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Common Urban Myths About Transport

This is probably the most widely believed myth about public transport, and therefore the most dangerous. It's an old story that, like current transport policy, originates in the first major American freeway study:

The conditions of land use and density....are the major determinants of the travel market. If demand is constrained by these factors, it is unlikely that changes in supply will have any great impact on the number of users.
---Chicago Area Transportation Study 1956

There was no alternative to freeways in Chicago, the road planners said, because the city was too spread out and low-density. The road lobby and its supporters have been using the 'spread-out city' as an excuse for freeway building ever since. The story has been repeated so often in Melbourne that many urban planners, commentators, and even some environmentalists believe it.

Gus Braidotti is rightly impressed with the quality, cost and frequency of public transit in Tokyo. But Tokyo has about nine times more residents per square kilometre than Melbourne. This is one of several fundamental reasons why Tokyo has such a high quality transit system and why Melbourne, with its highly dispersed and fragmented population, struggles to sustain the system we have.

Until there is a wider community appreciation here of these fundamentals of how a metropolis functions, it seems Melburnians will continue to build a very low density city and as a corollary get a low quality, high cost, urban transit system.
---David Mayes, Australian Institute of Urban Studies, The Age, 20 February 2006

Let's be frank about public transport - the outer suburbs of Melbourne are poorly served, and, with low population densities, are unlikely to be well served at any reasonable price.
---Sinclair Davidson, RMIT School of Economics, The Age, 11 July 2006

London has more than eight million people crammed into an area of around 1600 square kilometres. Melbourne is spread over 8000.... On the outer mortgage belt of urban Australia the car is king. Distance and population density make the most enthusiastic public transport systems expensive and inefficient. Working families drive to work, to sport and to the shops because they have no alternative.
---Matthew Warren, The Australian, 17 March 2008

The density myth has also become the centrepiece of the Bracks Government's Melbourne 2030 planning strategy. Apparently, in order to encourage public transport, vast tracts of inner Melbourne will have to be rebuilt at higher densities. As The Age puts it:

The deal implicit in urban consolidation is that people forgo private space, backyards and cars for a more compact lifestyle.... [instead] Melburnians are opting for ever bigger, more energy-consuming homes. They need to spare a thought for the environment in which their children will be brought up.... The compact city vision is also under pressure from knee-jerk resident groups and councils in established suburbs.... Unreasonable opposition to higher-density housing in existing streets only adds to the pressure for car-dependent fringe estates.
---The Age (editorial), 5 January 2007

The implication is that we must give open slather to developers to build high-rise towers throughout the inner suburbs because, we are told, this is the only way to achieve higher rates of public transport use. (Even if this were true it would be of no account: since Melbourne 2030 includes no real plan to improve public transport, the only result of all this flat-building would be increased traffic congestion.) The problem is, of course, that although many Melburnians are open to the idea of forgoing at least some car use, the idea of forgoing private space and backyards is much less popular.

But even the most well-meaning urban myth is an urban myth nonetheless. Melbourne 2030 notwithstanding, most Australian transport planners and their allies in the media want to convince us that Melbourne is the most decentralised, low-density city in the world because they have an implacable ideological hostility to public transport (especially rail) and a love affair with roads (especially freeways). No-one sums up this attitude better than the right-wing Institute of Public Affairs, who to their credit have held to this position consistently for three decades:

In spite of public transport benefiting from massive subsidies, the coverage of its ability to carry people to their destinations quickly is highly restricted.... It can only operate effectively in urban conditions and only really effectively in urban areas with high densities and concentrated origin and destination points. A rule of thumb is that, to be commercially viable, rail-based systems require [400 people per hectare] and express bus systems [250]. Melbourne has an average density of [15]....
For the main part....cities should adapt to the car and the truck. Road systems are far and away more important than fixed track systems, and buses can make good use of them.... It is therefore vital that the road system be upgraded to keep pace with the demand for car transportation.
---Alan Moran, "The Public Transport Myth", Institute of Public Affairs, October 2006

One cannot always believe the statistics that appear. In 1992 the Federal Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics calculated that Melbourne's population density is only 5.03 persons per hectare, less than 20% of Los Angeles' 27.1! (They did this by dividing the population of the entire Melbourne Statistical Division by its gross area, and the population of the City of LA into the area of residential land.) Melbourne 2030 plays a similar trick, claiming that Melbourne's density is only half that of Montreal and Toronto by using inconsistent definitions of the respective urban areas.

The BTCE figures were concocted in order to scuttle the proposition that Australian cities could support substantial new rail systems. In other words, transport planners keep saying our city is like Los Angeles because they want it to become like Los Angeles. LA is inevitable is an easier argument to sell the public than LA is desirable. The argument also suits the bureaucrats who oversee Melbourne's public transport planning, since the alternative explanation for the failure to boost public transport's share of travel in Melbourne reflects adversely on them.

Of course, the story seems credible: it's perfectly obvious that Melbourne is more spread-out than English and European cities. And a century ago, Melbourne was a low-density city by world standards, because its extensive public transport system enabled people to live in the suburbs long before the car came along. In 1883 a visitor to Melbourne observed: Terraces and attached houses are universally disliked and almost every class of suburban house is detached and stands in its own garden.

