Does it cost less to drive to work than catch the train?

Posted: December 10, 2011 | Author: Alan Davies | Filed under: Public transport | Tags: car, fares, Gabrielle Costa, Metro, MYKI, PTUA, Public Transport Users Association, The Age, train | 14 Comments

Laneways of Melbourne (photo from Planning Institute - VYP Street Art Tour)

The Public Transport Users Association (PTUA) is keen to make the case that it costs more to travel by public transport in Melbourne than it does by car. The PTUA says above-inflation fare rises over the last decade mean public transport now costs much more than “petrol in the car” for many trips.

The PTUA might take some moral support from this op-ed in The Age this week by journalist Gabriella Costa (the paper calls it an ‘Analysis’). Like the PTUA, she also argues that commuting by car is cheaper. She says the 9% fare increase announced this week by the Government will make driving a better option. Her contention is that, “even loosely, the maths just don’t add up” for rail:

And it’s a simple equation. A Metro daily ticket from a zone 2 station into the city? $11.90 from January 1. Petrol from home to work and back? two to three litres. Parking: less than $10 a day on the city’s edge.

Ms Costa doesn’t actually do the maths, so I have. Unless she gets her petrol for free, even on those numbers it still costs less to take the train to the city than drive! Petrol at $1.35 per litre is $4.00 a day, plus $10 for parking. Even loosely, that adds up in favour of the train! But as we all know, there’s more to the financial cost of driving than just petrol and parking, so I’ll try to do a tighter estimate.

Ms Costa’s example is based on her own circumstances. I know from her article that she lives in St Albans, near Giniver station in Zone 2. By her estimate, she’s 17 km by road from where she works in the city (presumably at The Age HQ in Spencer St). I’ll assume she commutes 220 days a year after taking rec leave, public holidays, sick leave, the odd day off, a bit of work-related travel and weekends into account. If she drove to work on every one of these 220 days she’d therefore travel 7,480 km in a year.

I’ll assume she drives the cheapest vehicle you can buy new in the small car class, a Hyundai i30. According to the RACV, operating costs of this vehicle for fuel, tyres and servicing, are 16.6 cents per kilometre, giving her an annual commuting cost of $1,224. That’s conservative because the fuel component is based on a city-country average – commuting in busy traffic is thirstier work.

Add to that parking at $10 per day for 220 days and her all up cost for a year of commuting by car to the CBD totals $3,444. That’s still quite a bit more than the cost of catching the train from St Albans, even under the new fare structure that takes effect from 1 January.

St Albans is in Zone 2, so Ms Costa could buy a myki Yearly Pass in 2012 for $2,021. That would save her $1480 compared to driving. Even if she travelled every day on a myki Daily Cap it would cost $2,438 over the course of a year, still putting her ahead by $1,000 compared to driving.

And if she lived any further out the cost of train travel would stay the same but driving would cost considerably more. If, for example, she lived in Pakenham (since she mentions it in her article) her annual expenditure on driving would increase to $6,371 p.a. because it’s 57 km from her workplace. But the cost of the train would be the same as it is from St Albans, since both stations are in Zone 2.

It’s important to note that I’ve only considered variable costs, specifically parking, fuel, tyres and servicing – I’ve taken no account of the cost of owning the car. But it makes no sense to ignore standing costs, because if she doesn’t actually have a car she can’t drive to work! The RACV says the annual standing cost of a Hyundai i30 is $5,668, made up primarily of depreciation, interest, insurance and registration.

If I assume commuting accounts for half of her total annual travel by car (i.e. she drives 7,480 km to work each year as well as doing a further 7,480 km p.a. in non-work travel), then the standing costs that should be attributed to her journey to work come to $2,834.

Add that $2,834 to the $3,444 she pays for parking, fuel, tyres and servicing and Ms Costa is up for an annual total of $6,278 for the privilege of driving to work from St Albans. Remember, a myki Yearly Pass will cost much less, just $2,021, and even a myki Daily Cap will cost her $2,438 for the year. Read the rest of this entry »

Are these contenders for ‘spin doctor’ of the year?

Posted: December 8, 2011 | Author: Alan Davies | Filed under: Public transport | Tags: fare increase, Metlink, online survey, Public transport, spin, Terry Mulder, The Age | 10 Comments

Public transport fares effective 1 January 2012 (Metlink)

There’s never any shortage of creativity when politicians, business and the media want to put a particular ‘spin’ – meaning an interpretation that furthers their own agenda, sometimes irrespective of logic, truth or salience – on an issue.

I saw a couple of interesting ‘spins’ this week when the Victorian Government announced the public transport fare increase that takes effect from January 1 2012. Three in particular caught my attention. I don’t know if they’re “best in show” but I think they might be leading contenders for The Melbourne Urbanist’s (proposed) annual SPIN Award to honour excellence in deceptiveness, bias, self-serving behaviour and a related string of detestable (and yet to be defined) offences.

