Where are the unoccupied dwellings in Australian cities?

Sat 4 November, 2017

Over one million private dwellings in Australia were unoccupied on census night in 2016 – 11.2% of all private dwellings – up from 10.2% in 2011.

This raises many questions. Where are these unoccupied dwellings and where are they now more prevalent? What type of dwellings are more likely to be unoccupied? How long have these dwellings been unoccupied? Do we know why these dwellings are unoccupied?

This post will focus on dwelling occupancy by geography, dwelling types and trends over time. In a future post I hope look into those last two questions in more detail.

I’ve prepared data for sixteen Australian cities, with various maps in Tableau (you will need to zoom and pan to your city of interest).

Why am I blogging about dwelling occupancy on a transport blog? Well partly because I’m interested in urban issues, but also because land use is very relevant to transport. If dwelling occupancy rates in the inner and middle suburbs were higher, there would be more people living closer to jobs and activities who might be less reliant on private motorised transport for their daily travel.

If you’d like to read more around the associated policy issues, Professor Hal Pawson from UNSW has a good piece in The Conversation highlighting the increasing number of empty properties and spare bedrooms, and advocates  replacing stamp duty with a broad-based land tax to improve housing mobility. Also read Eryk Bagshaw in the Fairfax press, Jonathan Jackson in Finfeed, and a piece in Business Insider where the Commonwealth Bank state that 17% of recently built dwellings are left unoccupied (not sure how that was calculated).

What are the dwelling occupancy rates in Australian cities?

Here’s a chart showing private dwelling occupancy rates for sixteen Australian cities (using 2011 Significant Urban Area boundaries) from the last three censuses:

Note the y-axis only runs from 84% to 94%, so the changes are not massive. However a small change in dwelling occupancy can still have a large impact on housing prices (rental and sales).

The Sunshine and Central Coasts have the lowest occupancy, almost certainly explained by many holiday homes in those regions, although all three have been trending upwards. Curiously, the Gold Coast – Tweed Heads had a significant increase in occupancy between 2011 and 2016 to take it above Perth, Townsville, and Darwin.

Hobart and Cairns also had increased occupancy between 2011 and 2016, but all large cities declined between 2011 and 2016. Perth, Darwin and Townsville had big slides – quite possibly related to the downturn in the mining industry and slowing population growth (all three have seen slowing population growth in recent years after a boom period). Then again, if there are more fly-in-fly-out workers in a city you might expect dwelling occupancy on census night to go down as a portion of them will be away for work on census night.

How does dwelling occupancy in capital cities compare to the rest of the country?

Private dwelling occupancy is significantly lower outside the capital city areas. While the capital city areas contain 63% of all private dwellings, they only contain 51% of unoccupied private dwellings.

How does dwelling occupancy vary by dwelling type?

Here’s a chart of 2016 dwelling occupancy by Greater Capital City Statistical Areas and the most common dwelling types:

In many cities there is a strong correlation between housing type and occupancy, with separate houses having the highest occupancy rates, and multi-storey flats/apartments having the lowest. The pattern is strongest in Perth – perhaps reflecting reduced demand for apartment living following the end of the mining boom(?).

The data suggests higher density apartments are more likely to not be occupied on census night, but it doesn’t tell us why. Of course different dwelling types have different spatial distributions, so is it the dwelling type that drives the occupancy rates? I’ll come back to that shortly.

Where are the unoccupied dwellings?

Quite simply, here is a map showing the density (at SA2 geography) of unoccupied dwellings in Melbourne over time (you might need to click to enlarge to read more clearly):

(I’ve not shaded SA2s with less than 1 unoccupied dwelling per hectare. You can look at other cities in Tableau by zooming out and then in on another city).

You can see a fairly significant increase in the number of unoccupied dwellings in the inner and middle suburbs (at least at densities above 1 per hectare).

From a transport perspective – this isn’t great. If people lived in those dwellings rather than dwellings on the fringe of Melbourne, the transport task would be easier as there would be many more people living closer to jobs and other destinations with non-car modes being more competitive.

But these areas with a relatively high density of unoccupied dwellings are also areas with a high density of dwellings in general. The density of unoccupied dwellings has risen in the same places where total dwelling density has risen:

(see in Tableau – you may need to change the geography type)

Given you would expect a small percentage of dwellings to be unoccupied for good reasons (eg resident temporarily absent, or property on the market), it makes sense that the density of unoccupied dwellings has gone up with total dwelling density.

But a decrease in the dwelling occupancy rate requires the number of unoccupied dwellings to be growing at a faster rate than the total number of dwellings. We already know that is happening at the city level through declining occupancy rates, so how does that look inside cities?

How does dwelling occupancy vary across Melbourne?