Melbourne is now, however, more densely populated than most US and Canadian cities, which spread outwards more recently under the influence of the car. And because Melbourne's initial suburban growth was based around trains and trams, rather than the car, the form of development is more 'public transport friendly', with a strong central business district and most major suburban shopping centres near railway stations.

Melbourne's population density declined a little following World War II, but in recent times the decline has actually stopped (despite propaganda to the contrary). According to official figures, Melbourne's overall density reached a minimum in 1981 and has since been increasing:

More detailed figures from the Census confirm the general trend. In the early 1990s, the proportion of Melbourne's population growth occuring within 20km of the GPO was 24% - a quite respectable proportion considering this was almost all within established suburbs. But in the three years to 2007, this proportion had jumped to 41%. For a while it had been evident that the population of inner Melbourne was booming; but now, established 'middle' suburbs whose populations were static or declining in the 1990s are also showing strong population growth.

A 'back of the envelope' calculation using the Census data shows that any location in the Melbourne urban area can support - at the minimum - a bus service running every ten minutes throughout the day, assuming just 20 per cent of people make just one return journey by public transport per day (see Appendix).

Perhaps the remarkable thing about the postwar growth of Melbourne is just how little it has altered the basic form of the city laid down in the 1880s land boom. The postwar brick-veneer suburbs are not fundamentally different from their 'Hawthorn brick' and 'California bungalow' counterparts of the 1880s and 1920s, and are even built to similar densities:

The appearance of Americanising tendencies in the 1960s now appears more like a 'hiccup' in a consistent long-term pattern. Trends toward 'gentrification' of the inner and middle suburbs reinforce this conclusion. Yet many commentators, mesmerised by the US experience and the false leads of the 1960s, seem to be ignoring the real nature of urban development in Melbourne. It often takes overseas visitors to observe the reality:

What you really have here is a European type of development at lower density.
---Matthew Quinn, a British transport analyst visiting Melbourne, 1992

Although some recent development has been poorly planned, Melbourne is not a formless sprawl like modern American 'anti-cities' which grew up entirely around the car. We do not share the American pattern of ring freeways linking scattered suburban office parks impossible to serve by public transport. This is precisely why present plans for the Eastlink freeway with its 'missing link' through Heidelberg are so dangerous to Melbourne's future.

Nonetheless, even low-density North American cities have, or are planning, viable alternatives to the car. In Toronto, for example, where the average citizen makes more than twice as many public transport trips as in Melbourne, the official transport plan aims to

enhance the attractiveness of travel by transit in the Greater Toronto Area for a variety of trip purposes including, but not limited to, journey to work, and decrease reliance on the private automobile.
---Transit 2020, Toronto, 1993

Vancouver, where public transport patronage is 37% higher than in Melbourne, plans to triple patronage by 2021 in order to catch up with Toronto. As in Toronto, this is to be done by providing fast, frequent, integrated, safe and cheap public transport.

Both Toronto and Vancouver are spread-out cities, but are not using that fact as an excuse for car-dominated transport policies.

Low-density Vancouver also gives the lie to the assertion that public transport in spread-out cities comes only at high cost. Its entire budget for roads and public transport corresponds to just $180 per resident, compared with $430 per resident in Melbourne.

This does not mean, of course, that sensitively applied encouragement of medium density housing is not worthwhile. Vancouver indeed has a plan to introduce more 'medium density' housing - but by this they mean the quarter-acre blocks that have been traditional in Melbourne for over a century!

So carefully targeted land-use measures will help, albeit marginally. But the real challenge lies elsewhere.

The problem is not inadequate road infrastructure....The problem is not that Melbourne is too dispersed....The above are all pseudo-problems posed by specialists of various persuasions to enable them to discover answers which serve and justify their interests and ideologies. Vast amounts of money are today being spent on pseudo-solutions which keep those interests in business. They have nothing to do with economic prosperity, environmental quality or accessibility in Melbourne.
---Nicholas Low, Senior Lecturer in Planning, University of Melbourne, 1995

Technical Appendix: How Much Population is Really Needed to Support a Bus Route?

The following calculation shows that any part of the Melbourne urban area is capable of supporting a 10-minute bus service for 18 hours a day if just 20 per cent of people make just one return trip each by public transport per day. It shows that under this assumption, any such bus route will cover its costs, even on the urban fringe; if we are prepared to accept a small public subsidy, an even greater level of service can be provided. In established suburbs with higher populations, a higher level of service is justified in any case.

We assume that the cost of running a bus is $45 per hour. This is the estimate that Spencer Street Station contractor Leighton gave publicly in August 2004 as the cost of running tram replacement services in Collins Street (the trams being unable to run due to work on the station upgrade). With the economies of scale in a large bus operator like Ventura or Grendas the figure for an individual bus will be less than this. We nonetheless use the higher figure to ensure any errors are on the conservative side.