The first is the on-line survey The Age ran this week to accompany its story breaking* the news about the fare increase. The Age blatantly sought the sympathy of outraged readers, posing the following question in its on-line survey:

Will you use less public transport as a result of the increase in fares in 2012?

Yes, I can’t afford to pay any more so will look at other options

No, I’ve got no choice but to fork out the extra cash in fares

For what it’s worth, 52% answered no. But it’s not worth much because almost everything imaginable is wrong with this survey. For a start it’s a leading question, connecting the increase directly to “less” use. That might be tolerated in a newspaper survey, given a more neutral alternative could be a bit clumsy. But where it goes seriously bad is with response options that don’t settle for a straightforward “Yes” or “No”.

Instead, The Age assumes it knows the reasons for the reader’s answer and and there’re only two possibilities – either “I can’t afford to pay” or “I’ve got no choice”. Other possibilities aren’t considered. What, for example, do respondents do if they want to say “No, I’m happy to pay to improve public transport”, or “Yes, it’s a matter of principle”?

The response options should’ve been a straightforward and unambiguous “Yes” or “No” (and a “don’t know”, or similar, is always a good idea). But this is not a survey designed to get an objective answer. It’s simply and unabashedly part of the main news story. It might as well be a photo or a breakout box. It’s not there to add objectivity; it’s there to add a bit of “colour”. Even the single “No” answer on offer is heavily biased to a begrudging acceptance – “I’ve got no choice”.

At first I wondered why journalism schools don’t give their students a basic grounding in survey design. After all, on-line surveys are ubiquitous. But then I realised that would be pointless – on-line surveys by media organisations are a tool of drama, not research.

The second comes from Metlink, which evidently will go to any lengths to present the fare increase in a favourable light. Counter-intuitively, Metlink tells travellers they “can beat the price rise” by switching from Metcard to myki. Here’s how Metlink says it can be done:

For example, a 2 hour Zone 1 Metcard will increase by 20 cents to $4 while a 2 hour myki cap will increase by 26 cents to $3.28. A Daily Zone 1 Metcard will increase by 60 cents to $7.60 and the daily myki cap will increase 52 cents to $6.56. A Daily Zone 1 + 2 Metcard will increase 90 cents to $11.90, while the equivalent myki fare will increase 88 cents to $11.08.

On this evidence Metlink won’t pass Communication 101, but the bottom line is myki really is cheaper under the new structure than Metcard is at present for the exact comparisons Metlink has specified. Trouble is, Metlink has very carefully cherry-picked its examples. It’s only true if the traveller shifts from a single use Metcard this year to a multi-use ticket next year (and not just to myki – works for multi use Metcards too).

However all those travellers who already have a myki won’t be able to “beat the price rise”. Nor will regular travellers who currently use multi-trip Metcards like a 10x2hr or a 5xDaily be able to “beat the price rise” – Zone 1 versions of both those tickets cost $30.20 at present, or $6.04 per day for a two-way commute. Under the new fare structure, a daily myki cap will cost more – $6.56.

The comparison Metlink is making is dubious – it’s not comparing apples with apples. Myki isn’t an “occasional” system like a 2 hour Metcard. Travellers don’t top-up $3.28 each time they want to make the occasional trip within Zone 1. Myki is more like a multi-trip Metcard – users who top-up via the web or the call centre must put in $10 minimum. I expect most people put in considerably more because it’s bothersome to top-up frequently. This after all is one of the advantages of myki.

Myki should be compared against multi-trip Metcards. As noted above, that comparison reveals myki doesn’t enable travellers to come even close to “beating the price rise”. Read the rest of this entry »

Are these really the most (and least) liveable suburbs in Melbourne?

Posted: November 27, 2011 | Author: Alan Davies | Filed under: Planning | Tags: Hallam, index, Liveability, Our Liveable City, South Yarra, suburb, The Age, Tract | 10 Comments

Liveability index for 314 Melbourne suburbs (from The Age)

I never read those glossy magazine inserts in The Age (who does?) but on Friday I made an exception for The Melbourne Magazine because it promised to tell me “the most liveable suburb in the world’s most liveable city”.

The Age’s Our liveable city project ranks the “liveability” of 314 suburbs from top to bottom and claims to reveal “Melbourne’s best suburbs, the ones improving the most, and where you should buy your next home”.

Liveability is defined initially as “the general quality of a place that makes it pleasant or agreeable for people to reside in”. Fortunately, someone saw that was a tautology and wouldn’t be of any practical help. So liveability is subsequently defined by 13 measurable criteria.

These cover topography, traffic, crime, cultural facilities and parks, as well as proximity to a range of amenities – the CBD, beaches, public transport, schools, restaurants and shops. Scores out of five on each criterion are added to give an overall summary score for each suburb. Each suburb is subsequently ranked from 1 to 314 on an Index of Liveability.