Here’s a map of dwelling occupancy in Melbourne and Geelong at CD/SA1 level geography:

(see also in Tableau)

You can see very clearly that occupancy is lowest on Mornington Peninsula beaches to the south – which almost certainly reflects empty holiday homes on census night (a Tuesday night in winter).

In fact, I’ve created a map of dwelling occupancy at SA2 level for all of Australia, and you can see many coastal holiday areas around Melbourne (and other cities) with low occupancy (with Lorne – Anglesea at 32% and Phillip Island at 40%):

The previous Melbourne map at CD/SA1 level is very detailed and so it’s not easy to see the overall trends. Also, apart from the Mornington Peninsula, occupancy rates are almost all above 80%.

So here is a zoomed-in map with a different (narrower) colour scale, with data aggregated at SA2 level (also in Tableau):

Things become much clearer.

The highest dwelling occupancy is generally on the fringe of Melbourne.

Apart from holiday home areas, the lowest occupancy in 2016 was concentrated in wealthier inner suburbs, including Toorak at 83% and South Yarra west at 84%. This was closely followed by the CBD, Docklands, East Melbourne, Southbank, and Albert Park between 84% and 86%. These areas have all had declining occupancy since 2011.

It can be a little difficult to see the changes in occupancy rates, so here is a non-animated map the change in dwelling occupancy rates between 2006 and 2016 (also in Tableau):

There are at least small declines in most parts of Melbourne. The biggest decline was 7% in Bundoora North (with lowest 2016 occupancy of 79% in these new units in University Hill ), followed by 5% in Doncaster (lowest around Doncaster Hill where there are new apartments, perhaps too new to be occupied on census night?), 4% in South Yarra East (lowest in the new apartments around South Yarra Station, again possibly because some are very new) and Prahran – Windsor.

Curiously, Docklands dwelling occupancy increased by 9% from 75% to 85% (rounding means that those numbers don’t perfectly add). Perhaps there were many new yet-to-be-occupied dwellings in 2006? For reference, Dockland’s 2011 occupancy was 84%, only slightly below the 2016 level.

The outer growth areas are a mixed bag of increases and decreases. This possibly depends again on how many brand new but not yet occupied dwellings there were in 2006 and 2016.

What are the dwelling occupancy patterns in other cities?

Sydney

You can see lower occupancy around the CBD, North Sydney, Manly, and the northern beaches, and higher occupancy in the western suburbs.

The largest declines are evident in the city centre and North Ryde – East Ryde:

Brisbane

Brisbane has some big declines to the north-east of the city centre, Rochedale – Burbank, Woodridge, Logan, and Leichhardt – One Mile. The Redland Islands in the east are presumably a popular place for holiday homes.

Perth

Low occupancy is evident around Mandurah in the south (a popular holiday home area). Lower occupancy has spread around the inner city, and beach-side suburbs of Scarborough, Cottesloe, Fremantle, and Rockingham (many of which are areas with higher concentrations of Airbnb properties).

The biggest declines were in Maylands, Victoria Park – Lathlain – Burswood, and South Lake – Cockburn Central. For the first two of these areas the decline was mostly in flats/units/apartments.

Adelaide

The lowest occupancy is on the south coast and in Glenelg. The biggest decline was in Fulham (-5%), followed by Payneham – Felixstowe (-4%):

[Canberra, Hobart and Darwin added 6 November 2017]

Canberra

Dwelling occupancy was lowest around Parliament House (the census was not during a sitting week in 2016), and highest in the outer northern and southern suburbs. The 2006 census was during a sitting week, so it’s little surprise that big dwelling occupancy reductions were seen around Capital Hill between 2006 and 2016.  There was also a 5% decline in Farrer and a 6% growth in Gungahlin between 2006 and 2016 (Gungahlin’s dwellings almost doubled between 2006 and 2011, so the 2006 result might reflect brand new dwellings awaiting occupants).

Hobart

Dwelling occupancy was lowest in central Hobart, with the biggest decline of 4% in Old Beach – Otago, but overall there was little change between 2006 and 2016 (average occupancy did drop slightly in 2011 though).

Darwin

Darwin dwelling occupancy was lowest in the city centre at 82% in 2016, while Howard Springs had 100% occupancy (in 2016). Declines are evident between 2006 and 2016 across most parts of Darwin.

Gold Coast

Here’s a map of 2016 occupancy at SA1 level, with the original broader colour scale:

You can see quite clearly that the beach-side areas have low occupancy, while the inland areas have much higher occupancy (some at 100%). Presumably many permanent residents cannot or choose not to compete with tourism for beach-side living.

Sunshine Coast

Similar patterns are evident on the Sunshine Coast, particularly around Noosa and Sunshine Beach in the north:

If you want to see other cities, move around Australia in Tableau for occupancy maps at CD/SA1 and SA2 geography (choose you year of interest), and occupancy change maps (at SA2 geography).

