This report measures access to jobs and to resident workers for 3 major New Zealand cities: Auckland, Christchurch, and Wellington, covering around 49% of employment opportunities and 46% of resident workers nationally. Access is the ease of reaching valuable destinations, namely urban opportunities. Access is measured in the report as the cumulative number of jobs (or workers) reachable within travel time thresholds. Access by four modes of transport are included: automobile, transit, walking, and cycling, and further compares access between cities, and across modes. City level access measures are produced as a population-weighted average to best represent the experience of the working population. The effects of traffic congestion on automobile travel times, and the walking and transfer elements of the transit mode are reflected in the access measures. The access measurements capture the combined efficiency of land use and transport infrastructure in facilitating people reaching valued destinations. Automobile provides better access than transit, walking, or cycling. Auckland has the highest regional job and resident worker numbers, and the best overall automobile access among the three cities. The majority of jobs and workers within Christchurch and Wellington can be reached by automobile within 30 minutes, so increasing travel time beyond 30 minutes has little effect on raising access in this two cities. Transit access is at a significant disadvantage compared to automobile. Transit reaches 12% of jobs reachable by automobile within 30 minutes in Auckland, 17% in Christchurch, and 38% in Wellington. Wellington has the fewest number of employment opportunities and resident workers among the three cities, but has the highest number of jobs reachable by transit at the 30-minute threshold. Transit accessibility tends to be higher in city centers, and low in other places. Cycling provides a viable option for improving accessibility. Assuming cyclists are willing to ride on-street, more opportunities can be reached by cycling than by transit in all three cities. Within 30 minutes, cycling can reach between two to three times the number of urban opportunities reachable by transit in all three cities. Walking access is lower than other modes of transport. Wellington has the highest walking access to jobs, suggesting a close proximity between residences and high-density employment centers. Christchurch has the lowest walking access to both jobs and workers. Accessibility measurements are made at the ‘Areal Unit’ level for 8:00 am trip departure time. Maps of 30-minute accessibility are included in this report.
The travel barriers presented by the coronavirus present academic administrators at schools that have come to depend on large international enrolments an opportunity. The opportunity is the political cover of exigent circumstances to force otherwise resistant and unsuspecting academic staff to translate their classes into a format that enables and facilitates distance learning. And once everything is digitised and presented asynchronously, it is a small step to scaling up to a MOOC – a massive open online course and scaling down the number of instructors.
Oxford
Whether we actually value the in-class experience is soon to be tested. The presumption appears to be we don’t. We are told a Learning Management System and online chat rooms and videoconferencing can replace real-time in person discussions. Even if it is not as good, it is good enough.
Honestly I am not clear why staff have not already (i.e. hundreds of years ago) been replaced by books, I suppose the tradition of lectures dies hard. Certainly many if not most subjects can be adequately covered in text. The university provides many valuable experiences but most are out of classroom. And if you believe signalling theory, the greatest value for many if not most students is the granting of the diploma, not the successful conveyance of knowledge and analysis skills the diploma purports to signify.
Which will be the first major traditional university to go entirely, or majority, virtual? Right now rankings and thus enrolments for prestige or credential-seeking international students has kept the numbers of academic staff what they are, as student / staff ratios factor into rankings. But the people with dollar signs in their eyes have to look at costs and the potential to hugely increase enrolment, (even at a monetary discount) perhaps under the phrasing of “democratization of education” as a source of increased profit. And if your university doesn’t go downmarket someone else’s will, leaving yoursoverstaffed with huge stranded assets.
Modern universities serve multiple purposes. They not only are in (1) the business of knowledge, skills, and diplomas, and (2) the business of prestige, and (3) the business of gathering and sorting young adults to forge new generations, (and entertaining those young adults with sports in the case of US unis), they are also (4) an immigration pathway. Perhaps those non-marketed businesses, moats in the feudalistic language of Warren Buffett’s business analysts, are what holds the physicality of the traditional 11th century university in place and keeps the center holding nearly a millennium later.
Britain has announced it will ban petrol and hybrid cars by 2035. University of Sydney experts comment on whether Australia can and should adopt a similar policy.
Move towards electric vehicles achievable in Australia
Professor David Levinson is an academic from the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Engineering who specialises in transport engineering and believes a similar move would be achievable if implemented in Australia.
“It is great to see Britain taking the lead on banning new internal combustion engine vehicles, which is essential to reduce pollution and carbon emissions. Electrification of the vehicle fleet is coming, as the technology for electric vehicles (EVs) and batteries steadily improves and costs drop with scale, and policy can accelerate the change,” said Professor Levinson.
