30-Minute City

The Thirty-Minute City on ABC Sydney Afternoons

| David Levinson

I had the pleasure of being on James Valentine’s

Afternoons on ABC Radio on Friday (June 18, 2021)

We discussed the thirty-minute city and related topics for about 15 minutes.

An automated transcript is below:

James Valentine 0:11
You’ve been hearing for a while now that we’re going to have sort of three cities in Sydney. We’re going to have the city city, the river city of Parramatta and now the new Bradfield city, the Western Sydney parklands city, the Aerotropolis, it seems to be a city, it’s got at least three names at the moment, that Western one and there’s going to be three hubs, we’re going to be a 30 minute city, we’re gonna be able to get around this city, you’ll be able to live, you know, Jason, the paramedic, everything will be there, your job will be there, the school will be there to help services will be there and everything. So you’ll never need to leave that area, necessarily. The you may have also heard that the IBC announced a little earlier in the week that 300 or so staff will be moving to Paramount or will be based in Parramatta in a few years time that we’re in the process of looking for the right accommodation and figuring out what what would be best in that in that part of the world. So these are interesting things. And I wondered whether it was a good time to have a conversation about how successful is this going to do things like this work? When when, when an industry when something like our says yeah, when a government department or the ABC or an industry says, Okay, we’ll base ourselves here. What is it? What do we need to make that work? Do we have the infrastructure to make it work? And what effect does it have on the area? Is that a good thing? Does it you know, usually mean? Yep, this is great. The play starts to boom. And it works. I mean, there’s a big broad questions, but let’s see if we can crunch them down a little Professor David Levinson joins us. He’s from the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Sydney. He’s a very successful career looking at transport and urban infrastructure in lots of ways. He’s the author of something that’s got a dissertation that’s called probably my favorite title, “on whom the toll falls”. Yeah, a brilliant title about road road charging. Really a title of people good road charging and the like. But it’s great to have you been here for a for a conversation. Professor David Levinson. Good afternoon. Thank you for having me. I mean, you’re we’ve been sitting about four years or so now from from Minnesota. Is that right? Yes. And so do you look, I would look at the City of Sydney go. It’s pretty congested, messy, haphazard, thing, but you know that that’s grown like, like Topsy over over a couple of centuries. Now. How do you see it?

David Levinson 3:35
Well, I mean, it’s certainly grown fast. But all cities are messy. All cities are congested. A city that’s not congested, is probably dying. And so congestion is one of the prices for urbanity. Right? We can’t expect our infrastructure to grow as fast as our population and places that tried to invest excessively in infrastructure before the people are there are going to have a lot of white elephants, a lot of projects that aren’t aren’t well used.

James Valentine 4:02
Right? So. So the notion that you might think, let’s, let’s build all the metro and the schools and the parks and hope people come, that doesn’t quite work.

David Levinson 4:11
We don’t have the resources to do that, unless you want to not address the existing problems that are already there. You know, if, if planning were 100% accurate, and we could forecast these things perfectly sure. But that’s not the case. that’s never been the case. And, you know, you, you can’t expect the populations that were here before 1788 to have built in advance of the settlers. It just doesn’t, you know, so we have to think about what are we trying to do and try to establish some sort of concurrency between the development of land and the development of infrastructure. And once you’ve solved all the problems for your existing residents, then if you have some excess resources and want to sort of plan for our future residents We might be moving into currently greenfields undeveloped areas. That might make sense. But we clearly haven’t solved the problems for all of our existing residents. And yet we’re starting to build some infrastructure for people who don’t live here yet.

James Valentine 5:12
Right. So is your sense of most cities is that the it’s enough for them to play catch up.

David Levinson 5:19
I think most cities need to play catch up with their existing demand. Certainly a fast growing city is always going to be playing catch up. When the growth slows, you might be able to have caught up at at some point. But at that point, your city’s not really growing anymore. And I think of cities in the American Midwest. You’re Detroit’s in Cleveland, well, they probably have enough infrastructure for the population that’s there. Now, they did catch up. And then things change, because that’s what happens, things change, we can’t accurately foresee how the technology is going to change how preferences are going to change how economics are going to change. And we really need to be thinking I mean, a 40 year time horizons fine for a vision. So if you think about the plans currently out there 2056 plans they were started in 2016. That’s fine for vision, but we have to also constantly be updating and and checking those and make the next investment decision aligned with the plan. But we can’t expect to build out a 40 year plan today and just wait for those roads and train lines

James Valentine 6:22
fell out. Yeah. And we can’t control that within a city like Sydney, will say things like, there’ll be another million people here in 10 years old and that sort of stuff. And people will say, Well, does that have to happen? Is this also somewhat uncontrollable cities have a great gravitational pull?

David Levinson 6:37
Well, I mean, a city is part of a country and the national government will decide immigration levels. And obviously, unexpectedly last year, immigration levels fell. And we see cities in Australia, especially Sydney, are losing population in the past year to regional areas as there’s more out migration and then migration. Now, maybe immigration will reopen. But that’s a policy choice. And assuming that that policy choices made, may be probably those people will come to cities, because that’s where most of the economic activity still is. But there’s no guarantee of that. I mean, we could have much better telecommunications technologies in 10 or 20 years, in which case, the advantages of the city are lower than they are today. Because today, it’s still better to be in person for doing things than to do them virtually.

James Valentine 7:30
Yeah, that’s right. And we’ve seen that, you know, 10 years ago, if people said, Yeah, I could probably work from home and use the computer system where you couldn’t really it didn’t really work. But it wasn’t robust enough, it couldn’t carry enough.