So are there lots of unoccupied inner city apartments in Melbourne?

Some commentators have spoken about many inner city apartments being unoccupied – perhaps through a glut or investors chasing capital gains and not interested rental incomes.

Here is dwelling occupancy in central Melbourne at SA1 geography for 2016, using the broader colour scale (also in Tableau):

There are quite a few pockets of very low occupancy, particularly areas shaded in yellows and greens. The average private dwelling occupancy for the City of Melbourne local government area was 87%, lower than the Greater Melbourne average of 91%.

The lowest occupancy is a block between Adderley, Spencer and Dudley Street in North Melbourne at 56%, which is probably related to the recent completion of an apartment tower not long before the census (from Google Street view we know it was under construction in April 2015 and completed by October 2016).

There are several patches of yellow  (65-70% occupancy) in the CBD, Docklands and Southbank.

But what about apartment towers? For that we need to drill down to mesh blocks – and thankfully 2016 census data is actually provided at this level.

Here’s a map showing dwelling occupancy of mesh blocks in the City of Melbourne (local government area) with at least 100 dwellings per hectare (as an arbitrary threshold for large apartment building – see the appendix for an example of this density):

(explore in Tableau)

Some notable low occupancy apartment towers include:

  • 48% for an apartment tower at 555 Flinders Street (Northbank Place Central Tower) between Spencer and King Street and the railway viaduct. It wasn’t brand new in 2016.
  • 47% in a block that includes the Melbourne ONE apartment tower, possibly because it was only just opened (as I write there are still apartments for sale)
  • 65% for one of the towers at New Quay, Docklands (which seems to include serviced apartments)
  • 66% for a tower at 28 Southgate Ave (corner City Road), and 67% for the Quay West tower next door (almost certainly popular places for Airbnb / serviced apartments).

Several of these towers include advertised serviced apartments, and I expect the towers would contain a mix of serviced apartments, owner-occupied apartments and rentals (regular and Airbnb). However ABS advises me that field officers do speak to building managers, and are therefore likely to not code serviced apartments as private dwellings.

That said, according to the 2016 census data there were only 11 non-private dwellings in Docklands that were classified as “Hotel, motel, bed and breakfast”, and zero non-private dwellings in the New Quay apartment towers.

I snapped this picture at 9pm on a Sunday in September 2017 of the apartments at New Quay (Docklands) that at the 2016 census had 65-70% occupancy:

Of course you wouldn’t expect lights to be on in all rooms in all occupied dwellings at 9pm on a particular Sunday, but I dare say it’s probably a time when fewer people would be out. It looks like a lot less than a quarter of rooms are lit. I know very few of these are on Airbnb (more on that in a future post!), but I don’t know how many are actually serviced apartments.

There’s huge variation in dwelling occupancy across these mesh blocks. So is the lower occupancy more concentrated in higher density areas? Here’s a scatter plot of all mesh blocks in the City of Melbourne by dwelling density and occupancy:

There’s not a strong relationship between density and occupancy. The variation in dwelling occupancy between mesh blocks will probably depend on a lot of local factors.

What about occupancy by dwelling type for the inner city?

(data points removed where dwelling counts were small, the isolated blue dot at the bottom is for Southbank).

There’s no evidence that flats / apartments have lower occupancy than other housing types in the central city. However there is evidence that inner city areas have relatively lower occupancy.

So how does the occupancy of apartment blocks of 4+ storeys vary across Melbourne?

Box Hill had the lowest apartment occupancy of 50% (perhaps some were brand new?), followed by Ringwood, Glen Waverley, and Brighton in the 70-75% range.  Croydon East, Templestowe , Seddon – Kingsville, Clayton, Carnegie, West Footscray, Braybrook and Frankston reported occupancy above 95%. The inner city areas were around 84-85% occupied, and these would make up the majority of such dwellings in Melbourne.

Apartments in blocks of 4+ storeys seem to have lower occupancy on average because most of them are located in the central city, which generally has lower dwelling occupancy.

Here’s a similar map (with a different colour scale) for dwelling occupancy of separate houses across the Melbourne region:

The lowest rates in metropolitan Melbourne are 82-83% in some inner city areas, while the urban growth shows up in pink and purple, mostly 94-96%.

Explore the 2016 occupancy rates at SA2 geography for different dwelling types for any part of Australia in Tableau. You can also view changes in occupancy rates since 2006 for separate houses, flats/units/apartments, and semi-detached/townhouses.

Why are there lower dwelling occupancy rates in the central city?

