It was my trip to Europe last year, and in particular the time I had in Venice, which I think had a particularly profound effect on the way I think about how cities should work – and in particular how city centres should work. For any readers who haven’t been there, I must restate that Venice is a wonderful city – quite possibly my favourite place in the whole entire world. The best bits of it aren’t on the main tourist paths though, but rather heading off to some random corner of the place and just marvelling at what “real Venice” is like. I guess it’s kind of obvious what I found so appealing about Venice (aside from all the old buildings!), and that was the complete lack of cars.
It really did seem like the “niceness” of a place was inversely proportional to the number of cars travelling through the area. In other cities, like Florence – which restricts but does not ban cars from its central area – it was further reinforced that in many cases it wasn’t necessarily the complete absence of cars which made a place nice, but simply that fact that they didn’t dominate. If a car was crawling along a narrow little lane very slowly, then it didn’t matter if you occasionally walked along that lane yourself – you could sort it out and weren’t confined to the footpath in the same way that one is when walking around areas with higher levels of traffic.
This “reducing the dominance of cars” mentality has, fortunately, finally worked its way down to Auckland – with Auckland City Council announcing that a number of central city streets are to be transformed into “shared streets“, streets where the distinction between the roadway and the footpath is removed to create a space that feels like a pedestrian area, but allows the occasional car to travel through it. I’ve been a big fan of this concept for a while now, partly because the uncertainty it creates in terms of who has right of way (legally the pedestrian will) means the cars will travel through the area slowly and carefully and there will be a level-pegging of who dominates the urban space: rather than pedestrians always being second-class citizens to cars.
Below are a couple of examples of what the council is proposing. On Elliott Street we will have a shared space, which allows cars through but very much appears like a pedestrian oriented area. On nearby Darby street, we will see the street actually fully closed off to cars. While full pedestrianisation is probably the ultimate goal, I think the advantage of a shared space is that by still allowing some vehicles through the area you don’t run into problems with parking garage exits, how to get goods vehicles in and other stuff like that.
Some further areas have also been proposed by the council for becoming future shared streets, including the lower parts of Fort Street & Shortland Street, Jean Batten Place, and the part of Lorne Street near the library. These will all be great changes to the city – making it much more “for the people” than you see at the moment. However, I do hope that the streets currently proposed for an upgrade are just the beginning of something that could spread to most other non-arterial routes in Auckland’s CBD.
In the map below, I propose three possible stages for turning most of Auckland’s small inner-city streets into shared spaces. The streets in red are those currently proposed for shared spaces. The streets in green at those that could form a “second stage”, and become shared spaces in the next 5-10 years, while those in blue I also consider to be appropriate for becoming shared spaces, but would be transformed in the longer term.
This kind of approach to a city’s CBD would not be unique to Auckland. In Copenhagen, Denmark most of the streets in the inner city have been completely pedestrianised. While I think it’s a bit much to ask for all the streets shown in the map above to be pedestrianised, if Elliott Street is a success as a shared space (which I think it will be) it would be great to see far more of these kinds of spaces rolled out throughout the CBD.
After all, the CBD is for people, not cars.
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You may want to observe the city’s one and only pedestrian mall at the moment, Alfred Street in between Princes and Symonds Streets. The entire street is a Pedestrian mall, but observe how pedestrians behave, and how drivers behave. I think after your observation you may want to revisit your enthusiasm.
Alfred Street is not really a pedestrian mall. The street is still delineated from the footpath, buses still run through it, cars still occasionally use it and so on.
How about Vulcan Lane? That’s a pedestrian mall in my books.
While I am in agreement with the general principle of your post, there are some practicalities that make an idea like this very hard to put into place. For example – take Federal St which you have indicated could be a shared space. Unfortunately, this is an entry and/or exit for a number of public and business car parks, and during the evening rush hour is generally jammed up. For many users of that particular street, there is no alternative.
I’m not sure what the solution is, but I would love to see one.
I’m really excited about the shared streets concept. I hope it will take off in a number of New Zealand cities. I’ve been reading about the hopeless US attempt to create pedestrian street malls in the 1960s. These failed for a number of reasons, but mostly due to lack of street environment and their low density living (thanks to many years of intense freeway).
Auckland City Council needs to use their land-use powers to attract cafes, restaurants and retail outlets onto these areas so street activity will run throughout the day and into the evening.
Brent, that’s why I’m only focusing on the CBD here, and also why shared streets as opposed to pure pedestrianising might be a good idea.
Auckland had its own failure, when the Onehunga Mall was pedestriansed a while back. It went dead, and eventually cars were brought back in. There is lots of interesting stuff around to read about shared streets, homezones, shared spaces and woonerf. They’re all effectively the same thing with different names, but quite fascinating actually.
I think I just like how it goes completely against everything traffic engineers believe in. Anything that annoys the traffic engineers pleases me 🙂
I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes and if it is a great success hopefully they do it to all non-arterial designated roads in the CBD…
I think construction on Elliott & Darby is meant to start in June next year, with completion by June 2011. Not sure about the timeframes for lower Fort and Shortland streets.
I myself am a Engineer working on large roading projects, my speciality through uni was traffic and road engineering, along with Urban Transport. I consider myself somewhat a traffic engineer and I have to say I think it is a great idea. However to be successful it needs to happen in stages as you suggest to get people used to the idea and requires a vibrant cafe styled atmosphere. Then as the area gets popular we can then build from there. The CBD is in need of projects like this to bring life back into the city, not only is it good from a Urban Design Point of view, it’s good for the city’s image.
I hope your not going to change you mind that now a Traffic Engineer agrees with you!
Oh I understand there are some enlightened traffic engineers out there. After all, it was a traffic engineer – Hans Monderman – who came up with the idea of shared spaces.
Venice, of course, made banning cars from its centre a feature from the day it was founded in the early middle ages. The canals are effective in only allowing boat and pedestrian traffic.
Digging out Albert and Queen Street, with the maze of CBD streets around them, re-forming ancient waterways and shorelines, would be a fantastic design idea to make downtown liveable.
Don’t share the streets with cars, share them with boats and gondolas. Auckland is a city of sails after all. Make it a city of oars too.