Unsurprisingly with this sort of exercise, there was a lot of criticism from readers, with many pointing to apparent anomalies in the rankings. One said, “once I saw Footscray was rated higher than Middle Park I stopped reading”.

Disagreement is inevitable. People are different and so it’s hard to get consensus on just what does, or doesn’t, make a place liveable. That shouldn’t be surprising – an elderly couple, for example, is likely to have a very different definition of liveability to that of a young single. Throw in further differences, say in education, income or ethnicity, and it gets much more complex.

There is a much more straightforward and reliable way of establishing the relative liveability of suburbs. That simply involves measuring what people are prepared to pay to live in them i.e. property prices. It doesn’t require complex measures and weights (not that The Age bothered with the latter). In fact it sidesteps entirely the hardest and most intractable question of all – defining apriori just what liveability is.

Moreover, it provides a clear ranking and allows us to measure the size of the difference between suburbs. And it’s based on the actual decisions of hundreds of thousands of householders. Knowing that the average property value in South Yarra is three and a half times higher than in Hallam is a much more useful and valuable piece of information about the relative merits of the two suburbs than knowing one ranks 350 places ahead of the other on the Index of Liveability.

There’re distortions in the market so property values aren’t a perfect representation of the relative liveability of Melbourne’s suburbs. I would argue however that this approach involves infinitely fewer compromises than the methodology used by The Age. Of course it wouldn’t make a very interesting story when there’s the option available to the newspaper of bringing some “science” to the issue.

That’s not to say exercises like the Index of Liveability don’t have value. They can be useful to establish just why residents think one suburb is more liveable than another. Knowing why properties average $1,300,000 in South Yarra and $369,000 in Hallam would be very important information for policy-makers.

Interpreted this way, I think The Age’s attempt is actually better than many of the commenters are prepared to concede (even though I’m annoyed that very little information about the methodology is disclosed). You can argue the toss at the margin – for example, I suspect proximity to schools only matters in the case of certain institutions – but by and large the criteria are a reasonable compromise. Read the rest of this entry »

Is Bali selling itself short?

Posted: October 25, 2011 | Author: Alan Davies | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bali, Carolyn Webb, Eat Pray Love, Indonesia, Kuta, Richard Woolveridge, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, tourism, tout, touting, Ubud | 7 Comments

Plenty of traffic in Ubud (BTW this photo misrepresents the extent of helmet use)

There were an astonishing 972 reader comments by 5.30 pm Tuesday on this story in The Age by journalist Carolyn Webb, Bali: why bother?, bemoaning the unwanted attentions from street touts she attracted on a visit to Ubud earlier this month:

Single women, especially, cannot walk more than 10 metres without being shouted at, approached, pleaded with, harangued and harassed with the words, “Miiisss, miiisss, transport, taxi, where you going … miiiisss?”

Even more extraordinary, over 37,000 readers had already voted on-line in answer to this question posed by the newspaper: “Do you agree with the author that Bali isn’t worth visiting?”. I’ve never seen numbers this large in response to any story in The Age before – it seems readers are very, very interested in the topic of Bali.

There’s no way I’m going to trawl through close to 1,000 comments, but my random sample indicates the weight of opinion is solidly against the author. She does herself no favours with a few naïve and possibly even condescending remarks. The weight of opinion from commenters is she should get over it and accept that touting is just the way it is across large parts of south-east Asia. If you don’t like it, they say, then don’t go there. Many argue that touting is an inevitable response to poverty – desperate people are simply trying to put food on the table – and should be accepted as part of what Bali is.

The Age must’ve noticed the depth of feeling in the comments – early in the afternoon the paper posted this counter-perspective, Being taken for a ride in Bali isn’t always such a bad thing, by the acting editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Richard Woolveridge. Even this article generated a respectable 145 comments by 5.30 pm

But it seems most of the “silent majority” – that’s the 36,000 or so who don’t offer a comment but are sufficiently motivated to vote in the online poll – actually agree with Ms Webb. By 5.30 pm a decisive majority (70%) had voted that Bali actually isn’t worth visiting. That’s a very large number and suggests Bali has a serious image problem with the Fairfax demographic (and remember that Ms Webb’s article is about “Eat, Pray, Love” Ubud, not “drunks and druggies” Kuta).

No matter what your personal feelings are about touting, there’s a sort of tragedy of the commons happening here. When touting by an aggressive minority of street vendors and taxi drivers puts off a large number of tourists, an entire economy of “back office” workers in hotels, restaurants and other downstream tourism industries is seriously threatened. As Ms Webb says, “aren’t there better ways of doing business? If a tourist is treated so badly they don’t want to ever return, isn’t that a bad thing for Bali?”.

