CITY CONGESTION

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 135, 4 December 1929, Page 12

CITY CONGESTION

CAUSES AND COST

HEIGHT OF BUILDINGS

AND STREET CROWDING

(By the Director of Town Planning.)

The people of Wellington are rapidly awakening to the fact that traffic con-

gestion is not a phenomenon peculiar to metropolitan areas like London and New York, and that even in a comparatively small city like Wellington, too high a price can bo paid for those outward and visible signs of progress and prosperity, such as tall buildings and motor-cars. What shall it profit a man if he load himself with gold ornaments and precious stones so that he cannot walk ? Tho truth is usually unpalatable, and he who voices it runs the risk of being regarded as a crank or a very offensive person. The truth in regard to the cause of the traffic congestion in Wellington and the remedy which must be adopted, is. particularly unpalatable. Nevertheless, it must be faced now, and decisive action taken if we are to profit from the costly mistakes of the j cities of the Old World.

The loss to the community in New York and London directly due to traflic congestion is conservatively estimated at £7 10s per annum per head of population Imagine what that would mean if it applied to a city like Wellington, with a population of only 100,000. It would mean the total annual loss of a sum half as big again as the municipal budget, or interest at 5 per cent, on a capital sum of £15,000,000. I do not suggest that tho loss we are suffering at the moment, serious as it is, is anything approaching this figure, but I do venture to predict that our present troubles are but a foretaste of those which are to come as the city grows, unless we grapple with and eliminate the root causes of this congestion. And, talking of our municipal budget, it would bo interesting to know how much of it is in respect of moneys expended for the relief or traffic congestion, either by street widening, traffic police, or traffic control devices: how much of it is in respect of capital charges and maintenance on streets and utilities of a greater capacity than is ever likely to be required of them? How much of it is in respect of interest and sinking fund charges on loans out of which public utilities and services were provided which no longer exist, which have had to be scrapped and replaced from time to time before the expiration of their economic life because we insist on multiplying indefinitely the building cubage and population density beyond the capacity for which these utilities and services were originally designed, in order that we may enjoy the doubtful privilege of concentrating land values and herding together into the smallest possible area, j WHO MEETS THE BILL? Tho owners of these large buildings; say: "We are public benefactors; these buildings are a - sign of the material progress of our city; they create ratable value; and whose business is it so long as we are -willing to pay the increased rates clue to the capital expenditure necessary to adapt the streets and public services to the needs of our new buildings"? But do these building owners pay the rates? Do they even pay a fair share of these increased burdens? I have already demonstrated in the columns of the "Evening Post" that they do not. Do the ratepayers of Wellington as a whole pay the rates? I think not. I will deal with this point later.

Now, I started out to discuss traffic congestion. Fnancially, there are two phases to this question—the direct loss due to the congestion itself and the cost to the ratepayers of providing a remedy in the form of' street widening and new streets. We must not forget, too, that those factors which cause traffic congestion in the streets usually cause congestion of the utilities and services such as sewers, water, gas, and electric light mains which lie beneath the streets, a form of congestion which may be even more costly to remedy.

The City of Wellington has embarked on a programme of street widening in the business area which may cost £5,000,000 before it is complete; it is quite impossible to estimate the ultimate cost. One might well ask, why is this Work necessary? Will it afford effective relief for existing traffic congestion? "Will the improvements be permanent? Who will foot the bill? But before answering these questions it is necessary that we should examino in some detail the cause or causes of traffic congestion.

WIDENING NO PERMANENT CURE

Traffic congestion is a sympton, and not a disease, and street "widening is just about as intelligent a method of curing the disease as the. old-fashioned method of bleeding is of curing hardening of the arteries, the sympstom of which is blood pressure. In the one case the ratepayer loses a lot of money, and in the other the patient loses a lot of blood. The treatment in both cases may give temporary relief, or at least postpone the inevitable catastrophe, but in neither case does_ it arrest the disease itself. To continue the simile, blood pressure is, I believe, due primarily to hardening of the arteries, caused'by over-eating and a badly balanced diet.

Traffic congestion is due to overbuilding and an ill-balanced arrangement of building uses coupled with a defective street system, and it is where these three factors are in operation together that the worst traffic congestion is found.

To the superficial observer the. narrowness of the streets appears to be the sole or primary cause of congestion. Seeing the streets congested it is natural to assume that they are not wide enough to serve the" buildings fronting them, together with the needs of through traffic, but it must be apparent that widening the street will not lesson congestion if the traffic is doubled after the increased capacity is provided. If you turn on the bath tap and leave it running, the bath will overflow and make a mess. ' It is no use buying a bigger bath. You must turn the tap off when tho batli is full. It is no use blaming the streets. They were in existence before the buildings. This being so, should not the buildings be adjusted to the street widths rather than the street widths changed to suit the buildings after they have been erected?

