Following on from my post about humanising the CBD, I came across a great video showing the measures that New York City is taking to make that city much more people friendly. It’s well worth a watch:
What I found most interesting in the video was the experiences of businesses after the pedestrianisation of parts of Times Square. They reported that higher pedestrian flows brought far more customers into their shops – and improved sales. This is the kind of impact we could expect from pedestrianising parts of Queen Street (and also places like High Street) where the number of pedestrians far exceeds the number of vehicles.
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Yes, NY is great, but they can make terrible decisions too. Paul Krugman decribes a recent decision to stop a tranist tunnel as arguably the worst policy decision ever made by the government of New Jersey .
Interestingly enough Owen McShane referred to this tunnel in his recent NBR article. He was saying we should follow New Yorks example because if they don’t have rail tunnel projects we shouldn’t.
And that was the comparatively sane bit of his article!
My goal for the incoming Auckland Council – how about Auckland beating the 200 miles (320km) of new bike lanes that NYC rolled out in the last 3 years! And by this I mean bike lanes in the city to enable people to move around Auckland’s CBD on bike, not just alongside motorways such as the NW.
200 miles of new cycleways in 3 years, here’s an achieveable goal for the new Auckland Council!
What, pedestrians buying things?!?! I don’t understand 🙂
Yes, but we kiwis prefer to travel through cities in our cars or, failing that, at least by bus. Here in Wellington we are de-pedestrianising streets to make them more convenient for motorised vehicles to use. That’s just our culture 🙂
Are you talking about Manners St? Because if you are, the “motorised vehicles” are buses and they’re replacing an ugly public space with a useful public transport improvement. I think they’re also going to pedestrianise or share lower Cuba St to make up for the loss of Manners Mall.
Need video, by the way. I’ve only been to NYC once. It was winter, almost snowing, and I had a cold. So my impression of the place is one of misery.
Someone should tell the lady in this article – http://www.theaucklander.co.nz/local/news/low-times-on-high-st/3916871/
Last year, Ms L’Estrange-Corbet suggested to Auckland City Council that there should be free parking over Christmas.
“Malls were bursting at the seams. I felt we needed to offer the consumer something to encourage them back into the city to remind them how good it is and what we do have to offer.”
She’s thinking about it from the wrong way, if she campaigned for a car free high street, turn the place into a pedestrian mall/shared space evidence shows she’d get more customers.
There’s a neat interview with the commissioner in the op video located here – http://www.streetfilms.org/transforming-nyc-streets-with-jsk/
Goes into a bit more detail what they’ve done in NY and how it’s improved public life
How’s this as a place to start? I know where this new tax money can go [just for for Liberty]:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/4249096/Call-for-higher-petrol-prices
What I find most interesting about NYCs improvements in recent years is how they do them cheap. They’ll simply spray some brown grippy paint stuff down on the road surface, surround it in planters, and call that a square. It’s not as nice as our multi million dollar developments, but I think we need more of this attitude, we don’t need to wait until we have millions to spend, we can experiment, close a street, if it doesn’t work, rip out the planters and wash off the paint. If it does, then when we have the money we can improve it over time. Experimenting is good.