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Melbourne Transport |
Common Urban Myths About TransportMyth:
Park-and-Ride facilities will encourage public transport use
Fact:
Expecting people to drive to railway stations puts an artificial limit on the
number of passengers the train system can support. Car parks are expensive
to build and maintain, are space-intensive, lock up valuable real estate near
stations, and require public transport users to own just as many cars as if
public transport didn't exist. In well-patronised rail systems around the
world, most train passengers arrive at the station by feeder bus or tram, not
by car; it would simply be impossible to provide enough car parking to get
all these passengers there by car instead.
One of the most visible aspects of most Melbourne railway stations is the acres of car parking that surround them. Our public transport authorities are constantly expanding these car parks, thinking this is an easy way to encourage more people to catch trains; certainly easier than feeder buses, which require planning and funding. And who could disagree? The car parks are well used, and anyone who catches a train from the suburbs in the morning, or gets off a train in the afternoon, can see for themselves that a lot of passengers drive themselves to and from the station. But looks can also deceive. At the time of the 2006 Census, around 140,000 journeys to work were made by train each working day in Melbourne (up from around 120,000 in 2001). The following table shows how these commuters got to the station on Census day in 2006 and in 2001:
(Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Method of travel to work (full classification list), 2001 and 2006 censuses. Totals may not sum exactly due to rounding.) As the figures show, barely one in five Melbourne rail commuters gets to the station by car. On the other hand, a clear majority of train travellers walk to the station, while a comparable number arrive by bus or tram as by car (despite the generally very poor provision of these services). What is also particularly interesting is that the vast majority of new train passengers in 2006 (those who weren't using the train in 2001) also walk to the station. In fact, the number of people walking to the station increased by 27% between 2001 and 2006. Meanwhile the number using feeder buses or trams increased by 20%; but the number driving or being driven to the station increased by just 2%. In absolute numbers, the recent increase in train patronage is dominated by those living within walking distance of a station - although feeder services, poor as they are, have also played a part in delivering more people to trains. On the other hand, the number of park-and-ride and 'kiss-and-ride' passengers has been relatively static despite the government's multi-million dollar efforts in building more station car parks. This hasn't stopped the road lobby using park-and-ride as a way of having their cake and eating it too: calling for more roads and more car parks as a way to get people to railway stations. This has led to some curiously ironic, if not outright daft, statements from community leaders who have been bamboozled into thinking that the way to improve public transport is to build bigger roads to drive cars on:
How do people get to railway stations in cities with 'world's best practice' public transport? Comparative figures show some striking differences between Melbourne and other cities. Paul Mees, in A Very Public Solution, compares access to stations by Melbourne's 88 million train passengers in 1991 with Toronto's 302 million train passengers:
(Source: Mees, A Very Public Solution, p.232) These figures are for all passengers, not just those travelling to work. They show that for non-work trips the share of people walking to the station is even greater, and the share of those getting to the station by car, bus or tram even less. (This is to be expected, since station car parks are quickly filled in the morning with the cars of nine-to-five commuters, while feeder services in Melbourne are even poorer off-peak than in peak hour.) The actual number of people walking or cycling to stations is the same in both cities, though in Toronto this number corresponds to only 20 per cent of passengers, compared with Melbourne's 68 per cent. Fewer people get to the station by car, largely because Toronto has fewer parking spaces - 11,000 compared with 27,500 in Melbourne in 1991. However, in Toronto those parking spaces are concentrated at fewer railway stations, which means that station car parks in Toronto take the form of huge multi-storey edifices, which fill up daily and yet only cater to 3 per cent of train travellers. The most striking difference between Melbourne and Toronto is the number of people arriving at the station by feeder bus or tram. Astoundingly, over 25 times as many people get to the station this way in Toronto as in Melbourne. This disparity helps explain the success of Toronto's public transport system, which in 1991 carried one-quarter of all trips in Metropolitan Toronto, and one-third of all work trips. As in Melbourne, around 80 per cent of Torontonians don't live within walking distance of a railway station. But in Toronto this 80 per cent slice of the population has a fast, frequent feeder bus network to access the rail system. In Melbourne this 80 per cent does not use public transport much at all, except perhaps in peak hour to commute to work. This key difference in Melbourne between the transport habits of people who have a station within walking distance, and those who don't, also explains why the proportion of people driving to the station is usually thought much greater than it really is. If you're a typical Melburnian, you probably don't live within walking distance of a station yourself, and chances are most of your friends don't either. If any of them do use trains, they'll more likely than not drive to the station. You're less likely to know train users who walk to the station, simply because these users, while more numerous, live in a different part of town. If Melbourne is to approach 