“It is expected that EVs will be less expensive to buy and operate in the next few years. Unfortunately, Australia has been unwilling to move aggressively on EVs, despite the almost unlimited sunshine providing the opportunity for truly inexpensive renewable power,” he said.
“Cleaner vehicles will make cities smell nicer, less noisy, and overall more pleasant to be in.
“One issue that needs more attention is the charging infrastructure. While people with garages at home can install chargers, those living in multi-family housing and parking on-street will need convenient charging locations. As EVs get more widely deployed, cities will need to build more charging facilities, and petrol stations will need to adapt.”
There are some comments from other University of Sydney academics in the full article.
Toyota iRoad one-passenger concept cars, image courtesy Toyota.
In this extract from my new book The 30-Minute City, I argue that in designing our cites, we need ‘Urban Operations’ experts who can straddle the realms of both strategy and tactics. Reprinted from Foreground
Access is the driving force behind how cities were built – which is to say, cities developed with the goal of making it as easy as possible for people to reach the opportunities and activities contained within them. In the contemporary city, though, the professionals tasked with designing and developing our cities for access can often seem to be working at cross-purposes.
Our engineers are trained in engineering school to ‘do it right.’ They are trained intensively in calculations to make sure the math works out. This is very important: structural engineers do not want to misplace a negative sign or they would build the bridge upside down. In contrast, our planners retort to the engineers ‘do the right thing.’ What are the right values? And that’s really important, too. Meanwhile, our public citizens say: ‘do the right thing right’, synthesising this apparent conflict.
In designing and managing our cities for access, we need to think about both strategy and tactics. We need to think about ideas and implementation. For instance, at train stations with entrances on only one end of the platform, the objective of enabling people to leave the station is supported, but not the broader objective of enabling them to reach their destinations in the least amount of time. Traffic signals presently are timed to minimise delay for vehicles, but not for people, and fail to count vehicle occupancy (buses wait in the same traffic as cars) or pedestrians.
“Traffic signals presently are timed to minimise delay for vehicles, but not for people” – David Levinson @trnsprtst
A Nihilistic Theory
I’m going to introduce a ‘nihilistic’ theory of transport and land use: everything is ‘pointless.’
Transit facilities are pointless. A station is not a point, it is a place.
Junctions are pointless. A junction, or intersection, is not a point, it’s a space. It has conflict points, which are also spaces, but it takes time to traverse, and those traversing it take up space.
Cities, too, are pointless, and yet planners often abstract away important details – as in the Greater Sydney Commission’s Metropolis of Three Cities plan, which, like so many regional plans, has dots on maps to represent whole communities.
Everyone working in the urban sphere should recognise this ‘pointlessness.’
Just as small spatial relations matters, so too does time. Do small amounts of time savings matter? Yes! Absolutely!
A traffic engineer proposes a change that will save somebody five seconds, and someone inevitably retorts that nobody cares about five seconds. But we can never get to larger time savings (or accessibility gains) when we’re always talking about how unimportant the small changes are. There is no way to save 15 seconds if you don’t save five seconds. There is no way to save 30 seconds unless you save 15, or one minute unless you save 30 seconds, or five minutes unless you save one minute.
Trips comprise many time elements, and use many bits of the transport network, and we are not going to save time all at the same place or with the same project or process. So the better practice is to take the gains that are possible, as they will accumulate over time. Saving time, or increasing speed, increases the area that can be covered in the same amount of time, and since accessible area increases with the square of the radius, time savings have disproportional effects on accessibility.
This argument applies to all modes. The traffic signal engineers use it to justify their signal timings for automobiles. The potential flaw here is not in saving time, but in doing so at the expense of pedestrians and the neighbourhood at large.
There is the argument that time, unlike money, cannot be ‘saved’, as there is no way to store it. And of course there is an element of truth there. But I would argue that time can be used for things that are valued more highly than standing at an intersection waiting to cross – which is to say, anything else. The time not spent waiting at the intersection might be spent in a more pleasant environment, or walking or riding farther to a slightly better or higher paying job, or a shop with somewhat better goods, or from a slightly better or less expensive home. These are the trade-offs people make all the time, and by increasing the area that can be traversed in a given amount of time, we increase opportunity and choice.
