At the Santa Parade just over a week ago one thing I was extremely happy to hear was that Auckland Transport left Queen St open for people for a few hours after the parade instead of squeezing thousands back on to the footpath so the road could be reopened to what would have been a significantly fewer vehicles like they’ve done in previous years. That allowed people attending (or just in the city) to make use of and enjoy the extra space and given the chance, people took it. This video is from reader Geogoose as he walks (I assume) up Queen St about an hour after the parade had finished.

Just to highlight the impact the Santa Parade has o pedestrian volumes, here are the pedestrian councils from Heart of the City’s automated counters showing that outside the Civic pedestrian volumes peaked at over 4,000 people in an hour and that’s just one one side of the road.

Santa Parade Ped Volumes 2015

Well done to Auckland Transport for leaving the road open to people for longer this year. In future why not close the street for the day – although I’ll accept that might be hard during the CRL works.

Share this

11 comments

  1. I wonder how those automatic pedestrian counters work and if they only count the pedestrians on the footpath or would it be able to count those that are walking on the road space as well?
    If it is the footpath only then it would have been significantly undercounting the total.

    1. I believe they use cameras. But not sure whether with image recognition software or with a student and a tally board sitting over a video tape later…

      1. It is image recognition software, you don’t get hourly data 365 days a year by hitting someone to count people in videos, the cost would be way too high

        1. You probably would, if you hit them hard enough, but thankfully that is illegal in NZ. Also, autocorrect is nasty.

  2. How are the cars meant to buy things with all those pedestrians in the way?

    Luckily High Street doesn’t have that problem. People can just rive directly into the shop for that “old fashioned shopping experience”.

        1. Looks like a pleasant scence. Will never work to close off Queen St. How will courier vans be able double park, park in bus stops, on footpaths etc happen

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *