Governing spaces: urban transit, land development and the local state

Abstract

In New Zealand and in the UK, policymakers have assumed that public transport operators are in a similar position to the operators of trucks, taxis, airlines and shipping. As such, a philosophy of commercialisation has been applied to bus operations. In practice, transit commercialisation has been disastrous. A large part of the problem is that transit operations do not compete with each other so much as with the automobile. As such, the agency which has the most incentive and ability to attract new customers to transit is not the operator but rather the city or, to be more precise, the ‘local state’. It is up to the local state to organise ‘loss leader’ transit services on priority routes, which will facilitate more intensive land development and eventually pay for themselves through higher rates. Transit commercialisation permits the local state to evade its development responsibilities and forces operators themselves into a defensive mode, reliant on inelastic, ‘captive’ customers and employing market strategies such as non-transferable tickets to retain their share of a small and perhaps shrinking pie.

Keywords:

• complexity
• governance
• local state
• transport

Notes

The views expressed in this paper are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of any organisation to which the author is affiliated.

‘Central business district’ or original downtown, to which most public transport in the region has traditionally run and which usually has its tallest buildings. In an otherwise automobile-dominated Auckland, the CBD continues to display a landform that depends on high levels of transit service, albeit mostly local and street-running in origin (see below), a fact that has limited the growth of the CBD relative to the region as a whole. This form may be contrasted with some American urban regions, where the old inner city has actually decayed.

The Auckland Regional Transport Authority offers common tickets for such problem areas where operator competition exists (!) along with an NZ{$}199 monthly pass, but it seems a condition of operator acceptance that such products should be significantly more expensive than any single-operator equivalent. See http://www.maxx.co.nz.

It is important to note that average regional densities may be the same or not very different under either system, but where transit is well developed, there will be more obvious density gradients and islands of concentration, even in the suburbs. Often, great parks are traded off for local intensification as a kind of quid pro quo in the planning system; this helps to explain why average regional densities may vary so little. Does average density of X refer to suburban Auckland? Or to a collection of four-storey apartments plus the Vienna Woods?

A key principle of social market philosophies is the idea that competition and monopoly can exist on more than one level, so that the state has to step in to prevent the more subtle forms of monopoly as well as monopolies of the more obvious kind. It is therefore common in social market economies for the state to deliberately favour or operate public transport in order to prevent automotive takeover. Similar considerations lie behind a permanently large state presence in such areas as broadcasting, banking, insurance and housing, similar to pre-1984 New Zealand. A common denominator in most of these areas is state command of metropolitan land development and capture, in one way or another, of increasing land values. Although it has some authoritarian antecedents of the kind alluded to by Hibbs (Tribe 1995), the social market is thus also a variation on the theme of the ‘social liberal’ ideology once also strong in New Zealand. In the latter, the role of the state is not just to keep the peace (as in narrower forms of liberalism) but also to positively develop the benefits of association while ensuring that they remain universally accessible.

Many readers will infer a similarity between the social market and the social view of ‘unearned increments’ in land and mortgage interest advocated by John Stuart Mill, Henry George and other such social liberal philosophers and reformers. The latter have, however, tended to express their views in one-shot libertarian panaceas (‘the single tax’, ‘social credit’) and, as such, have not developed it into a mature planning philosophy. Hence a common, if hasty, view of George as a single-issue ‘prairie populist’ whose views became outdated with urbanisation and growing social complexity (Thomas 1983). The problem of a reluctance to engage with economic complexity is a more general problem for Anglo-American social liberalism, which sometimes degenerates into a set of vaguely populist attitudes lacking in any kind of economic rigour whatever. An rare example of an Anglo-American economist who has explored the links between social liberal causes and their logical planning implications was the 1996 Nobel economics laureate William S. Vickrey (Vickrey 1977).