We have been a huge fan of the development of shared spaces and we aren’t the only ones with them being incredibly successful. Back in April I asked what was happening with the development of more of them as they seemed to have disappeared off the radar. In particular I was interested in the outcome of both the O’Connell St and Federal St upgrades which had been through a consultation period. Well now we have an answer thanks to an update in the latest Waitemata Local Board meeting agenda.
O’Connell St – Back in April I wrote:
First up we had O’Connell St in September last year however oddly that wasn’t a shared space. The proposal talked about making footpaths wider by removing car parking. Yet car parking was pretty much the only reason that cars would ever need to be in O’Connell St and with that gone, so to would probably most of the cars (not that there are that many in the first place). Those cars that did still use the street would no longer have to worry about someone opening their door or pulling out of a parking spot so are likely to travel down the road faster, not a desirable outcome in an area where we want lots of pedestrians. Overall it seemed like a poorly thought out design and we encouraged readers to make submissions saying so. The thing is despite the consultation closing back in the middle of September, we are yet to even hear what the outcome of that consultation was. I heard informally a while ago that the project went back to the drawing board but it would be nice to have an official update about where the project is at.
Well the great news is that thanks to the strong feedback against the proposal, the street is now to become a shared space. Sure it isn’t quite full pedestrian only street like I, and many others hoped for but I’m ok with that, at least with a shared street that can still happen easily later if need be. Here is the executive summary of the update (page 157 of the link above)
2. The upgrade of O’Connell Street is part of a 10-year programme of city centre streetscape and open space upgrades, which are funded by the CBD Targeted Rate. The O’Connell Street project budget is $4.367m.
3. The objectives of the upgrade are to improve pedestrian amenity, create more space for people and to promote O’Connell Street as part of the city centre ‘laneway’ circuit, as identified in the Auckland Council City Centre Master Plan. The upgrade will also create space for outdoor activities, including outdoor dining.
4. The shared space concept design (Attachment A) delivers on these objectives and has support from key stakeholders including the CBD Advisory Board, O’Connell Street businesses and property owners, as well as disability groups and the Royal New Zealand Institute for the Blind. Auckland Transport also support the shared space design.
5. In addition to the O’Connell Street upgrade, a range of other projects are proposed in the High Street Precinct area, including O’Connell Street, Freyberg Square, High Street and the Pioneer Women’s Building improvements. Officers are working to ensure that the design outcomes and construction schedules for each of these projects are co-ordinated.
6. The next step for the O’Connell Street upgrade is to commence detailed design. The construction is currently scheduled to begin in early 2014 lasting for approximately six months.
Here is what the new proposal composes of:
- A shared space where vehicles must give way to pedestrians.
- The same design principles and materials used in other city centre shared spaces to ensure a consistent standard and legibility for users.
- Fully paved road reserve i.e. a flush, kerb-less surface using the granite stone modules used in all other city centre shared spaces.
- Clutter-free, accessible routes for pedestrians and disabled users down both sides of the street, tactile delineators to enable safe navigation by disabled users, activity zones on both the eastern and western sides of the street which provide space for outdoor dining, street furniture and vegetation, plus a 3m carriage down the middle of the street.
- Cobbled threshold treatments that provide flush pedestrian crossing tables at either end of the street and widened footpath build outs at the Chancery Lane and Shortland Street corners, creating greater pedestrian amenity at the thresholds.
- New street furniture and façade mounted lighting
- Removal of an existing tree (Tulip tree) and inclusion of nikau palms (up to 9) along the western side.
- Removal of all (20) on-street car parks to provide space for pedestrian movement, greater public amenity and better activation of the street edges, which is consistent with parking restrictions in all other city centre shared spaces
- Removal of the existing loading zones with loading instead provided along the length of the street at permitted times (6am-11am daily) which is consistent with loading permissions in all other city centre shared spaces.
- Retention of existing traffic flow (via one northbound lane)
- Possible provision for a public artwork (mid-block)
- Possible provision of informal/perchable seating elements that feature text referencing the rich history of the street.
Federal St
Unlike O’Connell, Federal St (between Wellesley and Victoria St) was proposed to be a shared space. The report (page 163) says that the proposal had very strong support with 84% of the feedback supporting the idea. The detailed design will now be done and construction is due to start in August. Here is the proposed design.
Its good to see positive progress on these two projects.
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Are they getting rid of the car park on Federal Street ?
If so that is good news.
Sweet.
Went to Elliot St/Darby St and Fort St recently but still didn’t feel that safe or relaxed as a pedestrian there because at any moment a car can turn up. They are also cluttered with parked cars, which is a blight on the streetscape. The only nice ped area in Auckland is Vulcan Lane, and if they only could pedestrianise High St we’d finally get somewhere. Shared space seems like a have-cake-and-eat solution to me, not satisfying anyone.
I disagree, I love them and don’t care about if cars turn down a street. They can wait for me as they are required to.
