Urban development in New Taipei City: New residential areas with old transportation infrastructure?
In recent years Taiwanese cities started to focus more on green transportation, urban development as well as active mobility. For example in Taipei new bike lanes, metro lines and green corridors were built and the bike sharing system was also continuously developed. But unfortunately it takes much longer for the land developers and for the local authorities to incorporate these new ideas into their urban development plans, which results that new and ongoing projects are still primary based on the car-oriented approach. Therefore in the near future those people, who will move to the new residential areas (which are mostly located outside of Taipei) are more likely to continue to commute by their private vehicles. It will also make harder to reduce the traffic volume and pollution in Taipei despite of the ongoing green development projects.
One of the examples for this phenomenon is Xinzhuang District (New Taipei City), where the new residential area is currently under construction. For those who are not familiar with this part of the city I attached a map which shows Xinzhuang (with light gray), the new residential areas (with dark gray) as well as the two metro lines between Xinzhuang and Taipei City. The picture on the right shows part of the area under development:
Within this new zone the roads were designed primary for cars and scooters without bike lanes or other cycling related infrastructure between the residential buildings and the MRT/major bus stations. Today it might seems a marginal issue, but just within a few years the number of residents will increase rapidly as new high-rise building are completed. Therefore it is going to be an important question how the new residents will commute to work, most likely to Taipei. The following pictures show the current cycling design. In a few years these roads and sidewalks will be occupied by vehicles and pedestrians which will cause similar problems for cyclist, just like as we can see in Taipei today:
Of course I am not assuming that people will use their bikes to go all the way to Taipei. But bicycles are useful to extend the range of the metro or bus stations (compare to walking). However, if the number of people as well as cars/scooters increase, then without safe cycling facilities people are less likely to choose to go by bike even to the closest station. If cycling is inconvenient or dangerous (or feels like it), than those who live further than the convenient walking distance (500 ~ 600 meter) might continue to use their personal motorized vehicles to go directly to the city. On the map above I draw red circles around New Taipei Industrial Park Station (A3) and Xinzhuang Fuduxin Station (A4) to indicate those areas that are within convenient walking distance from the two MRT stations. Note, that the circles only show the air-distance radius, and in reality the actual 500 or 600 meters for walking is much closer to the station since you also have to encounter the turns and detours along the streets. It can be seen, that most part of the residential area is outside of the walking distance, therefore people living there need alternative solutions to reach the station in a convenient and quick way.
And this is one of the reasons why local cycling infrastructure and bike lanes are important, so it is easier to encourage people to use their bikes between their homes and the transit station, and then take public transportation to the city. And it is also easier to convince people to bike along a convenient and safe bike lane for only about 5 to 10 minutes to reach the metro or bus station. For such a short distance the hot weather during summer or lower temperatures during winter would be also a less issue. It could be even better if the bikes are allowed on the public transit vehicles, especially on the MRT (as I wrote it in my previous article about Taoyuan MRT and bikes), because then people could continue to ride their own bike once they arrived to Taipei.
This issue is importantt, because as more people will be shifted to green transit modes (bike+transit), the less cars/scooters will enter Taipei on a daily basis. This could be a great help to reduce the traffic and pollution in the whole area. Hopefully the road design in Xinzhuang can be changed before the majority of the people start to move in, and in the future the new development plans would already encounter better cycling infrastructure from the beginning of the project.