Pedestrian city
Simon Wilson considers what a real pedestrianfriendly city would look like
Is the new-look, pedestrian-friendly High St in Auckland’s CBD, the future of our city, asks Simon Wilson.
What about that traffic jam last weekend at Cornwall Park! People came to see the cherry blossom. What they had to put up with was long queues of cars full of other people who had, yes, come to see the cherry blossom.
It’s called Peak Auckland. You’ll see the same thing in the grammar zone before and after school, and around many other schools too. People stuck in traffic because they believe it’s more convenient to drive, because they assume they can drive anywhere and everywhere at any time, or because they believe it’s safer. The principal danger being traffic.
In defence of drivers, they do get a lot of signals that they’re right. The organisers of the Sandringham Street Festival, which has been held every year for 20 years, were told by Auckland Transport (AT) to cancel the event this year.
The reason: there were events at Eden Park, there’s a concert at Mt Smart, a cruise ship will be visiting, they don’t like people walking on the road.
Okay, they didn’t say the last one, but the others are so absurd they might as well have. A much-loved street festival, a neighbourhood event that most people will probably walk to, gets cancelled because somewhere else, kilometres away, other people are driving around?
Auckland Transport tells itself it has a “number one priority”: safety. That’s nonsense. It may be an aspirational goal, but the truth is, AT is almost entirely organised around one central idea: let the cars get through.
And its demonstrably not very good at it.
Maybe that idea sounds sensible. Few people can walk to Mt Smart or even Eden Park and public transport isn’t good enough to help everyone.
If you keep the traffic moving, the people in the cars will have a better time. It’s not like pedestrians are different people from motorists: most of us are both.
But is it really sensible?
If we had a more pedestrianfriendly city, how would our motorist selves miss out? Would there be more congestion, as the officials who canned the Sandringham event clearly believe, or would there be less?
How do you create a city that genuinely favours pedestrians?
And how do you ensure everyone benefits?
To do it, first and most important, you have to ask: what do pedestrians need? And then fit the rest around it.
IN A small but significant way, they’ve started this week in High St. The bottom block, from Shortland St up to Vulcan Lane, has been transformed. A boardwalk has been installed on the west side, extending the footpath over the space that used to be allocated to car parks. Planter boxes line the outer edge. On the east side, some loading zone parks have been retained, but no other parking, and there is a new bike stand and more planters.
Cars can still drive through, but 13 parks have gone and pedestrians have room to move. As mayor Phil Goff said when he launched the project on Wednesday, when you walk down there now “you don’t have to pull your shoulders in”.
It’s phase one, and it’s a trial. In February the wider footpath will be extended further up the street, and there’ll be more after that. When they widen the footpath outside Cornerbar in Hotel DeBrett, tables and chairs will clearly establish the changed nature of the street.
Cam Perkins, who heads up the council’s City Centre Project Design team, has much bigger plans in mind. “The rest of the street and the rest of the city,” he said on Wednesday.
A dapper Australian with twinkly eyes and a bristly beard, he looked like he wanted to laugh and shout and run about.
With good reason: the future of High St has been in dispute for years. Then late in 2018 the council authorised the Auckland Design Office, to which Perkins’ team belongs, to get cracking with Access for Everyone (A4E), its programme to make the city more pedestrian friendly. Trials were supposed to start in March, then August. Finally it’s happening.
High St is the loveliest street in the city but retailers have resisted closing it to traffic, fearing that would scare away customers. The breakthrough came when Perkins spearheaded a new style of consultation. No more the endless cycle of proposals, angry meetings, more proposals, more angry meetings.
He started again with an approach called “co-design”.
What do you want to do? he asked. How could business be improved for retailers by improving the life of the street for everyone on it? You tell us how to make it happen.
“Co-design means the design outcomes are led by the people who use the street,” Perkins told me.
Jordan Gibson, who runs the clothing store Checks, is one of those people. He talked about the importance of people being able to stop and look in shop windows, without jamming up all the other people walking past.
“And hospitality is so important,” he added. “It’s great for all the retailers, people can see at a glance that people enjoy themselves here. That’s what the tables outside do for us.”
Sheronika Chandra, from Hotel DeBrett, said they were “very excited” about the project, and excited too that it was happening with such little disruption.
“You compare it to O’Connell St, just a block away, which took so long. This was quick, they did it in three nights. And it’s not permanent, it’s a trial. They can play around with ideas.”
