An interesting little book is "Winning back the cities", by Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy, Australian Consumers’ Association/Pluto Press Australia, 1992. Newman has some interesting things to say, though he seems to be spending a good deal of his time advising the World Bank, OECD and the like on these matters. He’s trying to persuade them that public transport is a more efficient way to develop cities, and has GRP (Gross Regional Product) figures he says prove it, which is believable: roads for cars aren’t a very productive use of capital. He says that the World Bank only provides money for roads - it should be providing it for public transport, and is trying to persuade them by showing there are "market" ways to do this.
The more you get into it the more you see all this is tied up with town planning and the whole picture of development of a city. Cities in Australia and New Zealand typically have a radial pattern of major roads, running from a city centre. This is the result of strip housing along tram or bus routes running when the cities were developing early this century, before cars became common. While strip housing (within a few minutes *walking* distance of the public transport routes) seems an inelegant and inefficient way to develop a city, it’s actually efficient in terms of public transport. Some Scandinavian city development has been deliberately in this way - with small satellite towns to which good public transport connections are very economical.
With the coming of cars, people could live further away from public transport routes (because they used them less if at all), and low density in-fill housing between the radial routes developed. I don’t know it first-hand, but aerial photos we were shown of some U.S. cities show square grid roading over huge areas. Both situations are very difficult to service with public transport.
Symptoms and effects are seen in the tables below. They show, by the way, that you folk in the U.S. are exceptionally badly off for public transport: your complaints about the domination of the car are, while not uniquely yours by any means, far more relevant than anywhere else. European cities tend to be quite a different picture because they are very densely populated (which encourages public transport use), with centres designed for horses and people, that become impossible for cars. Asian cities are different again: at a guess, dense and with large areas of poverty.
Newman’s "market" solution is to build high quality, high capacity public transport (light rail if the numbers warrant it) which runs along corridors into the city centre. Since it attracts large numbers of people, it is a prime strip for retailing and other commercial development. His idea (which he can give real-life examples of) is that you sell this real-estate and use the money to build the light rail. Or you get a company who is willing to build the light rail and give them rights to the land. In addition, you have town planning regulations that encourage high density housing both along the transport corridors and in the city centre. That makes both more human, and at the same time encourages less use of cars (those in the city centre don’t need them as much) and more use of public transport (people move back to be near it).
I’m not advocating this particular way of doing things, but it does give some optimism that cars won’t necessarily rule for ever.
As far as Christchurch goes, the planners in our Councils gave us figures estimating that reducing traffic growth over 20 years from about 40-45% to about 20-30% would require the Councils to spend an extra $7-10m per year in public transport costs, but save about $20 million a year in car accident costs, and 150,000 tonnes per year of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide pollution. (Christchurch has a population of about 300,000; it has a typical Australian/New Zealand low density suburban sprawl; $ are NZ$).
Data below is admittedly rather old: 1980 for the first five lines; no more recent than 1989 the other three. Newman and Kenworthy’s study was of 32 cities worldwide; it is not clear how they were chosen.
Cities in
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US Australia Europe Asia Density (people/ha) 14 14 54 160 % total travel by PT (psngr km) 4 8 25 64 Urban road length/head (metres) 6.6 8.7 2.1 1.0 Parking spaces/1000 CBD workers 380 327 211 67 Petrol use/head (megajoules) 58,500 30,000 13,300 5,500 Car use/car (km/yr) 16,140 13,380 11,380 10,980 Car use/person (*) 12,500 10,750 5,600 1,800 Bike/walk to walk (% trips) 5 5 21 25
* passenger km per head per year 1000 megajoules is about 29 litres of petrol (gas for you Americans)
Cheers
Bill
-- Bill Rosenberg, Deputy Director, Computer Services Centre University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand w.rosenberg at csc.canterbury.ac.nz. Ph 64 3 3642801. Fax 64 3 3642332. Room 211, Ext 6801