A profession that is interdisciplinary in real time – or, doing the right thing right
To do the right thing right, we want to forge a new profession that is interdisciplinary in real time. Planners create long-term plans covering large areas – they, at least in theory, aim to optimise for all of society. Analysts develop policies over large areas, which have a shorter-term time horizon, and also should at least consider all of society. But the local-looking professions – engineers, architects, urban designers, and technicians of various kinds – whether they are involved in building for the long-term or managing and operating the system in the short-term, by definition optimise locally, for the site, rather than the city. How the site interacts with the city is neglected.
We need a profession not of more urban planners, nor of more transport engineers, but urban operators – people engaged in today’s city, not tomorrow’s, but who can optimise for the system as a whole (that is, by thinking about accessibility) and not just their small piece of it.
The world is changing ever-faster. Yet strangely, today’s professionals undertake and celebrate very long-term plans where they acknowledge the existence of a problem (i.e. congestion), and technology (i.e. autonomous vehicles), but don’t acknowledge that anything changes.
Instead, we should forge new urban operators as a strong alloy of planning, engineering, economics, and design. Urban operators take ideas in real time and solve today’s problems with resources on-hand, rather than solving imagined problems that bring distant dangers near. We have enough problems today. We also have solutions available to us today, and we don’t implement them. And yet people are employed to work on 40-year plans.
“We need a profession not of more urban planners, nor of more transport engineers, but urban operators – people engaged in today’s city, not tomorrow’s, but who can optimise for the city as a whole” – David Levinson @trnsprtst
Today’s disciplines are excellent for admiring and nurturing today’s problems, but not nearly so adept at solving them. Engineers and planners are so focused on the long term, their jobs effectively require them to build it and then abandon it. Operating and maintaining the system is someone else’s responsibility. Once they have made their design they hand it over to a contractor for construction, who then hands it over to the client.
And then we have people who are making microscopic decisions without thinking about the big picture. Where do you put the bus stop relative to the train station? This affects accessibility, but the decision is made based on what is convenient for the bus operator rather than passengers, or worse, to minimise delay for cars.
As Bill Garrison argued, we want people who can bridge the hard and the soft – the hardware engineering of infrastructure and vehicles and the software of management, control, and financial systems.
Bridging or merging the soft and the hard would vastly improve policy and policy-making processes. We should be able to simultaneously think of engineering and policy, not be restricted to engineering or policy. Those of us in the transport field should identify as transportists – not transport engineers or transport planners or transport economists. The problem must come before the mechanism of solution.
We want people who can bridge the site and the city. People who think about the position of a train platform in the greater context of the metropolitan area, so that people living on the south side of the platform can easily reach it, rather than semi-circumnavigating the train station to its only entrance on the north.
We want a fusion of planners and engineers who would focus on the ends not on the means, who can think in multiple scales and multiple time horizons.
The goal of the 30-minute city aligns with travel time budgets and human behaviour. We know that, historically, land developers and the railway builders were keen on the idea of a feasible commute, and they were keen on this idea when they deployed tram and train networks and concomitantly subdivided large tracts into lots and built homes that were within a 30-minute commute of the central city.
Lower case ‘d’ design
Architects are famous for BIG design ideas. But cities are not amenable to big designs any more. They grow (and should grow) incrementally, not comprehensively. So instead let’s talk about what I will call “lower case ‘d’ design,” the humble design decisions about where to put bus stops relative to station entrances, and how to time traffic signals. These are small urban design decisions that don’t get sufficient attention.
There are many things that we can do that involve rethinking the details – like adding train station gates to both ends of platforms to expand catchment areas, and thus patronage. Details like stop spacing and location, practices like all-door boarding, payment before boarding, optimising timetables and frequency, may just squeeze a few seconds per stop or minutes per route out of the existing configuration, but collectively they greatly expand people’s accessibility.
More strategically, this requires thinking about transport and land use balance. Offsetting today’s imbalance can give us growth without additional travel or commuting-related congestion. To achieve a 30-minute city, cities need to put new jobs in housing-rich areas and new housing in job-rich areas systematically as a way of growing. This contrasts with local government’s desire to focus employment in the central city, and developers who will tend to put more housing in the outer suburbs where there are many fewer jobs.
And we need to design for the cities we want, not ‘predict and provide’ for the city we forecast. Our future cities cannot be delivered by the same disciplinary thinking that created the cities we have.
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This is an abridged extract taken from David Levinson’s book The 30-Minute City: Designing for Access, available here in PDF format and here in print.
Levinson joined the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Sydney in 2017 as Foundation Professor in Transport Engineering. He conducts research on accessibility, transport economics, transport network evolution, and transport and land use interaction.
David Levinson, Transportist 
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