David Levinson 7:41
Yeah, and I think that the shift has been, I mean, there’s been a push, obviously a force factor, which has required people to work from home more than they otherwise would. But there’s also been the enabling of technology, which is better that we had video conferencing. 15 years ago, I lived in London for a year and supervise my students from in who were in Minneapolis via Skype calls. And it worked beautifully. We had a 24 hour work schedule, and it’s like I would, you know, it’d be late at night there and early in the morning in London, and I have meetings with them. And then you know, they would do things in and they would go to sleep, but I would wake up and I would see what they done. And it was probably more efficient than us being on the same timezone. Because the response was, was taking place during their off time. So we need to think about this dynamic of telecommunications is changing, not just work for for people who work in offices, I mean, it’s also changed how we shop significantly and our social patterns. And you know, how many people do you know on the internet that you’ve never actually met in person? I mean, this is a growing phenomenon. We’ve seen from travel data that people are making fewer social trips than they used to. And our hypothesis is they’re substituting online communications. Yeah, social social media for that guy is that even pre COVID COVID. work at home was rising as well. And virtual shopping was rising as well, but obviously is a huge spike in the in the last little over a year.

James Valentine 9:08
At this point. He listened to what Professor David Levinson. He’s from school of civil engineer at the University of Sydney and we just joined the fat a little on some of the planning issues around Sydney and some of the ways in which we’re moving around and some of what what what was coming so this notion of the 30 minutes city is that more than a slogan is that is that a reality?

David Levinson 9:26
Well, it depends on what you mean by the 30 minutes city right so the the Greater Sydney Commission has a few definitions in their report, which are not all the same, but that you can reach the the destinations that you need for your daily life within a 30 minute trip by public transport or active transport, walking and biking. But that’s not guaranteed that you will have a job within 30 minutes or in your local region of Sydney. And we see today of course there’s huge tidal flows of people who come from the western parts of Sydney towards the eastern parts of Sydney because There’s more housing in the West and more jobs in the east. And until all of these areas are balanced with terms of jobs and housing, a workers and housing in each of those places are roughly equal. We’re going to continue to have those kinds of tidal flows. And so it won’t be a 30 minute city, if you live in the West and work in the next city over or if you run if you’re if you’re in Bradfield and Western Sydney or near retropolis. And you work in the City of Sydney, that’s going to be well, more than a 30 minute commute by any mode of transport at this point. Yeah. And so

James Valentine 10:32
is that answered by you know, we’re making a gesture of moving 300 people to to paramedic, so then those people there, if that’s their job, is there, that’s good? Could the same thing? What is the answer also, then, for other industries and ourselves to move to campbelltown, to move to the hills district,

David Levinson 10:50
I think some of this will happen anyway. Because as telecommunications gets better than need to pay the high rents to be in the center, go down, or you see that you own a building in the center, and you can sell it and if you don’t actually need to be there. So there’s some industries for which the technical term economies of agglomeration are really high the benefits of being near other firms within walking distance of other firms. And typically, that’s things like finance and media and advertising. And arguably government. And there’s other industries, manufacturing, for which there’s no real benefit to being adjacent to the shelter. You know, you need the space. And once upon a time, it might have been appropriate when you physically move the goods by hand or horse from one building to another. But now, since it’s by truck, you just need to be nearby. You don’t need to be adjacent to. And so we’ve seen this kind of decentralization for decades. I mean, we’ve essentially been decentralization since 1788, right? I mean, we’ve people landed at a point and then they’ve spread out. employment in the Sydney CBD is about 15% of regional employment, which, you know, is probably not as high as people imagined it is. So what was the percentage of the 15% of total workers in the Greater Sydney region work in the CBD, right? And if you count the neighborhoods adjacent to the CBD, like ultimo or piermont, or Surry Hills, it gets up to about 20%. Right? Yeah.

James Valentine 12:21
But when we think of it as the CBD, so there’s all these workers come in. And that’s a fairly low percentage, it’s a low percentage. I

David Levinson 12:26
mean, it’s bigger than any other business district. And Paramount is on the order of 2%. Right now, and Western Sydney is going to be pretty close to 0% right now. And this will change over time. But this percentage has also been declining, historically. And so in 1789, it would have been close to 100% of all jobs were in the CBD. Now, it’s it’s much fewer. So this is a long term dynamic and the shock to the system of enabling office workers to work from home full time, but you know, maybe they’ll go back two days a week or three days a week? we don’t we don’t know yet. I mean, it’s still, I mean, we’re a year and a half into this. And public transit, which is basically a measure of how many people are going into the central business district is still below 70% of its pre COVID levels, indicates that it’s probably some kind of permanent effect. And yeah, and I think that’s going to be you know, an issue for people who own real estate and CBD who own businesses in the CBD and so on that, that it’s going to be harder for them in the future to generate as much money as they used

James Valentine 13:32
to So will it just happen all the deliberate moves and deliberate infrastructures have to put in nothing if something like the metro out to the to the northwest and that you know, huge industrial park and and business park out there, which major firms have their head office set up? Now? That’s a it’s made to be some, you know, some planners sitting down guy, put the trail on there, build that thing there, you know, that’ll boom, that area, it’s the same source, is that what they never aerotropolis look like? Yeah, I

David Levinson 13:56
mean, there has to be there. There are 1000s of deliberate decisions I think is the way you need to think about it and and ABC moving offices from ultimo to Parramatta is, is one of many of these kinds of decisions that will take place over next decades. That will help adjust the regional balance of jobs and and workers and ultimately reduce commute times overall. giving people more freedom. But you know, the question I mean, you physically are working in a building, I physically work in a building, but how often do you actually have to be here? It’s better if we’re in the building, perhaps but is I

James Valentine 14:34
very much have to be here between 1230 and 330. In the audition, sure, but I mean, at

David Levinson 14:38
the peak of COVID lots of reporters and working at home and makeshift studios and sound quality wasn’t quite as good. And, you know, obviously there were other issues associated with that. It’s better to be interviewed in person than it is to be interviewed over the phone. So these kinds of what actually needs to be done in person versus what can be done remotely is going to be needed. Oceana is going to be steadily changing as telecommunications technology gets better as more deals are built

James Valentine 15:04
as more software is made, once your report card on how Sydney’s handling all this in the moment,

David Levinson 15:09
Sydney is doing pretty well, overall, I mean, compared to say, how Europe, the United States did over the last, you know, your year and a half? I think we’re being a little bit, perhaps overcautious on some things.

