The recent National Emissions Reduction Plan - Te hau mārohi ki anamata Towards a productive, sustainable and inclusive economy – has a number of targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector.
The first target is:
Target 1 – Reduce total kilometres travelled by the light fleet by 20 per cent by 2035 through improved urban form and providing better travel options, particularly in our largest cities.
This target sits alongside other targets about EV take up, and more walking and cycling. It is good to see that cutting emissions is not just about switching to electric vehicles and planting some pine trees to offset the non-EV emissions. Less use of cars is also important.
However….
It is not totally clear from the target if the 20% reduction is to be based on 2022 emissions or what may be the 2035 figure, if no action was taken.
The 20% is also a total, national figure. If the population grows between now and 2035, then on a per capita basis the reduction would need to be larger. Others have pointed out that achieving a 20% reduction in VKT across the whole of New Zealand will require more aggressive reductions in some parts of the country – notably Auckland – to ‘offset’ the difficulties in achieving much change in smaller towns and rural areas. Furthermore, even in Auckland, some people are unlikely to be able to cut back travel by 20% so some people will need to reduce travel by more than 20%.
So the 20% reduction rapidly turns into a 30% to 35% reduction in VKT for an ‘average’ Aucklander. In fact, Auckland Councils Transport Emissions Reduction Plan says that VKT should drop by half, by 2030!
How do we do that? Does anyone have any idea?
The national ERP says that a specific plan needs to be developed, starting with the main cities. A Light vehicle kilometres travelled reduction programmes for Tier 1 urban areas is proposed.
So we have a plan for a plan. Understandable perhaps, but after lots of investigation of various budgets and pathways, action still seems long way off.
Auckland Council's recent transport emissions reduction plan is also a bit vague about how to do it, apart from the normal recipe of lots more public transport , walking and cycling, plus congestion charging.
While reducing VKT may be difficult and nobody seems totally clear how to do it, it’s more a matter of having to do it and having to find a way to do it, rather than argue if 20% or 30% is too much or not enough. We are, after all, in a climate emergency.
The interesting planning question is the role of urban form and urban design in helping to achieve the target.
But first some numbers. Per capita vehicle kilometres travelled in Auckland is around 9,500 kms per person, per year. Each car, on average, travels 14,000kms in a year.
So a 30% reduction is about 5,000kms less travel per year for each car – or 13.69 kms per day.
How easy will that be?
An often-quoted statistic is the large percentage of short trips – 50% of car trips are less than 6kms in length.
2011 data on trip lengths is:
- 17% (one-sixth) of driver trip chains are less than 2km long.
- 43% of driver trip chains are less than 5km long.
- 48% of driver trip chains are less than 6km long.
- 53% of driver trip chains are less than 7km long.
- 65% are less than 10km long.
However 50% of total VKT is not comprised of short (less than 6km) trips.
More than likely, to reduce VKT by at least 30%, some longer trips will need to be not taken, or else undertaken by public transport. So a mix of short and long trips will need to be switched from car to walk, bike or public transport or not taken at all.
So what type of trips could be diverted?
Household travel survey data for 2018 suggests the following share of VKT by trip purpose. Data on trip length is not easy to find.
|
Trip Purpose |
Share of total KMs |
|
|
Driver |
Passenger
|
|
|
Went home |
37% |
42% |
|
Went to work |
15% |
3% |
|
Shopping/personal business |
19% |
20% |
|
Social visit/entertainment |
10% |
17% |
|
Made a trip for work |
8% |
1% |
|
Completed study/education |
1% |
4% |
|
Accompany someone/dropped someone off/picked
someone up |
7% |
9% |
|
Sport and exercise |
3% |
4% |
|
Total |
100% |
100% |
Not surprising the two big trip purposes in terms of distances are work and shopping.
Work-related travel accounts for one-third of all household driving time and distance, most of which is commuting to and from work. The mean distance for journey to work in Auckland (one way) is around 11kms.
Already, due to Covid, many commuting trips are not being taken as work from home takes hold. But not all jobs can be undertaken remotely.
The journey to and from work has been the big focus of transport and land use planning to date, with congestion being the problem, not VKT The planning response has been trying to confine jobs to a number of larger centres that could be effectively served by public transport.
But has the time come to reduce the emphasis on the work trip as being the target of emission reduction? Has fibre and digital technology reduced the benefits of being in a large central spot anyway?
Shopping trips are the other big source of kilometres travelled, and perhaps more able to be combined or avoided (visit the supermarket every second or third day, rather than every day, or perhaps every day if on foot or bike).
Both the national and region emissions reduction plans see a role for urban form to help shape transport choices, with the emphasis on developing land use patterns that help reduce the need to travel.
Auckland refers to building up, not out and developing / encouraging more local shops and services.
Similarly the national plan refers to identifying ways to incentivise developments that avoid/reduce the need to travel and encourage travel by public transport, walking and cycling.