Doubtless many readers voted against Bali because of rampant Aussie bogans rather than rampant touting, but either way something seems to be killing the golden goose. Read the rest of this entry »

Is this the end of The Age (as we know it)?

Posted: June 22, 2011 | Author: Alan Davies | Filed under: Miscellaneous | Tags: Australian Financial Review, Banyule & Nillumbik Weekly, Business Spectator, Crikey, Fairfax, Greg Hywood, media, newspaper, online, Ron Walker, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Weekly Review | 7 Comments

by xkcd

My family let our subscription to The Age lapse the other week. It’s not that $419 p.a. isn’t good value – we’d be prepared to pay a bit more if we had to – it’s just that no one in the household reads the print edition of the paper anymore. And we no longer have to pay anything to read The Age electronically!

My wife has a free six months subscription to the iPad version and I read the free online version. More often than not, the home-delivered paper version never got unrolled. So when the decision came to renew for another year there was no point in pouring another $419 down the drain.

Maybe if the circulation department had followed up with a sweetener we might’ve changed our mind out of habit or because the idea of not reading The Age every morning over coffee and croissants is ‘unMelburnian’. But the company didn’t seem overly bothered about losing us (unlike, for example, lean and nimble Crikey, who worked harder at getting me to resubscribe).

Fairfax is having serious problems with its papers. As I understand it, the Sydney Morning Herald is on the verge of going into the red and The Age isn’t far behind. For Melburnians, there is a high probability that The Age as we know it will disappear from newsstands sooner rather than later.

The problems for Fairfax, the company that owns these papers, started with the enormous drop in revenue from classified advertising. These were rightly called “rivers of gold”. Older Melbourne readers might remember the advertising slogan “icpota” (“in the classified pages of The Age”). Fairfax wasn’t very successful in adapting to the online world – companies like car.sales.com, seek.com and eBay stole its market dominance. Nor does the company seem much better today – only last year my Fairfax-owned local paper, the Banyule & Nillumbik Weekly, was blindsided by a newcomer, the Weekly Review, which took over virtually all its real estate advertising. This week the Fairfax paper is 20 pages (with one half-page real estate ad), the Weekly Review is 96 pages (with 79.5 pages of real estate ads).

Another problem for Fairfax is the well known shift of readers (like me) to online media. The company feels it has to have an online presence to “stay in the game” yet it’s too nervous to put up a paywall for fear it will lose readers to other online sites that stay free. It’s earning modest revenue from (awfully intrusive!) online advertising, but Fairfax’s experience with putting its third paper, the Australian Financial Review, behind a paywall hasn’t been positive. The AFR lost visibility because it couldn’t be accessed by search engines, giving newcomers like the online Business Spectator a free kick. From what I can gather, the financial situation of the AFR isn’t healthy either.

New Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood has a plan to turn around the ailing fortunes of Fairfax’s three major newspapers (BTW, Fairfax also owns other assets e.g. 3AW). It seems he’s proposing to put all three online papers behind a semi-permeable paywall where most content is free, but premium content requires payment. This approach would allow search engines access to the site but still leave scope to earn revenue from subscriptions. The New York Times recently moved in this direction – it offers 20 free views per month before requiring a subscription (although if you come to the Times by clicking a link on someone’s sites that doesn’t count toward your 20). Read the rest of this entry »

Is the proposed airport train off the rails?

Posted: April 19, 2011 | Author: Alan Davies | Filed under: Airports & aviation, Public transport | Tags: High Speed Rail, Melbourne airport, RACV, Skybus, The Age, train | 10 Comments

Royal wedding preview

The idea of a high-speed Melbourne Airport-to-CBD rail line is in the news yet again, this time advocated by the RACV.

You’ve got to give the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria its due. While simultaneously calling for roadworks to reduce congestion and improvements to traffic flow in Hoddle Street, it’s morphing into a general transport lobby group that “advocates improved transport services for all its members, including those who use public transport”.

This story on the RACV’s call for an airport train has attracted over 100 comments, most of them favouring a rail line. There’re the same themes that come up every time The Age runs pro-airport rail stories – it’s embarrassing that Melbourne doesn’t have a dedicated rail line; car parking prices at the airport are extortionary; Skybus fares cost an arm and a leg; the contract with Citylink won’t allow competition; and the airport and taxi industry won’t let anyone kill their golden goose.

Even while they approvingly cite the example of Sydney’s and Brisbane’s airport trains, commenters nevertheless generally assume an airport train would be high speed, would solve congestion on Melbourne’s freeways and would cost no more than a Zone 1-2 fare.

I’ve explained before why an airport rail line is unlikely to make sense for a while yet, but it’s a good idea to take another more considered view of its prospects than those advanced by unabashed boosters. Here’re twelve reasons why a rail line to Melbourne Airport is unlikely to make sense for a while yet.