James Valentine 15:25
Also, this is with the with COVID. You’ve been with Calvin sort of in general is our is that is that getting that road? that balance? Right, between the long term planning and the short term investment, for example, is that sort of, we’re getting it I think,

David Levinson 15:37
I think we make transport decisions based on assuming the land use is fixed. And we make land use decisions based on assuming the transport is fixed. And we’re not really taking these decisions together in the way that we could, I mean, we, we should be planning for access and trying to see, you know, the city is measured by how many things you can reach. And we know that a function of where things are located as well as how fast you can move on a network to get there. We want to be able to we should be planning for that directly. And right now, the planning is is somewhat fractured for that. And we also are there’s sort of a mismatch between who gets the benefits from infrastructure decisions and who’s paying for the infrastructure. If you build a train station, and somebody owns land adjacent to it, they get a huge uplift in value, but they didn’t really pay for the full costs of the benefits they’re receiving. Yeah.

James Valentine 16:29
David Levinson great to get some time with you. Thanks so much for coming in. All right. Fight faces. Great. So nice to meet you, Professor David Levinson from the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Sydney. We’ll talk about employment and wage growth with with David Taylor in a moment or two ABC business reporter. I asked him if there was a song he wanted to sort of intro and he said I am in this one I want to groove into Michelle Pfeiffer that white. This was a masterpiece. Living in the city got Chuck was saying we got a kiss. So pretty. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Don’t give it to you. Believe images

The 30-Minute City – Open Access

| David Levinson

I am pleased to announce that you can now download a PDF version of The 30-Minute City: Designing for Access from the University of Sydney eScholarship Repository. (Free)

The 30-Minute City: Designing for Access

View/Open

Date

  • 2019-12

Author

  • Levinson, David M.

Metadata

This book describes how to implement The 30-Minute City. The first part of the book explains accessibility. We next consider access through history (chapter 2). Access is the driving force behind how cities were built. Its use today is described when looking at access and the Greater Sydney Commission’s plan for Sydney. We then examine short-run fixes: things that can be done instantaneously, or nearly so, at low budget to restore access for people, which include retiming traffic signals (chapter 3) and deploying bike sharing (chapter 5) supported by protected bike lane networks (chapter 4), as well public transport timetables (chapter 6). We explore medium-run fixes that include implementing rapid bus networks (chapter 7) and configuring how people get to train stations by foot and on bus (chapter 8). We turn to longer-run fixes. These are as much policy changes as large investments, and include job/worker balance (chapter 10) and network restructuring (chapter 9) as well as urban restoration (chapter 11), suburban retrofit (chapter 12), and greenfield development (chapter 13). We conclude with thoughts about the ‘pointlessness’ of cities and how to restructure practice (chapter 14). The appendices provide detail on access measurement (Appendix A), the idea of accessibility loss (B), valuation (C), the rationale for the 30-minute threshold (D), and reliability (E). It concludes with what should we research (F).

URI

The 30-Minute City by David M. Levinson

The 30-Minute City: A Review

| David Levinson

Tom van Vuren reviewed my recent book, the The 30-Minute City in Transport Reviews. I abstract some of it here.

cropped-30-minute-city-cover-r1-front.jpg
The 30-Minute City: Designing for Access

The author describes the book as a fast read. He is right – it is written in a very straight-forward style, avoids jargon and as such, I think it would be enjoyed by practitioners, first-degree students and even those with just a general interest in transport planning and accessibility. This is the fifth book published by Network Design Lab in David Levinson’s Access series.

…

Much of the book describes ways in which a 30-minute city may be created; and as Levinson says, “we do not require autonomous vehicles, hyperloops, drones, trackless trams, micromobility, or multi-copters, even if we eventually see such things widely deployed”. After the introductory chapters, chapters 3 to 10 provide practical examples of how accessibility has been eroded and conversely, how it can be improved by interventions that can be copied from elsewhere.

I was particularly taken by Chapter 3 on Traffic Signals. Through a simple example, Levinson illustrates that in a typical urban environment pedestrians lose 25%–30% of their effective speed because of traffic signals that are coordinated for cars, reducing their accessibility to jobs and other opportunities in a 30-minute walk space by almost half. He also offers solutions that can be implemented immediately. Essential reading for all practising signal engineers!

Another excellent illustration is given in Chapter 8 on Interfaces. The design of a station can have a big impact on accessibility. Through another Sydney example, he explains how saving just 75 seconds entering and leaving a train station can improve accessibility by 8%, for example by increasing the number or relocation of entries and exits, or changing the interfacing with buses.

In his last Chapter Levinson makes a plea for a new profession, Urban Operations – people engaged in improving today’s city, not just planning for tomorrow, but optimising for the system as a whole, using resources on-hand. As he says: “we have enough problems today. We also have solutions available to us today and we don’t implement them”.

…

Levinson’s arguments around urban restoration and retrofitting deserve a space in all transport planning courses. He makes a strong case to always consider the era during which an urban area evolved when developing solutions to address currently experienced traffic problems. Levinson advocates to restore what worked at that time (such as trams in historic centres of the early twentieth century), but not to try and impose such solutions in locations that were built for the motorcar in the fifties and sixties. The latter can only be retrofitted, at a cost and not necessarily effectively. In terms of retrofitting, Levinson provides a telling example of the temporary land-banking in urban at grade parking lots and concludes wistfully that unfortunately, temporary is often indefinite.

