City Limits: Why Australia's Cities are Broken and How We Can Fix Them.

[ozbob]

Grattan Institute : City Limits: Why Australia's Cities are Broken and How We Can Fix Them.

>> http://grattan.edu.au/report/city-limits-why-australias-cities-are-broken-and-how-we-can-fix-them/

City Limits: Why Australia's cities are broken and how we can fix them

by Jane-Frances Kelly and Paul Donegan

Grattan Institute's first book, City Limits: Why Australia's cities are broken and how we can fix them, by Jane-Frances Kelly and Paul Donegan, is now available at bookstores and through Melbourne University Publishing.

Our bush heritage helped to define our identity, but today Australia is a nation of cities. A higher proportion of Australians live in cities than almost any other country, and most of our national wealth is generated in them.

For most of the twentieth century, our cities gave us some of the highest living standards in the world. But they are no longer keeping up with changes in how we live and how our economy works.

The distance between where people live and where they work is growing fast. The housing market isn't working, locking many Australians out of where and how they'd like to live. The daily commute is getting longer, putting pressure on social and family life and driving up living costs.

Instead of bringing us together, Australia's cities are dividing Australians—between young and old, rich and poor, the outer suburbs and the inner city. Neglecting our cities has real consequences for our lives now, and for our future prosperity.

City Limits  synthesises insights from Cities Program reports with new analysis and real-life case studies of how individuals, families and businesses experience life in cities today.  It provides a readable account of why Australia's cities are broken, and how we can fix them.

[ozbob]

Melbourne Age --> Melbourne's planning disaster: jobs boom in CBD while affordable housing grows ever outwards in suburbs

[Stillwater]

Recipe for disaster .....

Although we are used to looking at Brisbane as the 'third place' city after Sydney and Melbourne, by 2050,  South-East Queensland will be home to six million Australians, which is greater than the combined population of Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong today.  The Gold Coast will have a population greater than Adelaide's.
Currently, six of the 20 largest cities in Australia are located in Queensland.  By 2050, the figure will be eight.

The current answer to moving people around and between these centres is more tar and cement.  A radical overhaul of our PT planning is required.  CRR is needed, as is fast rail to SEQ destinations managed by Queensland's equivalent of V/Line. 

[ozbob]

Twitter

The Australian ‏@australian 1 hour ago

Long commute erodes family life in big cities, new book claims. http://bit.ly/1vORzKP 

[ozbob]

Radio 3AW --> The great divide: New report into housing and employment

[ozbob]

The Conversation --> Sydney's stuck in traffic, putting the brakes on women and the west

[hU0N]

A radical overhaul of our PT planning is required.  CRR is needed, as is fast rail to SEQ destinations managed by Queensland's equivalent of V/Line.

I think this misses the point.  The authors of the this book are arguing that many of the urban problems that we perceive in Australia's biggest cities are fundamentally the result of broken and flawed thinking about how to plan and build a successful city.  Specifically this problem is that the geographical distance between the workplace of a person on an average wage and the housing affordable by a person on an average wage is already too large, and getting larger.  And it won't be solved by current modes of thinking.

A huge part of the issue is that, to the extent that anyone engages with this problem, they do so in a very outdated way.  The propose solutions like more trains, more tracks, more buses and more roads.  But this fails to truly appreciate the magnitude of the problem.

Consider this.

Brisbane is forecast to have around 400,000 full time jobs within 1km of the centre of the CBD by 2030.  This is more than double the number that it has today.  And under the current paradigm, the workers from these jobs will be housed (largely) in new houses built on greenfield sites outside the current city fringe.  That's 200,000 extra people travelling into the CBD in the morning peak, and 200,000 extra people travelling home again in the evening peak.  What kind of infrastructure would be needed to cater for this?  CRR, even with 9 car trains maxes out at about 35,000 per direction.  That means that you would need three CRR, plus the various new outer suburban lines just to keep up with the growth expected in the next 15 years.  Beyond that, who knows?

Clearly, outdated technological solutions just aren't going to cut it anymore.  But until our community at large realises this, we can't even make a start on fixing it.

[johnnigh]

The current paradigm forces us to build infrastructure that is heavily used for a couple of hours a day because of the peak flows that our housing/employment locations create.

How to change that paradigm without huge re-structuring of our cities? Employment to the places where people live. In the SEQ context, we need more jobs in the dormitory areas and especially the two Coasts that don't have substantial non-construction employment centres, no major govt depts and so on. Logan and Moreton Bay Region also need much more, not to mention Ipswich, where the employment centres are often past their use-by date.

If we didn't have to build for the two peak hours we'd be so much better off financially.

