Another great Streetfilms video shows the amazing impact that pedestrianising a street over the summer months in Queens, New York City, can have on the surrounding neighbourhood:
While I’m as sick to death with hearing the phrase “…for the rugby world cup” as anyone out there, I think we do have the opportunity with next year’s tournament to try a few things for the first time. Like a bit of temporary pedstrianisation of Queen Street or Quay Street, or preferably both – on match days.
If people aren’t that keen on it, then no real harm done we can open it up again tomorrow. If people really do like being able to walk up and down Auckland’s main street then perhaps we might think about doing it every Sunday. As the video above shows, the most important thing is to “give it a go”.
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I like this idea alot. Let’s give it a go!!
Stuff the world cup. Let’s do it for Auckland Anniversary, at least it will be warm.
Yeah a warm weekend would be great. I would like to see Queen Street closed (In between intersections so traffic could still cut across) from Wellesley to customs with buses only able to use the two centre lanes. In summer weekends. People would flock.
If the Queen Street nay-sayers are too influential one fall-back position could be to permit traffic through cross-streets (e.g. Wellesley, Victoria), like in Times Square. Not as ideal as full closure, but it would still boost walkability a great deal.
It’s great to have a bit more public space, but this is basically an ugly bit of tarseal. Why would you want to throw a frisbee (as was in the video) or kick a football around on paving? Why not just close it completely and landscape it properly? You could have some grass, a few trees, and remove the interface with the adjacent park.
As for implementing a similar idea in Auckland… The Queens example works because of the density of housing. An equivalent suburban street in Auckland will have driveways and garages and those will require vehicle access, although this access might be reducable to a single dead-end lane with lots of traffic calming. But Auckland suburbs generally have plenty of well sized public parks already. As for street closing in the CBD or a other built up area… office workers and people enjoying alfresco dining would benefit but I can’t imagine that families would travel to use the spaces. You have to be able to walk to them.
If you wanted to experiment with this, how about close Greys Avenue? It isn’t the most attractive street in terms of architecture, but there are trees along it and it sort of integrates with Myers Park. There is enough population up that end of the CBD to support more public space and it isn’t an important through-route.
Obi, I think the problem with Greys Ave is that it’s not really a focal area for pedestrian activity. Probably the most obvious street to pedestrianise in Auckland would be High Street: it already has tonnes of pedestrians, extremely few vehicles and it’s in an area that is a focal point of pedestrian activity.
I don’t necessarily think that streets are an ugly place to have a public space. Think of the piazzas of Europe – they’re often just paved or sealed places but are massive focal points of activity. The point with having minimal interventions is that it’s cheap to implement and also it’s easily reversible.
High Street doesn’t join on to a park like the Queens example, which was more a focal area for a community rather than somewhere that needed to attract passing foot traffic. Not sure if that is important or not. Personally I like the idea of the city merging in to a park without a road creating a border.
Piazzas generally have some nice paving, street furniture, a fountain 😉 and maybe some foliage. That’s not the same as dragging some jersey barriers across the ends of a NZ street and expecting people to socialise on some rough tarseal.
From memory Greys Ave doesn’t integrated into Myers Park very well, in that there is a row of buildings between the two. Secondly, Greys Ave also has a large number of vehicle entrances off the street that you would need to place elsewhere somehow.
Queen Street has no private vehicle entrances – obviously apart from streets. High Street has very few, just a couple of at the Victoria Street end.
So really, in many ways both Queen Street and High Street would be more practical, as well as more popular, pedstrianisation options than Greys Ave.
It might not be a park but it it does join onto Freyberg Square (or whatever it is actually called). Anyway regardless of the exact location, I think the main point of the post is to say lets just try some of these things, they don’t have to be multi million dollar developments that we all cross our fingers and hope they work but can start out small and as a trial using something as simple as road cones or a few planter boxes.
Yes great idea. But I can just see our traffic engineers opposing the idea, just because a few people are going to be inconvenienced having to drive around the closed street.
I agree that this needs to happen however just one look at lower Queen St during the day shows not that many cars are using it now anyway. I would be interested to see traffic counts from before the upgrade and from now (the old ones are still available on the old Auckland City website but I can’t find them on the AT website)
If traffic engineers don’t like something, that generally tells me it’s a good idea.
In any other developed country Queen Street would have been pedestrianised years ago. Or at the very least closed to normal traffic. There is absolutely no need for cars to use Queen Street. Yes, people will oppose it – until they’ve seen it! Let’s get that bandwagon rolling!
Part of the problem is that right now there are some routes that kind of require you to use it unfortunately. If you come off the motorway at Wellesley St and want to head to to the northern end of Albert St say around Swanson St (a trip I have done fairly frequently both driving or in a taxi) you don’t have many options. Because Wellesley St between Mayoral Dr and Queen St is bus only you either have to go around Mayoral Dr and around to Albert St or the more common route is along Kitchener St, down Victoria St but because there is no right turn from Victoria to Albert you have to go along Queen St and then up Wyndham St (option 1 is 8 sets of traffic lights, option 2 is only 5 while also being shorter).
I would imagine that if Queen Street was pedestrianised or even bus only, then an obvious outcome of that would be to open up Wellesley Street to cross traffic in both directions. I think the reason for Wellesley being bus only for a small part of it was traffic modelling showing that it would otherwise be incredibly busy and lead to long delays for Dominion Road buses ending their route.
Yes, if we were to pedestrinise Queen St, changing Wellesley St would be important, I guess my point was that by just putting a right turn onto Victoria St we could eliminate the need for some more trips along Queen St. Basically AT should work out why people are using the road, where are people coming from/going to and work at ways to reduce that traffic further. My personal unscientific observations are that north of Wyndham St traffic is very light already and can even be so in peak time, this is probably due to the amount of traffic lights (4 in the space of 300m). Wyndham to Victoria picks up a bit but not by a huge amount, Victoria to Wellesley there is definitely more vehicles around and south of Wellesley St is heavier again. While I can’t say for sure that it is related but I remember reading recently that the northern parts of Queen St now have more foot traffic and than southern parts (the flat probably helps) and there are now a number of high end stores going in that end of the street. Could it be that lees cars plus better access to PT (Britomart is just across Customs St) equals more foot traffic and more high value shopping? Of course Newmarket was meant to be the high class alternative to the CBD but that still has Broadway which is filled with cars and noisy buses 24/7.
To me we should at least be shutting the northern parts of Queen St (north of Shortland St) and slowly working south one intersection at a time.
It’s not about convincing the traffic engineers – it’s about convincing Aucklanders. There’s not enough space in this blog to list all the places around the world where removing cars from a part of a CBD has led to massive benefits for local businesses, but just as importantly has convinced the populous that good pedestrian-focussed urban design can transform a city.
Just do it! For one day. A weekend. A certain forthcoming sporting event. Then, let the debate commence and the people decide.
And as for Grays Ave/Queen Str/High Str/wherever. It HAS to be Queen Street. Nowhere else will make the impact needed to change things.
Like a lot of other cities (but not Auckland), NYC also participates in a Summer Streets program, which closes off long stretches of a normal road 2-3 weekend days during the summer. Areas are programmed for events, classes and normal ambling. Even the merchants have bought into it. It would be perfect on Queens St. and / or Quay St. if Council engineers weren’t so truly frightened of temporaraily inconveniencing motorists.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/summerstreets/html/home/home.shtml