I enjoyed this book for two reasons: As a dyed-in-the-wool, it challenged me to think differently about what transport planning and traffic engineering should really achieve. Secondly, Levinson peppers his text with memorable one-liners and inventive terms: who had heard of gradial before? Two noticeable examples that I might use myself:

  • Gradial, or the unreasonable network – Embedded infrastructure cannot adapt much to the world around it. But if it were optimal for the world in which it was designed, it is unlikely to be optimal as that world changes. The network, designed for a given technology, is very hard to adapt to a different technology. Instead, we expect the world to adapt to the infrastructure. And
  • There are many techniques for making the most popular mode, the automobile, greener. We need to think more about making the greenest modes much more popular.

As would be expected, the book finishes with an extensive and useful bibliography.

To get our cities moving again, we need a new kind of urban professional

| David Levinson

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.

30-minute-city
The 30-minute City: Designing for Access, David Levinson

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.

–

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.

Gradial: Or the Unreasonable Network

| David Levinson

The reasonable network adapts itself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to itself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable network.1

The physical location of network infrastructure is one of the most permanent decisions cities make. The Cardo Maximus in the old city of Jerusalem is still a main north-south shopping street, constructed when Emporer Hadrian rebuilt the city in the 130s CE.

The 30-Minute City by David M. Levinson
The 30-Minute City by David M. Levinson 

A street right-of-way, once created is seldom destroyed. A segment of that infrastructure is designed to be optimal at a moment of time, with a particular land use (either the realized development of today or an imagined place of tomorrow), enmeshed within a particular network context of all the other nodes and links, compatible with a particular technology. That it functions at all when land use, networks, and technologies change radically, as they do over centuries, is testament to the general flexibility inherent in networks. But the implication is that if it is optimal for the world in which it was designed, it is unlikely to be optimal as that world changes.

Some adaptations do occur. Streets designed for horses were adapted for streetcars (trams) and bicycles and cars and buses and pedestrians.

Still, it may be the best that can be done. Embedded infrastructure, the dictionary example of sunk costs,2 cannot adapt much to the world around them. Instead we expect the world to adapt to the infrastructure.

Following Shaw, we might say such infrastructures are `unreasonable’, in that they cannot be reasoned with.

Many, if not most, planned cities have been laid out with a network of streets “with the sombre sadness of right-angles,” as Jules Verne, quoting Victor Hugo, described the American grid in Salt Lake City, of streets at 90-degree angles to each other, in his classic road trip story: Around the World in 80 Days. Street grids don’t plan themselves, so while all street grids were planned, not all plans result in street grids.

Organically developed3 cities are often more naturalistic, radial cities, with streets feeding the city from the hinterlands, allowing more than 4-directions of entry. All roads lead to Rome, as the saying goes. The Romans themselves were a bit adverse to this organic radial system once they got their own growth machine going, laying out encampments and new settlements on the grid system. The radial system leading to and from the town would bend once it reached the town gates. But as cities themselves were generally not conceived of as whole, but rather themselves emerged, often as conurbations of smaller settlements, towns, and villages, there are often radial webs centered on town A overlapping radial webs centered on town B. Rome was famously built on seven hills, which can be read as meaning Rome is a conurbation of seven earlier villages. (See Elements of Access, Chapter 3.3)

Each of these networks typologies has its advantages and disadvantages.

DCMetro
Washington DC Metro. The center is a space, not a point. A `triangle’ is formed by L’Enfant Plaza (Yellow/Green with Orange/Blue/Silver), Metro Center (Red with Orange/Blue/Silver), and Gallery Place (Red with Yellow/Green)

 

We observe that radial networks are optimal to maximize access for many-to-one types of movements (suburbs to central city). So rail transit networks, which serve the high loads demanded by, and making possible, high density city centers tend toward being radial. But when they are large they are usually not so radial that all the branches meet at one junction. From a network design perspective, intersecting more than two lines at a station can lead to other types of conflicts, and many systems are designed with triangular center to avoid overloading a single transfer station. Washington DC’s largely radial Metrorail system, shown in  the first figure, illustrates this design. Cities are spaces, not points.

In contrast, the 90-degree grid is reasonably well-suited to maximize access for scattered trips, what network analysts would call a many-to-many pattern. We see this especially in dispersed point-to-point (suburb to suburb, within city to within city) flows that are enabled by and reinforce the grid. This is the network for the automobile. The Los Angeles freeway grid, the famous Milton Keynes arterial grid, and numerous other  late twentieth century cities have been designed in a grid-like way (though not so orthogonal that Victor Hugo would object). Even though the topology is not as efficient from a distance perspective as say a 60-degree mesh, by remaining out of the city core it can keep speeds higher.

But in response to the landscape that emerged with the automobile, transit planners like Jarrett Walker (2012) have called for more grid-like transit networks, so people can move, via public transport, from suburb to suburb without going through the city centre. This is relatively easy to reconfigure for buses, the very definition of  mobile capital, while very difficult for the more capital intensive rail networks with their physically embedded infrastructure.

Still, core radial lines will always be the backbone of transit systems so long as at least one important center justifies a disproportionate amount of service.

So how can we grid the radial, or square the circle, so to speak?

A better network topology might be the 60-degree, hexagonal pattern. (Ben Joseph 2000) But remaking street grids for existing cities is tough-going, as property rights are well established, and requires efforts like those of Haussmann in 19th century Paris. (Willms 1997).

daganzo
Possible system layouts: (a) hub-and-spoke; (b) grid; (c) hybrid. Source: Figure 1 in Daganzo (2010)

Instead, we have overlapping network topologies, ideally which are grade-separated in some fashion, so trains are radial and don’t intersect streets or motorways, and bus services can be more grid-like, and rapid or express bus networks serve the market niche in-between.

