Sense and Sensibility // Public Transport Infrastructure
It is a truth, universally acknowledged that anyone who lives in Sydney, inevitably criticises the failure of its public transport. Only in 2012, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that major auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers had identified Sydney as “forth worst major city in the world for transport and infrastructure” (Munro, 2012). The report, known as Cities of Opportunity did however, reprieve the city by naming it the most sustainable (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2012) and how this can be the case when Sydney also has some of the worst performing buildings and urban sprawl is beyond me. Nonetheless for me, the report’s findings begged an investigation of urban sustainability and its relationship to transport infrastructure.
Table from PricewaterhouseCoopers report, identifying where Hong Kong & Sydney lie in terms of "Cities of Opportunity" (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2012)
Chart from the Little Report, showing the Urban Mobility of 66 Major Global Cities. (Little, 2014)
n a more recent study by consulting firm Arthur D. Little called The Future of Urban Mobility 2.0, it was proudly reported by Hong Kong’s local paper that it named the city “the best city in the world for commuters” (Lee, 2014). While Sydney was excluded from this particular study, it provides several important lessons which would certainly indicate a direct correlation between sustainability and urban public transport mobility.
Arguably, this is one of the most comprehensive studies of urban transport systems for 66 major cities around the world. Selected based on the city’s regional GDP dominance and population density, Hong Kong and Singapore were the only Asian cities in a small elite group of ‘better than average’ performance cities, dominated by ancient European capitals including Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris and London (Little, 2014).
What the summary chart above indicates is that Hong Kong has a strong mass-transit oriented system, but lags behind in terms of car-sharing and bike-sharing. Despite this shortcoming and in a direct link to a previous post I made on Ricky Burdett’s lecture on urbanism, we see that the average travel time in Hong Kong stands at 18 minutes, far less than the worst recorded performance of the study, 120 minutes.
Perhaps one of the most significant changes has been the high penetration of the smart card, averaging 2.9 per capita in the city. The report identifies how this smart card, the Octopus can be used not only for transport but also at major convenience stores and retail outlets. As a system of smart cards, it has the highest penetration of its type anywhere in the world (Little, 2014). I myself can confess that I have three of these smart cards, one in a typical card form, one smart card chip embedded into my watch and another embedded in a keychain. There is an odd irony that when this card was introduced by a Sydney-based company to Hong Kong in 1997, the same company failed to introduce the same system in Sydney. Nevertheless, such systems of innovation, which has just been introduced in Sydney as Opalhave the potential to vastly reduce the amount of waste generate, reducing traditional paper and magnetic strip tickets which are seldom recycled.
Simultaneously, as the result of efficient transportation, with 92% usage what we find is a reduced amount of CO2 emissions, 72kg/capita in Hong Kong, compared with the worst result in the study of over 7000kg/capita (Little, 2014). While this has of course been coupled with a proper legislative framework, whereby taxation on private cars and on gasoline stands at close to 100% (Little, 2014), cities with efficient mass transit infrastructure perform more effectively and sustainably. I feel that urban planning should garner some sensibility and recognise, in the words of Enrique Penalosa, Mayor of Bogota, Colombia who believes that “An advanced city is not a place where the poor move about in cars, rather, it’s where even the rich use public transportation.” (Forstner, 2013).
References
Eva-Maria Forstner. “Traffic and the City – Future[istic] Ideas.” (2013) Accessed 6 April 2014 via: http://www.crowdcity.com/traffic-and-city-futureistic-ideas
Ada Lee. “Hong Kong named ‘best city in the world for commuters’” The South China Morning Post (3 April 2014).
Arthur D. Little. “The Future of Urban Mobility 2.0 Full Study.” Accessed 6 April 2014 via:
http://www.adlittle.com/future-of-urban-mobility.html
PricewaterhouseCoopers. “Cities of Opportunity 2012.” Accessed 6 April 2014 via:
http://www.pwc.com/us/en/cities-of-opportunity/index.jhtml
Peter Munroe. “Transport and Infrastructure Better in Mumbai than Sydney: PwC Report” The Sydney Morning Herald(15 October 2012).