The census doesn’t answer this, and I’m not a housing expert, but I dare say there are plenty of plausible explanations:

  • Many dwellings are rented out on Airbnb (and/or other platforms) – but are not in high demand on a weeknight in mid-winter (more on that in this post).
  • Many dwellings are serviced apartments that are indistinguishable from regular private dwellings (in buildings with a mixture of dwelling use). ABS say they don’t count these as private dwellings, however they are not showing up as non-private dwellings.
  • Dwellings are more likely to occupied by executives who travel more frequently.
  • Dwellings might be second homes for people living outside the city.
  • Dwellings might be owned by employers for interstate staff visiting Melbourne.
  • Dwellings might be poorly constructed and uninhabitable (eg mould issues).
  • Investors who are not interested in rental income might deliberately leave properties vacant (something that is disputed).

But I’m just speculating.

What about dwelling occupancy in the centre of other cities?

Here’s a map of the Sydney CBD area at SA1 geography:

There are some very low occupancy rates in the north end of the CBD, but very high occupancy rates around Darling Harbour and Pyrmont.

Here’s central Brisbane:

Here are occupancy rates for different dwelling types for selected inner city SA2s in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth:

In all SA2s except Surrey Hills (Sydney) and South Brisbane, flats or apartments in 4+ storey blocks had the lowest dwelling occupancy in 2016. Only in Perth City SA2 (which is quite a bit larger than the CBD) is there a reasonably clear relationship between housing type and occupancy.

Summary of findings

Couldn’t be bothered reading all of the above, or forgot what you learnt? Here’s a summary of findings:

  • Dwelling occupancy, as measured by the census, has declined in most Australian cities between 2006 and 2016 (particularly larger cities).
  • Dwelling occupancy is generally very low in popular holiday home areas, but also relatively low in central city locations.
  • Dwelling occupancy is generally highest in outer suburban areas.
  • Higher density housing types generally have lower occupancy, but that is probably because they are more often found in inner city areas.
  • There are examples of low occupancy apartment towers in Melbourne, but there’s not a clear relationship between dwelling density and dwelling occupancy in central Melbourne.

In a future post I plan to look more at why properties might be unoccupied, and for how long they are unoccupied, drawing on Airbnb and water usage datasets.  I might also look at bedrooms and bedroom occupancy which is a whole other topic.

 

Appendix – About the census dwelling data

I’ve loaded census data about occupied and unoccupied private dwellings data into Tableau for 2006, 2011, and 2016 censuses for sixteen Australian cities at the CD (2006) / SA1 (2011,2016) level, which the smallest geography available for all censuses. I’ve mapped all these CDs and SA1s to boundaries of 2016 SA2s and 2011 Significant Urban Areas (as per my last post). Those mappings are unfortunately not perfect, particularly for 2006 CDs.

The ABS determine a private dwelling to be occupied if they have information to suggest someone was living in that dwelling on census night (eg a form was returned, or there was some evidence of occupation). Under this definition, unoccupied dwellings include those with usual residents temporarily absent, and those with no usual residents (vacant).

For my detailed maps I’ve only included CDs / SA1s with a density of 2 dwellings per hectare or more.

For reference, here is a Melbourne mesh block with 100 dwellings per hectare:

And here is a mesh block with 206 dwellings per hectare (note only a small part of mesh block footprint contains towers):

6 Comments | Australian Cities, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Urban density, Urban Planning | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by chrisloader

Are Australian cities becoming denser?

Tue 5 November, 2013

Please refer to a fully revised second edition of this post – published in April 2019.

[Updated April 2017 with 2015-16 population estimates. First published November 2013]

While Australian cities have been growing outwards with new suburbia, they have also been getting denser in established areas, and the new areas on the fringe are often more dense than growth areas used to be (see last post). So what’s the net effect – are Australian cities getting more or less dense?

This post also explores measures of population-weighted density for Australian cities large and small over time. It also tries to resolve some of the issues in the calculation methodology by using square kilometre geometry, looks at longer term trends for Australian cities, and then compares multiple density measures for Melbourne over time.

Measuring density

Under the traditional measure of density, you’d simply divide the population of a city by the metropolitan area’s area (in hectares). As the boundary of the metropolitan areas seldom change, the average density would simply increase in line with population with this measure. But that density value would also be way below the density at which the average resident lives because of the inclusion of vast swaths of unpopulated land within “metropolitan areas”, and so be not very meaningful.

Enter population-weighted density (which I’ve looked at previously here and here). Population-weighted density takes a weighted average of the density of all parcels of land that make up a city, with each parcel weighted by its population. One way to think about it is the residential density in which the “average resident” lives.

So the large low-density parcels of rural land outside the urbanised area but inside the “metropolitan area” count very little in the weighted average because of their small population relative to the urbanised areas. This means population-weighted density goes a long way to overcoming having to worry about the boundaries of the “urban area” of a city. Indeed, in a previous post I found that removing low density parcels of land had very little impact on calculations of population-weighted density for Australian cities. However, the size of the parcels of land used in a population-weighted density calculation will have an impact, as we will see shortly.