Thus the original street level networks are still topologically grids, but the services running on that grid, while still largely parallel and perpendicular, are compressed near the center, so the bus lines, for instance, bend towards the center, as illustrated in the second figure. The regulatory layer of through streets for automobiles may be constructed to defer to the orientation of bus services.

There are no optimal network configurations independent of the enveloping land use pattern or the technological regime. Similarly there are no optimal land use allocations independent of the network pattern or technology. Finally, there is no optimal mode independent of the land use or network. All three of these systems are interlocking. Moving one requires adapting the others.

The unreasonable network forces the land use pattern to adapt to it, such that relocating network elements is more costly than keeping them in place. Similarly, in many ways the network, designed for a given technology, is very hard to adapt to a different technology. That doesn’t stop people and cities from trying, the misfit we see with the automobile in the urban core is the product of failing to acknowledge this unreasonableness. But as the number of European cities restricting cars in the city center are showing, the unreasonable network wins out over technology too.

The Grid/Radial Gradial network is also Gradual. These systems seldom change all-at-once, instead they gradually evolve over decades, centuries, and millenia.

Notes:

1. This is an adaptation of a famous George Bernard Shaw quote.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the  unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

2. The economist’s adage that “sunk costs are sunk” means that once something has been built, and that money spent, it no longer factors into benefit-cost analysis about how prospective decisions should be made, except to the extent it changes the costs of various options. Logically, you shouldn’t go to a concert just because you bought tickets if you don’t want to go, though if you are considering going to a concert or a bookstore after you bought the tickets, you don’t need to account for paying for the tickets again. You might also consider the `opportunity cost’ of going as the loss from not scalping the tickets. You shouldn’t throw good money after bad. But the sunk infrastructure cannot be unbuilt.

3. Organic development is often largely systematically unplanned, though obviously some degree of planning often goes into laying out a street, even if it is disjoint from any other decisions. When we think of `planning,’ we are generally referring to longer-term more strategic type spatial plans, that consider interactions between prospective decisions, rather than short-term tactical plans that optimize a single decision alone decontextualized from the rest of the city.

How to increase transit ridership by up to 35% with one weird trick.*

| David Levinson

This is a reprint from an article I wrote for The Conversation about our recent report “Catchment if you can: The effect of station entrance and exit locations on accessibility.”

The 30-Minute City by David M. Levinson
The 30-Minute City by David M. Levinson 

Train riders have to get to stations somehow. This is often referred to as the “first mile” or “last mile” problem. There are many technical solutions to help travellers get from home to the station and back, ranging from cars to electronic scooters, but most people use a much older technology, their feet, to get from A to B. What is seldom considered is access to the train platform itself.

Stations are not points but places. They occupy a large area. A person walking at average speed takes about two minutes to walk from one end of a full-length eight-car train to the other.

Often platforms have a single access point on one side of the station, which makes it more difficult for people on the other side of the station to get to the platform. Passengers may need to almost circumnavigate the station to get to the platform. At an average walking speed, the extra distance they must backtrack adds up to six minutes per trip each way, our research has found.

Imagine being so unlucky to have an extra 12 minutes of travel time every day if you take the train. You might be tempted to drive instead.

Catchment.jpg
Illustration of worst-case scenario, traveler lives west of the station with an East Platform and works East of a station with a West Platform, adding 6 minutes of travel each way, 12 minutes per day.

The table below shows the extra travel time in minutes depending on platform locations and access points for a traveller’s origin and destination. The average time for such a one-sided configuration of train stations is 3.25 minutes each way.

Work

East

West

Live

Platform

East

West

East

West

East

East

0

4

4

2

West

4

4

6

2

West

East

2

6

4

4

West

2

4

4

0

Table 1: Additional Travel Time Depending on Origin and Destination Residence and Workplace Location vis-a-vis Platform Location.

While this example is hypothetical, it is drawn from experience in Sydney, where 44 of 178 train stations have only a single side entrance.

So what impact will a second entrance have?

We examined those stations and access to their platforms: how many people lived within 5, 10 and 15 minutes of the station platform, considering actual entrance location, and how many jobs were within 5, 10 and 15 minutes of the platform. Using existing ridership data from Opal cards, we estimated a model that related the passenger entry and exit flows at each station to that station’s accessibility.

Accessibility at train stations across Sydney. Author provided

We sketched a second entrance at those 44 stations and measured accessibility again. It’s now higher, as having two entrances instead of one means more people can reach the platform in the same time. We then estimated the increase in ridership from the model due to the improved accessibility, assuming no change in population or employment.

Over all 44 stations, total morning peak period entries increased by 5%. But some stations benefit a lot, and others not at all, so prioritisation of investments matters.

It will be no surprise to locals that Erskineville station comes out on top with a nearly 35% increase. While many of the new apartment-dwelling residents west of the station make the extra hike every day, even more would catch the train if there were a convenient entrance.

Other top 10 stations include: Bankstown, Newtown, Villawood, Redfern, Burwood, Sydneham, Caringbah, Meadowbank and Penshurst. Planning is already under way to improve Redfern station.

While this result considers existing development, adding a second entrance can make new transit-oriented development that much more valuable. This is because it will likely increase activity on the previously less accessible side of the station, as the example of Erskineville shows below.

Author provided

 

Other considerations include accessibility for people who cannot use staircases, as many of the stations are older and will require lifts. The prospects of park-and-ride lots, the costs of construction, the presence of nearby stations, and site feasibility also play into final decisions.

