Shared Streets

One of the few pieces of good transport news to emerge in recent weeks has been Auckland City Council’s plans to embark on a “Shared Space Concept”. The plans basically entail a number of quiet inner-city streets being redesigned to create a balance between pedestrians and cars, where the distinction between what is road-space and what is footpath-space is removed. Pedestrians are then given the legal right of way, and you end up with a very attractive and pedestrian friendly part of the city.

Here’s an example of how Exhibition Road in London (the road next to the Natural History Museum) is being redesigned as a “shared space”:

And another example, showing before and after pictures of New Road, Brighton:

Oddly enough, I first heard about this from an NBR article, which provides some useful information:

In a $60 million scheme to be rolled out during 2009-2014 with funding from rates and development contributions as part of the Ten Year Plan, Auckland’s side streets will be transformed to resemble European lanes, eliminating signs, road markings, crossing signals and traffic lights.The streets will be paved flat without kerbs to encourage intuitive driving and pedestrian freedom.Inner city streets linking main roads where many businesses are located will be given a facelift under the scheme, including the entire Fort Street area (lower Shortland St, Jean Batten Place, Fort St, Commerce St, Gore St), Elliot St, Darby St, O’Connell St, and Lorne Street.

I’ve known about shared spaces for a while now, having first come across them in a job that I was involved in at the end of 2007. I originally knew of the idea as Woonerf, the Dutch term for looking at roads from an almost counter-intuitive perspective that it actually could be safer to mix vehicles and cars more – not less – to make drivers and pedestrians more aware of each other and force them to interact with each other. I wrote a post about “Livable Streets” in January this year, and how frustrating it was that Auckland hadn’t really gone done that path as much as many other cities.

In fact, I provided the following suggestion:

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.

Perhaps they were listening to me, or perhaps it was just a coincidence? What is now proposed does seem eerily similar to my suggestion though. So I unreservedly apologise for finishing off that post by saying: “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.”

Maybe some day Auckland City Council will start listening to my calls for Queen Street bus lanes.

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