by Russel Norman
Denver Light Rail
While the US has a very different greenhouse gas profile to NZ, there is one area of commonality which is transport. The US has made massive investments in roading and surprise surprise as a result has totally car dependent development and sprawl with associated high emissions.
This is pretty clear in Denver and Colorado with eight lanes or more of congested freeways filled with truly massive SUVs heading in all directions. Hummers don’t actually look that big here because all the other ‘cars’ are so ridiculously large.
But this is contested ground. Denver has had a debate about mass transit versus freeway expansion. The result is that while freeways have expanded so has the light rail system, which is new and pretty damn fine. They also have a free electric bus system running every few minutes up and down the 16th street mall, which is the main central city shopping and eating zone.
The light rail has been very successful, as usual beyond expectations of planners (Salt Lake City and Phoenix also into buildng new light rail amongst others). An interesting side effect of the rail has been the increase density of housing around the light rail – People like living near the light rail – they don’t have to spend time stuck in traffic on the interstate freeway and it makes for better quality living.
There has also been a parallel move towards people wanting to live in the city rather than sprawling out to the edges.
We can see the future starting to emerge in transport but it is limited by those who cling onto the past and by the infrastructure that we have inherited from generations before.
Published in Environment & Resource Management by Russel Norman on Fri, July 3rd, 2009
More posts by Russel Norman | more about Russel Norman
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
Dodging Foreshore & Seabed?
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jh, Russel isn’t even in the country at the moment (or he’s just got back) – of course he’s going to comment on what’s going on in the USA.
Denver light-rail is certainly a great step in the right direction. A lot of US cities are installing light-rail systems at the moment, it’s almost strange that we haven’t seen the same push in NZ cities.
A tram line along Tamaki Drive would be pretty popular in my opinion – could link through to Tank Farm as well. Another one going along Queen Street and then Dominion Road could boost capacity on a pretty saturated bus route.
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jh, Russel isn’t even in the country at the moment (or he’s just got back) – of course he’s going to comment on what’s going on in the USA.
I was meaning Frogblog as posts seem to coincide with current events (the other blogs have covered it). I would expect a post from Frog, Metira, Catherine or Kevin (as they seem to see honouring of the treaty as understood(?) by Maori in 1840 as necessary to the advancement of the modern state of New Zealand?
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This is one of the reasons why political exchanges to the US are worthwhile. Many cities in the western US are a similar age to New Zealand cities and built on similar design principles, and they are often ahead of us on public transport, but have started from the same low base that we have to start from. It makes them good to learn from.
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Please explain what is meant by “successful”. Has there been a significant mode shift from private car to light rail (or was it bus and walking to light rail), has congestion on parallel roads declined attributable to light rail, does it make a financial return (yes yes I know rhetorical), does it make an economic return, did a politician get re-elected?
Is the higher density housing next to light rail part of the scheme itself (i.e. not driven by the market but by federal/state subsidies) or did higher density development happen due to demand?
Honest answers to these, and honesty about not really having answers for any of this (or even asking).
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There’s a discussion on those issues here:
http://www.planetizen.com/node/31104
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jh said: Dodging Foreshore & Seabed?
Get out of Denver jh!
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“The US has made massive investments in roading and surprise surprise as a result has totally car dependent development and sprawl with associated high emissions.”
This sort of shallow cause and effect claim is what we just had to put up with during the Med-Pot Bill debate in Parliament. Russell, since WWII NZ & USA had zoning and mortgage policies that Europe and South America have never had. Those policies were most slavishly followed in the decades when USA and NZ’s economies were several times wealtheir than Europe and South America. USA and NZ had by far the highest car ownership rates in the 1920s without seeming to have caused car-dependent suburban sprawl. Although, the fact that our cities were more horse and bicycle dependent than Australian and European cities in Seddon’s day suggests we may have been attracting a less cosmopolitan breed of European immigrant.
