Pete McMartin, in a depressing sign of the times, references sprawl apologist Wendell Cox in his column today:
… densification, Cox maintains, rests on a mistaken assumption – that if a city is dense enough, we’ll get out of our cars in sufficient numbers to make a difference.
Instead, Cox wrote, densification does exactly the opposite. Most people continue to use their cars, but in a slower, less efficient flow of traffic.
“Behind this attempt to concentrate new housing near transit stops throughout the urban area is an illusion that by forcing people into higher densities, they will use cars less. There is little hope of this. A recent Statistics Canada report indicates that once the distance from downtown exceeds 10 kilometres, the travel behaviour of residents is virtually the same.”
I suppose Cox is right – if we simply ignore contrary evidence, namely everything noted in the following post, and add that lovely little qualifier: “once the distance from downtown exceeds 10 kilometres, the travel behaviour of residents is virtually the same.”
A 10K radius looks like this:
In other words, Cox’s argument that people won’t get out of their cars requires that we exclude Vancouver, most of the North Shore and some of Burnaby.
Interestingly, that 10K radius is almost exactly the extent of the original streetcar system (and today’s Frequent Transit Network): the transit that shaped this city. Beyond it, with the exception of places like New Westminster, is Motordom: the part of the region designed and built to be car dependent.
Not surprisingly, the statistics don’t yet show the drop in car use in Motordom – at least so far. Until the combination of sufficient density, mix of uses and transportation options are provided, people have no choice but to drive. (And the Province, dramatically expanding the road-and-bridge system while rejecting sustainable funding for transit, is doing its best to make sure that car dependence continues.)
What Cox and others maintain is that Motordom was the consequence of market choice, not the social engineering that was the basis for the transportation engineering that characterized the last half the the 20th-century.
Vancouver took a different direction in the late 1960s by rejecting freeway infrastructure – and its success remains a source of annoyance to those who require its failure to justifty the status quo. So they simply ignore and discount the last half century of our experience, and reject the idea that behaviour responds to changing conditions and incentives if it results in behaviour inconsistent with their worldview.
It raises the question as to who exactly is living an illusion.
Vancouver really never abandoned her streetcar system, it was just converted to Electric Trolleybus (“Trackless Trolleys”).
Nice rebuttal although I am not entirely sure Pete McMartin was agreeing with Cox or just suggesting further discussion.
Your 10km radius of course ignores the actual travel distance required to get from point A to B, which makes your claims as dubious as the ones you’re rebutting. But I suppose making a real map would require some actual effort in data visualization as opposed to just some wordpress blogging.
Author
Actually, given the simple grid of Vancouver, there’s not much difference between a crow-fly distance and actual travel. But regardless, 10K is clearly a rough marker, not an exact dividing point. I think the basic argument holds: Cox has to make Vancouver disappear to argue that people don’t get out of cars as density increases.
http://members.shaw.ca/theyorkshirelad72/working.mount.pleasant.html
Interestingly, 5-10 km is the “sweet spot” for a routine bike trip too. So travel within that radius is feasible and effective for yet another mode’s usage.
I tried tracking down the Statistics Canada report that Cox references. The article that Cox wrote is available online and has a number of footnotes but somewhat shoddily doesn’t reference this particular quotation.
A search of the Statistics Canada site turned up this as the top result, although a quote from the report…
“Access to public transit is closely tied to urban land use. It is much easier to provide efficient public transit in the high-density residential neighbourhoods typical of the central areas of major cities. The pool of potential users per square kilometre is much larger in such areas. This has an impact on public transit users who live in lower-density residential neighbourhoods—their commuting times are longer because the distances are greater. Less frequent service may also increase public transit commuting times if transfers are necessary and schedules are out of sync.”
…doesn’t line up well with Cox and McMartin’s arguments.
There’s another statistics canada study here but again…
“Even more revealing relationships emerge if we ignore distance and instead categorize people according to the density of the neighbourhood in which they live. For example, over 80% of residents of neighbourhoods comprising exclusively or almost exclusively suburban-type housing made at least one trip by car (as the driver) during the day. By comparison, less than half of people living in very high-density neighbourhoods did so.
In addition, travelling exclusively by driving was far more common in low-density neighbourhoods. Only about one-third of residents in very high-density neighbourhoods were at the wheel for all of their trips during the day, compared with almost two-thirds of those who lived in very low-density neighbourhoods”
…this doesn’t seem to be the study that Cox and McMartin are referring to.
But reading further, this actually is the study they are referring to. It contains a chart (chart 2) showing that at all distances from the city centre, there is less car use in denser neighbourhoods. However, they do not have enough data / enough of a gap to say with 95% confidence that the relationship is valid for dense neighbourhoods further than 10k from the city centre. The Statscan report suggests that mixed use zoning in dense neighbourhoods outside the central city might help them match the rates of non-car use in the inner-city neighbourhoods, as would increasing their density levels further to match the inner city densities. Although I don’t think Cox or McMartin picked up either of those recommendations from the report.
At any rate, I’d recommend that McMartin should be careful uncritically passing along ideas from someone who is a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, which is best known for equating anyone who believe in manmade climate change with the unabomber.
All of Vancouver may be within the 10K range, but only one in 8 or 10 people is South Vancouver use transit, according to a Chad Skelton Vancouver Sun analysis in August, 2011, that you posted here. Unfortunately, most trips by bus take 3 to 4 times as long as the equivalent trip by car, and most people simply don’t have the time whether they’d like to ‘go green’ or not. Poverty is the divider between transit user and car user in most of this city.
Seems my comment is stuck in moderation?