Why do we love our cars?

So, I'm walking down the street to go home after work (and by "street," I mean that I'm actually walking on the footpath), and I almost get hit by a car. I mean, WTF? Yes, the driver expected me to get out of his way! I took a photo of the car after I had jumped out of the way to avoid getting hit (above).

So, why do we have a love affair with driving? The easy answer is explained by timing a public transport trip (that involves walking) versus the trip driving to work. 

Nice parking job... thanks for thinking of people who might need to use the footpath.

The Anatomy of a Commute

On the morning I recorded the time, I walked to the train station in 9 minutes (9:05). I waited 10 minutes (9:50) for the train (this includes a little bit of extra effort walking around cars blocking the footpath, as above). Then I rode on the train for 17 minutes (16:56). I walked from the train to work in 17 minutes (17:17). However, I drove alone another day in around 13 minutes, 20 seconds in rush hour including a stop for petrol and the time it took to walk to and from the car. Public transport takes over 53 minutes on a day without any major problems – easily four times what it takes to drive. We don't prefer our cars; we just prefer not to waste the extra 5 hours a week it would take to get there another way.

Do we have a love affair with our cars?  I don’t mind the walk on clear days; it’s good exercise. It really sucks on rainy days, though, and that’s when I begin to love the idea of buying a car – mainly as a form of shelter. Maybe we just hate spending an extra hour and twenty minutes a day trying to use a bus or train. We also probably hate being out in [hot/cold/wet/any] weather that makes us [sweat/freeze/damp/uncomfortable] in our work clothes. Ultimately, I chose to change cities rather than buy the car (I bike to work now).

Thanks, traffic engineers, for giving lowly pedestrians no way to cross in any direction.

Giving Cars Priority

Traffic engineers love to talk about delay. They sometimes measure delay in minutes, and they often give us report-card-like indicators of congestion as measured by level of service. By one measure, intersection delay of greater than 80 seconds is considered LOS F when vehicles are involved, but that's just a routine crossing for pedestrians (whose movements through intersections aren't important enough to get the report-card-like grade).

I did a little research to understand why walking in New Zealand is different from walking in other places and ran across a paper by Dan Ross. The paper is very informative, but it misses the mark on a few points of comparison between New Zealand, Australia, and North America. In particular, he states, "The lack of a uniformly-recognised definition of a crosswalk [in the US] has created an array of different engineering standards, policies and systems of warrants for their installation and operation." This is not exactly true (though there are specific differences in a few jurisdictions); the American and Canadian crosswalk is defined in statute, and it doesn't even have to be marked. Ross complains about the complexity of rules that apply, and they are admittedly a little difficult to articulate in written form, but the rule boils down to a simple common sense approach: if a motorist would have to stop or give way to another car, then the motorist has to give way to a pedestrian making the same movement. That is, if a car has to stop or give way at T intersection for cars crossing and turning, then the motorist has to give way to a pedestrian crossing in the same way. The North American rule is actually quite simple; in fact, I think it is New Zealand that has the convoluted rule, since both pedestrians and motorists must examine and contemplate whether a footpath is broken by a kerb return to determine who has the right-of-way (this is not always as obvious as one might think). I once saw an explanation of kerb return design on Auckland City Council's website to illustrate when pedestrians or motorists had the right-of-way at an intersection... expecting the layperson to inspect the design details of every intersection before crossing is ludicrous. It inspired me to put together this satirical piece on learning how to walk in New Zealand.

At some point, some time ago, I had put these observations down on paper in a version that's a bit less sarcastic than my LinkedIn post. It illustrates that the benefits of the North American approach are best illustrated in a simple comparison of neighborhoods (mainly because I don't have the time or resources to do a larger comparison). I compared Ellerslie North (Census Area Unit) with Seattle's Census Tract 108 (both my home at various points in life) and came out with a few simple statistics. For Ellerslie, I used marked crossings and pedestrian crossings at signalised intersections as the definition of a protected crossing, while the Seattle example included the legal definition of pedestrian priority at intersections, as well as specially-marked mid-block crossings (similar in concept to those in New Zealand). In the two areas compared, the Seattle census area had 1/3 less population but three times the land area than the Auckland census area (largely due to lots of unusable slopes and a few large institutional land uses that lack residential populations). The mathematics of the two comparisons are interesting: In the Seattle example, there's a protected crossing for every 61 residents, compared to every 939 Ellerslie residents. That amounts to 18 protected crossings per square kilometer in Seattle, versus 4 in Auckland. To my way of thinking, that simply indicates that there are far fewer places to cross the street safely in Auckland. Ask if you want to see the background information... the paper version is actually digital, and I can send you a PDF.