“The light rail has been very successful, as usual beyond expectations of planners…”
The promoters make these claims, just as the freeway promoters did in the 1950s. Objective analysis by the FTA of all the systems it has funded reveals that, on average, they are only half as successful when compared with the estimated benefits at the intial alternative proposals comparison stage. By comparison freeway proposals generally produced more than three-quarters of the benefits claimed at this point. Most importantly the studies found that the gap in the accuracy of the initial estimates accuracy has been closing over time, suggesting that freeway estimates were accurate mainly because planners had a more complete knowledge base for freeways than for rail transit hence freeway costs were less badly underestimated and thus detailed planning didn’t have to remove half the original proposed capacity or service frequency to stay within the approved budget.
Denver may also be a special case because it has been developing as a centre of the “knowledge economy”, attracting a much younger demographic with a lot fewer families than has been normal for US cities, following in the footsteps of SF and NY. That would certainly explain why people in Denver “like living near the light rail” and why “There has also been a parallel move towards people wanting to live in the city rather than sprawling out to the edges.” wheras people in Houston, which fell off the knowledge wave when NASA downsized and has reverted to being petrochemical economy, prefer the exact opposite. Of course the entire difference in transport preferences between Denver and Houston won’t be entirely due to one being a “geek” city and the other being traditional working class. They also have different climates, Denver’s is brisk, Houston’s is sultry. PT commuters can easily defeat Denver’s climate by buying a fur-lined coat, Houston commuters need a coolsuit to stay cool, composed and smelling sweetly waiting at a bus stop.
Jarbury responded “A lot of US cities are installing light-rail systems at the moment, it’s almost strange that we haven’t seen the same push in NZ cities.”
That strangeness is the result of the USA having different Federal laws authorising funding for transit operating subsidies and transit capital investment in “new” systems. The result is that it is easier for US cities to get Federal funds to build a light rail system than to replace existing buses with hybrids or trolleys, or even just to replace them with attractive superlowfloor buses. We do have similar lunacy with busways (excluding bus stations) in State Highway corridors being fully funded by NZTA but whereas busways on local arterials are only partially funded by NZTA. Then we have the ridiculous decision to shift commuter rail funding from NZTA to the Crown so that it’s entirely at the mercy of whoever sits at the Cabinet table.
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Kevyn, have land-use policies created the transport policies, and subsequent auto dependence, of the US and New Zealand, or have the transport policies of the US and New Zealand created the land-use policies that we see in these countries?
A bit of a “chicken and egg” argument I think. Both have reinforced each other, and both need to be changed to reduce auto dependency.
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I see the wheels have come of the Greens Maori policy (due to the tino rangitiratanga wheel hub):
GREENS’ FORESHORE COMPROMISE THREAT TO TINO RANGATIRATANGA
A spokesman for the New Zealand Maori Council says a proposal by the Green’s to prevent the sale of customary foreshore and seabed land over-rides Maori tinorangitiratanga rights.
The Greens have suggested an amendment to the Maori Land Act to the panel looking into the Foreshore and Seabed laws but council spokesman Maanu Paul says it is not a good idea.
“It says that tino rangatiratanga for Mori ought to be conditional. That you ough not to have the power to determine the destiny of your takutai moana, of your foreshore and seabed. That it ought to be tied so that you can’t sell it. Tino rangatioratanga over any treaty asset under article two has to be unfettered,” Mr Paul says.
He says the proposal involves tinkering with the law to accommodate unfounded pakeha fears of how Maori will handle settlement money.
He says the selling of assets is something pakeha do while treaty settlements show that Maori don’t sell off their land but look after it for future generations.
Moral the greens assume that Maori interests are best for everybody and that tino rangitiratanga will go their way>Tino rangitiratanga means “we do as we f’n want”.
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“The US has made massive investments in roading and surprise surprise as a result has totally car dependent development and sprawl with associated high emissions”
Are you suggesting that New Zealand followed the same pattern? Well, unfortunately, if you look at all the statistics, they would tell you that post war suburban sprawl started before the construction of the motorway. In the ten years after World War II, the population of Papatoetoe Borough trebled and the population of Manurewa Borough doubled as well as the populations of Papakura Borough, Glen Eden Borough, New Lynn Borough and Howick Borough.
If you are looking at issues of car dependency, the first question you need to ask yourself is how much of it was the people wanting to use cars? Public transport patronage had already started decreasing before the first section of Southern Motorway was first opened in 1953. Further to that, you need to consider transport planning – you can easily have suburban sprawl and no car dependency; look at all the sprawl we saw throughout the Western world prior to the 1940s.