Estimating the amount of revenue generated on average by each passenger who boards is difficult (particularly with private operators who treat their operating statistics as trade secrets), but given the cost of a two-hour single-zone full-fare ticket is between $2.20 and $3.00 and many passengers will only make one trip on this ticket (and many who transfer will use multi-zone tickets), a figure of $1.50 per full-fare passenger is likely to be a conservative estimate (and leaves some room to reduce fares while keeping services viable). Of course, the contribution from a concession passenger will be half this.

To recoup $45 an hour therefore requires 30 boardings by full-fare passengers per hour, or 540 over the course of an 18-hour day. The number of buses required to operate a 10-minute service over a route of length L is equal to the time taken to cover distance 2L, divided by 10 minutes. With an average bus speed of 20kph (inferred from current bus timetables), a bus can travel 3.3km in 10 minutes, so the number of buses required is N = L / 1.67 when L is expressed in kilometres. Accordingly the number of boardings per day required to break even is 540 x N = 324 x L - that is, 324 per kilometre.

Define the catchment area for the route as the strip extending 400m on either side, and suppose that in that catchment area 20% of people make on average one return journey by public transport per day (for two boardings). Suppose 50% of those are full-fare passengers, with the remainder counting half the value. Then each route kilometre provides 80 hectares (0.8 square km) of catchment and 0.3P boardings, where P is the population of the catchment area. For 324 boardings, P must be at least 1080, and so the population density must be at least 1080 / 80 = 13.5 per hectare.

Now, the average population density for the Melbourne urban area is at least 18 per hectare, based on census figures. We can get more detail on specific areas by looking at the population density maps from the Melbourne Social Atlas, published every 5 years from Census data. On the 2001 map, patches of urban area are shaded in one of five colours; the lowest-density patches are shaded pale grey (less than 15 per hectare) or dark grey (15 to 30 per hectare).

In order to be considered part of the urban area at all, a region (with some exceptions) has to have a density of at least 2 per hectare. As a rough estimate, we therefore take the average density of a pale grey patch to be 8.5 per hectare (halfway between 2 and 15). Erring on the side of caution, we estimate the average density of a dark grey region at 20 per hectare, not far off the Melbourne average of 18.

Now consider a putative bus route passing exclusively through pale grey regions of 8.5 per hectare and dark grey regions of 20 per hectare. In order to get a mean density of 13.5 per hectare or more, the route can have up to 56 per cent of its length bordered by pale grey regions, and still get full cost recovery. With the exception of the Mornington Peninsula and the Dandenongs, there are very few putative bus routes on the Social Atlas map bordered with pale grey regions for more than half their length. Whether the route is in Craigieburn, Montrose or Werribee - or indeed in St Kilda - there would appear to be sufficient population along the route to make it viable.

Of course, the crucial assumption here is that 20 per cent of people make one trip by public transport each day, which roughly corresponds to public transport being used for 20 per cent of all trips - supposedly a State Government policy objective. If the mode share is only 3 per cent, as in most Melbourne suburbs at present, then the density required for viable public transport goes up proportionally - by our calculations, to 90 per hectare instead of 13.5 per hectare. And if concession passengers represent 90% of boardings, rather than just 50%, this pushes the figure up again, to a massive 123 per hectare. Very few parts of Melbourne record population densities this high.

This basic observation lies at the root of road lobby calculations (like those by Alan Moran above) purporting to show that viable public transport requires the kind of enormous population densities seen only in crowded cities like New York, Paris or Singapore. Basically, if you assume that drastic improvements in service frequency (from typically 40-60 minutes at present to 10 minutes in our scenario) don't induce more people to use the service, it's not surprising the improvement turns out hard to justify!

Our estimate of 13.5 people per hectare required to justify a 10 minute bus service compares favourably with other estimates by transport experts who make realistic assumptions about the way people respond to improved services: 12.5 per hectare in the 1965 Brisbane Transportation Study; 12 per hectare by Thompson in Great Cities and Their Traffic (1977); 15 per hectare by Pushkarev and Zupen in Public Transportation and Land Use Policy (1977); and 14 per hectare by Mees in A Very Public Solution (2000). Each of these authors use slightly different assumptions to arrive at their figure, none of which concide precisely with ours; it is thus especially reassuring that they all arrive at a similar result.

It's not hard to see how varying some of our assumptions affects the final result; since our assumptions were deliberately stacked against the viability of public transport, the effect is usually favourable. For example, if services are not expected to cover all their costs but can instead be subsidised by up to 50%, we can cover areas with a population density right down to 7 per hectare (including the Mornington and Bellarine Peninsulas and the Dandenongs). If bus priority improvements raise the average speed of buses from 20kph to 25kph, or economies of scale mean buses can be run for $40 instead of $45 per hour, then costs go down roughly in proportion. One can then provide a couple of additional services in peak hour, or run night services, or reduce fares, without increasing the subsidy.

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© 2007 Public Transport Users Association Inc. (PTUA), Victoria, Australia. ABN 83 801 487 611.
General copying and distribution on a non-commercial basis is permitted subject to proper acknowlegement.
Authorised by Tony Morton, 247 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, for the PTUA

Last modified: 21 April 2008