First, Skybus already provides a dedicated public transport service from the airport to the CBD with higher frequencies and longer span of hours than any train service in Melbourne. Most times trips to Southern Cross station take 20 minutes. While they blow out to over 40 minutes in peak hour, that could be addressed for a fraction of the cost of a new rail line by extending the existing dedicated on-road lane to other sections of the route that are prone to congestion.

Second, there’s little to be gained from spending more than a billion dollars to replace a high quality public transport service (Skybus) with another one (train), when the money could be spent on providing better public transport to areas that don’t currently have adequate service.

Third, every study undertaken to date has concluded that a rail service isn’t warranted. It might be in the future but not yet. In the meantime, there is considerable potential to increase the capacity and speed of Skybus. As pointed out here, Brisbane’s south-east busway already carries 15,000 passengers per hour. Read the rest of this entry »

Will E-Gate curb suburban sprawl?

Posted: March 10, 2011 | Author: Alan Davies | Filed under: Housing, Planning | Tags: brownfield, Denis Napthine, Docklands, e-Gate, Fishermans Bend, Major Projects, redevelopment, Richmond station, The Age, urban renewal | 4 Comments

24 hours NY subway animation - set to cello pizzicato (H/T Nick Bastow)

I like the (very) notional plans for redevelopment of the old E-Gate site in west Melbourne to accommodate up to 12,000 residents published in The Age (Thursday, 10 March, 2011).

Putting what might be 6,000–9,000 dwellings on 20 highly accessible hectares on the edge of the CBD makes a lot more sense than the mere 10,000–15,000 mooted for 200 hectares at Fishermans Bend.

But I do take issue with the claim by the Minister for Major Projects, Denis Napthine, that it’s a very significant development for Melbourne “because we want to grow the population without massively contributing to urban sprawl”.

The Age reinforces this take by titling its report “New city-edge suburb part of plan to curb urban sprawl” and goes on to say that it’s the first big part of the Government’s “plan to shift urban growth from Melbourne’s fringes to its heart”.

I’ve always liked the idea of E-Gate being redeveloped but, as I said on February 19 in relation to a similar report on proposals for Fishermans Bend, the significance or otherwise of the project for fringe growth has to be assessed in the context of the total housing task for Melbourne.

In the twelve months ending 30 September 2010, 42,509 dwellings were approved in the metropolitan area, of which around 17,000 were approved in the outer suburban Growth Area municipalities. That’s just for one year. E-Gate’s 6,000 – 9,000 dwellings would be released over a long time frame, probably at least ten years and quite possibly longer (the Government says Fishermans Bend will be developed over 20-30 years). Existing leases on the site run till 2014 so it’s likely the first residents won’t be moving in for a long time yet.

Of course it all helps but the contribution of the three redevelopment sites identified by the Government – E-Gate, Fishermans Bend and Richmond station – to diminishing pressure on the fringe will be modest. They don’t collectively constitute a sprawl-ameliorating strategy. Melbourne still needs a sensible approach to increasing multi-unit housing supply across the rest of the metropolitan area. The “brownfield strategy” is in danger of becoming “cargo cult urbanism”.

Read the rest of this entry »

How dense are Melbourne’s outer suburbs?

Posted: July 12, 2010 | Author: Alan Davies | Filed under: Growth Areas | Tags: density, growth areas, Kenneth Davidson, Melton, The Age, Toolern | 4 Comments

Kenneth Davidson claimed in The Age yesterday that Melbourne has 15 years’ supply of outer suburban land zoned for urban development at the world’s lowest residential densities of 12.5 to 15 houses per hectare.

Lowest in the world? I think that’s possibly a little harsh when Melbourne is compared with the outer suburbs of US cities. However what I’m really interested in looking at is what Melbourne’s supposed “lowest residential densities” actually look like. What does 15 dwellings per hectare mean on the ground?

An ideal case study is the new mixed use development planned for Toolern, near Melton. According to the Precinct Structure Plan, when fully developed it is expected to cover 24 sq km, house an estimated 55,000 residents and host businesses that provide 28,000 jobs.

This is an enormous project, covering an area around a fifth larger than the entire inner city municipality of Yarra. It is equivalent in area to a 2.8-kilometre radius circle – if the centre were Melbourne Town Hall, it would extend to Richmond Station in the east, Alexandra Parade in the north, Bolte Bridge in the west and Albert Park in the south.

The minimum average density set down for Toolern is 15 dwellings (per net developable hectare), the same as the target minimum for the growth areas set out in Melbourne @ 5 Million and its predecessor, Melbourne 2030. Read the rest of this entry »

Does a rail line to Melbourne airport make sense?

Posted: June 28, 2010 | Author: Alan Davies | Filed under: Airports & aviation, Infrastructure, Public transport | Tags: Booz Allen Hamilton, IMIS, Melbourne airport, rail link, Skybus, The Age, Tullamarine freeway | 10 Comments

The Age ran a front page story on Saturday (Train derailed by buck-passing and vested interests) on the need for a rail link from the airport to the CBD. I say story, but as the headline and this quote indicate, it was more advocacy than news:

“But thanks to decades of buck-passing and pandering to vested interests by successive state and federal governments, Melbourne – unlike so many other cities of its size and wealth – does not have a railway line to its airport”.

So having pressed the civic pride button, it’s a pity The Age didn’t also push the rationality pedal and ask: is there a case for constructing a new public transport system (rail) to compete with the existing one (bus)?

Airtrain terminal Qld international airport

I would quite like to have a rail line from the CBD to the airport, but as I’ve indicated before (here and here), only if it makes sense. Let’s look at some pertinent issues.

First, the feasibility studies undertaken by the Government conclude that the numbers for rail don’t stack up (yet). The most recent evaluations, undertaken in 2001 by BAH and in 2009 by IMIS, both concluded there is not a strong enough case to build a new rail line to the airport.

The Department of Transport projected rail would capture only 9% of all airport trips and would require a subsidy of $350-450 million over 10 years (in 2001 dollars).

Second, in 2003 the Government upgraded the Skybus service so it could deal better with congested conditions around the CBD and on the Tullamarine Freeway. According to the Transport Department, new roadworks enabled Skybus to bypass traffic delays at the Tullamarine/Calder Freeway interchange and at the city fringe. The package included lane widening as well as line marking changes to create an emergency lane wide enough for buses. Read the rest of this entry »

Is the online version of The Age still a paper?

Posted: June 15, 2010 | Author: Alan Davies | Filed under: Miscellaneous | Tags: Committee for Melbourne, e-commerce, Fairfax, Financial Review, internet, online, review, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, theage.com.au | 4 Comments

I value having The Age delivered to my door each morning, but I’m disappointed with the online version, theage.com.au. I refer to it often, but my experience with the site suggests I’d have to think long and hard before I’d be prepared to pay to access it online.

Charging is of course Fairfax’s ultimate goal (the online version of The Financial Review, which is also Fairfax owned, is pay for use) and seen as a way of making up for the declining popularity of newspapers – sales of the Monday to Friday edition of The Age fell 4% in the March Quarter, 2010. Sales of the Saturday edition fell 5%.

Those video advertisements that automatically start when you click on the site are a real turn-off but I have some sympathy for Fairfax’s search for a financially viable online model (although since I pay for the hard copy, why should I have to endure such intrusive advertising?). No, my disappointment relates to management issues.

A key reason for my dissatisfaction is basic – it’s hard to find stuff on the site. I imagine that many people want to track down an article they recall seeing in yesterday’s paper or last week’s, yet you can’t search by date of publication. You have to know the title or author. That seems like a terribly basic omission to me. Why can’t I look up a simple table of contents for each day, showing the name and author of articles with the ability to jump straight to what I want? Read the rest of this entry »

Spare infrastructure capacity – is it a tall story?

Posted: May 10, 2010 | Author: Alan Davies | Filed under: Architecture & buildings, Education, justice, health, Infrastructure | Tags: Albert Park Primary School, Infrastructure, portable classroom, school, spare capacity, The Age | 10 Comments

Here’s more evidence that claims of “spare” infrastructure capacity in inner city and inner suburban areas are a tall story. The Sunday Age reports that Port Melbourne Primary School, Malvern Primary and Middle Park Primary are the first schools to get double storey portable classrooms.

Two storey portables are a natural evolution – practically every State primary school in Melbourne within 10 km of the CBD already has single storey portables. However I’m not concerned with whether portables are better or worse than permanent buildings but rather with what additional classrooms say about spare capacity in schools.

As I argued previously in Why ‘spare infrastructure capacity’ is exaggerated, it is a mistake to think that there is necessarily spare infrastructure capacity just because an area historically had a higher population than it has at present. Read the rest of this entry »

Banging the high rise drum

Posted: April 12, 2010 | Author: Alan Davies | Filed under: Architecture & buildings, Housing | Tags: community, density, high rise, Housing, medium density, Melbourne, multi unit housing, social, The Age | 4 Comments

The Age is banging the high rise drum again.

This quote from Living the high life or just scraping by? in The Age on Saturday (who writes these clever puns, Tim Vine?) is a good example of setting up a ‘straw man’:

“With Australia’s population growth an increasingly vexed issue, ‘density’ has become a popular word with planners and developers. But are skyscrapers the way to achieve it?”