“Although, the fact that our cities were more horse and bicycle dependent than Australian and European cities in Seddon’s day suggests we may have been attracting a less cosmopolitan breed of European immigrant.”
It might have also been to do with transport development. New Zealand’s large cities didn’t really get the rural branch line networks that we saw in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, with Christchurch probably being the exception.
Certainly Sydney got onto the idea of rail based commuting quite early, and by the 1890s, they were already amplifing the Inner West Line from double track to quadruple track (it was later amplified to sextuple track in the 1920s)
Further to that, New Zealand’s large cities had problems with tram networks. Wellington and Dunedin had to switch from steam trams to horse trams because the steam trams were scaring the horses; Christchurch had a number of different entities involved, and in Auckland, the owners went bankrupt, and then the BNZ (who took the service over) itself went under.
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Before you start even thinking about installing light rail in Auckland (which has narrow roads following bullock and sheep tracks) look at the width of those roads in Denver and Melbourne which are on the flat and have the room for light rail.
Putting light rail down most of Auckland’s roads would cause havoc. There is just not the room.
Light rail in Auckland is a fantasy of people who actually make no distinction between the many varieties of rail and just work on the basis that rail is good.
In 2004 the operating expenses for light rail in Denver were $21, 689,060 and fare box revenues were $8,050,707, a pretty hefty loss.
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Jarbury,
I think your second paragraph sums up the situation in last 60 years pretty well. While post WWII economic recovery is a large part of the reason that this situation wasn’t as pronounced in Europe and Australia there was also a legacy of colonial land use policies that set the groundwork in USA and NZ more so than in Australia and Canada. In those two countries hospitable climates and favourable farmland seems to have been confined to belts on those country’s peripheries so that there wasn’t the same long trend of average travel distances growing twice as fast as the population as the great expanses of wilderness was subdivided into farms. The temperate climates that generally prevail in NZ and USA seem to have created dramaticly different cultural norms regarding living “in” the great outdoors. Europeans seem to be happy just to know that their is some wilderness nearby should they ever want to go skiing or picnicing.
In that light your question “have land-use policies created the transport policies, and subsequent auto dependence, of the US and New Zealand, or have the transport policies of the US and New Zealand created the land-use policies that we see in these countries?” can be best answered by saying that land-use policies triggered the cycle, and transport policies had to keep up, In my opinion even when bicycles and horses became widely affordable, and even as the motorcar became increasingly affordable, it was still land use policy developments that were driving transport policy developments. But I think there has been a huge cosmopolitan cultural shift in NZ and USA over the last few decades that is creating a more European attitude to both land use and transport.
In short, I reckon our love affair with the car is a consequence of our love affair with the quarter acre section.
Actually that wasn’t a problem when the sections were the narrow ones used in tramway suburbs but the post-WWII suburbs seem to have considered that narrow sections placed houses cheek-by-jowl, which was “too crowded”, too much like the slums of Britain. A daft idea with no objective evidence to support it, but one that was popular with voters 50 years ago.
As long as Russell doesn’t become so infatuated with LRT as all you need to stimulate cosmoplolitan living densities that he overlooks the need to get rid of single use zoning, minimum parking requirements and to introduce proper demand sensitive pricing for all road use including kerbside parking.
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OUr love affair with the motor car is the result of our love affair with personal freedom.
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I think the Auckland isthmus probably has sufficient population densities to support LRT – particularly along some routes like Dominion Road. For Owen’s benefit, I would like to point out that Dominion Road is being widened over the next few years anyway so provide better quality bus lanes. Why not got the whole hog and make it LRT?
Regarding transport policies v land use policies I don’t necessarily think that one caused the other – I think both have happened and they have both contributed to auto-dependency. Changing transportation technologies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries allowed cities to spread – through railway, tramlines and eventually automobiles. Yet over time the land use patterns that were possible due to changing transportation technologies became entrenched through poor planning rules. This further encouraged auto-dependency, and in response to that we shifted away from balanced transportation policy to the roads fetishism that we’ve had for the past 60 years.
So, I would say to summarise it’s a combination of transport policies and land-use policies. You can have a pretty decent public transport system even in a sprawled city – like Perth for example. However, just about every city with sprawled land-use patterns is FAR more auto-dependent than your average European city.
