[sustran] Denver, Houten and Auckland

[Kerry Wood]

Wendell

I think you have gone a generalisation too far.

In New Zealand the reason why transit investments are incapable of competing
with highways is structural: no capital funding is available, (except from
local body taxation) so nobody has seriously tried. In contrast, statutory
funding mechanisms are available for road building, from central government
funds.

The last serious try was electrification of Wellington's suburban lines in the
1930s, completed in the 1950s. That scheme (still with some of the original
rolling stock) seems to be the reason why overall transport costs and
congestion are lower in Wellington than in Auckland or Christchurch.

There is now increasing awareness of the limitations of road building, and
Auckland is developing a sensible-looking transit proposal. It uses suburban
rail, light rail and a busway (horses for courses), and looks reasonably
fundable, with central government more receptive to such ideas than for many
years. But there is still no regular funding mechanism.

Partial studies by the NZ Ministry of Transport (1994 - 96) suggest that NZ
road transport has externalities equivalent to somewhere around 2 - 4% of GNP,
even ignoring externalities such as 'free' parking provision (a favourite of
Todd Litman's). With subsidies like this, no wonder the alternatives cannot
compete with highways. Of course, those externalities are contestable: in some
cases the costs cover a 20:1 range, but with a reasonably reassuring 'most
probable' figure towards the bottom of the range. Arguing about precise figures
is fruitless; such charges can never be exactly right, but can only too easily
be exactly wrong, as they are at present.

In Auckland a professor of economics has identified a 400 m spur road off a
grade-separated flyover junction which, by back-of-envelope calculations, would
have costs of USD 2.00 / vehicle kilometre if the opportunity cost of the land
were included (the width is about 200 m, because of multiple approaches to the
grade separated junction). But it is not included.

Another difficulty is the cuckoo effect: providing for cars tends to drive out
other modes. Congestion makes buses or trams too slow and unreliable, roading
engineers allow drivers to go too fast and fail to provide adequately for other
modes, and drivers make walking and cycling too dangerous.

Other approaches are possible. I have just got back from visiting Houten, a new
satellite town of Utrecht, in the Netherlands. Houten now has a population of
40 000, but has not had a traffic fatality since 1987. The trick is to make
walking and cycling safe, with easy journeys to local shops or a station with
an excellent transit service to the city centre. Car ownership and use is
practicable, but  local car journeys are not: drivers have to go out to the
ring road, travelling slowly on roads designed to favour other modes, then
slowly back in to their destination. Cyclists and pedestrians go direct, so
walking is often faster than taking the car, and cycling is almost always
faster. Cycle and pedestrian crossings of the ring road are all grade
separated, and commuting into Utrecht by bicycle is practicable. Children as
young as 5 years cycle to school without adult supervision, and here lies the
inevitable downside: they have crashes when they move to other and less safe
cities.

I also visited Milton Keynes, in the UK, which is also a new town and is also
designed for safe cycling. The safe cycling objective has failed, and with
hindsight it was doomed from the start. Milton Keynes has safe segregated cycle
paths, but they are socially unsafe and have poor or very poor access at either
end. My guess is that ultimately, it was not designed for safe cycling: it was
designed to keep the cyclists out of the way. Milton Keynes is an old-paradigm
city, Houten is new-paradigm.

Regards

--
Kerry Wood
Sustainable Transport Consulting Engineer
76 Virginia Road, Wanganui 5001, New Zealand


Wendell Cox wrote:

> This debate could rage for years. After sending my original note, I was
> sorry that I had not clarified the point. My point had to do with the former
> "colonies" --- US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, where the land use
> tends to make transit investments real losers and incapable of competing
> with highways. Elsewhere this may not be the case. Especially in the
> developing world, authorities need to understand that the only hope for
> limiting the growth of auto use as people become more affluent is to provide
> comprehensive region wide transit systems that make people NOT WANT to buy
> cars. This means providing as much public transport as possible within the
> constrained budgets availalbe, it means priority for buses, jitneys,
> rickshaws and it means it is time to stop building Metro systems that cannot
> sustainably provide an alternative to the automobile for most of the trips.

(snipped)