TENDENCY TO OVER-BUILD HERE,

Now, there are many sides to this question, which space will not permit mo to enlarge upon here. It must suffice to say that in my opinion the traffic conditions in the city of Wellington today are primarily due to misplaced activities, and a tendency to over-build and thereby overload the capacity of the streets. A readjustment of these activities by means of efficient zoning regulations can undoubtedly do much to improve matters, and this ought to bo done without delay, but no permanent cure can be found unless and until the total building mass in relation to the superficial area of the- streets is considerably restricted below that which is now permitted by the building bylaws. If this were done, property owners would no doubt have a great deal to say about economic injury, and it is inevitable- that losses would be incurred by certain property owners, but these losses in the aggregate may be

almost negligible in comparison with the losses which the community must suffer if we persist in our present course, and every community loss means an individual loss to every business man.

• There are many people who will laugh when I say that we are over-building in the city of Wellington, and will point to the American skyscrapers, of which so much has been heard lately. A lot of nonsenso is talked about these skyscrapers. In New York, for instance, only 1 per cent, of the whole of the buildings on Manhattan Island exceed ten storeys in height, while the average height of existing buildings is only 4".8 storeys, a figure which has remained constant since 1913, which means that the average height of buildings for which permits have been issued since that date is only 4.S storeys. Even with this height, and taking into consideration that the streets which run east and west arc COft wide and 200 ft apart, and the avenues which run north and south are 100 ft wide and 600 ft to 700 ft apart, the traffic congestion on Manhattan Island is probably the worst in the world, notwithstanding that there is a network of underground and overhead railways. The maximum height of buildings permitted in London is 80ft, and in

In American cities, which are almost invariably rectangular in plan and with a standardised depth of plot, the total building cubage can bo controlled by means of height regulations In cities of irregular plan like Wellington, however, height regulations may mean very little. There may be two sections side by side, for instance one 100 ft in depth and the other 200 ft m depth. If buildings, both devoted to the same use, eight storeys in height were erected on these two sections it must be obvious that the one would require double the street capacity of the other m order to cope with the originating traffic. BYLAW PROVISIONS. Different types of uses also vary widely in regard to the volume of originating traffic. A thousand square feet of floor space in a retail shore, for instance, is the equivalent of 5000 square feet of floor space in an office building. Before the street system can be planned efficiently therefore ft i» necessary to bring about some degree of concentration or specialisation of building uses in defined areas, and that is one of the reasons why street planning and zoning must be carried out simultaneously. But to return to the question of building heights in relation to street capacity—the present city byaws permit of a height of one and a half times the width of the street, with a maximum of 102 ft, and this according to approximate calculations i have made, permits, of a ratio of gross floor area to street area of 14 to 1, whereas the present ratio of floor area to street area in Manhattan Island is approximately 6 to 1, and it is not anticipated that it will ever exceed 12 to 1, because before that ratio is established, breaking point would have been reached and the whole of the traffic brought to a standstill. UNECONOMIC BUILDINGS. Although there are very substantial reasons why the maximum building height in New Zealand should be kept as low as possible, it has very little significance in considering the question of street capacity, for the reasons I have enumerated, and I' think we shall do better to confine ourselves to controlling building cubage and (or) floor area. It can readily be demonstrated, too, that buildings over a certain height are uneconomic, and, personally, I think that some of the recent tall buildings in this country come within that category, or at least that a, higher net return on the capital invested could have been secured from lower buildings. A good deal depends, of course, upon the price of the building lands. English and American experts are agreed today that the maximum economic height of any building is ten stories, and that under no circumstances should a building be allowed to exceed in height the width of the street on which it fronts. It is held that buildings over twenty stories in height are either monuments, advertisements, or failures, increase taxation beyond endurance, create congestion, and shifting of value which can be overcome for the benefit of the few only through taxation of the many. By building horizontally instead of vertically and avoiding waste, the total values of the city would be increased, while the rate of taxation would be lowered.

_ The proof of this is that in New York tho over-building and crowding together of tall buildings in the lower end of Manhattan Island produced a loss of £18(5,000,000 in property values within an area of ten or twelve blocks around Twenty-third street in only two years. In one block values dropped two millions and a half dollars in one year and a half—a loss of 4G per cent. Whatever the justification in New York for tall buildings—and we must not forget the greater street capacity which exists there —there is no justification whatever for any such policy in any town in New Zealand.

In a second section of his article Mr. Mawson deals more particularly with various aspects of the problem locally, | and emphasises the necessity of endeavouring to so order development that improvements shall be permanent, and not merely temporary—though immensely costly—as at present. Mr. Mawson also emphasises in this section, to be published to-morrow, that the whole country, rural as well as urban areas, has a real interest in schemes of town-planning which aim at bringing about the highest possible efficiency in the use of land and thus may save, to farmer and city man alike, the great outgoing of waste.