This post contains an essay submitted as part of student course work for the Planning 100 "Introduction to Planning" course taught by me this year at Planning School, University of Auckland. The topic for the essay is: Comment on the influence of different forms of transport in shaping urban form and the way people live in an urban environment. Investigate and explain the key transport issues facing those responsible for planning Auckland's future. The essay is about Auckland planning and is by Luke Carey, who has kindly given permission for it to be published here.
Transport has defined urban life for as long as cities have existed, and it is far from being a ‘new’ domain of planning, yet it is still considered the biggest issue facing 93% of Aucklanders (Transit NZ, 2005), and the general public perception is that it is somehow ‘wrong’ and needs to be ‘fixed’. Ancient Rome by AD 100 with a reported population of one million had developed “immense problems of traffic congestion” (Hall, 2002). So why is it that after millennia of the issue existing in our cities, we somehow still struggle to get it right? How have different forms of transport influenced Auckland’s development over time? And why has this resulted almost exclusively in a pattern of urban sprawl and segregated zones of activity? The ability for the transport sector to rapidly diversity in order to accommodate outside factors causing change in society such as peak oil and climate change is questionable. It is becoming clear that the complicated urban fabric of the city is not the problem, but the solution, and that the key to transport success is achieving integration and avoiding having modes compete with each other.
Early 19th Century Auckland was dominated by coastal shipping and trade. Governor William Hobson selected the site in the then Commercial bay (now Fort Street) for the new settlement based on it’s easy access to both the Waitemata and Manukau Harbours, and a second port soon developed at Onehunga. Early development was sited around access to the wharves that scows transporting goods up and down the coast would trade from. Railways and roads were developed from 1870 onwards under Sir Julius Vogel’s infamous Public Works Scheme but it was not until the 1930’s and an extensive programme of tar sealing roads that suburban dwelling became widely possible. We never looked back. The suburbs of “cosmopolitan Auckland” reportedly “exploded” in the post war era. “It is the edges of the city where the residential areas are thrusting out to all points of the compass that the really spectacular changes are taking place”. “The shopping areas are new, up to date, convenient, the road gangs moving further and further into the country, Auckland’s fortunate in having room to grow, and with the roads comes the houses, a town the size of Whangarei goes up in Auckland every 12 months” all this new development was terribly exciting (TVNZ 7 Hindsight, 2011). By 1950 Auckland was contemplating an extensive motorway network to cope with this rampant growth, which had the city bursting at it’s seams (Bush, 1998). But De Leuw Cather, the overseas consultants contracted to design the motorway system issued a written letter to the Auckland Regional Authority in 1965 emphasizing the importance of balancing investment in the highway and motorway program with investment in a “transit” system that included significant rail improvements to avoid “unfortunate” consequences on “land use development”, or built urban form (Cayford, 2012). Nearly fifty years later, and most of the motorways have been built, but the ‘transit’ or public transport system most certainly hasn’t been. Why?
A common understanding we have is that the railroad tends to concentrate growth, and the automobile disperse it. The common view of urban sprawl (in abstract) is one of hatred for most people. We “deplore the loss of open space and farmland, long drives, congestion, and the boring uniformity of suburban development” (Bruegmann, 2005), not to mention air pollution, climate change, and the resulting segregated zones of activity. But when put in the context of how it might affect our ability to live the quarter-acre New Zealand dream it seems that suburban development is just “a natural market response to the desires of millions of individuals”. That is, as Bruegmann argues, we have it because we wanted to live at lower densities, and this was the primary cause for the growth in the transport industry. The enormous increase in mobility that came with it made sprawl possible, not caused it, and not the automobile specifically. So does the locational preference for life in the suburbs still ring true in New Zealand today? A 2009 ShapeNZ survey of 3244 kiwi’s had 80% of respondents state they would prefer to live in a stand-alone house than an apartment. And if there were no constraints on where respondents chose to live, 73% would choose to live in either the suburbs, or an even more low-density country lifestyle block or farm (N Preval, 2010 ).
Glaeser (2011), in his novel Triumph of the city contradictory to Bruegmann takes a more common stance by arguing that “modern sprawl is the child of the motorcar” and the urban form of our cities in general is directly influenced by which mode of transport is used. “The first 12-person omnibus appeared on New York’s Broadway in 1827, it was subsidized by the state and given right-of-way on the city’s streets, enabling the prosperous to commute into New York from less dense quarters uptown” (Glaeser, 2011), and so the suburban pattern started. He says that transport developments have been by far the most important, but not the only factor that made suburbanization possible, that it also involved cheap mass-produced housing and government incentives to make it widely available to the middle class. In New Zealand, this need was fulfilled by the government’s vast state housing schemes of the post-war era that gave people little diversity in housing choice, and government funding for vigorous motorway building schemes such as the Auckland Harbour Bridge and it’s associated northern motorway (Bush, 1998).
