I have been doing a fair bit of observation around Central Auckland (in particular) over the last few weeks, trying to work out what particularly works and what particularly doesn’t work. The first outcome of this observation was my cry for Queen Street bus lanes in a post a week and a half ago. Experiences since that time, including a near 10 minute crawl on a bus to get about 50m up Queen Street and through the intersection with Victoria Street has only strengthened my belief that bus lanes are an utter necessity for Queen Street to truly become a “heart of the city”.
My other observations, backed up with a fair amount of reading in recent days, has been a general look a the liveability of Auckland’s roads and streets – not just within the CBD (although obviously probably most applicable there), but also throughout the rest of the city. Obviously, roads and streets aren’t just networks for traffic to pass through, they are also the public realm setting within which buildings are located. Yet, particularly in Auckland there’s absolutely no guessing who’s boss out there: the private car without a doubt. A trip out to Pakuranga today (admittedly by car, public transport in that part of the city is near non-existent) confirmed the obvious “priority” given to private automobiles wherever possible in Auckland – so clearly exemplified by Pakuranga Road’s 6 or so lanes of general traffic and its token 20m long bus lane (to help with merging after an intersection I assume).
But anyway, I kind of digress. As much as I hate the super-highways of Manukau City, they’re not really the point of this blog post. I can’t really hope for them to every be truly “liveable streets”, unless something radical like a tram-line was constructed down the middle of them. No, if we’re ever going to find liveable streets in Auckland, they’ll probably pop up in the older and more central parts of the city: the CBD and its surrounding inner-suburbs.
So what is a “liveable street”? Livablestreets.com provides some sort of a definition:
A livable street is difficult to define; they serve as the fabric that holds together extraordinary urban spaces and ultimately build desirable communities. They strike a balance between the vehicles that travel through them and the community that lives there, works there, and plays there. They are functional corridors of public realm where people live, shop, interact, travel, and resolve their daily needs. Livable streets establish great neighborhoods and the possibility for true community building. Goods and services are readily accessible while adequate open space is provided for the local community. Unlike other streets that primarily serve the needs of traffic, they cater to the needs of everyone using them.
I think in some ways it’s simpler than that. A liveable street is simply one where the car is no longer king. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the car doesn’t exist (although personally I always think the best street is a pedestrianised one, I guess that’s a hangover from loving Venice so much), but rather that the car really does share the street-space with the pedestrian, the cyclist and the public transport user on a level-pegging, or possibly even with the pedestrian having ascendency.
If I think around Auckland there are extraordinarily few examples where this happens. Perhaps on High Street, where the road has been narrowed enough and has enough humps and other impediments for cars to slow them down to almost walking pace. Yet once again High Street feels like a bit of a half-arsed job in that it could have been fully pedestrianised, or it could have become more of a true shared space or woonerf, where pedestrians and cars are mixed together in ways that cleverly define the roadspace as clearly pedestrian. Kerbs distinguishing the footpath from the road could have been removed on High Street, along with the on-street parking that is surely completely unnecessary from a shoppers’ perspective (once again, how many people drive to the city and park on the street to shop, surely a fairly insignificant number compared with other users). If this had been done, then High Street could quite clearly become a shining example of a liveable street within Auckland. It’s still possibly our best attempt, which is a particularly sad indictment on the rest of us – especially compared to the direction that Paris seems to be heading.
Woonerfs (called Home Zones in the UK) are a Dutch concept that seems to run contrary to every possible thing a traffic engineer has ever been taught about road safety and efficiency. Yet, they have been shown to work enormously effectively. As “Liveable Streets” notes: “Because home zones provide no clear division between pedestrian space and auto space, vehicles must travel with great caution.” This great caution leads to slower speeds, more courteous driving and a far superior urban experience. In other cases, they have been called “Naked Streets”, generally because there are little or no road signs, little or no road markings and little or no distinction between the pedestrian zone and the road zone. A particularly cool “Naked Street” is being constructed at the moment on Exhibition Road in South Kensington London: one of the most famous roads in London for its many museums (Natural History, Science and Victoria & Albert). A fascinating image of how it will look is included below:
The cars are clearly mingling with pedestrians, there is no distinction between what is a footpath and what is the road – which combined with cobblestone paving makes it appear as though the whole place is a kind of footpath. I hope that Auckland’s city planners take note of this project as it unfolds, and see how it could be applied to Auckland in the future.
So, bringing this all back to Auckland, what could be done here to make our streets significantly more liveable? If I am to focus on Auckland’s CBD for now, it’s clear that significant and fairly straightforward steps could be taken to improve the pedestrian experience for those walking around the central city. Clearly, for a start it is unrealistic to expect Queen Street to become a woonerf/home-zone/naked street any time particularly soon. In my opinion this is largely because I think it has a significant public transportation role to fulfill in the next decade or so. As I’ve mentioned previously, the construction of bus lanes is essential for this purpose to be achieved. For other main streets in the city, like Wellesley, Victoria, Customs, Nelson, Hobson and Fanshawe streets I think improvements will need to be made in a way that is mindful of their important roles in shifting traffic in, out and around the city. Bus lanes along the part of Victoria Street serviced by the Link bus would also be a good idea, but once again that’s a fairly separate issue. However, in the longer-term I think there must be an ultimate aspiration for pedestrianising Queen Street. When the various responsible agencies for Auckland’s CBD rail loop eventually get their act together and build it (maybe by 2025 if we’re lucky) there is hope that most people using public transport to get around the city will use the train, or perhaps a tram-line that could be laid along an otherwise pedestrianised Queen Street.
In any case, leaving aside Queen Street and the other main streets of Auckland’s CBD for now, there are actually a huge number of small, narrow little streets that would be perfect for becoming more liveable, shared spaces. At a glance Elliott, High, Lorne, O’Connell, Wyndham, Durham, Federal, Fort, Shortland and many other streets could easily be classified as “shared spaces”. These streets could then have a particularly low (20 kph perhaps) speed limit imposed upon them, progressively have their kerbing removed and be paved rather than asphalted to make it totally obvious to drivers that they are clearly within a pedestrian zone now. Considering that council plans to revamp a decent number of inner-city streets over the next decade or so (assuming that the current council doesn’t can the lot, as it seems to want to), taking those upgrades one step further to actually create high-quality liveable streets where clearly the car is no longer king, would surely help lift Auckland beyond the kind of ‘overgrown town’ feeling one gets of it at the moment. But I fear the short-sightedness and narrow-mindedness of council is difficult to over-estimate these days and I can’t really expect anything half-decent from them. A pity.
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