Hard News: Policy, finally
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Robert, I don't think $/km is as big a factor as time/km. Until the $/km becomes more than $/time (or some relatively fixed fraction thereof), it's still profitable to use a system. So for wealthier people, a high cost faster alternative is always going to win. For people who earn nothing, their time costs a lot less, so slower options are fine.
A transport engineer friend of mine told me once that statistically cities don't move to highly efficient train systems until the average commute time exceeds 90 minutes. When people are spending more than 3 hours per day on average in transport, the alternatives are demanded.
Auckland is probably about halfway there, so its commuting population can grow quite a lot before we start getting really antsy for trains and other alternatives.
I don't see that we need to rush getting that point here faster by disincentivizing using cars. Passing on fair costs is ... fair, and I have no problem with that. Especially if it's ALL the costs, including pollution costs. But to do more than that is just hurting millions of people. Quite the opposite, roads should continue to be improved, in perpetuity. They are fantastically useful public works, and will always be, regardless of whether petrol runs out one day. They are one of the best uses of all that energy, since they reduce energy usage over their life. I think if the gas does run out, we'll be mighty bitter not to have made roads while we had it.
But train lines, undergrounds etc, are excellent too. We should have those.
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You know, I often think that London and New York and other great metropolises were starting to build their undergrounds when they were about the size Auckland is now.
But that 90 minute figure is really interesting, because before cars, crossing London by horse would have been at least 90 minutes... I'm going to have to think about this.
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Ben: Sure. I was actually equating time and money in my assumptions (taking $1/km = $1/10 minutes; the question for bus rides within most NZ cities being, how much would you pay to save yourself a 10-minute walk?) -- but yes, the longer the journey, the less practicable the walk, and hence the more attractive public transport becomes. (I fairly often choose to walk the 7km from my office to Ikebukuro in central Tokyo. My workmates regard this as utter insanity, given I could do the same journey as a 20-minute, 200-yen train ride; the point is that, over that scale, walking it only takes me an extra 45 minutes, and I can live with that. But even I would never consider walking the 50km from my office to my apartment in Saitama [50 minutes, 570 yen by train].)
--Robert. -
b) Cantabrains still don't get out much <wink>
LOL. Chch public transport is great, as long as you live inside the city. If you live in Rolleston, you can drive past the closed Rolly railway station and all the way into town right next to the railway line, but you can't take a train.
We have geography on our side, too. Most days in the summer, we don't use the car. My kids walk or bike to school - three whole blocks without getting run over, abducted or murdered! My partner bikes to work in the CBD. From Riccarton, biking takes about the same amount of time as walking, depending on the direction of the wind. And some of the cheapest property in town is in Philipstown, right next to the CBD.
But Auckland... I'm a big lefty liberal greenie, and I wouldn't use public transport in Auckland.
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Hence, a PT system good enough to use under NZ conditions requires massive subsidies from city councils/local bodies/central government. Getting to Tokyo standards would require 95% subsidisation of the actual cost.
That's a pretty simplistic analysis. I haven't been to Tokyo, but some of the economies of scale will have taken effect. 20 times the population won't mean 20 times the number of trains. It'll mean (depending on the time) more trains, but larger ones than you would see in a NZ city. Other economies of scale will have a lesser impact. If you have 20 times as many people travelling during peak hour, and in NZ the bus was full, well then in Tokyo you have 20 buses, which means 20 vehicles, 20 drivers etc. That's not really cheaper at all, just bigger.
Also, if getting to Tokyo standards means, 20 buses going past a bus stop every 10 minutes, which is the sort of volume they'd need there, then that's a bit silly for NZ.
I don't know what the actual figures are, but I'd presume that if we pay a reasonable subsidy now, then doubling it would have a pretty strong impact upon price/quality/convenience.
Personally I'm with some other people who have suggested that the more inconvenient cars get, the better public transport will both look, and actually be. If something is bad, and we want to discourage it, up the tariffs on it - purchase and use. Then we'll change the behaviour.
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[A previous version of this vanished in the ether; it hasn't reappeared after 30 minutes, so I'm trying again.]
