Shared spaces: traffic volumes matter

As regular readers will know, I’m a huge fan of the shared spaces we’ve seen rolled out around Auckland’s city centre (and in New Lynn) over the past year or so. It’s fantastic to see pedestrian freely milling around streets that were once the sole property of vehicles, but also to see a regular “eyes on the street” value that traffic can provide, if you compare shared streets to pedestrian malls. In terms of practical implementation, shared streets also seem to be simpler (if more expensive) to make happen, as property access, deliveries and so forth can still be retained. Elliott Street has been a particular success in my opinion (although this photo is taken on a day when the street was closed to cars, generally Elliott Street seems to work the best of the lot): A key part of the shared space philosophy is to reduce the amount of signage and general “road clutter” that normal streets have in spades. Obviously, the distinction between the footpath and the street is also removed, so that all users of the street are put much more on a “level pegging”, having to think and negotiate their way through the space.

An interesting blog post from the UK “As Easy as Riding a Bike” blog, analyses shared streets in Britain (which are really taking off in popularity), looking at the question of what makes some shared streets work really well, but others work not quite so well. The blog post makes the argument (and I haven’t followed the issue close enough to really know whether it’s a completely fair accusation) that shared space proponents say the biggest problem with our existing road environments (in terms of their friendliness to pedestrians and cyclists) is all the signage and separation between different users:

What is causing the real ‘impact’ on the urban environment is, apparently, the engineering measures – not the dozens of motor vehicles clogging up the space.

The problem I have here is that a symptom – the clutter, the rules and the control – is being treated as if it is the problem itself, the root cause of the decay of our urban environment.

Now while I accept that excess clutter and demarcation can be an issue, per se, Hamilton- Baillie is missing the point. There is a correlation between street clutter, rules and control, and the decline of the quality of our urban environment – this much is true. But fundamentally, it is the emergence of the motor car, and its gradual dominance of our street environment, that is responsible both for the declining quality, and the increase in rules and regulations. It has also eroded the natural sharing of spaces that we see in historical pictures, or today in places where the motor car does not exist, or is only present in low volume.

So we have to be very careful not to assume that simply stripping away the clutter, rules and signage of our present-day streets – returning them, essentially, to a nineteenth-century street – will result in a civilized environment, because that clutter did not arise spontaneously. It emerged, as I have said, in response to the motor vehicle, and it is quite clear, to me at least, that if you don’t take action to tame the motor vehicle – not to get rid of it, but to tame it – then you won’t see a civilized street, the kind in which vulnerable users are genuinely happy to mingle, which is surely a prerequisite of a street being shared.

I think this is a fair and well made point. It is the volume and speed of vehicles which determines the pedestrian friendliness of a street as much as the physical design of the place. We are seeing this with the different shared streets around Auckland’s city centre: Elliott Street has very low traffic volumes and high pedestrian counts so therefore pedestrians dominate and the place feels like a “proper” shared space. Fort Street has much higher traffic volumes and pedestrians tend to stick to the sides of the street, meaning you don’t really see the interaction and pedestrian domination of Elliott Street. Fort Street is still a million times nicer than it was before its upgrade, but it hasn’t quite succeeded (yet) to the same degree as Elliott Street has.

East Street in Horsham is shown as a successful example of a shared street – because of its low traffic volumes:

Crucial to the success of this shared street are the restrictions placed on motor vehicles entering it. Only vehicles delivering disabled passengers/drivers to a couple of dedicated parking spaces, and loading vehicles, are allowed down East Street – severely limiting the number of vehicles it has to cope with.

New Road in Brighton similarly discourages traffic – not through outright bans, but through clever design making it an impractical and “silly” through-route for any prospective vehicles: One issue I’ve had with the Darby Street shared space is that it’s actually a really attractive ‘rat-run’ for vehicles travelling from Queen Street to Victoria Street as they can zip down Darby Street and avoid the traffic lights. So you see quite a lot more vehicles using Darby Street as a through route than you would if, say, it was one-way in the other direction and therefore not any use as a rat-run (I can’t really see vehicles from Wellesley to Queen bothering to use Elliott and Darby instead of just Queen Street as the rat-run is much longer).

