Transport planners are asking the wrong question - which is why their answer is always 'more trains'

Places of work are not conveniently distributed and, to make matters worse, where most people live is more disbursed than planners seem to think. Since most people don't live in dense inner-city suburbs and don't work in 'central business districts' (this is true even for a city like London), transport planning solutions founded on urban transit from suburb to city don't work. Transport planners are asking the wrong question and getting the wrong answer.

Here's Joel Kotkin talking about Los Angeles:

If you want a job in Southern California, it is very useful to have a car. The average worker in the Los Angeles metropolitan area (which includes Orange County) can get to fewer than 1 percent of the jobs by transit in 30 minutes. By car, the average worker can get to 33 times as many jobs, according to University of Minnesota research. In Riverside-San Bernardino, the average worker can get to nearly 100 times as many jobs by car as by transit in 30 minutes.

Yet, as Kotkin observes, the city managements in Southern California have "...decided only their solution — more trains — is an acceptable alternative." There's no consideration of ride-hailing, ride-sharing or private jitneys - responses that work with the dispersed nature of the place and the realities of how people live.

West Yorkshire is, you'll all agree, pretty urban in nature but its land area is a third bigger than Greater London with a quarter of the population. And, for all Leeds supposed significance (something I consider consistently overstated to the detriment of the region), the distribution of employment is such that the same applies to West Yorkshire as does in Los Angeles - if you want a job it's pretty useful to have a car.

Despite this reality, transport planners remain transfixed by the idea of the train (or some other fixed line system such as trams, streetcars or trolley buses) - transport solutions that, as one wag put it, "take people from one place they don't want to be to another place they don't want to be". We go to London, which has the most comprehensive public transport system of any major city anywhere, and say "let's do that" without appreciating the constraints of physical geography, where people live and where they work. We need a tram because Manchester has a tram.

But Manchester's tram system doesn't serve most of Greater Manchester:



So, because the tram doesn't go near where most Mancunians live, they do what they've done for years - get in their car and drive to work. Tram systems are great but still, for places that have them, represent fewer than 5% of commuter journeys.

The central problem here - one that transport planners must know but seem to ignore - is that the distribution of people and jobs simply isn't suited to the sort of mass transit solutions those planners like other than where population density is high and there has been a long history of major investment in transport infrastructure (London and Tokyo are the two best examples). Given that it is uneconomic to run relative cheap bus services into many dispersed parts of West Yorkshire what hope do we have of creating a fixed infrastructure transit system that can replace using the car?

Last night I had a conversation with some folk about buses and taxis (it started with us talking about getting the train to Carlisle). The conclusion of the conversation was that, if there were more than two of you then getting a taxi to Bingley station for the train is cheaper than using the bus. And, even with two people the extra cost of a cab is minimal (seven quid in a taxi, six quid and change on the bus). So you get a taxi that comes at your convenience, gets you there quicker and picks you up from your front door rather than have you stand in the wind and rain at a bus stop.

So the right way to think about transport in this case is "how do we make taxis cheaper, cleaner and safer". But that's not what transport authorities are doing - quite the opposite. When a system arrives (ride sharing) that promises to do just this the response of authorities is to try and stop the improvement. And the same goes for ride-hailing, jitneys and mini-buses - public authorities put regulatory barriers in the way, often at the behest of those whose interests are affected by these innovations.

This isn't to say you shouldn't have a tram (although I consider it the wrong thing for West Yorkshire) but to argue for transport planning to work with human behaviour rather than to see itself as trying to force people to change that behaviour. I never drive into Leeds city centre, not because I'm trying to save the planet or think cars are evil but because it's cheap and convenient for me to do so (especially when my wife drops me off at the station). I do drive into Bradford centre because the public transport option isn't cheaper or more convenient.

Joel Kotkin is right to criticise this sort of statement from transport chiefs (this is from the CEO of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Phil Washington):

“It’s too easy to drive in this city. We want to reach the riders that left and get to the new ones as well. And part of that has to do with actually making driving harder.”