[#Metro]

The problem with forecasts is that they are, by definition, not facts.
Forecasting is also extremely bad at modelling feedback effects, sudden changes, and curves.

It is not clear what these jobs actually are. There is the Canberra model of development where a large amount of CBD style office development has been sent to nodes like Belconnen/Woden etc. There is already some level of this with Ipswich and Springfield, and previous attempts in the 1970s with locating the ATO out at Garden City.

[hU0N]

Undoubtedly decentralization is probably part of the solution, but it isn't the whole show, and we probably shouldn't expect it to be. It is, though, an interesting starting point to challenge the broken paradigm and see what could possibly replace it.

For example, in a city built on decentralization, what land uses should go where?

Or, given this is a transit forum, what transit infrastructure is necessary to support a decentralized paradigm? For example, primary purpose for CRR is to provide inner city capacity for future suburban rail to places like Flagstone. Which makes sense in the old broken paradigm, but would it make sense in a decentralized paradigm? To my way of thinking, it wouldn't. Instead CRR would be seen as a counterproductive enabler of centralization. Instead you might look just over the hill and decide to spend the money building a rail (or LRT) network centred on Springfield CBD, with lines to Darra via Forest Lake, Doolandella etc, Ipswich via Ripley, Moggill via Redbank and even Flagstone via Greenbank. And that would be vastly more important than connecting another far flung suburb to an impossibly remote CBD.

There are probably other better ideas, I am no expert. But two things are for sure, the broken paradigm won't get any less broken on its own, and it won't ever change so long as we keep using it to guide our communities decisions about the future. There is no point saying, "We need to change the paradigm, but first we need to do a bunch of things that the old paradigm says are really important to do." Instead we should ask, "What can we do to help the community consciously choose a better paradigm, and in light of that, what needs to be done to get there. "

[#Metro]

New homes, though, are not being built quickly enough in these areas, meaning more than 50 per cent of people are moving to suburbs over 20 kilometres from the CBD.

Same old story. House prices in the inner core go up, residents don't want to share with other people that come after them, NIMBY etc.
Makes you wonder how LA solves the problem.

[ozbob]

LOL  it just continues  ...  we all know what the issues are, but lets continue doing the same thing over and over and over ^ infinity

Ipswich Icon - new office building to be populated by 'decentralised' public servants was the previous Labor Government's mantra.  Progress on the decentralisation stalled somewhat under the Newman mob.  But eventually it was populated, by de-centralisation? No, not really just re-locating public servants already in the Ipswich area in the main.  The very poor counter-peak frequency on the Ippy does. not. help.

The lack of a proper connected network does. not. help.  Radial focussed system.  Time to break the mold!

Just sayin' ...   

[#Metro]

I think once you start on this path, it is a bit hard to undo more than 150 years worth of development. The roads, layout and so forth are already set, and the cost to reset/recast everything mean it is not going to happen.

Unfortunately the silliness prevails - look at Cedar Woods, total waste of opportunity, ban on anything not a single family home and density regulated right down to 7.5 dwellings/ha which means no viable public transport.

A quick way to tell where houses can be built is to look at the prices. Prices rise when an area is popular, prices fall when it is unpopular.

Satellite map gives bird's eye view of Brisbane property prices
http://www.news.com.au/finance/real-estate/satellite-map-gives-birds-eye-view-of-brisbane-property-prices/story-fndbalka-1227138235248

What is interesting about this map is that it is a gravity model - the price falls off quickly as one becomes more distant from the CBD core. The highest prices are close to the CBD - where transport distances are shortest. Remember, the shorter a bus route is, the cheaper it is to operate, all things equal.

Australian cities are extraordinarily low density and hugely wasteful in their use of land. If you go to European cities, it is easily 5 - 8 story blocks everywhere. Nobody seems to think that is a bad thing. Many develoments are so large they have internal parklands as well.

[#Metro]

I meant to add that I don't really accept that Australian cities are 'broken'. Broken compared to what? There are plenty of worse cities all over the world, ones that don't have proper roads, non-functional PT, horrible climate, smog and pollution galore, overcrowding, poverty, urban decay, crime infestation, sanitation issues, drug gangs etc.

Australian cities consistently come up on top in international liveability rankings, along with Canadian cities and I think this simply is because they are much newer compared to Europe, Asia etc. We started from scratch and so were not so constrained by the past so much.

[#Metro]

Almere, Netherlands ---> Where and what is Almere? - AIPH

http://www.aiph.org/site/img/klanten/234/Green%20City%20Almere_Adri%20Duivesteijn.pdf

Also featured on human transit regarding the busway infrastructure.