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Quite right Owen. If our love affair with personal freedom hadn’t manifested itself in the quarter-acre fetish we might have satiated our lust for personal freedom by walking, cycling or living in high density suburbs like Kensington, Bondi, Haight-Ashbury, Bohemia, Greenwich Village or Weatherfield
In Japan a love affair with the cellphone and the internet seems to have supplanted their previous love affairs with cars and bullet trains as the way to consumate their love affair with personal freedom.
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I think Owen’s talking about the “freedom” to have no choice but spend two or three hours a day in a car to undertake one’s necessary daily activities.
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Jarbury, Owen does deserve credit for demonstrating how people who don’t want to live in a city should actually go and live on a few acres in the country as long as it’s not within convenient commuting distance of a city. I admire him for actually doing land use that provides alternatives to quarter acre sprawl. Outside of cities the car actually does deliver on that promise of individual freedom, at a cost that most people consider acceptable (or else they take the ignorance is bliss approach).
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That’s true Kevyn, although Owen’s opposition to a metropolitan urban limit means that most of the countryside surrounding our cities is likely to become quasi-urban sprawl if he had his way.
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Jarbury, it is already becoming sprawl of the most dangerous form – the lifestyle block. While public transport can and has worked with the quarter acre section, it is very difficult for it to work with the lifestyle block.
“However, just about every city with sprawled land-use patterns is FAR more auto-dependent than your average European city.”
That is largely because of transport planning issues, and employment distribution more than anything. I would rather that Auckland be more like New York (lower density, with an intense CBD), than Los Angeles (medium density, with much more distributed centres)
Before you make a comment, Los Angeles is actually denser than New York is; it is just that New York has the more intense core, while Los Angeles had more distributed centres.
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LRT needs a network if it is to work at all – and it normally does much less well that the same investment in bus systems.
And Dominion Road is one road. Look at K’Hape road and Kyhber pass and Remuera Rd and the Eastern Bay road. Where do the vehicles drive that are displaced out of the two centre lanes.
There has been New York type CBD built since the advent of the Ford except by dictatorships.
And it is not residential density that counts in establishing the viability of public rail transport it is the employment density. IF residential density counted so much New York would not have an effective subway, and Los Angeles would.
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MY opposition to MULs is based on my concern for current and future generations.
We owe it to young families to be able to buy an affordable home.
MULs make that impossible.
New Zealand is only 1.5% urbanised and our population will peak around the middle of the century so what is your preference?
Drive all the young families out of the cities or out of New Zealand or let them live in a house they can afford and with enough land to grow their own vegetables if they chose. If families want to live in suburbs why on earth can’t you let them do it?
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This observation from the Anti-Planner (Randal O’Toole) website coincides with my own. The rise in bus traffic (and especially shuttles) has been dramatic over the last decade. Shuttles are also hugely important in Auckland – they deal with most of the international traffic from town to the airport for example.
ntercity Buses: The Forgotten Mode
Jul 2
2009
During my last trip to DC, I happened to listen to a debate over a proposal to build a streetcar line in Baltimore. “People won’t ride a bus,” argued one of the streetcar advocates. “To attract tourists, we need to have a streetcar.”
Meanwhile, within a two-block walk of the Cato Institute offices, I could find dozens of buses: charter buses in front of hotels, open-top tour buses filled with tourists, Bolt buses, two-story-high Megabuses, and many more. Most of them filled well over half their seats, except for the city buses which ran nearly empty.
Rail advocates are fond of claiming that Margaret Thatcher said, “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure” — as if support from a fiscal conservative lends credence to their cause. In fact, there is no evidence Thatcher ever said this “or indeed shared the sentiment.”
The truth is that intercity buses are staging a revival, attracting riders of all ages from all walks of life. They are doing so by offering services you can’t get from Amtrak at much lower prices. But because they are unsubsidized, they are ignored by would-be policy makers such as the Surface Transportation Policy Commission. Moreover, accurate data on bus ridership are very hard to come by.
