on limiting the density of development: once again a legacy of 100 years ago when densities were far too high for what was sanitary and healthy.…
Further confirmation that sprawl sucks
If there’s one message that I want this blog to get across more strongly than just about anything else (other than good public transport is really essential) it would be the need to integrate land-use planning and transport planning better. Connected in with that concept are questions of ‘how do we want Auckland to grow and develop over the next few decades?’,…
How free is your parking?
A lot of the writing about parking policies is quite complicated, and in some respects counter-intuitive. So it’s good when you can get the impact of our current parking policies simplified into something that’s quite easy to digest and understand. This 12 page document entitled “How free is your parking?”…
Fixing Flat Bush?
Manukau City Council seem to have finally come to the realisation that creating a massive area of auto-dependent sprawl out in a far corner of Auckland, miles from any railway lines, motorways or high-frequency bus routes, might not be the smartest idea.…
The importance of “off-peak”
A couple of weeks ago I got to meet Jarrett Walker, the guy behind the excellent “Human Transit” blog. We had a number of transport geeks in the same room, and unsurprisingly the result was a pretty interesting conversation. There was one thing in particular that Jarrett mentioned, which I think is certainly worth repeating, and that is: “the quality of a public transport system should be measured by how it performs at 7pm on a Sunday night, rather than at peak hour.”…
Street Patterns Matter
Humantransit has a great post on cul-de-sacs and what is known as the “radius of demand”. In short, the post highlights how disconnected street networks make it much more difficult to adequately serve areas with good public transport, because what should be a relatively short walk ‘as the crow flies’, becomes a really long walk to the bus stop/train station because the street network won’t allow you to make the trip in a more direct manner.…
Where to put Parnell station: weighing up the data
I was under the impression that the location of the proposed Parnell station had been finalised after much to-ing and fro-ing, but recently there has been a push by a local group to change this to a somewhat different location .…
Regenerating Auckland
In late January, the government announced it would be establishing a group to look into housing affordability and the Metropolitan Urban Limits (MULs) in Auckland. The basic argument is that houses cost too much, so allowing sprawl will reduce house prices Auckland wide.…
Applying the ‘network effect’ on the North Shore
Like Jeremy and the Admin I am a big fan of Paul Mees’s writings on the network effect, particularly his latest book ‘Transport for Suburbia’. I recently studied a transport planning paper with him which basically followed the same flavour of the book: through the use of a network and transfers you can gain the go-anywhere convenience of the car while keeping the move-lots-of-people-in-the-same vehicle efficiency of public transport.…
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