Re: Travel patterns (was Re: New form of rail transportation)

[amorton@mullian.ee.mu.oz.au (Anthony Morton)]

>Peter Berrett <pberrett@optushome.com.au> wrote in message

>> When people take on a new job their choice of place to live is influenced
>> by the availability of public and private transport routes to their job.
>> Promoting a radial network has the following effects.
>>
>> 1. People are less likely to go for jobs in areas that they do not have
>>    good transport options to eg across town.
>> 2. People are more likely to moved to suburbs that have good transport
>>    options in terms of getting them to their work.
>>
>> The effect is that transport journeys become centred on the radial
>> networks.  The population is servicing the rail network not the other way
>> around.

You put your case well, but I think you misunderstand the nature of town
planning.  It's the rule in virtually any Australian city that the
infrastructure comes first and the people follow.  Thus in Melbourne, the
first great age of 'urban sprawl' occurred in the 1880s when suburbs sprang
up along the new railways and tramways.  For a while Melbourne was the
lowest-density city in the world because people could live on their quarter-
acre blocks in Camberwell or Caulfield and catch the train into the city to
work.  Thus for virtually its entire history Melbourne (unlike Sydney) has
been a city organised around radial rail corridors.

Remember that at the same time as these first suburbs were growing, there
were some circumferential rail lines built as well, including the Outer
Circle, the Rosstown railway and the Box Hill-Doncaster tramway.  But all of
these services folded within a decade due to lack of patronage.  They failed
to attract the kind of development that had accompanied the radial services.

Even today in Melbourne, when the vast majority of people travel by car and
roads go everywhere, people's 'mental maps' are still oriented radially.  The
census data bears this out.  Now if you want to encourage people to switch to
public transport, having predominantly radially-oriented travel patterns is
indeed fortunate, as much of the infrastructure to service radial travel is
already there.  So if we wanted to, we could shift a large number of car
trips to public transport without first having to expend vast sums of money
on new infrastructure.

It's not a question of whether people serve the rail network or vice versa.
People will _always_ 'serve' the transport network in your sense, because
people will always organise their home and work locations according to how
easy it is to travel from A to B.  The real question is whether it is a good
thing to deliberately engineer more dispersed travel patterns, with a greater
emphasis on circumferential travel for its own sake.  I can't myself see any
good reason to do this, and plenty of bad ones.


Alex Pout <alpout@optusnet.com.au> wrote:

>I agree with Peter's comments there about jobs and transport access.  As it
>was pointed out in another message, one of the things that eastern suburbs
>employers wanted in the east and south east was better PT for their workers.
>I've lived in Sydney, Newcastle, Brisbane, and Melbourne, and Melbourne
>definitely had the biggest "the city is where everything is" attitude and
>feel about it.  The way I interpreted that was (and I raised a few eyebrows
>with people there) that trying to avoid the city was something to be avoided
>in itself.  So while that persists, it's not going to help.

So be it.  If you want to avoid the city, live in the country.  There's a
lot to be said for country life; I'd find it infinitely preferable to living
in Los Angeles.

>You also wouldn't want to include purely home-work-home journeys in that.
>Does the census data have anything in it about all the non-work related
>journeys that are made, especially across suburbs (i.e. shopping, nights
>out, etc)?  The fraction of overall trips that work-related trips  make up?
>Or for the ultimate test, what are the traffic volumes on roads that cross
>connect suburbs, such as Frankston-Dandenong, Springvale, Stud, Bell St, and
>Camp Rd?

Generally non-work trips follow similar patterns to work trips, but with a
greater emphasis on local travel (particularly for shopping).  However it's
the journey to work in peak hour which accounts for virtually all the genuine
traffic congestion we have in Melbourne.

>Finally, and I think I'll get a fair bit of agreement here, when is
>Melbourne going to do something about the level crossings?  Springvale Rd
>and Nunawading one good example, 4 sets of lights plus the crossing in 300
>metres, and Bell St (pick one there).

If the bureaucracy wasn't so keen to throw money at freeways they'd all be
gone by now.

Cheers,
Tony M.

Public Transport Users Association         http://www.vicnet.net.au/~ptua/