‘Roads are really about people, not cars’

THE gist of Marianne Vanderschuren’s objective as a transport engineer is to dislodge the stubborn notion that roads are built for cars.

Road networks, she argues, are about people, “not about people in cars”, and that means accommodating and protecting pedestrians and cyclists, and creating shared roads and associated infrastructure like pavements and crossings that accommodate vulnerable road users.

South African road engineering tended to follow the US model, based on plentiful land, and cheap fuel – but the challenge was to adopt practices from European frontrunners in pedestrian and cyclist-friendly cities.

“We need more of this thinking in South Africa, where 57 percent of road fatalities are pedestrians.”

Vanderschuren, a professor at UCT, is the author of new national Transport Department guidelines for non-motorised transport which promote “more zebra crossings, better infrastructure on the sides of roads, such as broader pavements and dropped kerbs for special-needs users, and introduces more trafficcalming measures, such as bollards, neck-downs – where the road is narrowed in certain areas to accommodate pedestrians, and chicanes, or artificial narrowings or turns that force cars to slow down”.

Another measure to restrict speed is to introduce third-tier roads in suburbs with a 40km/h speed limit.

Writing in a UCT publication, Vanderschuren acknowledged that “while it's important to maintain the existing road network, as a growing economy demands this, it's also important to reconfigure some important roads to accommodate sharing by building in trafficslowing measures and adding cycle lanes to the infrastructure”.

This also meant introducing more special lanes for buses and taxis. “When the taxi lane was introduced on the N2 highway in Cape Town, the taxis managed an extra trip in peak traffic, increasing their passengers by almost 30 percent. And the travel time for cars decreased too.”

PEOPLE CENTRED: UCT Professor Marianne Vanderschuren.