Don’t forget to thank your planner
We finally bought a second car.
This feels like the final step in becoming full-blown suburbanites. It is certainly a far cry from when my partner and I lived in Sydney 15 years ago and didn’t own a car. Or when we lived in Canberra of all places with just the one adorable little hatchback.
Over time, we have tended to use public transport less, walk less and drive more. And now we’ve put the icing on that inactivity cake with a second car.
What’s the big deal, you ask? Isn’t this pretty normal? Well, yes. But I didn’t want to. Years ago, I had high hopes of living somewhere walkable, never buying a second car, commuting on public transport and even owning one of those cool/ridiculous recumbent road cycles.
But life got the better of us. We moved to Canberra, and needed to be able to drive to and from Sydney. We had kids and needed the flexibility to be able to carry all the baby junk around. Our growing family eventually made the hatchback a bit squishy, so when we moved to Wellington, we got a bigger car. And then the final nail, we moved to an absolutely, classically car dependent suburb: Maungaraki. We needed the space, and that’s where we could afford a big house.
Our story is a perfect example of how our built environment dictates our choices. No one forced us to buy a second car, or a first car. It was just more convenient. No one forces me to drive to work instead of catching the train. It is just faster, and as a time poor parent, that’s the determining factor. No one forces us to drop our kids at school instead of walking. It’s just easier that way, because it’s a 40 minute walk down the hill to my daughter’s preschool in Petone. Yes, we could catch a bus - but we don’t.
Those are all choices we have made as a family, but they are the absolutely predictable outcome of building low density suburbs like Maungaraki which are not walkable, hard to serve with public transport, provide ludicrous amounts of space for parking and are extremely well connected to the arterial road network.
As a result of these “choices”, like everyone else in similar circumstances, we’ll spend a sizeable proportion of our income on purchasing, maintaining and operating two cars, and we’ll be less healthy because of all the incidental exercise we aren’t getting. We’ll generate more carbon emissions, cost the health system more and probably die earlier than we otherwise would.
Planners cop a lot of flak from people who either don’t understand what they do, don’t think they have the right to do it or sometimes both at the same time. Even ministers want them to stop planning!
But if you live somewhere you can walk to a supermarket; if you have a bus stop or train station close by; if your kids can walk or cycle to school safely; and if you can grow old in the suburb you live in now, don’t forget to thank your planner. They don’t get a lot of thanks, so you might just make their day.
Oh, and one other thing you could. Next time someone insists that we just need a bunch more low density suburbs on the urban fringe, connected to the city by a giant motorway, please don’t vote for them.
If you’re keen to learn more, check out our Transport Policy and Planning course at www.windycitytraining.co.nz/courses/transport