Calculations of population-weighted density can answer the question about whether the “average density” of a city has been increasing or decreasing. But as we will see below, using geographic regions put together by statisticians based on historical boundaries is not always a fair way to compare different cities.

Population-weighted density of Australian cities over time

Firstly, here is a look at population-weighted density of the five largest Australian cities (as defined by ABS Significant Urban Areas), measured at SA2 level (the smallest geography for which there exists a good consistent set of time-series estimates). SA2s roughly equate to suburbs.

According to this data, most cities bottomed out in density in the mid 1990s. Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane have shown the fastest rates of densification in the last three years.

What about smaller Australian cities? (120,000+ residents in 2014):

Darwin comes out as the third most dense city in Australia on this measure, with Brisbane rising quickly in recent years into fourth place. Most cities have shown densification in recent times, with the main exception being Townsville. On an SA2 level, population weighted density in Perth hardly rose at all in 2015-16 (a year when 92% of population growth was in the outer suburbs)

However, we need to sanity test these values. Old-school suburban areas of Australian cities typically have a density of around 15 persons per hectare, so the values for Geelong, Newcastle, Darwin, Townsville, and Hobart all seem a bit too low for anyone who has visited them. I’d suggest the results may well be an artefact of the arbitrary geographic boundaries used – and this effect would be greater for smaller cities because they would have more SA2s on the interface between urban and rural areas (indeed all of those cities are less than 210,000 in population).

For reference, here are the June 2014 populations of all the above cities:

Australian cities population 2014

The following map shows Hobart, with meshblock boundaries in black (very small blocks indicate urban areas), SA2s in pink, and the Significant Urban Area (SUA) boundary in green.  You can see that many of the SA2s within the Hobart SUA have pockets of dense urban settlement, together with large areas that are non-urban – ie SA2s on the urban/rural interface. The density of these pockets will be washed out because of the size of the SA2s.

Hobart SUA image

Reducing the impact of arbitrary geographic boundaries

As we saw above, the population-weighted density results for smaller cities were very low, and probably not reflective of the actual typical densities, which might be caused by arbitrary geographic boundaries.

Thankfully ABS have followed Europe and released of a square kilometre grid density for Australia which ensures that geographic zones are all the same size. While it is still somewhat arbitrary where exactly this grid falls on any given city, it is arguably less arbitrary than geographic zones that follow traditional notions of area boundaries.

Using that data, I’ve been able to calculate population weighted density for the larger cities of Australia. The following chart shows those values compared to values calculated on SA2 geography:

pop weighted density 2011 grid and SA2 australian cities

You’ll see that the five smaller cities (Newcastle, Hobart, Geelong, Townsville and Cairns) that had very low results at SA2 level get more realistic values on the kilometre grid.

You’ll notice that most cities (except big Melbourne and Sydney) are in the 15 to 18 persons per hectare range, which is around typical Australian suburban density.

While the Hobart figure is higher using the grid geography, it’s still quite low (indeed the lowest of all the cities). You’ll notice on the map above that urban Hobart hugs the quite wide and windy Derwent River, and as such a larger portion of Hobart’s grid squares are likely to contain both urban and water portions – with the water portions washing out the density (pardon the pun!). While most other cities also have some coastline, much more of Hobart’s urban settlement is near to a coastline.

But stepping back, every city has urban/rural and/or urban/water boundaries and the boundary has to be drawn somewhere. So smaller cities are always going to have a higher proportion of their land parcels being on the interface – and this is even more the case if you are using larger parcel sizes. There is also the issue of what “satellite” urban settlements to include within a city which ultimately becomes arbitrary at some point. Perhaps there is some way of adjusting for this interface effect depending on the size of the city, but I’m not going to attempt to resolve it in this post.

International comparisons of population-weighted density

See another post for some international comparisons using square km grids.

Changes in density of larger Australian cities since 1981

We can also calculate population-weighted density back to 1981 using the larger SA3 geography. An SA3 is roughly similar to a local government area (in Melbourne at least), so getting quite large and including more non-urban land. Also, as Significant Urban Areas are defined only at the SA2 level, I need to resort to Greater Capital City Statistical Areas for the next chart:

This shows that most cities were getting less dense in the 1980s (Melbourne quite dramatically), with the notable exception of Perth. I expect these trends could be related to changes in housing/planning policy over time. This calculation has Adelaide ahead of the other smaller cities – which is different ordering to the SA2 calculations above.

On the SA3 level, Perth declined in population-weighted density in 2015-16.

When measured at SA2 level, the four smaller cities had almost the same density in 2011, but at SA3 level, there is more separating them. My guess is that the arbitrary nature of geographic boundaries is having an impact here. Also, the share of SA3s in a city that are on the urban/rural interface is likely to be higher, which again will have more impact for smaller cities. Indeed the trend for the ACT at SA3 level is very different to Canberra at SA2 level.