Kyle: I'm happy to admit my comparison is simplistic. But the economies of scale (it's cheaper per capita to provide a higher total volume of service) actually strengthen my argument (that a viable public transport system in NZ requires higher levels of funding than most local bodies are comfortable with), and that's why I dismissed them with a handwave above. The estimate of a 95% cost subsidy still stands as a minimum for NZ, if we are to have a comparable level of service in terms of frequency (NB: not capacity! this is a per capita comparison) and network density (station/ route spacing), while still keeping costs to commuters down to something affordable.
NB by "Tokyo standards" of frequency I meant -- as stated -- 4 services per hour on average across the network. (Even in Tokyo, not many routes have more than 10 services per hour; some have only 1.) Frequency of service can't be reduced much below that point without seriously impacting convenience to commuters. Compare Wellington, where there are only 2 services per hour on average across the network as a whole (more on some routes, less on others) -- and an uncertainty of up to 15 minutes in arrival times. If the average journey takes only 30 minutes, but you have to wait that long for a bus or train anyway, surely that's a "bit silly"? :-)
--Robert.
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[A previous version of this rant has appeared numerous times on PAS; it hasn't stopped, so I'm venting again.]
Geez, I **really** hate how the LINK buses will stop for 5 minutes so that they can maintain their 'one-every-ten-minutes' schedule. And they always seem to stop at Victoria Park Market, when all I want is to get to the top of College Hill. Soooooo close ...
(and don't tell me to get off and walk up the hill, that defeats the purpose of catching the bus!)
(I saw Rudman on the LINK once -- he's shorter than he appears in the Herald)
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But that 90 minute figure is really interesting, because before cars, crossing London by horse would have been at least 90 minutes... I'm going to have to think about this.
I think the figure was not referring to the cities that did it before automobiles were widely used. From memory London had major traffic jams in the streets just from carts etc, every day, prior to the undergrounds being put in. They really needed it.
Personally I'm with some other people who have suggested that the more inconvenient cars get, the better public transport will both look, and actually be. If something is bad, and we want to discourage it, up the tariffs on it - purchase and use. Then we'll change the behaviour.
I agree with the first sentence, and not the second. Well, I don't agree automobiles are bad. They have their place. The costs should be true, for sure. After that, you're creating a problem rather than solving it.
Then again, my opinions are formed around not being one for trying to guess what the city of the future will look like. Is this huge rat race of masses of people moving into a small space and out again every day what is going to continue? Do we want it to continue? Personally I don't do it and I don't want to do it. I did it for years and hated it. Everyone I know who does it pretty much hates it. And they especially hate the commuting part, especially on the bus. Is the solution to bypass these outdated concepts of workplaces, rather than legislate against the most convenient form of transport to them, so as to bring the average level of commuting up to something that everyone still hates?
Perhaps I'm dreaming that considerable numbers of people could move towards my mode of work, commuting to the office on foot from the bedroom, and using the vehicle to zip around doing anything that can't be done at home. But I don't think so, not when I see what most people do all day, which resembles my work greatly. They sit at a computer and talk on the phone.
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Perhaps I'm dreaming that considerable numbers of people could move towards my mode of work, commuting to the office on foot from the bedroom
Sometimes you can look forward in time just by looking overseas. In California, where telecommuting seems be a lot more common than it is here, groups of e-lancers have started renting office space and all working in the same physical space, on their different projects. Simply because people miss that face-to-face bouncing ideas off each other dynamic that you get from a communal workplace.
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But the economies of scale (it's cheaper per capita to provide a higher total volume of service) actually strengthen my argument (that a viable public transport system in NZ requires higher levels of funding than most local bodies are comfortable with), and that's why I dismissed them with a handwave above. The estimate of a 95% cost subsidy still stands as a minimum for NZ, if we are to have a comparable level of service in terms of frequency (NB: not capacity! this is a per capita comparison) and network density (station/ route spacing), while still keeping costs to commuters down to something affordable.
What you've said, is that running a public transport system for one million people, costs exactly the same as running a public transport system for twenty million people. And therefore to make it viable for the one million, they should pay the same cost as the twenty million, and the money that the other nineteen million would have paid, should be paid by subsidy (95% of the total cost).
The first presumption, that running a public transport system for one million people costs as much as running one for twenty million people, is clearly nonsense. You don't need a ten buses running every ten minutes simply to deal with demand. You can have one running every ten minutes. That's nine buses, and nine drivers etc etc, that you don't pay for. The service is still just as good, there just aren't 20 million people trying to use it.
