November, 2011

I take an agnostic view of freeway proposals – I don’t assume apriori that they’re all bad or all good. I prefer to look at the evidence first before deciding if a proposal has merit or is a poor idea. But it seems there are some who will overlook evidence to the contrary if it [...]

I’ve frequently mentioned that trips by public transport in Melbourne are longer on average than those by car. The exhibit above illustrates that difference using data from the Department of Transport’s VISTA data base. It shows the length of non-work trips in Melbourne by private vehicles versus public transport. For all practical purposes, it’s cars [...]

I never read those glossy magazine inserts in The Age (who does?) but on Friday I made an exception for The Melbourne Magazine because it promised to tell me “the most liveable suburb in the world’s most liveable city”. The Age’s Our liveable city project ranks the “liveability” of 314 suburbs from top to bottom [...]

The exhibit shows two seemingly similar patterns – but one of them is random and one isn’t. Can you tell which is which? More in a moment. I’ve taken these plots from Steven Pinker’s new book, The better angels of our nature: why violence has declined. It’s in a Chapter titled The statistics of deadly [...]

We need to start thinking about new ways of increasing housing supply in the established suburbs. As I’ve noted a number of times now, activity centres aren’t delivering much and infill housing, though it’s putting in a sterling effort, is probably at full stretch. These strategies are still important, but additional sources of supply are [...]

We know that the inability to increase significantly the supply of dwellings within established suburbs is a key failing of strategic planning in Melbourne. Simply put, there’s not enough housing to make established suburbs affordable for all the people who would like to live in a relatively accessible location. We also know that activity centres [...]

Pending completion of the Government’s new urban strategy for Melbourne, the two major strategic planning documents that jointly guide the metropolitan area’s development – Melbourne 2030 and Melbourne @ 5 Million – are rich with rhetoric about the importance of directing development to established suburbs rather than the periphery. They also emphasise the desirability of [...]

In his new book, The price of civilisation: reawakening American virtue and prosperity, progressive Columbia University economist Jeffrey D Sachs argues that the relationship between income and happiness is not as strong as people often imagine. Above a (lowish) minimum level, income doesn’t make a big difference. But money could make us happier if only [...]

Despite an enormous increase in house prices over the last ten years, real estate commissions stayed relatively constant as a percentage of selling price. Agents consequently enjoyed a spectacular increase in the dollars earned on each sale even as the volume of sales was expanding. In its new report, Getting the housing we want, the [...]