Viv Beck of Heart of the City, the central city business association, said the real innovation isn’t the wider footpaths. “It’s the collaborative process. And the idea they can try things, if it doesn’t work it’s easy to change and make it better.”
The raised wooden footpath has trapdoors to allow access to manhole covers. Perkins said the next iteration could be to make the whole thing easily moveable.
“We have to solve problems locally. Where will the rubbish go? The answer has to fit with the street, it might be different on another street. That’s fine. We’ll work these things out as we go.”
While we were standing there talking a man came over and said he was the guy who waterblasts graffiti off the buildings. He wanted to know where he was going to park his truck.
Perkins talked to him. The answer would depend on when he did the work. He couldn’t rock up in the middle of the day to do it, but he could in the early morning.
Previously, that kind of problem would have stopped change in its tracks. Now, it’s something that needs a workaround, so they’ll find one. The
The answer has to fit with the street, it might be different on another street. That’s fine. We’ll work these things out as we go.
Cam Perkins
needs of a service worker are fitted to the needs of the pedestrians.
Beck pointed out they’d kept some loading zone parks and said they’d been experimenting with the council’s parking building at the other end of the street too. “Some tradies, that’s a good solution. Park there for the day and get to work. But others need to park closer. We’ll keep working on it.”
HIGH ST is on a walking route that runs from Customs St up through Fort Lane and Jean Batten Place, and after High St continues on Lorne St all the way to Rutland St and Aotea Square.
“These are our laneways,” said Perkins. “They’re the real thing.” But how much is that true? This isn’t a pedestrian-friendly city, not yet. Wider footpaths, fewer car parks (and slower speeds) and planters on an inner city street: they’re the easy bit.
What’s going to happen on Hobson St and Nelson St? Twin one-way arterials leading on and off the motorway, they’re also home to thousands of people, many of whom are children who walk those roads every day on their way to and from Freemans Bay School.
And what about Fanshawe St? It’s another motorway access ramp, but it has a major bus station and it divides the very popular Victoria Park from the waterfront precinct of the Wynyard Quarter, which is filling fast with workers and residents. The pedestrian count on Fanshawe St is rising.
The use of all three streets has changed, and a pedestrian-friendly city would have responded to that, with wider footpaths, slower speeds
and better ways for pedestrians to cross. Instead, the needs of people walking have come last.
The result: they’re among the most dangerous streets in Auckland, especially if you’re on foot.
RIGHT NOW in Auckland, half the deaths and serious injuries (DSIs) we suffer are to people hit by vehicles, the overall number has soared by 78 per cent over the four years to 2017.
Auckland Transport, responding to those stark facts, will decide on Tuesday whether to lower the speed limits on 828km of the city’s roads. About 12 per cent of the total. The proposal has been widely consulted on and is part of a larger safety strategy that also includes road design, enforcement and driver education.
There are two options for Hobson, Nelson and Fanshawe: 40km/h or 30km/h. The AA opposes them both, saying they should stay at 50km/h because they’re motorway feeders.
Ironically, when you allow traffic on a street like Hobson to speed and stop its way along, all vehicles end up delayed. Every car braking causes a compounding ripple back along the line behind. The best way to move heavy traffic is at a slow and steady speed, with phased lights. As it happens, that’s best for pedestrians too.
Not all drivers grasp that, so AT has another stark fact to contend with. In its consultation, the roads for which most submitters wanted the existing speed limits kept included Tamaki Drive, the Coatesville Riverhead Highway and the Whitford-Maraetai Rd, along with Nelson, Hobson and Fanshawe Sts. All are among the most dangerous in the city.
It’s almost as if the more dangerous a road is to pedestrians, the more some motorists want to keep it that way.
A PEDESTRIAN-FRIENDLY city is a carfriendly city too. The reason is counter-intuitive, but simple. A pedestrian-friendly city requires excellent public transport, far above the level we have in Auckland now, working smoothly at peak times and serving all parts of the city at all parts of the day.
For reasons of cost, reliability, time, safety and convenience, taking the train, bus or tram has to become, for most people, more attractive than taking the car.
As that becomes a reality, far more people will migrate out of their cars. Which, paradoxically, will make the roads more efficient, thus enticing people back into their cars. Assuming clean-energy vehicle options become the norm, that will produce a seesawing balance.
But we won’t get there by just building roads and pushing the needs of pedestrians down the list. That will only make everything worse. We have to put pedestrians first, and build around them all the support services we need to make it work.