Since no transport system based on fixed lines can serve a dispersed population as well as the car, this attitude condemns many people to a less pleasant, more expensive and slower journey that can't be substituted for a ride on a public transport system. Yes the new capacity will fill up (although it is interesting to note that most journeys on UK tram systems outside London are not commuter journeys) but it will be marginal to the totality of journeys.

There are a lot of unanswered questions about the 'decarbonisation' of road transport (what you use to generate the electricity, how to keep all those cars charged up, power grid problems, etc.) but the intention of public authorities is to do just that - we're committed to 100% zero-emission vehicles by 2040. It would be, therefore, better to invest in resolving those unanswered questions than to pile more billions into transport systems that don't even begin to answer the question we should be asking - how can people move around as they do now but more efficiently, more safely and more cleanly?

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"Hey, young people, give up on that dream of a nice house with a garden."

"Californians need to give up on their dream of a “ranch-house lifestyle” and an “ample backyard” and the state should become “more like New York City..."

The Antiplanner reports the words of a Los Angeles columnist. We are so familiar with this sentiment, not always expressed this way but always the same - suburbia is 'urban sprawl' filled with nasty motor cars and boring people, what we need is dense walkable cities filled with happy smiling young folk. And this planning orthodoxy is supported enthusiastically by the rich older people who live in those parts of the city's margins that, without planners, would meet people's dreams of a house with a garden in a nice area.

The first response to this criticism is, of course, to say that modern young people don't want to live in suburbs, they don't want a boring house with a garden but something altogether more funky. Think again:

According to NAHB’s study, 66% of respondents who were born in 1977 or later said they would prefer to buy a home in an outlying suburb or close to a suburb, while only 24% preferred buying a house in a rural area and 10% would rather have a home in the center of a city.

Review after review, survey after survey tell us that people's preference is for suburbia. For sure people also want to live a short ride from work and have access to entertainment but compared to lower crime, good schools, more living space and a private outdoors these things soon become less important.

The problem (which is the point of The Antiplanner's piece) is that the planning system - in the UK as much as in California - makes it very difficult to meet home buyer's aspirations affordably. And that this system's defenders often base their argument on misinformation or misunderstanding - here The Antiplanner points out some surprising facts about "Urban Sprawl Central" or Los Angeles as we usually call it:

• Many consider it sprawl, yet it is the densest urban area in the United States: 7,000 people per square mile vs. 5,300 for the New York urban area (and a national average of 2,500), so to become more like New York it would have to add 350,000 acres to its land area.
• Many think it has been paved over with freeways, yet it has the fewest freeway miles per capita of any major urban area: about 53 miles per million residents vs. 68 in New York (and 122 for the national average urban area), so to be more like New York would require building 188 miles of new freeways.
• Many think that all it needs is to build more rail transit, yet for every new rail transit rider it has gained, it has lost five bus riders, meaning rail transit is more harmful to transit riders than even Uber and Lyft.

Our misperception about how much land is developed for housing ('concreted over' to use the CPRE-approved terminology) perhaps rests on the fact that most of us live in urban areas surrounded by housing. What we seldom do is look at an actual map:



Harrogate District Council (for those who don't know, Harrogate is a wealthy rural district in Yorkshire, North of Leeds and Bradford) expects that all of its housing growth can by met by development near the circles on this map. The rest of the district, well over 90%, is open countryside. You could double the total amount of homes in this district and it would still be overwhelmingly open, rural and beautiful.

The unholy alliance between planners who think suburbs are bad and NIMBYs who want to protect their rural idyll (plus the inflated house prices) acts to prevent other people from having the homes they want - homes that, in times past, were affordable on average wages. Instead millennials are told that they must carry on living in rabbit hutches piled on top of each other in those delightfully walkable, cycle-friendly cities (with their air pollution, knife crime and dangerous roads).

There is nothing wrong with suburbia yet we live in a planning culture that, for huge swathes of the country, prioritises golf courses, race courses and airstrips over building the homes that people want to live in. Surrey famously has more land given over to golf than to housing (although it's an urban myth that the whole country does this) - if just 20 of Surrey's 118 golf courses were developed for housing that would provide close to 20,000 lovely suburban homes for tomorrow's families.

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