Our formal findings and details methods are summarized in this Executive Summary, and written up in this report: Catchment if you can: The effect of station entrance and exit locations on accessibility. 

The full Atlas is here: Atlas

 

A brief interview was ABC NSW News, Friday May 3, 2019, starting at 13:24 into the broadcast.

*Results vary by station.

How more development can lead to less travel: Examples

| David Levinson
The 30-Minute City by David M. Levinson
The 30-Minute City by David M. Levinson 

Balancing housing and jobs, so that they are located near each other, logically reduces travel compared to a situation where those same jobs are far apart. This has long been understood in the transport planning community (see e.g. Cervero 1989, or my 1998 paper), but is not well grasped among the general public.

However, moving a fixed number of things around is not how cities actually grow. Telling place A you taking away their employment is controversial. More generally new things are added.

Development in Mascot. Photo by author.
Development in Mascot. Photo by author.

It is commonly asserted that more development adds to congestion. And often this is true. But not always, it depends on the type of development. More housing in a housing-rich and job-poor area will result in more total travel. More employment in a job-rich, housing poor area will do similarly. More housing in a job-rich area, and more jobs in a housing-rich area can actually reduce travel.

For our baseline case, imagine a city with two precincts separated by 2 km.

Precinct A: 1000 Jobs, 0 Resident Workers

Precinct B: 0 Jobs, 1000 Resident Workers.

The one-way (morning commute) trip table looks like:

Jobs 1000 0
Workers A B
0 A 0 0
1000 B 1000 0

Total daily travel to work is 2000 person km per day. (Everyone commutes from B to A). Travel on Link BA is 1000 at 2 km per trip, or 2000 person km traveled. (This just analyzes one-way trips. Round trip commutes would double this.)

Case 1. 

There is a proposal to intensify development in Precincts A and B, so each is more locally balanced.

Precinct A: 1000 Jobs, 500 Resident Workers

Precinct B: 500 Jobs, 1000 Resident Workers.

The new one-way (morning commute) trip table looks like (rounded):

Jobs 1000 500
Workers A B
500 A 498 2
1000 B 503 497
  • assuming 0.5 km intrazonal travel distance, using a doubly-constrained gravity model with a d_{ij}(-2) impedance function.

The Daily Travel on links:

AB = 2 @ 2 km

BA = 503 @ 2 km

within A = 498 @ 0.5 km (walking)

within B = 497 @ 0.5 km

TOTAL = 1507 pkt.

This is considerably less than the baseline case as many more travelers can reach their destinations locally. While there is still some commuting, it is far less than before.

Case 2.

There is a proposal to build a locally-balanced Precinct C halfway between Precincts A and B.

Precinct C has 500 Jobs and 500 Workers

The new one-way (morning commute) trip table looks like:

Jobs 1000 0 500
Workers A B C
0 A 0 0 0
1000 B 666.666667 0 333.333333
500 C 333.333333 0 166.666667
  • assuming 0.5 km intrazonal travel distance, using a doubly-constrained gravity model with a d_{ij}(-2) impedance function.

The Daily Travel on links:

BC = BA + BC = 1000 @ 1 km

CA = BA + CA = 1000 @ 1 km

within C = 166 trips @ 0.5 km

TOTAL = 2083 pkt.

In this example, the total person kilometers traveled (pkt) on the links connecting inter-city precincts is essentially identical to the base case, despite adding 500 residents and 500 workers halfway between each. There are an additional 167 pkt daily on the intrazonal market (within C), which is likely walking.

The total one-way commute travel per person however drops, from 2 km/person per day to about 1.38 km/person per day. The average trip length is reduced. The experienced travel is thus about one-third lower.

Case 3

Building on Case 1, completely balancing A and B (so each has 1000 jobs and 1000 workers) reduces one-way commutes further (to 1176 pkt)

The new one-way (morning commute) trip table looks like (rounded):

Jobs 1000 1000
Workers A B
1000 A 941 59
1000 B 59 941
  • assuming 0.5 km intrazonal travel distance, using a doubly-constrained gravity model with a d_{ij}(-2) impedance function.

So, it should be clear from this example that adding development can actually reduce total travel, if it is the right kind of development in the right places.

A Political Economy of Access: Infrastructure, Networks, Cities, and Institutions by David M. Levinson and David A. King
A Political Economy of Access: Infrastructure, Networks, Cities, and Institutions by David M. Levinson and David A. King

Signalling inequity – How traffic signals distribute time to favour the car and delay the pedestrian.

| David Levinson

An edited version of this appeared on The Conversation June 11, 2018. The original is below.

Traffic signals are a source of great inequality in the urban realm, giving priority to motor vehicles over pedestrians.  Cities and states say they want to encourage walking and biking for many reasons: it is space efficient, it has less environmental impact, it is healthier, it is safer for other travelers, and, since,  it reduces the numbers of cars on the road, even motorists should be in favour of other people walking. To help achieve that, road management agencies should take the lead in reprioritising traffic signals by redistributing intersection delay from pedestrians to cars.

The 30-Minute City by David M. Levinson
The 30-Minute City by David M. Levinson

 

While planners tend to focus on the long-term decisions, like infrastructure and land development, it is the shortest of short-term decisions, how many seconds of green light each movement gets at an intersection, that shapes daily perception of the feasibility of walking or driving to a destination at a given time, and thus the choice of route, destination, and mode of travel. Traffic signal timing involves math, so it has been historically delegated to the engineers, but it also involves values and priorities, and so is the proper subject of public policy.