Yeah I’m with Matt, I think they are awesome. I walk down Fort literally every day and Elliot several times a week. Feel nice and safe, and it is far far better than previously. It’s a touch frustrating with the vans in the morning but hey it is a living city, not disneyland. Come lunchtime it’s great, streams of people and only the occasional crawling car to be seen. Overtime the dynamic will only shift further, more pedestrians, fewer and slower cars.
Hans time to become a ‘militant pedestrian’! with a smile and a wave of course…..
Hurrah! That bullet point list above is all good but we especially love these:
-A shared space where vehicles must give way to pedestrians.
-Timed loading 6am-11am
-Fully paved road reserve i.e. a flush, kerb-less surface using the granite stone modules used in all other city centre shared spaces.
-Removal of all (20) on-street car parks
-Flush pedestrian crossing tables at either end of the street and widened footpath build outs at the Chancery Lane and Shortland Street corners, creating greater pedestrian amenity at the thresholds.
And personally I’m also keen on these too:
-The same design principles and materials used in other city centre shared spaces to ensure a consistent standard and legibility for users.
-Possible provision for a public artwork (mid-block)
-Possible provision of informal/perchable seating elements that feature text referencing the rich history of the street.
Federal Street is a tougher nut as it will still be dominated by its ‘owner’s’ totally auto-dependant business model. This public space has become little short of Sky City’s own access lane and so it will remain.
I’m unclear why the tree at the Southern end of the street has to be cut down?
Good point – that should really stay, and no clear reason visible why they should cut it down…
I too still feel slightly anxious wandering about Elliot and Fort. Traffic speeds are in the main still too high. Given that cars have been the dominate species in our town I don’t think the balance is quiet right yet.
After dark is another matter all together the rules simply don’t apply – might (and speed) has right
Culture won’t change overnight but that is no reason to not to start to making the change…. more shared spaces, like more pedestrians and cyclists is what will normalise this uncertainty.
One simple improvement that could be made to O’Connell St would be to add a pedestrian crossing over Kitchener Street at the top of O’Connel Street (next to the Metropolis Hotel entrance) and another over Bowen Avenue. This would link with the walkway through Albert Park. I use this route from Wellesly Street (where almost all of the buses now stop) to my workplace on Shortland Street every morning and it always baffles me that there are no pedestrian crossings linking through to Albert Park.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we see something like that pop up, the meeting minutes suggest that O’Connell, High and Freyburg Place are all being looked at together, hopefully that includes some works on surrounding streets too.
A pedestrian facility linking Albert Park with Bowen Ave (about half way down) was called for by Pippa Coom with my support during an upgrade to the Bowen Ave, a wee while ago. AT rejected the idea. I think the reason was because there were too few pedestrians.
HaHa…. Isn’t that exactly why the facility is needed!? Isn’t it time they accepted that what they build shapes demand…. ?
Standard AT response. What AT staff can’t seem to get into their collectively thick skulls is that the lack of pedestrians on Auckland streets is a rational response to the fact that over the past sixty or so years the city has designed its streets for motor vehicles. Pedestrians have been marginalised in these strategies and discouraged from using anything but the most necessary routes. This sort of cart before the horse thinking (to employ a transport related metaphor) really has to stop.
Yep, have seen them refuse zebra crossings because they are unsafe in “low-pedestrian” areas (which is somewhat true – if drivers learn that a zebra is rarely used by any walker when they drive across it, they may get casual about giving way) – and then have seen them refuse speed table-elevated zebra crossings too, for the same given reason, even though they are an order of magnitude safer (because drivers slow down, even if they don’t expect to actually encounter pedestrians).
When I’m in the shared spaces, I try to make it a point to walk in the middle of the road as much as possible. I’m not trying to obstruct traffic, but I want to make the drivers aware of the “shared” part of “shared space”. I’m looking forward to seeing the east end of Fort Street completed with all of the street furniture in. One of the things I like about the Queen Street end is the planter boxes that some of the eating places have installed around their seating areas. It’s a little thing, but it seems to add a bit more ambience that tables and chairs sitting on the pavement by themselves seem to lack.
Does anyone else think that the council is trying to surround High Street with shared spaces to coax the retailers into asking for one? It would be a win for pedestrians, it would be a win for delivery drivers. The only downside would be the loss of on-street parking, and I don’t think on-street parking is as crucial to business as the retailers would probably like everyone to believe.
Re the Queen end of Fort- how long before that corner tenancy of the Deloitte building busts out onto the pavement and moves to hospo instead of fashion, d’ya reckon?
What is the speed limit on a shared space?
Whatever it’s marked as. If they’re unmarked, it’s 50 km/h (e.g. Jean Batten Place).
Speed limit is 20 km/h in all shared spaces.