The point about economies of scale is that it wouldn't cost 1/20th to run the system for a million, it would probably cost 1/10th, making it twice as expensive per capita.
Once we see that your base presumption is nonsense, your 95% subsidy claim is also.
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Emma
If you live in Rolleston, you can drive past the closed Rolly railway station and all the way into town right next to the railway line, but you can't take a train.I've been told the magic number is a pop of 80K to justify light rail. Although Rolly will never get there. If it piggy backs onto the Industrial Dev at Rolly & stop the southern bypass motorway from Rolly to Lyttleton we might get some where.
Failing that light rail from CHCH to Ashburton & CHCH to Amberly encompassing all of the northern res devs up there? -
Whoops
stop the southern bypass motorway & use the existing train line -
Failing that light rail from CHCH to Ashburton & CHCH to Amberly encompassing all of the northern res devs up there?
I wouldn't go quite that far yet, but it seems logical that Chch is going to spread outside of the Green Belt - Templeton, Kaiapoi, etc.
The big problem with commuter rail in CHCH is the brilliant decision to move the 'central' railway station out to Riccarton. I guess there was a good reason for that at the time, but I dunno what it was.
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Kyle: can we agree that the truth is somewhere in between? The problem with low population density for a transport system is not that we've only got 1M people, but that they're taking up the same area as 20M. Also I think we're assuming different kinds of system.
I started off considering rail (since that's the mass transit system in Tokyo) -- and clearly didn't factor in rolling stock volumes (which part of the cost is, as you state, roughly proportional to passenger volume, so should be cheaper for 1M). On the other hand, line and station construction and maintenance is something that should be roughly constant for the same area of coverage, regardless of volume of use -- and represents the largest part of the cost for a railway system. But if you're considering public transport = buses, then fair enough: roading isn't part of that budget ... though perhaps it should be!The other part of my argument (which I think still emerges unscathed?) is that if in the 20M-person population a route is viable with one bus every 15 minutes, then for the 1M-person population that route no longer exists (1/20 of a bus = a car), and thus the overall system for 1M cannot be as flexible/ convenient as that for 20M if we are covering the same area (and conversely, if we do try to deliver as flexible a system, it will be grossly uneconomic). This, I think, we can agree on: it is not possible to deliver the same system for 1M people that we could for 20M. To return to where I came in: that becomes a problem if the system that we can deliver for 1M people is, as a result, so inconvenient as not to be used.
--Robert.
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Simply because people miss that face-to-face bouncing ideas off each other dynamic that you get from a communal workplace.
I miss the communal workplace period. Its social function is huge. But it doesn't need to be in the CBD.
Kyle:
You can have one running every ten minutes. That's nine buses, and nine drivers etc etc, that you don't pay for. The service is still just as good,...
No it's not. Waiting 10 minutes on average is a lot worse than waiting 1 minute. That's 9 minutes less waiting. If your trip is only 10 minutes in the first place, the more frequent service is roughly twice as good.
Of course most bus trips in Auckland are much longer than 10 minutes. That's partly because they stop everywhere which is also more shit than the equivalent service in a mega city, where express buses are much more frequent too, especially during the peak periods.
I don't agree with linger's maths, but his point that big cities have better PT services from economies of scale is a no-brainer.
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Kyle: can we agree that the truth is somewhere in between?
Yup.
To return to where I came in: that becomes a problem if the system that we can deliver for 1M people is, as a result, so inconvenient as not to be used.
Yes you're right. But it's all relativities. Auckland is eight times larger (in population) than Dunedin (I'm not sure about relative size of the urban region), which has a reasonable (if not great) public transport system. I suspect Auckland's problems relate as much to bad design (city design, and public transport) as a lack of people squeezed into the space.
Auckland is a bit of an unusual example because it's all spread out to hell rather than built up and the main arteries are limited in some ways by geography and bad planning. Also, public transport tends not to be able to use motorways much because of the need to go through the suburbs, and yet driving through the suburbs is very slow. Light rail or a subway would not have that problem.
There's also a tremendous lack of commitment to public transport in Auckland. It wants to be a big grown up, international city, attract thousands of tourists, host major international events etc. City planners from real cities overseas must come and look and fall over when they try to get around.
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