The Commuters Commons - Where we've come from
I've gone so far down the commuting rabbit hole that Alice asked me what method of transport I used to get to Wonderland 🐇
What is common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care - Artistotle
Getting from A to B is one of the most consistent and predictable drumbeats of society. Every weekday, more than half of us wake up, get ready for our day, and travel from home to office. Eight hours later, we repeat the process in reverse. Society has operated on the 9-5 rhythm for over a century now; we’ve built our school systems around it, our infrastructure is built to support the rush hour volume it’s burdened by 10% of the time, and we’re all accustomed to the congestion we experience during the in-between time from home to work.
Whether you walk, drive, cycle, scooter, or bus - you’re reliant on more or less the same infrastructure. We’re building more seperate cycleways now, which is good - but they’re still beholden to the rough layout of our roads. Even Trains, which do remove pressure from our road infrastructure, need to conform in a variety of ways to their more dominant cousin. The only public transport method that has total freedom in this regard is the ferry; but it’s application is obviously a bit limited. Planes also have the freedom - but I really hope you’re not regularly commuting by private jet (and if you are please consider supporting my work with the money that would cost you instead 👀).
So Roads, then, are a form of commons - that is to say, they’re something shared by a group of people. More specifically (and more nerdily), they’re a finite public good that faces demand from a range of actors, who are largely more incentivised to act in their individual interest, and whose use of said resource is (for the most part) unmoderated.
All that boils down to the following ‘so what?’: We only have so much room and capacity for roads, and we all typically think about ourselves when considering how they should be put to use. This piece series is a quick exploration into how that dynamic has evolved over recent history, where things are at now, and some scenario mapping to envision where our commuter’s commons might be going. We’ll kick off with what has now become part one (because this got away on me big time) - where we’ve come from.
Part one: Where we’ve come from
As one might expect, we haven’t always been reliant on a set of wheels to get us from A to B every weekday. In fact - we haven’t always had to get from A to B every weekday, and we haven’t even always had weekdays. So let’s start at the beginning…ish.
Society began commuting in earnest as we entered the industrial revolution. Workers initially flocked to the cities as they were built, with the later, more affluent entrants settling on the outskirts of the densely populated industrial slums. New York’s first ‘Commuter suburb’, for example, was made possible in 1814 when the Fulton Ferry Company established a regular route to Manhattan. By 1860, Fulton’s Ferry’s were carrying over 100,000 workers across East River every single day.
The next paradigm-shift in commuting didn’t really happen for another 100 or so years (although plenty of cool stuff happened in between). Private Vehicle transport went through it’s Cambrian explosion in the 1920’s, totally transforming how we collectively saw roads, and massively expanding the reach of anyone wealthy enough to have the right kind of access. Where streets used to be mixed-use places of congregation, they evolved into single-use resources - sequestered for transport and transport alone.
In the New Zealand context, this looked like one car for every 7.1 persons (at maximum; this was in Wellington East, the most motorised place in NZ in the 1930’s). To put that into current-day context - we now have 884 cars per 1,000 people nationwide; or one car for every 1.13 persons. That’s a 528% increase - which is massive when we consider the toll cars have on roads, the environment, and society as a whole.
Once the car had been shaped to conform to our cities, our cities began to conform to the car. Roads went from clay and cobblestone to cement and tarmac, and over time, the very design of our cities was determined by the presumption of vehicle access. Suburbia hit it’s peak in the 1950’s; the Nuclear family was largely defined by it’s access to a lawn surrounded by a white picket fence. You don’t get a white picket fence if you live in an apartment, though - and the only land that’s accessible is out of town. Cars drove (pun intended) the expansion of cities, surrounding metropolitan areas with housing. But in many instances, these suburbs were designed without accessibility, liveability, or community in mind.
A local example is Grenada Village in Wellington. To access any kind of produce or food store, you need a car. There’s not so much as a local dairy, and any kind of supermarket is across State Highway 1. This puts it within spitting distance of becoming a food desert, lowers the social cohesion within the community, and forces residents to be dependent on a car even if they’re WFH.
So it is through the design of our growing cities that the car became the dominant form of transport in our lives - and over time, how we became increasingly dependent on private vehicles to access vital communal resources.
Now - driving may be the dominant mode of transport, but it isn’t the only way of getting around. New Zealand has a rich history regarding public transport, including all sorts of innovative methods. Historically, commuters have had electric trains since the 1930’s. We’ve seen trams (both horse-drawn and electric), cable-tramways, and trolley-buses all come and go.