Melbourne’s population-weighted density over time

I’ve taken a more detailed look at my home city Melbourne, using all available ABS population figures for the geographic units ranging from mesh blocks to SA3s inside “Greater Melbourne” (as defined in 2011) or inside the Melbourne Significant Urban Area (SUA, where marked), to produce the following chart:

Note: I’ve calculated population-weighted density at the SA2 level for both the Greater Capital City Statistical Area (ie “Greater Melbourne”, which includes Bacchus Marsh, Gisborne and Wallan) and the Melbourne Significant Urban Area (slightly smaller), which yield slightly different values.

All of the time series data suggests 1994 was the turning point in Melbourne where the population-weighted density started increasing (not that 1994 was a particularly momentous year – the population-weighted density increased by a whopping 0.0559 persons per hectare in the year to June 1995 (measured at SA2 level for Greater Melbourne)).

You’ll also note that the density values are very different when measured on different geographic units. That’s because larger units include more of a mix of residential and non-residential land. The highest density values are calculated using mesh blocks (MB), which often separate out even small pockets of non-residential land (eg local parks). Indeed 25% of mesh blocks in Australia had zero population, while only 2% of SA1s had zero population (at the 2011 census). At the other end of the scale, SA3s are roughly the size of local councils and include parklands, employment land, rural land, airports, freeways, etc which dilutes their average density.

In the case of SA2 and SA3 units, the same geographic areas have been used in the data for all years. On the other hand, Census Collector Districts (CD) often changed between each five-yearly census, but I am assuming the guidelines for their creation would not have changed significantly.

Now why is a transport blog so interested in density again? There is a suggested relationship between (potential) public transport efficiency and urban density – ie there will be more potential customers per route kilometre in a denser area. In reality longer distance public transport services are going to be mostly serving the larger urban blob that is a city – and these vehicles need to pass large parklands, industrial areas, water bodies, etc to connect urban origins and destinations. The relevant density measure to consider for such services might best be based on larger geographic areas – eg SA3. Buses are more likely to be serving only urbanised areas, and so are perhaps more dependent on residential density – best calculated on a smaller geographic scale, probably km grid (somewhere between SA1 and SA2).

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3 Comments | Australian Cities, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Urban density, Urban Planning | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by chrisloader

A detailed look at changes in Melbourne residential density 2006-2011

Mon 8 July, 2013

Since my first post looking at 2011 Melbourne residential density, there’s been a heap of new 2011 census data released. This post includes new maps showing Melbourne’s population density in maximum detail, as well as some more calculations of Melbourne’s urban/residential density for the density nerds.

Melbourne’s residential density in extremely high resolution

2011 population figures are now available for mesh blocks – the smallest ABS geographic unit. This allows a fine-grained look at 2011 residential density, and comparisons with 2006 as we now have a time series.

Here’s a very large animated map (4.7MB, 6825 x 4799 pixels) showing residential density at mesh block level for 2006 and 2011. You’ll need to click on it to download and see the animation (I’d suggest a new tab or window). Use your browser to zoom in and scroll around to areas of interest.

Melbourne mesh block density

 

[update 10 July: It has been brought to my attention that some people are unable to view this map because they are restricted to using certain versions of Internet Explorer. If you cannot see the large map above, I have also created a smaller animated map showing only the inner areas of Melbourne]

You can see that new growth areas on the fringe actually have relatively high densities, contrary to conventional wisdom. I also note a relatively high and increasing density in the Springvale/Keysborough/Noble Park area, quite some distance from the CBD. If you look carefully you will also spot infill developments like Waverley Park, Parkville (ex-Commonwealth Games village), Gresswell Hill in Macleod, Docklands, Maidstone, Edgewater estate in Maribyrnong, along St Kilda Road, Waterways, and no doubt many more.

More values for the urban/residential density of Melbourne

Okay, you might want to stop reading here unless you have a deep interest in density calculation methodology.

Along with mesh blocks, the recently released census data provides boundaries for urban centres and localities, which each representing a relatively continuous urban area (including residential and non-residential land). There is an urban centre of “Melbourne” defined, which excludes the satellite urban centres of Pakenham, Melton, Sunbury, Healesville and towns along the Warburton Highway, but includes the major urban regions along the Mornington Peninsula to Portsea and Hastings.

All this new data enables calculation of yet more values of the urban/residential density of Melbourne, adding to my previous list (some of which I have repeated for comparison purposes). The areas covered by each calculation are shown on the map below.

