The importance of road-width

In my opinion, perhaps the most important factor determining how a particular part of the city will feel are the road widths. The wider the road is, generally the faster people will be encouraged to drive – the opposite is obviously true too. Now clearly in some areas we want wide roads – for example, I bet most people wish Dominion Road was a bit wider so we could fit a lane of traffic, a high quality bus lane, a cycle lane and keep on-street parking. We also spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year in Auckland widening motorways (Manukau Harbour Crossing, Victoria Park Tunnel & Newmarket Viaduct projects are all effectively motorway widening projects) – although the merits of that spend are probably highly debatable in many situations. But is the engineer’s mantra of “wider is better” actually true? I would argue that in most cases the opposite is true – particularly for residential streets and for streets in town centres.

It is interesting driving around Auckland and seeing the relationship between street width and the character of the area. Auckland’s narrowest little streets generally seem to be in places like Ponsonby and Freeman’s Bay – and they contribute enormously to the character of those areas, along with the heritage housing of course. Would John Street be anything like it is if you could zip along there at close to 60 kph? I tend to think not.

Some of the newer developments in Auckland seem to finally be understanding the importance of narrow streets: to generate character and to slow vehicles down. In the Stonefields development, a brownfields redevelopment of the old Mt Wellington quarry, the road-widths have tended to be limited to a greater extent than I’ve seen in most other new subdivisions. The photo below shows that to some extent, although it’s a bit difficult to analyse the widths because there are no parked cars to compare to:Another thing to note is the intersections don’t have massively wide arcs allowing cars to turn corners at high speeds. In fact, cars need to slow right down to turn a corner – gosh that must annoy the traffic engineers!

Unfortunately, such enlightened thinking as we’re seeing at Stonefields has not migrated further south to developments happening around Flat Bush, or indeed to the heart of Manukau City which is still dissected by a massive 70 kph arterial route (despite the fact that there’s hardly any traffic on it because that has been diverted onto the new motorway).

Starting with Flat Bush, there is supposed to be a new town centre being built over the next few years to complement the growing residential area. On the plans, the town centre looks pretty good: it’s close to the massive Barry Curtis Park, it has an obvious main street – and so on, and so forth: So Ormiston Road is going to be the main street, passing through the town centre. Should be quite nice one would think – a kind of new version of old town centres perhaps?

Clearly, nobody told the traffic engineers:Oh great, we have a defacto motorway as the future main street of Flat Bush, with a stupid pointless “kink” in it just to completely ruin our urban design principles. I can totally see cafes and retail shops establishing along here in the future to create a sense of town centre vibrancy. NOT. I can see another Albany megacentre urban design failure in the making.

Finally, turning to the heart of Manukau City – which had been sliced in half for so long by Wiri Station Road – I had some hope for the future of this area once the SH20-SH1 connection was completed. Getting all those vehicles off Wiri Station Road (now called Manukau Station Road, by the way) offered a superb opportunity to slow the road down, narrow it, create a lot more pedestrian connections and tie together two sides of the town centre. So how have things gone?So we haven’t slowed things down at all yet, and the empty road hasn’t been narrowed yet.There’s a shopping mall on one side of this road and a theme park on the other – but what are the chances of a pedestrian actually trying to get across this road? Next to zilch I would think. What an epic failure, what a missed opportunity.

If there is a lesson to be learned from these observations, it is that we really need to be smarter in the way we align our transport and land-use policies. The main streets through our town centres cannot be four-lane superhighways. If we want people to drive slowly, if we want to encourage pedestrian activity, if we want to have streetside retail activity, then we need to keep those roads narrow. We need to slow the cars down, we need to prioritise the pedestrians, we need to give these places some character.

Seriously, we need to do better than this.

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