Go to the web page to read more: http://ti.org/antiplanner/
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And by the way, I have posted some photos of my houses and their environs on my face book page. Because these were taken for me they don’t include photos of the evapo-transpiration fields but I may be able to remedy that in future.
also if you think I do not know how to operate Face book and its photo albums you are dead right. The uploaded photos seem to choose a destination of their own.
Each one becomes and album on its own.
I have had favourable comments from South America and the Phillipines so far!
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Owen – try a flickr page. I did for my ‘greenfly’s garden’ photos and it’s easy. I’m told though, that the images become public property, but I care not. I’m keen to see your photos.
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There has not? been New York type CBD built since the advent of the Ford except by dictatorships.
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I would somewhat agree with that – although just because lifestyle blocks are problematic perhaps we should look at fixing that problem rather than encouraging the same thing on an even more extreme level.
A network has to start somewhere – and Dominion Road to Queen street & Wynyard Quarter to Tamaki Drive is a useful north-south and east-west beginning to a network. In the future you could have LRT along Pakuranga Road, Onewa Road, Ti Rakau Drive, Great North Road and potentially many others. Pakuranga Road is MORE than wide enough for it, for example.
The problem with LA has been transportation policy and not land-use policy. As john-ston states above, LA has a high population density and could have a very effective public transport system if they’d bothered to build one (instead of ripping out the largest tram network in the world). All the public transport expansion in LA over the last 10-20 years have been rapidly taken up and a true subway network is finally going to develop over the next decade or two.
Correction – MULs drive up house prices IF councils are idiots and don’t allow intensification to off-set the reduction in housing supply. Auckland City Council, for example, have been totally useless in allowing for intensification over the past decade, except for in the CBD. Barely any land has been rezoned residential 8, apartment and townhouse developments are often so difficult and expensive to consent that they have to be built on the cheap for the developer to make any money and so forth. The only place where the market has been free enough to provide the necessary intensification has been the CBD (until the last few years when high development contributions have knocked that on the head) and as a result you have seen CBD apartment prices go up and down in accordance with the market.
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Jarbury, like I have said to you many times, there are a number of other problems. Greenfields developments are problematic if a developer has to try and acquire the properties, and unlike you, I am not particularly hopeful that should government get into the development field that it would be particularly successful and would more than likely result in crime ridden cesspools, as the government would be forced to account for the lowest common denominator as well as normal people; and like what happened in Clendon, the lowest common denominator would drag the suburb down.
The other problem is that much of the reason why councils support such urban planning restrictions is so that people can be shut out of affordable housing. In Portland, there was an attempt to rezone an area for higher density housing, and that was met with masses of opposition – people are supporting MULs and other restrictions not because of the sustainability aspect, but because it means shutting out other people, and they are most definitely not going to support having higher density living in their backyard – look at all the outcry over the Soho development in Ponsonby.
Then your other big problem is the stigma associated with higher density housing and its association with leaky buildings – that will take at least twenty years, if not longer to fix. People aren’t going to live in higher density housing because they aren’t sure if they are going to end up with a lemon or not.
Like I said above, if you want more people to use public transport, then you are going to need more jobs in a single place. What you and others have advocated for is multiple job centres with higher density housing – that is exactly the path that Los Angeles took, and it screwed them up (and I must add that their tram network was partly closed because the lines were no longer producing sufficient revenue).
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I guess you mean brownfield/intensification redevelopment. I certainly don’t think that government involvement would result in crime-ridden cesspools. We’re certainly not expecting the Hobsonville redevelopment (undertaken by Housing New Zealand) to be a cesspool, neither the case with the Flat Bush town centre development (Manukau City Council). I know both those examples are greenfield developments, but the point is that public developers can lead to outcomes other than Otara or Glen Innes. You just need to be careful about the amount of subsidised housing you put in an area.
That’s why I have little time for those who oppose plan changes that provide for intensification on NIMBY grounds. Although councils have to take some of the responsibility for the opposition by taking so long to come up with half decent rules that make higher-density developments fairly simple to consent, but at the same time lead to high quality outcomes.
Build in brick then.
That’s only good for encouraging public transport use amongst those commuting. The trip to and from work only accounts for around a third of the vehicle trips people in your average sprawled city make. The rest are things like picking the kids up from school, popping down to the dairy and so forth. It is only a focus on intensification and mixed-use developments that can reduce people’s auto-dependency for those kinds of trips.
