The Wrong Side of my Car

The blog that wants to go obsolete

Census 2018 mode shares

With the travel data out for the census, we can now make our cycling modeshare GIF. Purely for posterity — the COVID-19 crisis has made all of this pretty much obsolete.

The 2018 map looks completely different from the previous 2. Cycling is way more concentrated in the “bike-friendly” suburbs. I have no idea why that is, maybe the counting was different. None of those areas are places where you’d consider buying a place to live even with an income in the lower six figures. *1

The impact of the northwestern and Tamaki Drive cycleways clearly stands out. The Devonport peninsula still doesn’t have that flashy infrastructure, but it is unusually shitty for driving to work.

What about the Future Streets programme in Māngere? Nothing. That is bad news for people who argue cycling is not a thing for the rich.

The level 1 data gives a more detailed, but in this case very noisy view. Cycling mode share is barely detectable at this level. So the GIF above uses the larger area units *2.

What about the others?

A nice looking compact blob in the middle. A striking illustration of the difference between ‘human scaled’ and ‘modern city’ scaled.

Next: public transport:

Clearly growing, at least until a few weeks ago.

Finally: car. This is the undisputed king, the highest bin (in purple) on this map is 90% — ninety percent — and it still covers a lot of area.

Auckland is the city of cars, but a bit less than last census. Even the car strongholds like Westgate and South-east Auckland have slightly dropped. The exception is South Auckland, giving some credibility to the idea that cars are becoming the vehicle of the poor.

Now, why can’t people just work from home in this day and age?

That slightly increased, but one could still call it stubbornly low. But this is perhaps the most obsolete map of them all.

Of course that was then, in 2018, back in the time when SARS and similar coronaviruses were still a far-from-my-bed show. A global pandemic of this scale was a thing of the past…

until it wasn’t.

And now. There is an unforeseen, but very prominent effect on the street. The endless roar of traffic has mostly disappeared. Many people are now experiencing something that was inconceivable just a few weeks ago.

Streets as positive space.

You can walk and actually hear birds. You can talk without having to yell over the car noise. You can hear other people talking. You can walk with your kids without fearing for their lives. For many people here, this is the first time in their lives they experience this in their neighbourhood instead of some far away designated hipster playground. How happy will everyone be to go back to car-only streets?

Even in the city after COVID-19, these maps above may be obsolete.

The December hindsight note

The answer to that question turned out to be ‘reasonably happy’, and Auckland stands out even among its Anglo peers as being exceptionally resistant against change in this direction. Even during the lockdowns we got but a token gesture of a dozen or so kilometres of bicycle tracks, which were mostly dismantled as soon as the lockdown ended.