The Campaign For Better Transport

It appears to be generally accepted that auto-dependent sprawl is bad from an environmental perspective, and also from a social perspective. However, one of the biggest arguments that public transport advocates seem to come up against is that roading projects come across as having better cost-benefit ratios. Furthermore, land-use policies continue to generally promote single-use sprawl instead of intensified mixed-use developments – despite the recognition that auto-dependent sprawl leads to higher CO2 emissions and other environmental nasties. Pages 29-44 of my thesis detail the adverse effects of auto-dependent sprawl quite exhaustively.

So let’s have a look at the economic effects of auto-dependent sprawl a bit more, using my favourite book of late: Resilient Cities. OK I admit it, the main purpose of this post is to allow me to quote good bits of this book – but seriously they are too good not to share! For a start, the book outlines the way in which many of the actual costs of auto-dependent sprawl are somewhat “hidden” from us:

One of the main characteristics of our modern society is that so many of the direct and indirect consequences of our consumption and other personal (and collective) decisions are hidden from us. We tend to judge our investments in renewable energy in terms of artificially truncated incomplete pricing systems that fail to adequately account for the full and true costs of our overuse of fossil fuels.

This is particularly true for private vehicle focused transportation policies in my opinion. We don’t offset the CO2 emissions produced by our cars, or the particulate matter emissions that kill hundreds of people in Auckland a year, or the effects of requiring masses of the city being set aside for parking, or many many other hidden costs of our auto-dependency. This is further detailed: Read the rest of this entry »

I’m reading an excellent book at the moment – Resilient Cities by Peter Newman, Timothy Beatley and Heather Boyer. I commented on this book a few posts ago, with particular reference to how pathetic our preparedness for peak oil is and how stupid Treasury’s oil price predictions are. I have just got up to reading the chapter which relates to transportation issues, and there are certainly some interesting points in it.

The basic premise is that for a city’s transportation system to be resilient – that is to be able to adapt to the changing world that we face over the next few decades – it simply can’t be as auto-dependent as many American cities, as well as Auckland, are at the moment. Whilst electric cars may come along and be the answer to our problems at some point in the future, to properly ensure that the effects of peak oil and climate change are not too horrific there is simply no alternative to making cities more public transport oriented.

One point that I found particularly interesting, before I get on to explaining the pointlessness of building more motorways, is the relationship between increased public transport use and decreased car use. Often it is simply thought of as a one-to-one relationship: that each increased ride for public transport is one fewer trip made in the car. However, it appears as though the relationship is actually stronger than that: that “there is an exponential relationship between increased transit use and declining car use.” This is further explained:

This helps explain why use of cars by inner-city residents in Melbourne is ten times lower than that of fringe residents, though transit use by inner-city residents is only three times greater. The reason is that when people commit to transit, they may sell a car and even more closer to the transit, eventually leading to lan use that is considerably less car dependent.

Read the rest of this entry »