Geography Area 
(km2)		 Population Average density 
(pop/ha)		 Areas on map below
“Greater Melbourne” Greater Capital City Statistical Area 9990.5 3,999,982 4.0 white + yellow + green
SA1s within Greater Melbourne with population density > 1 person/ha 2211.4 3,903,450 17.7  (not shown exactly, slightly less than yellow + green)
Mesh blocks within Greater Melbourne, with population density > 1 person/ha 1713.1 3,913,215 22.8  yellow + green
Mesh blocks within Greater Melbourne, with population density > 5 person/ha 1348.5 3,824,999 28.4 green
Melbourne urban centre 2543.2 3,707,530 14.6 all within blue boundary
Mesh blocks within Melbourne urban centre, with population density > 1 person/ha 1443.8 3,696,316 25.6 yellow + green within blue boundary
Mesh blocks within Melbourne urban centre, with population density > 5 person/ha 1238.3 3,642,685 29.4 green within blue boundary

I note that the Melbourne urban centre is approximately a quarter of the area of “Greater Melbourne”.

Here’s a reference map of Melbourne showing the Greater Capital City Statistical Area, Statistical Division and Urban Centre boundaries of “Melbourne”, together with mesh blocks of above 1 and 5 persons/ha.

Density area scope map mesh blocks2

Finally, for the density nerds who are still reading this post, I have calculated the 2011 population-weighted density of Greater Melbourne using mesh blocks to be 42.8 persons/ha, which is much higher than the population-weighted density using SA1 geography of 31.8 persons/ha. It’s higher because more non-residential land parcels have been excluded from the overall calculation. If I restrict myself to mesh blocks within the Melbourne urban centre, the population-weighted density is only slightly higher at 45.1 persons/ha.

So if you want to compare population-weighted densities of different cities, you’ll need to make sure you are using equivalent geographic units, which I suspect would be very difficult for international comparisons. An attempt at Australian and Canadian city comparisons was made in the comments section of a previous post.

There you go. Next time someone claims to know the urban density of Melbourne, you can now argue with them for hours about whether you agree with their number and how it should be measured.

3 Comments | Melbourne, Urban density | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by chrisloader

How did Sydney get to work in 2006?

Fri 26 October, 2012

With the imminent release of 2011 census journey to work data (30 October 2012), I thought it would be worth completing a look at 2006 data for Sydney and other cities. This post will take a more detailed look at Sydney, thanks to the free data provided by ABS and the Bureau of Transport Statistics New South Wales (BTS NSW).

There are five parts to this post:

  1. Mode share by home location
  2. Mode share by work location
  3. Mode share for Sydney CBD workers
  4. An employment density map of Sydney
  5. The relationship between employment density and mode share

(get ready for 25 charts!)

In future posts I hope to look at Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane in more detail, and also compare 2006 and 2011 results.

Firstly a few definitions for mode shares:

  • Public transport: Any journey involving any public transport mode (private transport might also have been involved – eg park and ride).
  • Active transport: A journey that only involved only walking and/or cycling.
  • Sustainable transport: Public transport + Active transport (note: this includes private+public journeys, but not private+cycling journeys).

Also, I have included railway lines on the following maps, however the data I have is unfortunately quite old and doesn’t show the CBD area rail network or the airport line (the Epping-Chatswood line was not operational in 2006).

Method of journey to work by home location

Data is readily available on journey to work by home census collection district, however this is by place of usual residence. Ideally mode shares should be measured using place of enumeration (where people actually were on census night), but I haven’t forked out the $750 required to get access to ABS TableBuilder Pro which would provide that data. So the data I’m presenting is not ideal as some people would have been away from home on census morning and their modes of travel will be associated with their usual residence.

But the data still provides a fairly good feel for what happened as most people were probably at their usual residence, and hopefully most people filled out their forms accurately.

Public transport mode share

Sydney is a sea of green on this map (other cities will have the same colour scale, stay tuned!). Public transport use in journey to work was highest in the inner city area and along the train lines. It was lowest in the outer suburbs beyond the rail lines.

Train

There are three large and stark areas of red near the CBD and close to train lines. Most of these areas are served by direct and frequent bus services to the CBD, and while for some it might be quicker to change onto a train, this would probably be more expensive. Also, the area around Castle Hill has very low train mode share, although we will see shortly that of the small number who do commute to the CBD about three-quarters use public transport.

I note that the airport rail line (not drawn on the map) resulted in a high train mode share at Mascot but not at Green Square.

Bus

Bus mode share was high in the suburbs close to the Sydney CBD, but very low in the outer suburbs (with exceptions around Palm Beach in the north, Castle Hill (served by freeway buses), and seemingly random pockets north of Mount Druitt).

Train and bus

The following map shows people who used both train and bus in their journey to work:

I’ve used the same colour scale as other maps, and so most of the city is red indicating very few bus-train transfers. The curious exception is around Bondi Beach/Bronte. This is probably all to do with the special Link Tickets that allow bus and train travel on the one ticket in this area only. They are designed for people visiting these areas, but they seem to be very popular with locals travelling to work.

