The Wrong Side of my Car
The blog that wants to go obsolete
Are hills more difficult than flat terrain for cyclists?
Every couple of months I come across some article or video saying that ‘no, hills aren’t harder than the flat’.
Said no cyclist ever.
Let’s imagine some guy called Daniel *1, Danny for friends. He is riding his bicycle to his local café, 3 km up the road. He can go two ways. One way is a bit shorter but it goes over a hill with a big 5% climb. Can you guess which way he is going to go?
Protected bike lanes: what they do, and don’t
You often hear talk about protected bicycle lanes. How we need them. How they will keep parked cars out. How we need them to fix left hooks. Spoiler alert: they won’t, and they won’t. Let’s try to clear up some misunderstanding.
Apartment living: disadvantages only
A while ago I made an interactive version of the population density map on Observable, and I noticed something.
Safe School Street in Birkdale
Auckland Transport is running a trial arrangement at Birkdale Primary School. The project page even has some Vision Zero buzz words on it.
Auckland Transport is taking a Vision Zero approach to road safety. This means we are striving to have zero deaths or serious injuries on our transport system by 2050. To achieve this, we are working to create a more forgiving road network that recognises that we are human and make mistakes. But those mistakes should not mean someone dies or is seriously injured on our roads.
We have used material and colours that enhance the vibrancy of the area. This serves both as an effective and visual queue (sic) to motorists, that they are entering an area with lots of people moving around, and to add to the character of Birkdale Primary School and its surrounding neighbourhoods.
On the ground (literally) we see flower patterns and bollards, mainly to take away excessive road width, especially at the intersection. Making crossing the intersection less dangerous due to cars turning at high speed. These are welcome changes to anyone who has a kid walking to that school. Even with the build-outs Birkdale Road still has a very generous 7.5 m width.
So should we ride a bicycle on the footpath then?
You may remember this ad.
With a healthy portion of manufactured outrage. Hey, it is not allowed to ride a bike on the footpath. To this day I am not sure what their real problem was. zOMG they let a kid out unsupervised. Many people never miss a chance to pour scorn on parents.
Nevertheless there is talk of allowing cycling on the footpath. Officially you’re not allowed to do it, but a lot of people do it anyway. You’d be crazy to ride on the road.
So should the law catch up to the situation on the ground?
Ideally we shouldn’t ride on the footpath. Or, we shouldn’t have to. But, as is often the case, we will have to strike a balance between idealism and pragmatism.
Armchair expert
Let’s play armchair street designer.
This is an intersection on Mount Albert Road in Three Kings. Auckland transport is planning to rebuild it. Bike Auckland quite quickly posted their opinion on it and it is not exactly glowing.
Best practice or nothing
Is it OK to settle for painted bike lanes? Often, people will say no. Cycling advocates will point out that it is not real infrastructure and they’ll point at the Netherlands. Authorities make this argument, and then conveniently figure out that therefore the cost will blow out and they’ll cancel the whole thing.
Surely the Dutch don’t bother with just paint, right?
Well, this is a myth.
Cycling deadlock
I was recently introduced to the Wheeled Pedestrian blog. He is best described as a former cycling advocate. A bit disgruntled perhaps. He was lamenting the failure of cycling advocacy to achieve anything:
Progress will remain stalled while advocates fail to reflect on the reasons why they are failing. It is too convenient to blame AT. — @MarkBracey on twitter
I have made a dot map of cycling mode share a while ago. Now also on Observable. One dot for every quantum of 3 responses to the NZ Census. If you have a strong computer you can get an idea of the sheer difference in uptake between cycling and driving:
Sometimes the simplest of visualisations is the most bluntly clear. If we want cycling to be mainstream we have worse problems than just the lack of infrastructure.
The scale of Auckland
I sometimes tell people the scale of Auckland is mind-boggling. An endless sea of houses. Where does that impression come from?