20 per cent of trips by public transport - let alone the Toronto 'benchmark' of 25 per cent - a way needs to be found to get people to railway stations who live beyond walking distance. There are basically three methods: car, bicycle or feeder bus. Driving to the Station: a failed strategyFor decades the Government has relied unsuccessfully on the 'car' option. Not only does the evidence show this is an ineffective strategy: there are a number of obvious problems with trying to accommodate a large population of public transport users by getting all (or even most) to drive to the station. While it's fine to provide some park-and-ride capacity, relying on it exclusively is likely to fail for the following reasons. It's never going to be enough. This is a familiar problem: the car is a perfect method of transport as long as you're the only one using it. Currently, around 5 per cent of Melburnians are train users, and 20 per cent drive to the station; Melbourne's railway station car parks are quite up to housing the cars of this 1 per cent of the population (20 per cent of 5 per cent). But what if not 1 per cent, but 25 per cent of Melbourne's population wanted to park their cars at railway stations? There wouldn't be enough land or enough concrete to handle the task!
Even if we merely doubled the size of every station car park in Melbourne, the very best we could do on the figures above is increase train patronage by 20 per cent - from 5 per cent of the population to 6 per cent. Such a tiny increase seems hardly worth the very substantial cost of providing all that extra parking. It's expensive to provide. This is true even when multi-storey parking structures aren't involved. To take one example: in 2005, the government spent $2 million on an additional 120 car spaces at Huntingdale station. Depending how one views it, this amounts to either a $17,000 gift to each of 120 lucky car owners, or an attempt to grow patronage at a cost of $17,000 per additional train passenger. (The park-and-ride facilities announced more recently in the Meeting Our Transport Challenges plan come at similar cost: $17,000 to $18,000 per space, probably the most expensive way known to increase patronage.) According to the local council, the people using the extra spaces at Huntingdale don't even come from the local area, but are instead driving in from further out to take advantage of cheaper Zone 1 fares:
For a fraction of the $2 million outlay, one could buy and operate two buses which would deliver local passengers to trains all day, not just in peak hour when parking spaces might be available. It can't be relied on to increase patronage. Relying on park-and-ride to grow patronage assumes that every new driver using the car park is someone who didn't previously use public transport - as distinct from someone who previously caught the bus, or perhaps carpooled with someone else. This is the fallacy behind the 'successful' park-and-ride station installed at Doncaster in 2002, which allows people to park at the entrance to the Eastern Freeway and catch a bus the rest of the way into the city. A review of the facility by the Department of Infrastructure in 2004 found that of those using it over the survey period, precisely one person was a new user of public transport. Every other person had previously caught a bus all the way from home to the city. The real reason for the car park's popularity was that, like Huntingdale station, it was located on a fare boundary. This made it advantageous for a lot of former bus users to drive as far as the freeway, park for free, and then change to the bus and pay the cheaper fare. It certainly was a 'success', if the objective was to get people to drive more! It's contrary to good land use planning. There are compelling urban planning arguments against the wholesale expansion of park-and-ride facilities. Many railway stations in Melbourne are located in district centres, with a concentration of nearby commercial activity. We are fortunate in Melbourne to have such a pattern of rail-centred urban development. But this also puts a premium on real estate near stations, which means that expansion of car parks is not only expensive but also displaces other, more useful commercial activities. The cars of train passengers also add to traffic volumes in district centres, detracting from urban amenity. It places pressure on car parking for other purposes. Because there will never be enough car spaces to accommodate all train users, giving people no alternative to driving to the station means that pressure is inevitably placed on parking for other purposes as well. Even with our current low patronage levels and higher provision of car spaces compared with Toronto, this is already apparent:
It entrenches environmental and social equity problems. Park-and-ride requires even regular public transport users to own cars, and has nothing to offer those who (for whatever reason) do not own a car. If the car is left at the park-and-ride station while the owner is at work, the car remains unavailable to other household members, so that a second or third car is still necessary. Meanwhile, the car itself is vulnerable to theft - so much so that ironically, police in Epping are now encouraging commuters to certify that their cars are not used during the day, so that a car on the road during working hours can be identified as stolen! Is it really a good thing to require families to shoulder the cost of a car which must then sit idle for eight hours a day? Park-and-ride also leads to an increased number of short car trips, which contribute disproportionately to air pollution owing to the 'cold start' effect. 'Kiss-and-ride', a variation in which a family member drops off the traveller and returns home, is no solution as it leads to increased empty running of private cars. It undermines public transport use. Perhaps one of the biggest problems with the idea of driving to public transport is psychological. Once you've started your journey in a car, you've got little reason not to drive it all the way to your destination; a fact not lost on public transport users themselves.