The difference is quite clear when you look at travel patterns for those in the inner New York suburbs (high density, mixed use developments, low auto-dependence – with very low car ownership rates) with those in the outer suburbs (low density, decent use of commuter rail to work, but otherwise high auto-dependency).
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From john-ston:
that is exactly the path that Los Angeles took, and it screwed them up (and I must add that their tram network was partly closed because the lines were no longer producing sufficient revenue).
Obviously you missed this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal
Can anyone tell me how to do quote boxes..? I’ve tried [quote], [/quote], etc…
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Jeeza: I would like to know that trick, Is it a cut, copy and paste job from the Edit box? I would experiment if I could only be able to activate those boxes.
Cheers
Drak.
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Guys, its < blockquote > < /blockquote >, or to italicise, the much more convenient < i > < /i >. Important – take out the spaces.
The relevant help page seems out-of-order at the moment. Will have that looked at.
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Ah yes that was quite a tragedy really. And while the streetcars may have no longer been making a profit, what road makes a profit?
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Jarbury, while you are hopeful, I am not – particularly about Flat Bush. My father did some surveying work in that area sometime in either 2007 or last year of people in that area, and a number of people who live in the outskirts of what will be Flat Bush are already worried about the increasing amount of crime in their area. My father commented that one gentleman even said that he would move out of the area as soon as a Secondary School opened in the area because of vagrancy, and he also noted that almost every house had some sort of fancy high-tech security facility.
While the amount of subsidised housing might play a role, remember the lowest common denominator issue and think of that area that was mentioned in the Aucklander article a few months ago.
This is a different sort of NIMBY though; consider what happened when the council planned to bowl over Freemans Bay back in the 1950s. I can foresee there being a massive outcry in the next decade or so, and it will not be a good one. Heck, the only reason why the Eastern Motorway was defeated was because of NIMBYs and that resulted in Banks losing office all those years ago.
Well done, not only have you created high crime areas where people need to spend tens of thousands in security, but when an earthquake hits, you are going to kill them all.
How much auto-dependency is there really for those kinds of trips though? If you look at Pakuranga for instance, almost the whole suburb is within walking distance of a primary school and a group of shops. If you look at how things were even in the 1960s and 1970s, children walked or cycled to school and mothers walked to the dairy, and developmental patterns haven’t changed all that much since then.
What has changed is attitudes. I suspect it was the murder of Teresa Cormack in 1987 (and the fact it took fifteen years to find her murderer) that changed everything – parents no longer felt safe allowing their children to walk to school, and started driving them. Then you had the start of stranger danger awareness and the like, and I suspect that it dealt another blow to the idea of children walking to school. Further to that, with women entering the workforce, you no longer had mothers who had time to walk their children to school – they also now had to commute.
If you want people to start doing things like walking to school again, then you need to make parents feel safer about the safety of their children – we are going to have to deal with the problem of crime. Urban design isn’t the issue in this case, it is a social problem.
The biggest difference between New York and Auckland would probably be the size of these items. Schools in New Zealand tend to be very small compared with what you find in the United States, and there would presumably be far more of them. I can immediately name three primary schools in the area bounded by Pakuranga Road, Ti Rakau Drive and the Pakuranga Creek – an 800m circle from them all would cover that entire area.
I didn’t miss it, but you must have missed the Wikipedia article on the Pacific Electric Railway
In terms of in the United States, their transit systems were probably only kept going by the Great Depression and the Second World War, and would have been closed much sooner. All that National City Lines did was act as a mechanism for what would have happened.
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Ah the arrows, should have known, cheers…
I’m glad I joined this site looks like its full of climate change deniers, people who think public transport is the devil “cause my Daddy votes National” and those who say Auckland’s development is going just dandy thanks, I’m sooo glad central government ignored Sir Dove-Myer Robinson… Quite hilarious these people should be on a “green” site, trying to change the enlightened minds methinks…
@john-ston do you really think Los Angelenos today don’t wish the Municipal government hadn’t picked up the tab and keep the system going for all these years..?
