Frank LD, Kershaw SE, Chapman JE, Perrotta K. (2014). Residential preferences and Public Health in Metro Vancouver: Promoting Health and Well Being by Meeting the Demand for Walkable Urban Environments. Health and Community Design Lab, University of British Columbia. Vancouver, BC. (pdf)
There is unmet demand for more walkable neighbourhoods in Metro Vancouver, with proximity to commercial areas and a wide range of food stores identified as the features most lacking in existing neighbourhoods.
Among City of Vancouver residents who considered their existing neighbourhood to be very auto-oriented, strong desire to live in a neighbourhood within walking distance to commercial areas, and within walking distance to a variety of small and medium-sized food stores was expressed by 30% and 20% respectively. Similarly, an unmet demand for these neighbourhood features was reported by about 25% of residents living in auto-oriented neighbourhoods in other areas of Metro Vancouver. These findings suggest that there is unmet demand for more walkable residential neighbourhoods in both the City of Vancouver, and other areas of Metro Vancouver.
Metro Vancouver residents who prefer and live in a walkable neighbourhood are more active than those who prefer a walkable neighbourhood, but do not live in one.
Metro Vancouver residents who prefer an auto-oriented neighbourhood are more active if their neighbourhood allows them to walk to shops and services, than those who share this preference but live in a low walkable place.
Terry Slavin, “Unless we stop driving cars, all other sustainable transport plans are pointless“, The Guardian. I don’t know if I totally agree with his argument, but I thought this was an excellent point:
Melia, who lectures in transport and planning at the University of the West of England and advised the last Labour government on its eco-towns programme, says one of the biggest myths about transport policy is that there has been a “war on the motorist” – that successive governments have used fuel duties, speed cameras and road taxes to discourage car use and help fund public transport…
But if there is a war going on, it is against public transport users, says Melia. According to the RAC Foundation, the cost of rail and bus travel rose twice as much as the cost of driving in the past 10 years, and public spending on roads over the past five years has been more than twice that spent on local public transport.
Joseph Stromburg, “Young people are driving less than their parents. But why?” Vox:
The only way to know for sure what’ll happen is to wait and see. “It’s really hard to distinguish what’s going on from the cyclical short-term trend,” says Alan Pisarski, a transportation researcher. “Are we still in the aftermath of the recession, or are these structural changes in society that augur a new normal?”
There are some reasons to believe that young people today might have different priorities than their predecessors.
For one, the 2009 data that showed 16- to 34-year olds driving much less can’t be chalked up entirely to more unemployment. Those with jobs still drove 16.4 percent fewer miles per capita than the same age group in 2001.
Meanwhile, surveys find that compared to older generations, young people today are much likelier to care more about living near a city center, in a walkable neighborhood.
Other surveys show that, in general, young people are less obsessed with cars than before: they say they’d rather give up their cars than their computers or smartphones, and half as many of them describe themselves as “car enthusiasts,” compared with baby boomers.
Paul Swinney and Elli Thomas, “A Century of Cities: Urban Economic Change Since 1911“, Centre for Cities:
Over the last 100 years all cities have been buffeted by the winds of economic change. Globalisation and technological and transport developments have meant that they have had to continually adapt to these changes, both to continue to provide jobs and contribute to national economic growth. These global changes have altered the role that our cities play in the national economy, meaning it is now proximity to knowledge rather than proximity to resources that is the primary driver of city growth.
Those cities that have adapted to this change have reinvented their economies, creating jobs in new, more knowledge-focused industries to offset losses in more traditional industries. These cities, such as Reading and Brighton, have thrived as a result, creating many thousands of jobs in higher-skilled, higher paying occupations.
Those cities that have struggled over the last 100 years have merely replicated their economies. They have replaced jobs in declining industries with lower-skilled, more routinised jobs, swapping cotton mills for call centres and dock yards for distribution sheds. Some cities have struggled even to do this – Burnley has half the total number of jobs in 2013 that it did in 1911.
Gareth Morgan, “We warned you Nick: Auckland’s sprawl is a false economy“, Gareth’s World:
Auckland Ratepayers should not pay for Government policy
Auckland Council are right to speak up, and existing ratepayers should get behind them with the message that they aren’t going to pick up the bill for sprawl. There are good reasons for this – successful public transport systems overseas focus on providing a high quality, cheap service for short trips. Spending large amounts of money subsidising trips from Helensville to Auckland is a waste – in most countries in the world that trip would be viewed as a long distance trip between cities. Councils should make it clear that new suburbs will not be the priority for their investment, and any rational ratepayer should back that stance.
Of course ratepayers are part of the problem – the same people that stand to lose from sprawl are the ones opposing development in the city. House owners in the central city need to swallow their pride and accept that high-density housing – if done well – can bring all sorts of benefits. A major one is future proofing – a major new report shows that denser cities have far lower carbon emissions.
