The prioritisation of car parking in our busy town centres and along our cities’ high streets increases traffic, pollution and noise and discourages people from staying in an area to socialise and create a sense of community. To make matters worse, the increasing tendency of local councils to not install seating or shade along high streets (or worse to install hostile architecture) further discourages the use of our streets for anything but the most utilitarian uses. This is as true for Sydney as any major Australian city. For a country that is known to love being outdoors and with a climate that is conducive to lingering outside, we’ve created an urban environment that discourages people from sitting outside and enjoying the streets. As Committee for Sydney says in its excellent Reclaiming Sydney’s High Streets report: Most of Sydney’s streets, including its main shopping streets, lack places to sit. It’s a sign of a great street when it invites people to stop, rest, and check out the urban scenery. This, along with shade and shelter, is a key element in enticing people to stay on a street rather than just walk through. We shouldn’t have to go to a café every time we want to sit down. Above: Hostile architecture in Dulwich Hill (left) and Marrickville (right), Sydney. Source: Author At Better Streets we want the community to be able to use and enjoy safe, attractive, shaded, comfortable streets for recreation, socialisation, safe transport, community events, and more! And a critical point of public space is it should be for everyone and not cost money to use. At the same time, studies have shown that people walking or riding a bicycle spend more money in local retailers than people arriving by car and improved walking and cycling amenities can increase retail spend by up to 30%. It’s well established that when you design streets for people, you get all the things that come along with that: community, leisure, connection, recreation, commerce and celebration. One way to address our car-dominated city high streets is to advocate for car parking spaces or entire carparks to be given over to community use through conversion to ‘town squares’, parks or parklets in place of kerbside parking for public use or cafe use. Above: Good Design Projects, Parklet commissioned by Randwick Council (left), and Foursquare, Summer Hill Piazza (right) But how to do this? There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, but here are some things to think about:
In some cases, the best way to change the way a street works will be to test interventions through temporary pilot projects. This was famously how New York City began the process of pedestrianising Times Square: the first move was temporary planters and a coat of paint. Cities all over the world have converted single parking spaces at the side of the road called “parklets” - small art installations, mini parks, and café seating that occupy parking spaces next to the kerb. Bike lanes, bus lanes, footpath widenings, and many other changes can be trialled on a temporary basis. Lessons from the trial can then be converted into permanent changes. Marrickville Town Square Sydneysiders love the rich multicultural heritage, offbeat underground arts scene and fabulous food offerings of Marrickville, an inner city suburb around 5 km from the Sydney Central Business District. But if you’ve ever walked down traffic-filled Illawarra Road on a hot day to buy groceries, queued for a banh mi, or played chess at Café Nho, you’ll probably agree – it would be so nice to have a shady place to sit down, for people to come together, socialise, chat, eat their banh mi without having to resort to hovering next to the carpark or sitting in the back of their vans (see below!). Above: Locals trying to eat their lunch in the only available bit of public space on Illawarra Rd - the back of their van in the Calvert St carpark. Source: Dan Conway. Currently there are very few central places to gather in Marrickville, in the style of the Piazza in Summer Hill or the new Parramatta Square, and also very little seating or shade along the major high streets. Above: Plenty of street parking on Illawarra Road, Marrickville, but nowhere for people to sit down. For this reason, a group of local residents have started a petition to the Inner West council for the conversion of the Calvert St carpark into a town square. The group has also:
But the goal of the campaign is a permanent reclaiming of that space from cars, for community use. The space could be used for food markets, outdoor music, chess, table tennis, screenings of football matches, and any number of community events. Therefore the campaign is ramping up support for the petition currently, to demonstrate the extent of the support for such a change in the community. Above: Artist's Impression of the proposed Marrickville Town Square The campaign’s experience has been that most local residents are desperate for a public space and the proposition makes total sense to people intuitively. Some choice quotes from petition signatories include:
The biggest barriers are those in the small business representatives who are very concerned about loss of parking. The campaign has worked to reassure residents that there will still be back street parking and direct them to parking areas they may not know about, while emphasising the need to improve public transport, widen footpaths, and generally improve public amenity so residents don’t feel compelled to drive to their local shops.