It would have saved them untold billions in traffic congestion costs, much of the cost they face in expanding their current system and if San Fran is anything to go by added to their tourist market…
The anti-competitve law they faced now seems at best a joke (like contact energy not being able to sell power to itself if it decided to build a LRT in Christchurch) and at worst corrupt (the american political corruption when it came to the Big Oil and the like started in 1913). Furthermore the “car lobby” was prosecuted and convicted of conspiracy…
So:
- GM et al (car lobby) either through influence or luck have a law passed that essentially forces streetcars to go for tender.
- Car lobby buys system.
- Car lobby destroys system.
- Car lobby sells and operates buses and sells cars.
If the inevitable decline had happened as you say, it would have given the locals the chance to campaign for the system and Municipal government the option to buy it when it was very cheap al’a the San Fran cable cars (just look at the Bay area’s rail transport in comparison now)…
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Sorry, but when did they managed to build it?
I was in Denver 4 years ago, but I don’t remember this thing….
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RE: Freemans Bay. That proposed “urban renewal” was a joint idea of the MOW planning department and Robbie.
It was called slum clearance and I was fortunate to join the City Development Team in the early sixties and be one of the major players in removing the slum clearance programme and by deregulating the land use etc enable the genuine urban renewal which then flourished. We also used the cleared flat land at the base of the valley to produce a range of medium density housing (and I invented the word Town House and Infill Housing to describe some of the prototypes) and I lived in them for four years so the architects upstairs could not reduce standards on the grounds “these people don’t need carports and washing machines” etc.
The once we reduced the ban on building (an rebuilding) on lots under 24p (most were 10 and 12p) then renewal took place naturally because people could now borrow mortgage money. The “workers” living there had the longest trips in Auckland to work because most worked in the meat works in south Auckland.
IF it was not for our market led approach the whole valley would now be star flats and high rise towers on the ridge. All built down to a cost.
The sections were small because these were initially working class suburbs. The middle class suburbs of early auckland were around 24 perches while the upper class suburbs such as Remuera had lots from 1/4 to an acre which is why there are so many large trees. These differences in lot size were established early in the piece and had nothing to do with transport and density. The quarter acre lot has always been more myth than reality in our cities. We always had a decent spread until density became a goal and we now have lots too small to allow for a decent sized house and several decent sized trees.
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jarbury Says:
July 5th, 2009 at 12:14 am
> Ah yes that was quite a tragedy really. And while the streetcars may have no longer been making a profit, what road makes a profit?
I bet the traffic lights weren’t making a profit either. Did they close them down as well?
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Ah john-ston I guess we’re never going to resolve our disagreement on this issue.
Fortunately, the ARC is following what most people agree is good sense and are focusing on providing for significant intensification of the Auckland area in the future:
http://www.bdcentral.co.nz/afa.asp?idWebPage=8338&idBobDeyProperty_Articles=12558&SID=538208765
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Nothing like the debate between people being able to choose how they want to live and those who want to plan for how they think they should live.
Jarbury, if most people agree on it, why do there need to be rules and laws to make it happen, and why is most demand for new housing based on suburban development of sections and new subdivisions, not the onanistic replication of old world cities with highrise near railway stations?
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Because pollution is aggression and therefore gives the local and central government the right to organise our public goods in a manner that limits this aggression…
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Liberty, I suggest reading a District Plan one day. Then you’ll realise that it’s a million times easier to comply with the rules when building sprawl than it is for intensification.
The planning rules provide for sprawl (although they’re slowly being changed), so that’s what we end up with. It’s not about choice, it’s about what’s easy.
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Most people agree is good sense? Has a poll been conducted of people Jarbury on intensification – I highly doubt it. Certainly, it isn’t good sense when tens of thousands are being locked out of inexpensive housing because the value of land is being driven up, and you cannot deny it, the vast majority of centres where New Urbanism thinking has come to the fore has suffered incredible housing affordability issues.
Talking along a more sustainability line, I am thinking more that suburban sized sections might be more useful in your peak oil environment than intense living – consider what you can do on a quarter acre section for self sufficiency; you could easily have a sizeable garden with which to grow vegetables, a couple of fruit trees for fruit, and chickens to provide you with eggs – these sort of possibilities are simply not possible within high rise apartment buildings.