[newbris]

...Satellite map gives bird's eye view of Brisbane property prices
http://www.news.com.au/finance/real-estate/satellite-map-gives-birds-eye-view-of-brisbane-property-prices/story-fndbalka-1227138235248

What is interesting about this map is that it is a gravity model - the price falls off quickly as one becomes more distant from the CBD core. The highest prices are close to the CBD - where transport distances are shortest. Remember, the shorter a bus route is, the cheaper it is to operate, all things equal.
...

Just a point about that map...they are not the actual medians for each suburb, but instead they have allocated one median to all the suburbs in a ring, even if the median is totally different for an individual suburb. I think the prices vary up and down more than shown due to distance from CBD, but also change in housing style as well.

[newbris]

I think a percentage of the room for the new residents should be made by changing the mode of the existing residents.

We should make cycling far accessible with connected separated bike infrastructure to move many who want to cycle into cycling. We should move many who are currently driving into PT with a connected network.

Both of these things would free up space without costing much relatively.

[Jonno]

I meant to add that I don't really accept that Australian cities are 'broken'. Broken compared to what? There are plenty of worse cities all over the world, ones that don't have proper roads, non-functional PT, horrible climate, smog and pollution galore, overcrowding, poverty, urban decay, crime infestation, sanitation issues, drug gangs etc.

Australian cities consistently come up on top in international liveability rankings, along with Canadian cities and I think this simply is because they are much newer compared to Europe, Asia etc. We started from scratch and so were not so constrained by the past so much.

Broken? Definetely not working best for us http://spacepublic.com/topic/96-do-our-cities-still-work/

[johnnigh]

The 'liveability' rankings are based entirely on the inner ring - CBD and surrounding suburbs, such as those in which only the wealthy live. Go into the growing edge and liveability declines as the authors of the report point out. Jago Dodson and his colleagues then at GU examined this a decade ago with their reports on vulnerability of suburbs to rising energy costs. He continues this work as Professor at RMIT.

We in the inner suburbs are OK, thank you, with our high liveability ratings intact. But beyond the PT built in the main before the 1960s, the disjunction between employment and housing remains a disgrace. SEQ seems more disgraceful than most of our cities in that regard.

[johnnigh]

Tax inner suburbs to service the outer ones:
http://www.theage.com.au/comment/tax-inner-suburbs-to-service-the-outer-20140814-103y3d.html
A recent oped by Jago Dodson.

[Gazza]

On the other hand, what about having heavy infrastructure charges in the outer suburbs that reflect the higher costs of servicing them.
That way its not falsely cheap to buy up in the middle of nowhere.
Could go either way.

[ozbob]

Couriermail --> Bus industry calls on state, federal governments to heed complaints from city dwellers and fix congestion

[#Metro]

^ Get the QLD Government to open the back door of the bus. When that happens, then we can dream a bit bigger!! 

[ozbob]

Oh gawd, the sky will fall ... the world economy will teeter ... 

PEOPLE DO NOT LIKE ALL DOOR BOARDING OR TRANSFERS IN BANANA-LAND 



^ Banana-land brain power .. abundant north of the Tweed ..

[ozbob]

The bus from Werribee to Wyndham Vale was all door (of course) ..  I boarded rear door ... JUST BECAUSE I COULD 

[bcasey]

Couriermail --> Bus industry calls on state, federal governments to heed complaints from city dwellers and fix congestion

Most of that article makes sense, but there is a couple of things I question.

The objective would be to guarantee public transport services — bus or tram for example — every 20 to 30 minutes for at least 18 hours of a day.

20-30 minutes isn't really high frequency, which is the main attractor for people to use public transport. The aim should be 15 minutes or less. Otherwise you may end up spending your entire 20 minutes waiting for the bus, not counting travel time as well. They are correct in saying the population density would need to increase to support this.

Small buses might be introduced to help maintain the frequency and cut costs.

The BIC report notes smaller vehicles mean savings from fuel use, maintenance and wages.

"The major problem with smaller buses is that if passenger loads at any time exceed the capacity of a smaller bus, then another bus (or other vehicle) is needed. If this necessitates acquisition of another vehicle, costs will clearly increase," the report states.

Smaller buses may cost less than normal-sized buses in terms of fuel and maintenance, but I'm assuming wages are a considerable % of the cost, and unless you are paying drivers less for driving a smaller bus, the size of the bus doesn't really have an affect on this cost.

[Jonno]

Agree with comments about the article but the key here is the change in mindset of "keep building more roads to fix congestion".  Walkable, compact, transit oriented mixed use cities go a long long long way to fix our congestion problems.  Stop and repair the sprawl!!

[ozbob]

Citymetric --> Australia's public transport is better than Australians think