Save Our
Sydney Suburbs (NSW) Inc.
News
Release June 2004
Paris question
Hi SOS Members
The following correspondence, stemming from a recent letter published by the
Sydney Morning Herald, deals with important matters that do not appear to be
understood by our political masters (or perhaps they do not wish to understand).
Tony Recsei
----- Original Message
-----
From:
Chris Watkins
To: trecsei@bigpond.net.au
Sent: Friday, June 11, 2004 9:25 AM
Subject: Your Paris question to Prof Newman
Hi Tony,
I saw your letter to a newspaper recently, posing a question to Peter Newman re public transport & traffic speed in Paris. But in assessing the time efficiency of transport (and this is only one of the important factors), surely actual transit times rather than speed should be used (including the time taken for those on PT)?
Have you read Newman & Kenworthy's book, "Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence"? So far I have only leafed through it, but it does appear to address the relative merits of different forms of planning and transport, based on a good size sample of cities.
Regards
Chris
Hi Chris
You have posed an excellent question. As letters to the newspaper have to be
brief if they are to be printed, it was not possible to deal in detail with
all aspects.
I have read Newman and Kenworthy's book. If you look at the statistics listed
(such as % energy used) you will deduce that in all sizable cities, the portion
of journeys using public transport is very much less than those travelling in
their own cars. This is more clearly shown in figures from another of Kenworthy's
publications, "An International Sourcebook of Automobile Dependence in
Cities: 1960-1990" (Jeffrey R. Kenworthy, Felix B. Laube and others) which
provides the actual % daily journeys in private and public transport:
%Private transport %Public transport
Europe Vienna
71.52%
28.48%
Europe Munich
71.66%
28.34%
Europe Paris
73.02%
26.98%
Europe London
73.67%
26.33%
Europe Stockholm 74.36%
25.64%
Europe Zurich
77.48%
22.52%
Asia Surabaja
79.75%
20.25%
Asia Kuala Lampur 83.05%
16.95%
Europe Brussels
84.12%
15.88%
Europe Copenhagen 84.62%
15.38%
Europe Hamburg
86.35% 13.65%
Australia Sydney
86.44%
13.56%
It is apparent that even
if Sydney were to be able to put into place an equivalent of the Paris public
transport system (impossibly expensive), change single residential houses to
Paris type higher densities (so worsening our quality of life) and close all
freeways (exacerbating congestion even more) the % of people's journeys in public
transport could only double and would still be much less than the % in cars.
The number of cars in a given area will increase from the increased density
- note the number of car parking spaces in the new high density built around
railway stations. This increase will overwhelm any greater portion of people
using public transport, and therefore congestion increases. It is really quite
simple, more concentration means more congestion.
With regard to your question, a widely used measure of traffic congestion is
average speed - the more the congestion the lower the average speed through
the streets. The slow average speed through Paris streets is an objective indicator
of the serious congestion that people tell us they experience in that city.
There is a fundamental reason for this transport difficulty. In large cities,
the variety of destinations located over a wide area and distances involved
make it impossible to walk or cycle to most of them.
Even more fundamentally, cities are two dimensional spaces, public transport
travels in one dimensional straight lines. So for the majority of journeys,
it is quite impractical for public transport to directly connect the desired
destination with the point of origion of one's journey (unlike a car). Therefore
people have to use cars. Add onto that the limitations of publc transport timetables
often not according with the desired travel times, as well as many other problems
(carrying large parcels, safety, weather). The result is people use cars for
most of their journeys.
The plans announced for the Sydney Metropolitan Strategy are naive in the extreme,
huge amounts of money will be spent on reconfiguring and disrupting Sydney for
no benefit, in fact our quality of life will become worse, not better.
In case you are interested in joining our community organisation, Save Our Suburbs,
an application form is attached.
Tony Recsei
President
Save Our Suburbs (SOS)