Cycling to the Station: a healthy optionOne alternative to park-and-ride is pedal-and-ride, where people use bicycles to get to the train station. This is an environmentally desirable option which is taken up by choice in some European countries such as the Netherlands that have adopted an aggressive approach to traffic calming, limiting vehicle speeds in urban areas and restricting road space to create an urban environment conducive to cycling. It will be a daunting challenge to recreate the Dutch experience in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, whose urban environments have been steadily moving in the opposite direction over the decades. While pedal-and-ride is a mode choice compatible with the provision of feeder buses, it is almost certainly incompatible with park-and-ride, as the latter cannot help but increase the volume of car traffic on roads leading to railway stations, and high traffic volumes and speeds are a major deterrent to cycling in Melbourne. Provision of bicycle lanes and bike parking at stations - but not additional car parking - will help make cycling an attractive way to get to the station. Bus to the Station: a public transport solutionThe remaining alternative is feeder bus services. Part of what makes this so attractive compared with park-and-ride is that feeder buses have useful functions other than conveying train passengers to railway stations. Half of all our journeys are local trips, with the origin and destination within the same suburb, and when such journeys are made by car they also contribute disproportionately to pollution and congestion. A comprehensive bus network is essential to making public transport attractive for these local trips, as our Squaresville thought experiment shows. But as suburban activity centres and railway stations are often found in the same locations, the same buses that are useful for local travel are also useful as feeders to stations. The feeder bus option is currently at a disadvantage relative to the car option, for reasons that are not at all hard to find (unless you're a Victorian Government transport planner):
The kind of lack of coordination cited above, as well as low frequencies, limited operating hours, slow convoluted routes and an absence of bus priority in traffic, ensure that Melbourne's buses are no more than a last-resort option, even for a relatively short trip to the nearest railway station. Improvements in frequency, coordination and priority up to a standard that is commonplace in European and Canadian cities could make buses competitive with cars, and superior to park-and-ride both in cost and convenience. Park and Ride: an option, not a panaceaThe problems with park-and-ride become apparent when planners rely on it as the only method of delivering passengers to public transport. This is not to say that it can't be a useful backup option when applied in a limited number of locations to supplement a good feeder bus network. While experience in other cities with high public transport use points to the importance of feeder buses, it remains true that some train users do prefer to drive to the station. Park-and-ride remains as a minority travel mode in Toronto and in other cities with well-used public transport. Many of the disadvantages of park-and-ride pointed out above can be avoided if park-and-ride facilities are located at those railway stations that do not have intense development nearby, and if park-and-ride is always viewed as complementary to feeder services and never as an alternative that makes feeder services unnecessary. And where feeder services are inadequate, it is only good sense that their improvement take priority over the expansion of park-and-ride facilities for funding. © 2007 Public Transport Users Association Inc. (PTUA), Victoria, Australia. ABN 83 801 487 611. Last modified: 27 May 2008
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