Here’s another great video by the Streetfilms project, on streets in Paris. The video explores traffic calming amenities Paris has installed. For example, in several areas of Paris curbs have been removed and bikes, pedestrians, buses and taxis coexist at low speeds. On wider roads bikes share the BRT lanes with buses and taxis. Counter-flow bike lanes expand the bike network. Raised crosswalks and neckdowns slow traffic and make pedestrians more visible at intersections.
I wonder if we’ll get around to much more of this kind of thinking in Auckland?
Processing...
That is one of my favourite quotes about sustainable, efficient, public transport:
“It’s not about the throughput of vehicles, it’s about the throughput of people”, you hear almost every public transport expert talk about that…
Can you imagine John Banks or Stephen Joyce actually thinking to put the people/cyclist/pedestrian first.
Nope but they aren’t gonna be in charge forever…
Was at the Foundation for the Blind last week (as part of my job- I work with animals not that I am blind) and was discussing the wear and tear on the guide dogs (who have a very dificult stressful job when in urban environments) and how this foreshortens their working life and affects their health.
They showed us a film following around some blind people and their labradors about Newmarket and Ellerslie shopping centres. It was amazing how unsympathetic the environment was to them- high curbs, slip lanes, uneven surfaces, low signange, narrow footpaths that disppear to no-where. The poor dogs have the job of protecting their walkers, every time and they had to be constantly alert to uneven surfaces, difficult to cross intersections etc..
Watching this and talking about how stressful Auckland is to guide dogs made me realise how pedestrian unfriendly our shopping strips are. It would not cost a lot of money to providena few extra pedestrian barriers, better dfined walkways, lower curbs, slowing down cars when appropriate- but our planners and engineers seem to show so little interest in giving us (and the poor guide dogs) a less stressful life.
PS the worst example of a badly planned pedestrian precinct in my view is Ponsonby Rd- its downright dangerous, I would hate to be a guide dog guiding a blind person there.
We really need some more of this sort of thinking in Auckland, esp in the CBD. Most of the main roads in the CBD, such Fanshawe, Quay St, Albert, and worst of all the one way streets like Hobson and Nelson are so orientated towards cars it creates a completely unfriendly pedestrian environment with no street life whatsoever. I guess its what happens when engineers have too much control of the road network, they forget about the real purpose of the CBD, for living, working and play, not driving.
The first step should be to remove the one-way streets, I note Perth is currently going through that process now.
Any improvements to the road environment need to go hand in hand with major PT investment though, especially better transport between different parts of the CBD.
First things first, engineers are there to do a job, they are given the results they are to achieve at the lowest cost possible. While achieving the results set-out by the authority responsible, if they don’t provide the lowest cost, a different company will get the work. So the matter is infact that the Authorities don’t require the streets to be pedestrian freindly and in fact specify the amount of vehicle movements required rather than the other-way round.
A prime example with the funding problem is ponsonby rd, the council has identified the need to make the steet more pedestrian friendly, however insteed of changing the street environment, (the most effective way), they try to change vehicle behavour by simply adjusting the speed limit. The cheap but not very effective method.
In this case the problem is actually funding, John Banks has done a great job from shifting focus from roading to pedestrain and public transport throughout the Auckland City, a major improvement on hubbards term, however without the funds, not everything can be done.
I can imagine John Banks doing so…Joyce is more of a lost cause in that department.
Yeah the problem is not so much what the engineers say (except for things like induced demand where they are woefully neglectful of reality) but how much they are listened to above everyone else.