Have you got a link to that? As I understand the rule, shared zones work the same way as any other street – 50 km/h limit unless otherwise marked. There’s no special rule for shared zones. http://www.legislation.govt.nz/regulation/public/2004/0427/latest/resultsin.aspx?search=sw_096be8ed8098ccb8_shared+zone_25_se&p=1
I checked at lunch, and Fort Street/Fort Lane/Jean Batten doesn’t have any speed limit signs, so the limit there should be the default. Don’t know about the shared zones in Midtown.
Of course it should be 20 km/h, or even 10 km/h. But I don’t know if putting up signs will change much – AT’s evaluation of Fort Street found that nearly 50% of drivers thought that the limit was 10 or 20 km/h. Another 25% didn’t know…
http://www.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/EN/planspoliciesprojects/plansstrategies/ccmp/Documents/fortstareaevaluationfullreport.pdf
That document also includes the line “Unlike in conventional streets, a zoned approach applies in the shared spaces. There is no sign posted speed limit, and the default speed limit is 50 km per hour.”, which suggests AT have the same interpretation as me about the speed limits.
Mmmmh, I thought that the southern entrance to Elliot Street had a 10 km/h speed limit sign, but I can’t be sure anymore whether I dreamt it…
I remember that when they proposed the shared space design, AT/AC was very keen on NOT speed limiting it formally, but I understand they may have gotten a little bit less certain on that since.
Elliot street is 10, was there 2 hours ago.
I’m surprised Federal st wasn’t made a shared space a long time ago. I’m sure skycity would have paid to do it themselves a long time ago if shared spaces were in the norm a few years back.
Good news. Hopefully there can be more shared spaces around the Chancery area soon – the older roads are starting to look seriously ugly and anachronistic when compared to the new shared spaces. The footpaths on High St, in particular, are ludicrously small compared to the number of people who use them.
Also, what about around the Viaduct and Wynyard Quarter? It’s crazy that the main pedestrian access to Wynyard, this supposedly public transport friendly new area, goes through a cramped carpark. It isn’t even as if that carpark is essential to the commercial viability of the area – there is lots more both adjacent to Wynyard and on Princes Wharf.
Yeah, the congestion in High St is human! Even Traffic Engineers can probably understand the need if we put it like that….. And this is one form of congestion that is best addressed by growing the available space, because more people on a commercial city street is a ‘good’ that we want more of, unlike vehicle quantity.
More is more with people, but more is less with cars. and we can choose to a great extent: What we feed will grow.
The former Auckland City Council approached High St with plans to turn it into a shared space. This was strongly rejected by I understand three retailers in the street. Council went on to do Eliot and Darby, and ongoing works in Fort St etc. There are no plans in place to install shared space on High St at this stage.
Surely you’d have to be a petrol station to reject high street becoming a shared space?
Federal Street is one of the few places that tourist coaches can park downtown. Any idea if the broader SkyCity development includes coach parking anywhere?
Shared space should be used in all the narrow streets and lanes around the inner city. Having been a delivery driver around Auckland for a number of years it can be very hard getting into areas. One thing that really get me went trying to deliver around Fort St/Jean Batten Pl at 4am on a sunday and not being able to move because of taxis being double parked all over the place.
Loading zones should be priority number 1 for on-street parking space, since deliveries and pick ups are pretty much the only vehicle use that actually needs to be right next to the destination.
I would be interested to see how that has changed now that the buses that used to stop outside the Pullman Hotel on Waterloo Quadrant now stop on Wellesly Street. There are large numbers of people who catch those buses and work in the office towers on Shortland Street and the lower end of Queen St (me being one of them). In any event I wouldn’t have thought putting in a couple of pedestrian crossings would be hugely costly.
Any news on whether we will ever remove that stupid traffic lane through the middle of Freyberg Plaza? Someone once correctly said that it currently is “very Auckland” – no matter how small the public space, cars must have access…
It is being considered for removal. The legal title of Ellen Melville Hall underlies half of the width of that lane!
The entire square is being upgraded; the surface paving has deteriorated quite badly as everyone can see, prompting renewal moves.
Thanks Christoper – good to hear!
For the 12 story apartment building I lived in when in Melbourne we only needed two levels of parking with the car park only having about half the footprint of the main building.
Damn, wrong thread lol.
Apropos of nothing, here’s the Herald on shared spaces, Thursday, 21 February 1924. The author is complaining about not being allowed to park in Durham St East or West, Vulcan Lane, Fort Lane, High St and even on Grafton Bridge.
http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZH19240221.2.202.23&cl=CL2.1924.02.21&e=——-10–1—-0–
I, for one, still believe that the thoroughfares are for sauntering. As well as ambling, strolling, sashaying, loitering, wandering, meandering, lingering, dawdling, idling and dilly-dallying.
Good find Steve! And so the wheel turns: Thesis; Antithesis; Synthesis.
It has been in my mind for ages that Queen St itself should be either a series of malls or pedestrianised shared spaces, and only the west-east feeder roads (Victoria etc) be normal traffic thoroughfares. I don’t expect to see that in my lifetime.
Part of the plan up to 2040