We encourage you to sign the petition for Marrickville Town Square here: https://www.change.org/p/we-want-marrickville-town-square For more information:
2 Comments
By the time both of my children were at school I found myself wishing that our bike ride to and from school could be a little bit nicer. For context, it’s already nice-ish. Our school, Coburg North Primary School, has separated pedestrian and cycling paths that run right to the main entrance. It’s just that as usual, space is quite contested around school pick up and drop off times, and there is a lot of motor vehicle traffic. We also have to cross a very busy arterial road to get there. The inspiration to do something about it comes from my family’s lived experience of using active transport every day to school. Putting aside the daily constraints of the weather, it feels like our ambition to make active transport the first choice in our family is working well. But it isn’t exactly easy all the time. The chance came to do something about it when our council, Merri-bek (Victoria), started to directly engage with schools in a Ride and Stride program. As a volunteer on the school council, my first step was to work with the school in applying for this program. In our application we talked about how many children already ride to school, and we felt that this was only the beginning. The Ride and Stride program brought a range of new initiatives to our school. It enhanced our existing engagement in ride to school day, and also helped the council collect data on how many families used active transport to get to school, and how often. A centrepiece of the program was trialling “Open Streets”, where for a period of time before and after school the street is opened to humans by closing it to through motor vehicle traffic. As I’m sure many readers will appreciate, schools are busy places. We are fortunate in that our school supports these programs, but it is quite clear that they need to be community run to succeed here. Teachers have to teach. So the trick was to find a way to make this run with volunteers, so that we could deliver better active transport to the children, without putting any more burden on the school. The Open Streets trial events were carried off with great success, but quite a lot of work from the school, the council, and support from Bicycle Network. The trials revealed three things: that open streets can be carried out; that they have a huge impact on the amount of active transport used to get to school, and that an overwhelming majority in the community supported the idea. A successful trial needs to lead to something else, and in this case, it was establishing a fully fledged program. More than the trial, the program has to rely on volunteers. So in the background, I took on the role of lead volunteer in the program, which meant undertaking traffic management training, so that I could implement a traffic management plan. A traffic management plan is the sort of thing you see when roadworks are undertaken, we put signs out to advise of road closures in a safe way. These plans are drawn up by professionals. Another role of mine as lead volunteer was to build a team of willing adult volunteers who would help on the day. While I have to be present, as the person implementing the traffic management plan, each time we open the street, we also rely on other volunteers. We’ve got one person at each end of the street and another person roving the area. We provide advice on how to detour motor vehicles around the space, and we also help residents gain access to their homes if they need to, during the event. There’s even a building site in our area, and I often help the builders get their materials on site. An Open Streets event is a happy event. By opening a stretch of side street, only 100m long, we create an entirely different look and feel. The space becomes human centred. We close the road to motor vehicles from 8:15 to 9am. During this time, it’s wonderful to see how the space fills with families, and the children have lots more space to play, walk, ride and scoot – both to school and around the street once they arrive. The street becomes a social space, before the school bell rings. Lots of people hang around, the children play and chat to each other, and frankly the parents do the same. It changes the dynamic of the school drop off. In the afternoons from 3:15pm to 4:15 we do it again. When school ends at 3:30 pm, it fills up with people who sometimes hang around for a short time, and sometimes as long as they can! The afternoons have more of a relaxed feel, perhaps because of being on a Friday. Being a volunteer on the school council was no doubt a part of getting this initiative started. It also has to be said that the leadership from Merri-bek has been superb. Naturally, our school principal and leadership team have been instrumental as well. They understand the educational benefits of children using active transport to get to school, so the whole program is in their interest. So far this year, we’ve been running open streets on the first Friday of every month. We launched with a celebratory feel, and now have ingrained them as kind of normal. Every event isn’t a party, it just feels like a little slice of somewhere else, happening here in suburban Melbourne. In the beginning, I fielded plenty of questions from locals, but these have become much easier to answer as the evidence - that is, happy children playing - becomes visible. If you’ve ever had curiosity about what can be done at your school to improve active transport, then my suggestions are straightforward. First of all, contribute to your school council by volunteering. Secondly, make the time to explain the educational benefits of active transport to the school. Thirdly, engage with your local government on active transport. This last step for me was easy, but even if it’s difficult, I think it is always worth trying. For more info about the program and to read the reports visit: https://zerocarbonmerri-bek.org.au/travel-smart/ride-and-stride/ Robbie NapperRobbie Napper is a parent of two primary school aged children and lives with his family in Coburg, a Northern suburb of Melbourne. When not volunteering, Robbie is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University and sustainable transport expert. He is Deputy Director of Monash's Mobility Design Lab, member of the Australasian College of Road Safety, and holds a PhD in Industrial Design specialising in mobility. He is co-author of the book: Urban Mobility Design. |
Archives
July 2024
Categories
All
|