Since the early twentieth century dawn of what Peter Norton calls ‘Motordom’ in his book ‘Fighting Traffic‘, street space has steadily been regulated and enclosed, limiting the rights and privileges of pedestrians while promoting those of drivers as a class, in the name of safety and efficiency. But we should ask safety and efficiency for whom? Prior to traffic signals, pedestrians could and did cross the street whenever and wherever they wanted, before the term ‘jaywalking’ was invented and street crossing was regulated. The introduction of signals prioritised the movement of motor vehicles at the expense of pedestrians, whose effective walking speed through the city necessarily slowed. The consequences of making it easier to drive and harder to walk on people’s choice of mode is pretty straight-forward, and consistent with the rise of the automobile in the 20th century.

Phases

Pedestrians take longer to cross streets than cars because they move slower. As a result, the ‘don’t walk’ signal flashes before the light turns red for cars. But at many intersections it is worse than that. In Sydney, the traffic signal policy is set at many intersections to give less green time to pedestrians on a phase (from the time the light turns green to when it turns red, or from ‘walk’ to ‘don’t walk’)  than to automobiles, to give autos a protected left turn without having to yield pedestrians. This guarantees the average pedestrian arriving randomly at the intersection waits longer than a random car.

Cycle length

The cycle length (time from the start of the green light to the start of the next green) tends to be longer at busier intersections (and busier times of day) as a longer cycle length reduces the number of phases per hour, and thus reduces the amount of lost time associated  each phase, when the intersection is not being effectively used by any approach. Lost time can never be reclaimed, so one understands why engineers might want longer cycle lengths if the objective were moving cars.

However long cycle lengths particularly disadvantage pedestrians, who stand out in the open exposed to the elements and the tailpipe emissions of cars, motorcycles, trucks, and buses. Even more significantly, people systematically misperceive travel delay, so waiting at a traffic light feels even longer than it actually is.

Coordination

First introduced in 1922 in New York City, traffic signal coordination aims to ensure vehicles arrive at the traffic signal when it is green, so they don’t have to stop. By correctly timing traffic signals in sequence, platoons of vehicles move together through a ‘green wave’. So let’s say the wave is set for a speed of 40 km/h. Then as long as a car accelerates from the first signal to 40 km/h, and maintains that speed, it should then hit the following lights on their green phase as well.

Typical_Signal_Schedule_and_Traffic_Flow_Diagram,_North-South_across_Market_(1929).png
Typical Signal Schedule and Traffic Flow Diagram, North-South across Market Street, San Francisco (1929). Green wave set to 10.5 MPH (about 17 km/h).

While this is relatively easy to maintain on a single road, it is more difficult on a network, especially a complex, asymmetric network. It also works against the idea of actuation, as interruptions to the pattern (extending or contracting phases) change the window in which cars can successfully hit a green light at a given speed. Of course, just because cars can make a green wave at a speed of 40 km/h doesn’t mean pedestrians will make a green wave unless they travel at exactly a divisor of 40 km/h (e.g. at exactly 5 km/h between intersections). This means that pedestrians will more likely wait at red lights at intersections timed for cars.

Actuation / Beg Buttons

While some signals are ‘fixed time’ which eases coordination at the expense of adapting to conditions, modern signals are ‘actuated’, that is, they respond by adjusting the phasing, and perhaps the cycle time, in response to the presence of vehicles. For vehicles, there is either a camera which detects their presence, or more commonly, a sensor in the road, often a magnetic loop. In either case, this is automatic for the car, and can detect cars upstream of the signal. This allows the signal to stay green longer for a phase if it detects a vehicle approaching, or turn red sooner when there are no vehicles. In contrast, for pedestrians, they are required to push a button to get a walk signal. If they arrive a second too late, they have to wait the entire cycle to get a walk signal. If there are many pedestrians, they don’t get a longer walk signal. Pushing the ‘beg button’ (so nicknamed as the pedestrian must request the signal) twice does not make it come faster or stay green longer. Ten, or a hundred, pedestrians do not make the ‘walk’ light come faster either. The beg button is often positioned out of the way, requiring the pedestrian to walk longer than would otherwise be required. A few seconds here, a few seconds there, add up.

There is a  reason that traffic engineers don’t automatically allocate pedestrian phases. Suppose the car only warrants a six second phase but a pedestrian requires 18 seconds to cross the street at a 1 meter/second walking speed. Giving an automatic pedestrian phase will delay  cars, even if the pedestrian is not there. And there is no sin worse than delaying a car.  But it also guarantees a pedestrian who arrives just after the window to push the actuator passes will wait a full cycle.

The role of signal policy

It turns out that one of the world’s most widely deployed traffic signal control systems, the Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System (SCATS), was developed here in Australia. Just as Australia led in traffic control to more smoothly move cars, it should lead in pedestrian-oriented traffic control. There are a number of steps that those concerned about pedestrians should insist on. To start:

  • Pedestrians, like vehicles, should be counted automatically at controlled intersections.
  • Pedestrian time must be considered (and prioritised) in the traffic signal timing algorithms so that their weight is equal to or higher than the weight of a passenger car.
  • Pedestrians should get the maximum feasible amount of green time on a phase, rather than the minimum, so that pedestrians arriving on the phase have a chance to take advantage of it, and slower moving pedestrians are not intimidated by cars.
  • Pedestrians should get a ‘leading interval’ so they can step into the street on a ‘walk’ signal before cars start to move on a green light, increasing their visibility to drivers.
  • Pedestrian phases should be automatic, even if no actuator is pushed. Instead, the actuator should make the pedestrian phase come sooner.
  • Many more intersections should have an all-pedestrian phase (what is referred to as a ‘Barnes Dance’) in addition to existing phases so pedestrians can make diagonal intersection crossings without having to wait twice.

