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Melbourne Transport |
Common Urban Myths About TransportMyth:
Viable public transport requires high population densities
Fact:
Public transport runs successfully in many cities with similar or lower
population densities than Melbourne. Any city with sufficient population
density to cause traffic congestion has sufficient population to support a
first-rate public transport alternative.
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:
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.
The density myth has also become the centrepiece of the Bracks and Brumby 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 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. 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. Pretexts and FabricationsMany of the contemporary supporters of higher densities are perfectly well-meaning, and speak from genuine concern with the sustainability of Melbourne's urban form. But not everyone's motives are so benign. It's always been the case that many Australian transport planners and economists, 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 motorways). No-one sums up this attitude better than the neo-liberal Institute of Public Affairs, who to their credit have held to this position consistently for three decades:
Although the growing public discontent with the inadequacy of public transport has made open political support for this idea less common since the 1990s, one politican who has been happy to regurgitate it without shame is Federal Liberal leader Tony Abbott.
One cannot always believe the statistics that appear when density is used to discredit public transport. 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. The latter calculation is a reasonable one, as we see below, but the former is nonsense: around 75% of the MSD isn't in the urban area at all.) Federal Finance Minister (and MP for Melbourne) Lindsay Tanner made the same mistake about Melbourne in 2009, in an address to the Property Council of Australia. And Melbourne 2030 itself played 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.
Like the most successful urban myths, the story has a grain of truth.
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: Melbourne is now, however, more densely populated than most US and Canadian cities, which spread outwards more recently under the influence of the car. US Census figures published for the first time in 2008 (see below) show that Melbourne is more dense than Boston, Chicago and Portland - three of the cities with the most successful public transport in the USA (if still modest by world standards). The figures also reveal a startling paradox about Los Angeles itself. LA, in reality, is overall one of the most dense urban areas in North America. All American cities are surrounded by low-density suburbia, but LA's suburbs were settled with densities somewhat higher than elsewhere - compensating for other factors such as the huge amount of space given over to roads. LA's transport problems stem not from low density, it turns out, but from high density combined with car-centric transport policy - precisely where Melbourne is headed if we aren't careful. Melbourne: Density versus FormYet Melbourne does have a geographical advantage that works to public transport's benefit - and not just through being more densely populated than many American cities. Because our 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. Aside from a handful of postwar shopping malls, most of our suburban district centres date back to the late 19th century, contrary to those in most American cities where suburbs only became established after World War II.
While Melbourne's public transport has historically been far from perfect,
it is worth recalling that in 1950 the average Melburnian made 449 trips by
public transport, and three-quarters of all motorised journeys to work were
made by public transport. That this was possible in a sprawling city of
Melbourne's population density declined a little in the years after 1950, 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:
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 current plans for ring roads and 'missing links' are so dangerous to Melbourne's future. Density, shmensity: it's all about serviceDespite not sharing in Melbourne's extensive rail infrastructure and supportive urban form, 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 has long aimed to
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. Unfortunately, many transport planners have completely failed to make the link between quality of service and patronage. The connection is obvious to anyone who checks the statistics, and holds true in low-density cities as much as in high-density cities. As a result, low patronage on public transport is too frequently excused as being residents' fault for wanting big backyards, rather than a fairly obvious result of lousy service provision. So when Portland (a US city with modest public transport use, though fairly good by US standards) was forced to cut some low-patronage services in the 2008-09 recession, one prominent transport planner wrote:
As Jarrett well knows, residents of these Portland suburbs do have an alternative - private cars. And their decision to use them in preference to the cited bus routes was, it turns out, entirely rational. Of the three routes he named, two were 'commuter' routes that ran five trips a day on weekdays, while the third operated once an hour with the last bus at about 6:30pm. None of them ran on weekends. In short, they were equivalent to some of the worst Melbourne suburban bus routes. Blaming density merely serves to excuse poor design and false economies, and lets the planners off the hook when poor service fails. If density were the key to use of sustainable transport, then of course you wouldn't live in Portland at all - you'd live in high-density New York, which rates highest in the US for public transport use. But you might just as well consider living in Los Angeles, Miami or Las Vegas: all cities with much higher urban density than Portland. Los Angeles even has a higher density than New York when entire urban areas are compared - a fact not widely known or believed until very recently. The problem is these cities, all 'high density' as they are, all have lower mode shares for public transport than even Portland does! The table below gives the overall urban density and the public transport mode share for journeys to work in a selection of US and Australian cities. There is some relationship evident between density and public transport use, but it is weak and unconvincing, to say the least. Some other factor must be at work to explain why Brisbane, for example, has three times the rate of public transport use as LA despite being just one-third the density. That factor is good-quality service, which is present in Brisbane (at least in peak hour) but virtually absent in LA. Although we haven't included Canadian cities, they do even better: Ottawa with 17.2 people per urban hectare has almost the same density as Miami, but differs from Miami in having one of the highest-quality bus systems in the world. Its 21.2% of journeys to work by public transport exceeds that in Miami more than fivefold!
Source: Extracted from Mees, Transport For Suburbia (2010), Table 4.1 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.
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. © 2010 Public Transport Users Association Inc. (PTUA), Victoria, Australia. ABN 83 801 487 611. Last modified: 28 August 2010
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