A ‘straw man’ is a logical fallacy where a decoy argument is substituted for the real issue under debate. In this case high-rise is easier to disparage than the real issue, even though (almost) no one is actually arguing that high rise is the answer. The real issue is almost entirely a debate about sprawl versus medium density housing. Sprawl is mostly about detached houses while medium density is mostly about two storey town houses and four storey apartments. Read the rest of this entry »

No foundation for policy on centres

Posted: April 9, 2010 | Author: Alan Davies | Filed under: Activity centres, Employment, Planning | Tags: Activity centres, Broadmeadows, CAD, Central Activities Districts, Melbourne @ 5 Million, suburban centres, The Age | 2 Comments

The six building blocks for a better Melbourne announced yesterday by the Premier are innocuous (the term mother’s milk springs to mind) except for the third one, in which he pledges to ensure the planning system “encourages the transformation of Melbourne from a mono-centric to a multi-centred city, so that people can work closer to where they live”.

The belated recognition that large modern cities tend to have multiple major employment centres was set out in the Victorian Government’s supplementary strategy plan, Melbourne @ 5 Million, released in late 2008. The original strategy, Melbourne 2030, implicitly conceived of Melbourne as a nineteenth century monocentric city – with jobs in the centre and with the suburbs acting as dormitories for workers. The multitude of small suburban centres identified in Melbourne 2030 were seen as largely providing retail and personal services for residents.

It seems the Premier knows that 72% of Melbourne’s jobs are now located more than 5 km from the CBD and 50% are more than 13 km out. But the Government doesn’t seem to know much about the geography of suburban jobs, particularly the number and role of major suburban activity centres.

Melbourne @ 5 Million designated six new Central Activities Districts (CADs) to provide “significant CBD-type jobs and services” in the suburbs. The Age described them as “mini-CBDs”. They are Broadmeadows, Box Hill, Dandenong, Footscray, Frankston and Ringwood.

I find it very hard to imagine that any of these CADs can seriously be thought of as having the potential to provide “significant CBD-type jobs and services”, at least in the foreseeable future. All the indications are that six of the existing Transit Cities were simply redesignated as CADs without much further thought.

Consider the case of Broadmeadows. On 24 March The Age ran a story headlined “Broadie all set for major revamp”, with the subtitle “Broadmeadows could become a major economic centre in the north”*. According to the story, the outstanding prospects for Broadmeadows come down to its designation as a CAD.

I don’t however see much evidence that Broadmeadows is acquiring a CBD-type character. The story lists a number of major investments that are either proceeding or planned, all of which are public sector driven.

There’re new Council premises, a Global Learning Centre, a leisure centre, a secondary school, a tree-lined extension of Main St, an upgrade of the railway station and a parking station. There’s a planned seven level office building but it is intended to accommodate public servants. All in all, there is little evidence that the private sector, which is the backbone of the CBD, has much interest in Broadmeadows beyond retailing and consumer services.

An examination of the composition of jobs is revealing. Whereas almost half of all jobs in the CBD are in Commercial Services (i.e. Finance, Insurance, Business and Property), the corresponding figure for the Broadmeadows CAD is just 4%. Where it excels however, as the projects listed above suggest, is in government – 44% of jobs are in the public sector.

Broadmeadows also has neither of the other two key characteristics of the CBD – size and density. It has only 1% as many jobs as the CBD and is only one eighth as dense. The idea that it could function like the CBD in the foreseeable future seems fanciful. Read the rest of this entry »

How big is Melbourne?

Posted: March 26, 2010 | Author: Alan Davies | Filed under: Planning | Tags: agglomeration economies, city size, density, Justin Madden, London, Melton, new towns, Planning, Suburban sprawl, The Age, urban boundary | 11 Comments

How big is Melbourne really? This issue is ‘front of mind’ this morning because of a recent claim in The Age that Melbourne “is already the eighth largest city in the world in geographical size, stretching about 100 km from east to west”.

This is a common view. In June last year The Age’s editorialist said “Melbourne’s population of 4 million already sprawls across roughly 100 kilometres in all directions, occupying a bigger area than much more populous cities such as London or New York”. Read the rest of this entry »

Problems with fringe-dwelling are peripheral (OpEd in The Age)

Posted: March 19, 2010 | Author: Alan Davies | Filed under: Planning | Tags: fringe-dwelling, peripheral, sprawl, suburbs, The Age | 4 Comments

I have an OpEd in The Age this morning which the editor has titled Problems with fringe-dwelling are peripheral. That’s quite clever! My OpEd seeks to cut through the hyperbole and examine the issue of sprawl dispassionately and logically. Unfortunately this time The Age doesn’t appear to have made provision for people to make comments – that’s usually a lot of fun. (EDIT 1: I see that The Age has now activated the comments section but its after midday so I suspect the horse has bolted. Edit 2: see further post on sources here)

The jobs are already in the suburbs

Posted: March 18, 2010 | Author: Alan Davies | Filed under: Employment | Tags: commuting, Employment, Jobs, Project Melbourne, sprawl, suburbs, The Age, The Great Divide | 2 Comments

There was another good story published in The Age yesterday as part of the continuing series, Project Melbourne: Towards a Sustainable City. Titled The Great Divide, it compares living in a CBD apartment with outer suburban living.