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That depends on how apocalyptic things get john-ston. In a situation where transport costs go up significantly but the structure of society still functions I would rather live in a higher density mixed use area where I can do most of what I need to do within walking distance or a short bus/cycle trip from where I live than out in the distant suburbs where I live 40 km from where I work and a few km from the nearest shopping area.
If things do get truly apocalyptic then yeah I guess it would be good to have a quarter acre section – but it’s been 40 years since we subdivided down to quarter acre sections. Most sprawl in recent times is only 400m2 sections.
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jarbury, why do you think the costs of transport will rise when technology is rapidly reducing the cost of transport?
And the PEW surveys in the US and the recent surveys which followed their methodology here all show that about 50% prefer suburban living, about 20 percent prefer inner city living and about 30 percent prefer to live in rural areas or small towns.
It will take a lot of coercion to change the behaviour and preferences of 70% of the population.
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Peak oil Owen. Electric cars are decades away from being affordable to the masses, due to their current high prices and the fact that our car fleet is pretty old.
Having read quite a few books on the matter, it really does seem like oil is a bit of a ‘holy grail’ when it comes to ease of use and energy intensity. I fully expect transportation costs in the future to be higher than they are now. Perhaps that will lead to a ‘re-localisation’ of society in the future, counter-acting the ‘de-localisation’ of the virtual world.
Crikey, sounds like a thesis topic.
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Owen
I reckon that those numbers would be about right… though I think that more of that 50% is actually just bi-polar about the issue. City and Country both have major attractions… the suburbs have malls.
BJ
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New research from the Center for Neighborhood Technology indicates that transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions are up to 70 percent lower per household in cities than in suburbs, a pattern that holds true in lower-density cities like Houston as well as in higher-density cities such as New York.
http://www.houstontomorrow.org/livability/story/area-outside-beltway-8-contributes-most-per-capita-carbon-emissions/
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Those studies were hugely misleading. They deal only with transport related emissions as you recognise in your post. But total transport (air, car and rail) accounts for only about 10% of the typical household’s total carbon footprint. Food accounts for about 30%. And the higher density housing in CCs has a heap of public space which needs to be lit etc. And of course concrete and steel has a higher carbon footprint that the timber of light timber frame construction. And try retrofitting solar heating to a apartment block.
Go to Consuming Australia for the most thorough analysis. See the pie chart p5.
http://americandreamcoalition.org/ConsumingAustralia.pdf
They found that the lowest carbon footprint households were in the peri-urban area or rural areas.
It has to do with income. But essentially you can live and work where you like.
Isn’t that good news?
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Owen
If the wind displaces hydro, as it is apt to do in many places in the south, the power stored in the lakes stays in the lakes when the wind is blowing… and the hydro generator isn’t a thermal plant that has to be on standby, it is more like a battery, smoothing the load.
This makes it the cheapest rather than the most expensive. This is one of the most common and least useful arguments against wind that actually exists. See below.
A more cogent objection is noise, which does affect some people, but that is mitigated by size. Larger turbines are quieter, not louder.
————
The real problems for NZ lie in the North, where there is more sun and less wind, lower hills and fewer hydro resources. A good power grid will HELP, but it doesn’t fix the location problem
Tidal power can do SOME useful displacement and North Island has geothermal. Again, not a fossil fuel but not yet developed into a resource capable of powering points North.
Finally, there is the possibility of generating surpluses with the wind, most of which has to be dumped at present… the resource is almost unlimited. What is surplus can be transformed into something else without regard to the fact that it is not 100% converted. It can be stored and shipped.
Make H2 from water and electricity, make methane from the H2 and Carbon, turn that into LNG or CNG and ship it to the North Island where it can be used in a thermal plant or fuel cells. This gives us a storable medium. It also solves the issue of providing power to apartment blocks.
I would prefer a more complex hydrocarbon, less apt to making a methane problem for us if it leaks (an issue with the gas reticulation as well).
http://ssrl.slac.stanford.edu/research/highlights_archive/pmmo.html
http://www.rsc.org/publishing/chemscience/volume/2006/12/from_methane_to_methanol.asp
Additionally CH4 in the form of LNG can be burned in existing cars with a few modifications. No batteries. No drama. Methanol has issues if water gets into the system (as it will).
respectfully
BJ
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