The key thing to note with all these innovations is this: The survival and success of all these methods of transport have been heavily influenced by their compatibility with private vehicle infrastructure. Light-rail solutions like trams were initially phased out in Wellington in favour of solutions like trolley-buses - which were then phased out in favour of standard buses in 2017. There are genuine benefits to these transitions; rail is an incredibly rigid form of infrastructure, as are trolleybuses. It’s harder to update and adapt these networks when changing the routes comes at such a high cost - it’s far cheaper and more efficient if your public transport solution can fit in to the existing road network without any additional hardware.
Alongside public transport, we’ve seen cycling go through various ebbs and flows over time. In 1924, for example - Christchurch wore the crown as cycling capital of New Zealand. It was estimated in that year that 50% of residents cycled, making up 20% of New Zealand’s overall bicycle ownership. This all collapsed in the 50’s and 60’s as the government supported the adoption of cars as a primary mode of transport. The cyclists that remained were further reduced by people feeling forced into cars out of safety concerns.
Cycling briefly became popular again during the oil-shocks of the 1970’s (we even had carless days for nearly a year), but it wasn’t until the early 2000’s that the Government acknowledged cycling as key to a range of their own transport goals. During this time, cycling was rising in popularity under it’s own momentum, as people were searching for green alternatives to driving every day.
Throughout this time, though, and up to now - the popularity of cycling has been hampered by safety concerns. These have recently begun to be addressed after a coroners report led to the establishment of an expert panel, which led to significant investment in cycleways. These cycleways aim to protect cyclists by getting them off the roads - but even so, almost every cycleway in development is tethered directly to the roads they’re separating cyclists from.
Hopping from one 2-wheeled solution to another, we’ve also recently seen the rise of e-scooters, with the notable catalyst of ride-sharing solutions increasing accessibility massively. E-scooters are the face of the ‘micro-mobility’ boom; a range of transport solutions designed to solve the last-mile problem often faced by people who opt for public transport. While e-scooters are older than traffic lights, they didn’t truly explode as a viable mode of transport until 2017, when Bird and Lime bought dockless share-scooters to the world.
These share networks represented a paradigm-shift in two key ways:
They presented a transport solution that can exist symbiotically with another; improving the accessibility of both.
They popularised and proved the viability of ride-share networks, paving the way for future developments in the space.
However, alongside these boons came a few banes. ACC reported $6.5 million in scooter-related accidents in 2019; the peak-year for scooter-related claims for most regions. That being said, the amount and severity of claims have both gone down significantly since slow-zones have been introduced. The other notable challenge with scooters lies in their storage. When a user ends their ride, they can end it wherever they like - their scooter can be left in the middle of a footpath, in the way of parked cars, or if they’re drunk enough - in the harbour (shout out to Ghost Diving for the work they do in this space!). This is a classic commons problem; where the offender is almost guaranteed not to deal with the impact of their offence, it’s a lot easier to leave it for whoever might come along next to sort things out.
To Flamingo’s credit especially, they have worked with the council to establish designated parking areas, incentivising riders with account credit for parking in safe spaces. They even recently provided free rides to people commuting to voting stations for our general election - which was very sexy of them.
OK - that’s it. That’s as brief a history of commuting methods as I could manage - with a bit of global and a bit of local context thrown in. For the most part, we’ve seen change in only the methods we use to get from A to B. The instruments we play have grown and evolved over time; but the song has always been the same. Until 2020…
COVID drastically changed how we commute - first, in a very acute way; with virtually no one commuting for the entirety of New Zealand’s lockdown (and across the world to varying extents). Then, in a much more enduring way; with WFH and Hybrid work significantly more the norm now than ever before.
For the first time in 2020, we were all playing a different song. Some of us have since gone back to the old rhythm, but there are a lot of us who kinda like this funky new beat. Commuting is now more diverse than ever before, not just in terms of how we all get from work to home, but also in how often we commute, what time of day we commute, and whether we do so at all. For the first time since the industrial revolution, we’re becoming more local; shrinking the geographic footprint of our day-to-day lives.
This is the point where history merges with present day; we’re now in the interregnum. No one can say for sure where the dust will fall - but I’ll be exploring that some more in part 2 and 3 of this series. Stay tuned!
Big thanks to Nick Hyland from Flamingo, Julie Anne Genter, MP for Rongotai, and Alan Doak from
for their contributions to this piece - I’ll be quoting them more as we go on, and possible weaving in some more familiar faces too.I’d like to also acknowledge Alex Dyer for all the work he does locally in this space (check out his incredible resource on lowering car dependency here), along with James Longhurst, Ben Southwood, and Joseph Hannon, and Maksymilian Kwiek for the insights their work has offered.