With the benefit of hindsight, it has become clear that tomorrow’s solutions to our transport woes should place much more emphasis and importance on the co-benefits of alternative modes of transport, such as active modes and public transport (Howden-Chapman, 2010). As Jamie Lerner puts it, “The car is like your mother-in-law, you have to have a good relationship with her, but she cannot command your life.” “So when the only person you have in your life is your mother-in-law, you have a problem” (Lerner, 2008). A more balanced approach to transport will result in more resilient communities. The transport system needs to “adapt to new challenges that span the environmental, social and economic range” of life in cities, such as peak oil and climate change, and these challenges all point very clearly towards increased use of alternative modes of transport (Howden-Chapman, 2010). New Zealand rail, for example is on average 47 times more efficient at moving goods and people than roads. (Hindsight, 2012) There is also a direct relationship between vehicle kilometers travelled (VKT) and urban density. As average density increases, vehicle kilometers travelled decrease, with a doubling in urban population density resulting in a 25-30% reduction in vehicle miles travelled (Ewing, 2010). Higher-density living, particularly along transport corridors, also supports higher per-capita use of alternative means of transport (Ewing, 2010). Therefore, the relationship between built urban form and transport is mutual, and changing the built urban form of an area can also address issues in transport. For example, designing and zoning for mixed use activity like what we have in Auckland’s CBD and Takapuna instead of segregating land-use activities like in Albany or Pakuranga should, in concept, also reduce VKT.
But investment precedes growth, particularly in public transport (Auckland Transport, 2011). Curitiba’s infamous bus rapid transit system (BRT), now with over 220,000 passengers daily, was conceptualized in the 70’s and 80’s and started on just 20,000 passengers a day. (Lerner, 2008) It has now revolutionized Curitiba’s transport system and urban form, with high density development having been concentrated along the BRT corridors. But Lerner emphasizes that the key is having an urban form and transport system that avoids having modes directly compete against each other and achieving integration between different modes; the better integrated the system is, the more potential it has to be successful.
In Auckland, we currently have a discrepancy between the priorities of central and local government, with a more balanced approach to growth and development of urban form being advocated by local government in response to a resurgence in the popularity of alternative modes of transport (Auckland Regional Council, 2010) and desire for more compact urban development. Whereas central government continues to invest in highways without funding alternative forms of transport, such as rail improvements, and advocate the relaxing of the metropolitan urban limit (MUL) instead of increasing density within the existing urban area (Mees, 2006). It’s my opinion that this discrepancy will, for the time being, be the most significant difficulty we face in planning for Auckland’s future. Investment in “both public transport services and infrastructure has not kept pace with the growth in travel demand” (Auckland Regional Council, 2010). This restricts people’s choice of transport modes and the viability and amenity of alternative means of transport. The most efficient and integrated, forward-thinking outcomes seem to occur when a specific public transport project has central government support, such as rail network electrification and the northern bus way.
If we are to see a more balanced outcome to transport investment in Auckland, we also need to see backward-thinking rules and regulations such as minimum parking requirements removed from our legislation. These have an economic cost and in places where alternative means of transport are available undermine efforts towards balanced investment because they directly compete against other modes (Auckland regional Council, 2009). The transport strategy claims that if we increase roading capacity by just 9%, and public transport services by 130%, then we can expect congestion in 2040 to remain roughly at current levels (Auckland Regional Council, 2010). Interestingly, the expected increase in public transport usage (270%) at this level of investment is also expected to have roll-on effects of increasing walking and cycling trips by 128%, so the solutions are there, it is simply a systemic change in the way we assess projects and manage transport funding that is needed to make these solutions possible, especially at a central government level.
In conclusion, transport and urban form have a mutual relationship, they both affect each other. The railroad tends to agglomerate development while the private car disperses it. The dominant pattern of transport has been growth in use of the private motorcar and investment in roading infrastructure that has seen an unprecedented growth of the suburbs. While this has historically met the ‘quarter acre kiwi dream’ it has had other consequences on the quality of life in our cities that we deplore and could be called a tragedy of the commons. The result is an unbalanced transport system in Auckland that is not currently serving the needs of it’s people, and this pattern will continue to increase unless significant systemic changes in transport funding towards alternative modes are made. It is quite possibly the biggest issue facing the growth and development of our city and is not an issue that is solved overnight, but investment precedes growth, and the first step is to introduce a more balanced model of funding and transport policy that values and encourages growth in alternative means of transport.
Bibliography
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