Shared streets or full pedestrianisation?

The completion of the Darby Street shared space, and progress on Fort Street’s makeover have led to some interesting debates in the the posts I have written on these projects in the past few days: should they be shared spaces or should they be fully pedestrianised? Discussion about pedestrianising High Street, as well an ongoing interest in the possibility of removing cars from Queen Street mean that such a discussion is well overdue.

At the start of such discussion it’s probably worth noting that I’m a fan of shared streets. Some people think they’re a bit dangerous, as the distinction between space for cars and pedestrians is taken away – meaning that pedestrians aren’t given a dedicated ‘safe’ space: as they are on both normal footpaths and obviously on streets where cars are fully banned. I would argue that this is probably a design matter – looking at the design for Darby Street (see photo below), it’s fairly obvious which parts of the street are completely inaccessible to vehicles, so you retain the “completely pedestrian” area – but you also gain former dedicated roadspace. It’s a kind of win-win – if you design it well. That said, there’s also something awesome about pedestrianised streets where cars are completely banished. Vulcan Lane is a brilliant example of this and has been enormously successful since closed off to traffic in the 1960s (I think). It now commands some of the highest levels of foot-traffic anywhere in the CBD: Often I think that shared spaces might be a useful way of achieving significant pedestrian improvements when full pedestrianisation wasn’t politically, or practically, possible. With full pedestrianisation you need to worry about emergency access, freight deliveries, ensuring alternative routes are available and so forth. With shared spaces you might be making all that a little bit more difficult for drivers, but it’s still possible. People are being discouraged from driving down a street, but it is still possible.

From this point of view, I suppose that shared spaces are seen as something of a ‘compromise’ where the ideal (full pedestrianisation) wasn’t possible to achieve. Or they might be seen as a step towards full pedestrianisation. In the case of Darby Street, originally it was proposed to ban cars completely but when some of the local business owners (presumably) complained the council compromised by going for a shared space instead.

On the down side, to me it seems difficult to create a shared space quickly or cheaply. Because you have to be so careful about the design, to ensure safety, and because shared spaces involve repaving the whole streets into one space – removing the curbs that distinguished footpaths from the road itself – it’s inherently a process that takes time, a lot of digging and therefore a lot of money. As New York has shown, full pedestrianisation can be achieved simply by putting up some barriers: I suppose the immediate answer to the “shared streets or full pedestrianisation” question is that the best option will depend on the particular situation. If you have few traffic alternatives, quite a number of garage entrances and quite a wide space (as is the case for Fort Street) then perhaps a shared space is best. For High Street, the narrowness of the road and the (general) lack of need for vehicle access, plus the high pedestrian flows may mean that full pedestrianisation could be preferable.

To throw another perspective on the question, I’m reading a good book at the moment called “Makeshift Metropolis: ideas about cities” by Witold Rybczynski, which has an interesting few paragraphs on ‘pedestrian malls’ – in particular talking about their history and how they evolved not from a desire to improve life for pedestrians as much as an ideological position that cars and pedestrians should be separated as much as possible – a modernist ideology most commonly linked with Le Corbusier. Rybczynski writes:

In 1957, the first pedestrian mall was built in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Over the following two decades, more than two hundred North American cities undertook similar pedestrianisation measures. The problem with malls, as Jane Jacobs wrote at the time, was that “planned pedestrian street schemes, if they throw formidable borders for moving and parked cars around inherently weak and fragmented preserves, can introduce more problems than they solve.” In short, once the novelty wore off, people – that is, shoppers – found that they didn’t like pedestrian malls, preferring traditional streets with sidewalks. Businesses along malls suffered, stores relocated, the deserted pedestrian malls soon became magnets for vagrants. Only about thirty pedestrian malls remain in operation today.

Unfortunately this was also the fate of the Onehunga Mall, which was closed to traffic, but eventually reopened as that was a failure.

I don’t know if Jane Jacobs ever saw the development of the shared streets concept, but I imagine that she would have loved it, being such a fan of celebrating the complexity, conflicts and interaction between all different elements of the urban environment.

The real catalyst for giving further consideration of the merits of full pedestrianisation versus shared spaces is the growing support for doing something about the traffic on Queen Street. An International City Centre Masterplan is being prepared by Auckland Council to consider some ‘big ideas’ for improving the city centre over the next 20-30 years – and one of the flagship projects forming part of the master plan is the consideration of whether part (or all) of Queen Street should be pedestrianised.

Personally I think that Queen Street has reached a scale, in terms of its number of pedestrians and the lack of any real ‘rivals’ as Auckland’s main street, to survive and prosper if it was fully pedestrianised – in much the same way that Brisbane’s main street has done so (which is also called Queen Street by the way). Nevertheless, I think it would be smart to progressively bring Queen Street towards full pedestrianisation – perhaps by closing off a block or two to start with, or by doing it just at the weekends (or at lunch time during the week). We want to make sure we don’t repeat what happened to so many pedestrian malls in North American cities, we want to make sure that we don’t repeat what happened in Onehunga. Queen Street could work as a shared space too, although we’d have to get most of the buses out of it and ensure drivers were persuaded away from using it unless they had absolutely no alternatives.

While full pedestrianisation may make more sense for Queen Street, I don’t think that means that shared spaces are always the “poor cousin” to pedestrianisation. Not only are they more practical and politically acceptable in many cases, the passing through of cars creates a ‘passive surveillance’ that may make them seem safer while adding to the feeling of vibrancy of the area. In the end, perhaps it really is “horses for courses”.

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