Arguing for sprawl with “strategic misrepresentations”
A number of recent posts have taken a look at some of the “strategic misrepresentations” that people have used to argue for a sprawled-out, roads-focused Auckland. We’ve taken aim at some of the common fallacies, including: Auckland isn’t dense enough for good public transport – in fact, it’s a medium-density city that is misrepresented by Demographia’s flawed statistics
A car-based transport system will be cheap – in fact, all of the initial cost estimates were wildly undercooked and the costs to build motorways have never stopped increasing
Auckland is too congested to function – in fact, average commute times are a cruisy 25 minutes, well below many overseas cities.…
48 Comments Fact-checking hyperbolic arguments for more roads
Following the gridlock on the roads last Saturday, the NZ Herald published several perspectives on how Auckland should cope with disruption to its transport networks. Matt weighed in with an excellent piece on the need to build Auckland’s long-awaited rapid transit network, which would give people an alternative to congested roads.…
Need to build missing modes to avoid congestion
Yesterday large parts of Auckland’s Motorway network was brought to its knees by a single crash.
A serious crash brought Auckland’s motorway network to its knees with motorists stuck in grid-locked traffic for up to four hours.
Three motorbikes and a truck collided on Auckland’s Harbour Bridge about 12pm yesterday, leaving two motorcyclists with critical injuries and a third with serious injuries.…
Engineers versus … everyone else?
How do you define “optimal conditions” in a transport sense? The graphic below paints a stark difference in opinion on what constitutes “optimal conditions” for different professions:
Now I’m both an engineer and an economist, so feel I have some insight into the motivation for whoever developed this graphic.…
Why it’s not possible to build our way out of congestion
Wired magazine recently published a good, succinct explanation of induced traffic. It’s worth reading in full as it hits upon an incredibly important, often overlooked fact: it’s not possible to eliminate congestion by building more roads. Here are a few of the more interesting excerpts:
The concept is called induced demand, which is economist-speak for when increasing the supply of something (like roads) makes people want that thing even more.…
How congested is Auckland, really?
A lot of people think that Auckland’s got bad traffic congestion. The annual TomTom Traffic Index reinforces this perception – it regularly describes Auckland as one of the most congested cities in the region. (We’ve previously highlighted the methodological flaws with TomTom’s numbers – don’t take them at face value!)…
Is less congestion actually a good thing?
It almost goes without saying that congestion is a terrible thing, so bad that it justifies the spending of massive amounts of public money as well as the impact on our cities from widening and building new transport infrastructure to rid ourselves – or at least reduce the level of – this terrible thing that is congestion.…
NZ Initiative’s ideology short-changes compact city debate
The New Zealand Initiative last night released a think piece on the trade-offs of urban form – entitled “Up or Out“. Given the extensive recent debates in Auckland over the Auckland Plan and the Unitary Plan, plus the ongoing issue of housing affordability, it’s helpful to have further analysis and research in this area.…
TomTom latest meaningless congestion report
TomTom have once again released their meaningless congestion index.
TomTom has announced the results of the TomTom Traffic Index 2013, revealing New Zealanders waste up to 93 hours a year stuck in traffic and that Wellingtonian’s experienced the worst traffic delays during peak hours, spending up to an extra 41 minutes in an hour commute.…
Let’s define “congestion” properly
An article in Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper just over a week ago, using the rather provocative title of “Sick of Congestion: build roads not transit” has unsurprisingly led to a lot of fisking of the information contained in the article – particularly around the different ways of defining congestion and how easily they can be misused.…
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