However there is a point where the writer, Julie Szego, goes too far. She contends that outer suburban living “depends on jobs becoming a reality. If jobs don’t come to the suburbs, roads will remain choked and families time-poor”.

The idea that there are few jobs in the suburbs is a common misconception with important policy implications.

The reality is that around 72% of all jobs in Melbourne are located at a distance greater than 5 km from the CBD. Half of all jobs are more than 13 km from the CBD.

Destinations of Casey commuters

And these aren’t all low-skill, low-pay jobs either. The majority of jobs in Melbourne occupied by graduates are located more than 5 km from the CBD.

This misunderstanding of the geography of employment is also displayed in the first feature written for The Age’s current Project Melbourne series. That article, titled The Outer Limits, made the claim that “of those jobs that are available (in fringe suburbs), a higher percentage are blue-collar”.

The idea that suburban jobs are mostly in low skill occupations seems to be another popular misconception.

In fact, only 9% of jobs located more than 40 km from the CBD are in the Manufacturing sector, compared to 14% for all of Melbourne. If the definition of blue collar is extended to include jobs in the Wholesale, Transport and Construction sectors, the respective figures for the fringe and metropolitan area are 26% and 31%. What the fringe areas actually do have is a higher proportion of jobs than the metropolitan average in the high-skill education and health sectors.

It is not in any event clear why having more ‘blue collar’ jobs would be a disadvantage compared, say, to having an over-representation of retailing jobs. Many jobs in the modern Manufacturing and Construction industries are highly skilled and involve interacting with complex technologies and systems.

The main issues associated with employment in Melbourne can be explored in this presentation I gave last year at a cultural industries seminar at Qld University of Technology, Jobs in the Suburbs.

The contention in Julie Szego’s article that outer suburban roads are “choked” probably depends on one’s definition of what constitutes congestion. Most outer suburban residents travel locally – for example, 70% of trips by residents of the City of Casey are to destinations located in either Casey itself or the adjacent City of Cardinia (the corresponding figure for Cardinia is 83%). Read the rest of this entry »

Increasing multi unit housing supply

Posted: March 17, 2010 | Author: Alan Davies | Filed under: Planning | Tags: housing supply, Inner city, Melbourne, multi unit housing, Project Melbourne, sprawl, suburbs, The Age | 4 Comments

There’s a feature in yesterday’s issue of The Age, The Outer Limits (clever title!), which is the first shot in a new series the newspaper is publishing under the banner, Project Melbourne: Towards a Sustainable City, on the challenges facing Melbourne as it hurtles towards a projected population of seven million sometime around 2050.

One of the key themes developed in the article is the need to increase the proportion of new dwellings constructed within the existing urban fabric rather than on the urban fringe. Another key theme is the need to increase housing affordability across all price segments.

I’m a strong supporter of these priorities. We do need to lessen the constraints on new construction in the suburbs but not, as The Age implies, because sprawl is intrinsically bad – it’s deficiencies are greatly exaggerated. Rather, the key reason is to increase affordability.

Most Melburnites want to live within established areas where they’re closer to everything else that’s going on in the city. They can do their grocery shopping and get their hair done anywhere, but living closer in usually means greater proximity to family, work and major sporting, cultural and entertainment facilities.

Contrary to much of the rhetoric on this issue, most households looking to settle in established areas do not have the option of locating in the buzzy inner city. It’s way too expensive. Redevelopment opportunities are constrained by heritage protection, by high property values, by highly organised resident opposition and by small lot sizes that are difficult to assemble into viable redevelopment opportunities. The inner city is also much smaller than most commentators realise – only 8% of Melbourne’s population live within 5 km of the CBD despite the considerable growth experienced in this region over the last 15-20 years. Read the rest of this entry »

The ABC and climate change

Posted: March 12, 2010 | Author: Alan Davies | Filed under: Energy & GHG | Tags: ABC, balance, climate change, letters, Maurice Newman, Taegen Edwards, The Age | Leave a comment

Taegen Edwards has a superb letter in The Age today in response to Maurice Newman’s upbraiding of the ABC for supposed lack of balance on climate change.

She points out that unless it resorts to ideologues, opportunists, vested interests or nutters, where can the ABC possibly find someone who opposes climate change from a rational, evidence-based viewpoint?

The ABC’s obligation to ensure fundamental principles of science and logic are respected must come before any compulsion to provide ‘balance’ in ideology and political point-scoring.

The Melbourne Urbanist

Planning and development issues with a particular focus on Melbourne, Australia