I do wonder what would happen if there were valuable integrated tickets for more places (perhaps we’ll see some differences for 2011 thanks to MyZone).

Ferry

I’ve zoomed into the harbour for this map, and included the ferry wharves (some receiving a much more frequent peak period service than others).

You can see high mode shares on the north shore, to the inner east, and around Manly (wharves which probably have fairly direct services to the CBD). This includes some areas a fair walk from the ferry terminals – with some people probably using connecting buses. In fact, here is a map showing bus and ferry commuters mostly on the north shore (note different colour scale):

Public and Private transport combined

The following map shows the percentage of people who used public transport as well as car, motorcycle and/or truck to get to work (again using a different colour scale):

Use of both public and private modes is most common in the northern suburbs around Hornsby (areas away from the train line), around Macquarie Park (now served by rail), north of Blacktown (now serviced by bus rapid transit), and west of Sutherland.

Cycling

The following map also uses the different scale, and I have zoomed into the areas with significant bicycle mode share.

The cycling mode share peaks at 11% from a pocket of Enmore, and seems to be the domain of the inner southern suburbs.

Active transport (only)

The following map shows people who only used walking and/or cycling to get to work:

You can see the walking/cycling hot spots are around the CBD, North Sydney, Parramatta, Chatswood, Liverpool, Penrith, and around Randwick/UNSW.

Method of journey to work by work location

Here is a map showing the public transport mode share of journeys to travel zones in Sydney in 2006 (where 200 or more journeys were made):

It’s not just the Sydney CBD that had reasonably high public transport mode share. Public transport mode share peaked in the centre of the following regional hubs:

  • North Sydney 53%
  • Bondi Junction: 41%
  • Parramatta: 38%
  • Chatswood: 35%
  • St Leonards: 34%

(these are the highest value recorded by any travel zone in each centre).

By contrast, analysis of destination mode share for Melbourne showed all major suburban centres to have well less than 15% public transport mode share (most less than 10%).

Public transport mode share was also quite clearly higher along the train lines – particularly in the middle and outer suburbs.

Here are enlargements of inner Sydney and the Sydney CBD area:

 

Here’s a map showing active transport mode share for greater Sydney workplace destinations:

Active transport was most commonly used to inner city areas including Newtown, Camperdown, Bondi Beach, Randwick, Paddington and Potts Point.  However it was low in the Sydney CBD. The Holsworthy Military Camp as a large green area in the south with high active transport mode share – probably because the military staff live on site. People more familiar with Sydney might be able to comment further.

Here is sustainable transport mode share (public transport and active transport combined, everything else being private motorised transport). You can see that private transport was by far the dominant for western Sydney jobs.

Journeys to work in the Sydney CBD

Here’s a map showing the public transport mode share by home location of journeys to work in the Sydney CBD (defined as the Sydney – inner SLA, the only red SLA on the map):

Public transport had a mode share around 70-80% for large areas of Sydney (in contrast to Melbourne where 60-70% was more common). However there was a much lower share from the CBD itself and areas adjacent.

Were they walking or cycling instead?

Well, yes for the City of Sydney areas, but not for Woollahra to the east. On the following sustainable transport mode share map, you can see that around 35% of workers from Woollahra commuted to the CBD by private transport (note I have used a different scale for this map):

Sustainable mode share is highest from the western and south-western suburbs, whereas many people chose to drive from the northern suburbs, the southern coastal areas, and even the inner eastern suburbs.

But what proportion of the working population commuted to the CBD?

Compared to the Melbourne CBD, the Sydney CBD seems to have a stronger role, even though Sydney has major employment centres outside the central CBD.

For anyone interested, here are similar maps for North Sydney and Parramatta as work destinations:

Sydney’s employment density

The BTS data also allows the construction of an employment density map. I’ve drawn this map based on people who travelled to each destination zone on census day.

And a zoom in on the inner city:

Employment density and mode share

Finally. here is a look at the relationship between employment density and public, active and private transport mode share (by workplace zone).

I must stress that these results will strongly reflect the design of public transport – which is heavily geared towards places with high employment density (such as the Sydney CBD) as that is where public transport can generally complete strongest with private transport (the cost of parking and traffic congestion etc). By increasing employment density in any parcel of land you won’t automatically get high public transport mode share – you have to provide high quality public transport to that destination first!

No surprises there!

Was that what you expected? Active transport actually had the highest mode share in areas with the lower employment densities. These are likely to be mixed residential/employment areas where employees can live close by, military camps, and farms.

Finally, it will be little surprise that the lower employment densities had the highest private transport mode shares. These areas are likely to have ample room for free employee parking, and public transport is likely to struggle to efficiently deliver a small number of employees over a large area.

4 Comments | Employment density, Mode share, Sydney | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by chrisloader

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