The blog post goes on to talk about how the ‘balance of power’ between pedestrians and cars in their ‘unregulated interaction’ on a shared street is very important:

Moving on from how rules – or their absence – affect the way in which streets are shared spatially, we can consider how streets are shared in a kinetic sense; how its users, of whatever mode, interact with each other.

Shared space advocates are, again, fans of a lack of regulation. The analogy Ben Hamilton-Baillie often gives is of an ice rink, or a camp site…

…These are environments with no formal rules or regulations, yet with people (and in the latter case, vehicles) moving around and interacting with each other quite happily, and in reasonable safety. Surely we could apply the logic of the campsite, or the ice rink, to our streets? Why can’t we interact freely with each other on our streets the way we do in these other unregulated environments, by getting rid of the rules and regulations that differentiate a street from a campsite?

There is a superficially attractive logic in operation here, but it rapidly falls apart when we start to consider the details. A campsite is, typically, a field with lots of pedestrians in, with perhaps one or two cars actually driving around at any one time. Shared space advocates argue that despite the absence of a regulatory framework, these environments are quite safe. This is obviously true. But they go one step further, and argue that it is the absence of the regulatory framework itself that makes the environment safe. Add more rules about how to drive, they say – treat drivers like idiots – and they will behave like idiots. Putting up lines about where to drive in the campsite might a good example – drivers would probably drive faster, and perhaps with less caution, within those lines, for instance.

So far as it goes, this is plausible. But let’s imagine a parallel example – exactly the same field, but this time, instead of it being full of people on foot, milling about unpredictably, this field is now full of cars being driven about, in just as unpredictable a way. And instead of just the one or two cars you might find being driven in a typical campsite, we now just have one or two pedestrians, inching their way through this field full of unpredictable cars.

Is this field just as safe for pedestrians as a ‘typical’ campsite? If safety was only about the absence of regulation, then it must be – but I don’t think that is true. You wouldn’t feel as comfortable letting your child run around in a field full of cars driving around unpredictably as you would be for them to do so in a field that was like a genuine campsite; likewise an ordinary ice rink is very different from, say, an ice hockey game. There are seven foot Kazahks wearing body armour, whizzing about. Even if they’re being careful, that, again, is a very different environment to introduce your child into.

My point is that power relations are an important component of safety; even if we assume that all those drivers moving their vehicles around the field are experts, or the giant ice hockey players will be more than capable of avoiding your offspring, there is an unequal distribution of risk, that will quite obviously affect how the more vulnerable parties will behave in that environment.

So once again we see the point that numbers (of both pedestrians and vehicles) really does matter here. For the space to feel like it’s properly giving pedestrians equal status to vehicles, we need to ensure the number of vehicles does not dwarf the number of pedestrians. Some analysis done to inform the development of the Exhibition Road shared space in London highlighted the importance of keeping traffic volumes low – saying the following:

…if vehicle flows are greater than 100 per hour, pedestrians will not use the vehicle zone as a shared space 

Another study, by Transport for London, made a similar conclusion:

 A study undertaken by TRL in 2003 for TfL’s Bus Priority Team indicated the limits to which pedestrians in London may be prepared to share a surface with traffic. This study found that below flows of 90 vehicles per hour pedestrians were prepared to mingle with traffic. When flows reached 110 vehicles per hour pedestrians used the width between frontages as if it were a traditional road, that is the majority of pedestrians remained on the equivalent of the footway and left the carriageway clear for vehicles.

The blog post probably takes a more negative view of shared spaces generally than I do (perhaps because of a fear they’re being introduced in inappropriate places) but overall I think the point is very well made. An extremely important part of making shared spaces work is to limit traffic volumes – so that the ‘balance of power’ between pedestrians and motorists gets tipped further towards the pedestrian. I don’t necessarily think that the vehicle per hour numbers are a fixed rule though, as surely that depends on the concentration of pedestrians. If you have an extremely busy pedestrian street (like Queen Street, for example) then pedestrians are still going to dominate the space, even if you had more vehicles than the seemingly magic “100 per hour”. As we see more shared streets rolled out across Auckland in future years, I’m hopeful that these issues are taken into account – to ensure that all shared streets can be as successful as Elliott Street is.

The blog post goes on to talk about how the ‘balance of power’ between pedestrians and cars in their ‘unregulated interaction’ on a shared street is very important:

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