In Scotland, to take a different example, reducing people’s need to travel with more local access to goods and services is seen as the first priority. Likewise, digital connectivity and flexible working approaches will play a key role.
Sounds good, but as also often noted, land uses are slow to change – as a climate change commission report notes:
There are numerous studies examining the emissions reduction potential from compact urban planning and design. For example, the Productivity Commission notes that higher density urban centres can reduce vehicle kilometres travelled per capita by between 5 and 12%. A study by the Stockholm Environment Institute highlights that urban planning for compact urban form can reduce emissions by 5% by 2030 and 6% by 2050. However, the potential to achieve emissions from land use change is slow, buildings typically last between 50-100 years and infrastructure lasts for at least 100 years. Therefore, we need to ensure a stronger and more deliberate relationship between urban planning, design and transport immediately. Ensuring this happens at planning stage is more effective than retrofitting transport needs
So all too hard to achieve a high density compact urban form in 8 years? Probably. But can we at least enable more mixed uses in neighbourhoods? As cars become more costly to use, and people have to walk or cycle more, then demand will come on for more services close by.
Talk of mixed uses may mean a jumble of industrial and service activities interspersed with apartments. Noise, lights, late night activity can be expected. But what if the aim was more local, small retail uses and services?
If you map the location of supermarkets (as determined by Open Source Maps) and apply a 1.2km buffer around them, then large areas of the city are relatively close to supermarkets, but there are also areas with no coverage
What are the conditions for more local activities? We can speculate that things like the following will help:
• There are more people living in the catchment
• There is a mix of customers
• There are cheap options to rent space
The NPS-UD / MDRS has kicked along the intensification aspect, but should it be more targetted? Should the areas with limited coverage of supermarkets be prioritised for more housing (to help build up the catchment). But the areas with limited coverage tend to be on the edges and probably also have more limited public transport options.
Covid has helped with a wider range of customers as more people work from home. Anecdotal evidence: my barber says that their busy time is now during the week when many at home workers drop in for a haircut, in contrast to pre covid when the weekend was their busy time.
What remains is the cost of finding and renting non-residential space in residential areas.
Most neighbourhoods will have a small neighbourhood or local centre zone that may be accessible by foot or bike. But often rents are high and expansion options are limited. Sometimes the shops may look a bit run down, and there is some hope that by concentrating retail into the centres, demand will be higher and with it more likelihood that shops will be occupied. But as we know, keeping a tight rein on supply of floorspace pushes up rents and land values.
There may be concern that opening up more retail options will just see more cheap liquor stores, fast food joints and vap shops.
Then there is a dreaded car orientated strip mall development along main roads – the disjointed collection of cheap box-like buildings with prominent parking lots visible from the street, with multiple driveways, large signs and a few sad looking trees.
But is it time to set these concerns aside and expand out beyond the centre? To allow for a wider range of compatible activities in residential areas. More fundamentally, should the concept of a retail / centres hierarchy be set aside. The concept of the central city as the main hub and a pattern of strong sub regional hubs was a response to a car centric transport system. Likewise town centres anchored on a ‘drive-to-supermarket’ to drive foot traffic and cross over shopping trips. Is the need now to enable dispersion of retail rather than their concentration?
In the revised version of the Auckland Unitary Plan’s Residential Mixed housing Urban zone (a zone that now covers the better part of the urban area thanks to MDRS), dairies up to 100m2 gross floor area per site and restaurants and cafes up to 100m² gross floor area per site are restricted discretionary activities. The revised Residential Terrace Housing and Apartment Building zone is pretty much the same.
What about offices, small workplaces and other forms of retail? These all require discretionary resource consent.
The range of compatible uses in residential area needs to be managed, but more options need to be enabled than current.
But there are some issues to work through. Perhaps most important to safe, convivial street environments that support walking, cycling and public transport is how to activate ground floors to create pleasant, safe streets for pedestrians and to support the local economy. More specifically, should there be minimum ground-floor heights or minimum ground floor spaces for new developments so that active, street-facing uses at ground level on every neighbourhood’s main street are supported. Again, this requires an adjustment of planning rules.
The 3-storey format of the Mixed Housing Urban zone does not suit mixed uses with buildings, but some form of horizontal mixed use is likely to emerge as some sites redevelop for housing and some residual sites get taken over for commercial and service activities.
The multi-storey Terrace Housing and Apartment Building zone is more adaptable for mixed uses. But vertical mixed use is not easy to achieve – there will be uncertainty about whether ground floor commercial spaces can be let; while owners and tenants of upper floor apartments will be worried about what activities may operate downstairs. Demand for more local services will build over time, but there is likely to be a lag between demand and supply. In the interim, new development may foreclose future, better options.
I think there is a need for some RNAS to go alongside the MDRS – Residential Neighbourhood Activity Standards to go with the Medium Density Residential Standards.
