February, 2011

A recent paper on travel in Sydney illustrates how dependent the CBD is on public transport and, in turn, how dependent public transport is on CBD commuting. The paper analyses the journey to work in Sydney using data from the 2006 Census. It was undertaken by Blake Xu and Frank Milthorpe of the NSW Bureau [...]

I’ve mentioned before how travellers in developed countries like the United States, Britain and Australia are driving less. The accompanying chart, from a new paper, Are we reaching peak travel? By Adam Millard-Ball and Lee Schipper of Stanford University, shows the change in per capita distance driven over the period from 1970 to 2007/08 (before [...]

Chart from Mother Jones. And here’s a link to the paper this chart came from, Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time (it’s quite short).

Many readers will have seen this now-ubiquitous chart before – it’s from Melbourne 2030 and has been republished countless times. It shows the proportion of metropolitan jobs accessible within 40 minutes travelling time from different parts of Melbourne by car and by public transport. I’ve never been happy with this chart because its simplicity is deceptive [...]

In an interesting article on Crikey, Guy Rundle riffs off the Borders bankruptcy to ask if technological change will inevitably destroy local strip shopping centres: The whole centrality of the shop is changing. It is no longer a necessary place, and so the high street no longer acts as the spatial core of a community. [...]

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) 2011 Global Liveability Report says Melbourne is the 2nd most liveable city in the world, just behind Vancouver and up one place from 3rd last year. Sydney ranks 7th. But any elation is likely to be short-lived. The Mercer Annual Quality of Living survey for 2011, due in late May, [...]

The Age breathlessly headlines the Government’s proposals for the redevelopment of Fishermans Bend as Premier Ted Baillieu’s “inner city housing revolution”. Planning Minister Matthew Guy says the area will evolve as ”Australia’s first inner-city growth corridor”. Whoa there! I think it might be time for a relaxing cup of tea and a lie down. Let’s [...]

There is little doubt that Melbourne Airport needs action to improve land-side access for passengers arriving and departing from the airport. Many observers argue the solution is a rail line from the CBD to the airport. I think there’s a much bigger picture they’re missing. They would be well advised to look at the Airport [...]

The centre of the city of the future will be the airport, according to a book by John D Kasarda of the University of Carolina and journalist Greg Lindsay to be published next month. They say in Aerotropolis (subtitled, to emphasise its inevitability, The Way We’ll Live Next), that “not so long ago, airports were built near [...]

Last year I linked to an animation of Melbourne’s trains system developed by Flink Labs. This one (click on map) shows a day in the life of public transport in Auckland and was developed by Chris McDowell. He says: The animation begins at 3am on a typical Monday morning. A pair of blue squiggles depict [...]