Instead of spending their money on new suburbs, Councils could calm ratepayer concerns by focusing their investment on making areas of high-density housing very liveable. Councils need to ensure that high-density housing areas have the best services in terms of parks, access to shopping and cafés, and transport. They also need to ensure the high-density housing itself is high quality to avoid repeating the mistakes of the shoddy apartments that went up in the 1990s.
Once people see that high-density housing can actually be a very pleasant way to live, attitudes will shift. After all, high-density housing is a way of life for the majority of people living in the most liveable cities in the world.
John Quiggin, “Some Unwelcome Good News“. Quiggin, a well-known Australian economist, is being a bit puckish with this title – this is good news for the planet, but unwelcome for people who’ve been denying that we can act on climate change:
The announcement by Tesla of a new home battery storage system, called Powerwall, costing $3500 for 10KwH of storage, has been greeted with enthusiasm, but also a good deal of scepticism regarding its commercial viability, which depends in any given market on such things as the gap between retail electricity prices feed-in tariffs for solar PV.
This is missing the forest for the trees, however. Assuming the Tesla system comes anywhere near meeting its announced specifications, and noting that electric cars are also on the market from Tesla and others, we now have just about everything we need for a technological fix for climate change, based on a combination of renewable energy and energy efficiency, at a cost that’s a small fraction of global income (and hence a small fraction of national income for any country)…
Dominion Post, “Editorial: Welcome movement on Wellington bike lanes“:
Yet can there really be much dispute that cyclists need at least some decent, dedicated infrastructure?
There shouldn’t be. The arguments are simple and convincing. The present system is obviously unsafe. Cyclists and vehicles should not have to share busy roads where traffic moves at speed – it is a recipe for crashes and injuries.
Each is caused by someone or other – driver or cyclist – but the bigger point is that they are caused by failing roads, and they ought to be changed.
Now set that against a large pool of government money available for urban cycling projects in the next three years. Add to it the growing number of cyclists in Wellington, despite the inhospitable roads – up 75 per cent in the seven years to the 2013 census, and doubtless up again since then.
Put that together with the other “silent” group – the high numbers of Wellingtonians who say they would cycle if only it didn’t feel so unsafe, among them children and older people.
The net result is a strong case for what is only a modestly expensive piece of infrastructure.
Roman Mars, “The Gruen Effect“, 99% Invisible. A fantastic history of the shopping mall – and how its inventor, Victor Gruen, eventually came to rue its creation:
In his travels across the United States, Gruen saw how much time Americans spent riding around in their cars, cut off from the city and from each other. This was especially true in the suburbs.
[From Centers for the Urban Environment: Survival of the Cities by Victor Gruen]
The suburbs lacked what sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls third places. If home is the primary place, and work is a second place, then a third place anywhere else one goes to be around other people—to build community, to hang out, to feel connected. Gruen wanted to give the American suburbs that third place.
Victor Gruen imagined designing an environment full of greenery and shops. An indoor plaza which could be an island of connection in the middle of the sprawl. One that would get people out of their cars in order to walk and stroll within them.
[From Centers for the Urban Environment : Survival of the Cities by Victor Gruen]
Gruen saw his structure as an architectural panacea—it would remedy environmental, commercial, and sociological problems with the creation of a single building.
Gruen presented his a solution for America: The Shopping Mall.
Jamie Morton, “Next Auckland eruption: Should you worry? Map pins volcano risk spots“, NZ Herald:
New models have laid bare the threat explosive volcanic activity poses to our largest city, with Three Kings and Mangere among the Auckland suburbs most vulnerable to devastating, high-powered blasts.
Just-published maps, created by a Massey University researcher, show for the first time which areas are more at risk from a violent kind of eruption that can send a turbulent cocktail of gas, steam and fragments roaring from the ground. These events are sparked when magma mixes with water from the sea or underground, causing an explosion.
Mikayla Bouchard, “Transportation emerges as crucial to escape poverty“, NY Times:
In a large, continuing study of upward mobility based at Harvard, commuting time has emerged as the single strongest factor in the odds of escaping poverty. The longer an average commute in a given county, the worse the chances of low-income families there moving up the ladder.
The relationship between transportation and social mobility is stronger than that between mobility and several other factors, like crime, elementary-school test scores or the percentage of two-parent families in a community, said Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard economist and one of the researchers on the study.
The study notes the connection in places with notoriously long commutes and poverty, including Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Orlando, Fla., and Birmingham, Ala.
A separate report focusing on New York, from New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation, came to a similar conclusion. The study compared neighborhoods by accessibility to mass transit and the number of jobs within an hour’s commute. It found that residents of the areas least well served by mass transit relied on personal vehicles. Areas in the middle third — those with some, but insufficient, access to transportation — had the highest rates of unemployment and the lowest incomes, the study found.