It is of course because what I am used to in Europe. European cities have a different history, and therefore developed with a different settlement pattern. If we would have a city with that sort of pattern over here, what would it look like? How big is it?
We could come up with some imaginary settlement pattern, with about 1.5 to 1.7 million imaginary people.
3 years later, pedestrians (and cyclists) did not gain right of passage across Cook Street
That was 3 years ago. In this post I wrote:
there’s only so much you can do before the automobiles strike back.
Is cycling still for the rich?
Here are 2 somewhat related statements that sow division among urbanists:
- The car is the vehicle of the poor
- Cycling is for rich people
If you see these coming up you can expect mockery. However, we have census data and the so-called deprivation index, so we can actually check this. Last time we saw little evidence that either of them is wrong.
Did anything change with the 2018 census?
…and they’re open to cars again
Well, that didn’t take long.
This was never going to be an easy or uncontroversial project, but this demise still came quicker than I expected. And I don’t exactly consider myself more optimistic than average.
Where did we go wrong?
What do street name suffixes like “street” or “avenue” mean?
After living in a suburb for a while you get used to streets being randomly tagged as ‘Street’, ‘Road’, ‘Avenue’, or others. Here’s a top 10 for Auckland. *1
| Street type | amount | |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Road | 3809 |
| 2. | Place | 2491 |
| 3. | Street | 1853 |
| 4. | Avenue | 1439 |
| 5. | Drive | 977 |
| 6. | Lane | 521 |
| 7. | Crescent | 483 |
| 8. | Way | 285 |
| 9. | Terrace | 227 |
| 10. | Court | 225 |
How do you choose a type? Do they just choose a random one for each street? It looks like it for sure.
But these words actually have distinct meanings.
Unique street names counted in the area covered by the maps I generated from the census data.
They’ve actually closed some streets for cars
A few weeks ago, images like this started popping up in my Twitter feed.
It is called the Arthur Grey Low Traffic Area.
A Note about Sale Street
I noted the Sale Street / Wellesley Street intersection in the previous post. This intersection got sanitised recently.
A picture can tell you many things:
That Epic Victoria Quarter Rant
If you’re here for the crappy pictuers of our city centre, don’t miss David R’s epic rant about Victoria Quarter (that is approximately the area in the city centre west of Hobson Street).
- Part 1: Introduction
- Part 2: Cook Street and Motorway Severance
- Part 3: Vehicle Prioritisation and Pedestrian Design Failures *1
- Part 4: Pedestrian Hostile Intersection Design.
More recently he posted some progress:
You can tell right away a ton of work went into those posts. And into showing the local councillors around, and reporting issues. A petition. Maximum respect for putting in that effort.
Driveways: we’re Doing it Wrong
Robert Weetman has written a lot about footpath design on intersections, and why he prefers the Dutch design *1. I would also strongly prefer those designs over whatever is to be found here.
Streets are an example of the ‘everyday things’ that Don Norman writes about in his book Design of Everyday Things. You can definitely recognise similar thinking in that post. It shows the way good design helps people to intuitively do the right thing.
So, should we look at intersections in Auckland and see how these stack up? Eh, no. These are so uniformly bad it not worth bothering.
Let’s instead apply this line of thinking to driveways. Driveway crossings should be even less conspicuous than side streets. Since they are also places where turning car traffic gives way to pedestrians, you should see similar design features.
And driveway crossings, even though they don’t see many cars per day, we have a lot of them so they’re quite important.
Pedestrian give way rules: “We’re thinking about it”, year 4
About four years ago I wrote a post on our investigation on priority rules for pedestrians on crossings.
this Unique Piece of Kiwiana Heritage is going obsolete.
Nope, it did not.
Imagining something else for Birkenhead
After the Harbour Bridge opened in 1959 Onewa Road became the main arterial to the city. To cope with the traffic from Beach Haven and Birkdale (presumably), part of Mokoia Road was bypassed. This presents us now with an opportunity.