There are numerous other steps as well that can improve the life of the pedestrian, and thus increase their number. Certainly we can demand more patience from drivers as well.  The advent of the autonomous vehicles over the next few decades is unlikely, by itself, to eliminate the need for traffic control in cities. There will be places where the number of cars and people are such that they cannot efficiently organize themselves, and where other traffic controls, like stop signs or roundabouts, cannot be effectively implemented. But autonomous vehicles should help get more throughput out of intersections, losing less time than human drivers, and behaving far more safely.

Moving the capital of New South Wales to the west

| David Levinson

The capital of New South Wales is currently in Sydney, eastern Sydney, historic Sydney, tourist Sydney, or to speak the language the planners understand, the Harbour City. Parliament meets in a gorgeous building adjacent to the Domain, a large urban park. Government offices are scattered throughout the city and the metro area.

New South Wales Parliament Building
New South Wales Parliament Building

Policy in Sydney has recently engaged around the idea of a 30-minute city, the idea that people can get where they need to go on a daily basis (work, shop, school) in 30 minutes or less by walking, biking, or public transport. (Or that 70% of the people do so, depending on which definition.) This can be achieved through a combination of transport and land use strategies. On the transport side is the question of how fast and how direct the transport network is. On the land use side is the question of where desired activities are located relative to each other. The government of New South Wales is promoting the development of jobs in Western Sydney (and housing in Eastern Sydney) to reduce commuting times and encourage the 30-minute city. This is a noble goal, and the market may move in that direction.

The 30-Minute City by David M. Levinson
The 30-Minute City by David M. Levinson 

At one extreme we can imagine a completely functionally separated city, where all the homes are on one side of town, and all the jobs are on the other side of town. If the sides are more than 30 minutes apart, there is little that can be done to achieve the goal, though perhaps the connection between the two parts can be made faster or more direct. But since transport networks act to spread out cities physically, it might only induce more suburban development. This functionally separated city is equivalent to the classic monocentric city, with a single dominant downtown surrounded by residential suburbs.

At the other extreme we can imagine a completely functionally integrated city, probably relatively dispersed, where jobs and housing are completely integrated, so there are as many jobs in any suburb as there are workers. There is no guarantee that a worker will be able to find a job next door (or choose it), but the likelihood of finding a job nearby is higher than in the monocentric city

If everything else were equal, from a transport perspective, we would probably prefer an integrated city, as this would place the least strain on the transport network. Moving towards jobs/housing balance is a long held goal, if only weakly operationalized.

But all else is not equal. Employers have an affinity for each other. All the big banks want to be near each other, as do other big companies in various sectors. As does the government. This is what economists call economies of agglomeration.

The government is not just an employer, it is also a major player in real estate markets. It can catalyze development of western Sydney, its Aerotropolis/Parkland City, as it is called in the 2056 Three Cities plans, by moving itself there first.

 

Cities change with the pre-dominant transport technology. When the capital was established in Sydney in 1788, the dominant technology was animal and human powered, with wind and sails moving ships. Since then, much has changed, and the center of population has migrated inland.

The shape and form of the pedestrian city differs from the rail (trams and trains) city, and  differs from the automobile city. Retrofitting trams into the pedestrian city, and especially automobiles into the pedestrian and rail cities broke much earlier urban functionality, while creating new problems, new opportunities, and new designs. Technology played and plays out differently on greenfields, which could be designed to serve a new transport paradigm.

As we approach the transition from the traditional automobile to the autonomous electric and shared vehicle, with all of the ancillary changes, the opportunity for a new city of the future emerges. This technology will invade existing places, which will need to adapt, and new places which can more fully adopt the new technology. But we also need to keep an eye out for the next transition, whatever that may be (flying cars?), so that what we build now is not soon obsolete.

Transport is not the only shaper of cities, other technologies are also critical, from piped water and sewer, electricity, telephony, elevators, and air conditioning historically, to wireless high-speed internet most obviously today, and robotics coming up shortly.

The new capital will need to orient itself around these new technologies, as well as new extensions of well known technologies, like trains and Metros and light rails and bicycles and pedestrians. This is a huge opportunity, and while I won’t suggest a specific design, I will say it should be forward looking as well as reflective of the changes that have come before. Canberra was an opportunity, but by spreading itself out so much, it foreclose the possibility to effectively use slower modes.

If Daniel Burnham were designing the new capital for Sydney, it might look like this.
If Daniel Burnham were designing the new capital for Sydney, it might look like this.

 

A government campus for key departmental headquarters and Parliament at the end of the Mall, a now traditional design for capitals, with the vast majority of government offices scattered throughout the rest of New South Wales, could spark development. Access to the new airport and rail lines will provide connectivity to the rest of the state.

Ancillary businesses, not just those serving lunch to government workers, but those dealing with government on a daily basis, will migrate to deal with their public sector clients and customers. There are many sites on the axis between Parramatta and the Blue Mountains that could serve this purpose.

Sydney’s soon-to-be-abandoned historic Parliament House can have a variety of uses, from appropriately sized conventions to space for a museum. Other government offices in Sydney can be sold off, retrofitted for urban housing, or replaced as warranted. The Sydney CBD is thriving, and will continue to without a few thousand additional government workers. But that could be all the difference in success for a new city for Western Sydney.

In 1908, Australia, then with a population of 4.1 million, decided to relocate to Canberra. Today (2018) New South Wales has a population 7.8 million. As Australia has proven, the political capital need not be the largest city.  In the US, most state capitals are not the largest city: St. Paul not Minneapolis, Sacramento not Los Angeles, Albany not New York, Harrisburg not Philadelphia, Springfield not Chicago, Annapolis not Baltimore, and so on to name but a few.

 

Albany, New York, another planned state capital district
Albany, New York, another planned state capital district. Source: Flickr

It is time to plan and create a new government precinct, out west, to help spark the development the government seeks. It will bring the government to the people, de-center the government from its locational bubble, and juvenate new places with new ideas.