The Wrong Side of my Car

The blog that wants to go obsolete

27 Feb 2021

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.

This one is a menace for anything on wheels, with a sideways slope of well over 1:10 over half the width.

And 5 in a row. Since we’re too dumb to build small side streets, you see these big clusters **everywhere**.

Driveway crossings

The footpath should be continuous

It should be as clear as possible to everybody that cars give way to pedestrians at this spot. Make it self-explaining. Ideally the surface and design of the footpath changes as little as possible at your driveway.

And it is a bit hit and miss, depending on how this particular driveway and footpath were built. Sometimes the driveway was built in one go, resulting in a confusing situation where the footpath has priority, yet it appears to to be interrupted by the driveway.

It is level

This is not just about clarity, but also about making sure people will be able to use the footpath at all.

And guess what: we fail. Badly.

There are not 1, but 2 major problems:

At every driveway it goes down to street level, and up again. This by itself is annoying, it can cause you to trip, and kick scooters can get stuck.
More subtle but much more annoying: only the street side drops down, introducing a significant crossfall for pedestrians. And because driveways also taper out, the transitions in height slope especially badly towards the road. *2

This causes anything with wheels to roll onto the roadway. If you’re pushing a heavy stroller it is almost impossible to keep it on the footpath.

It still has a proper kerb

This is important because of how it limits the speed of cars: if you drive onto a kerb at high speed you’ll get a very unpleasant jolt, and you’ll intuitively learn to turn more slowly.

Of course we fail. There is no kerb, and the taper enables even faster turns. You can easily turn into these driveways at 30 km/h. This is dangerous for pedestrians, especially where parked cars block sightlines.

Small straight upstands are bad

If you look closely you’ll spot another odd detail:

You see the little upstand between the roadway and the footpath? It looks like a dud, but this upstand is consistent across newly installed crossings, and freshly rebuilt paths like the shared path on Northcote Road.

So despite looking flat, it will catch small wheels on strollers, scooters or bicycles. If your stroller just rolled off that sideways slope, it is almost impossible to pull it back onto the footpath.

This creates a strange paradox: for cars it looks and feels flat, but for strollers it still works like a proper kerb. Small upstands are evil, if you make a crossing flat, do it properly.

Alternatives

Overall, if your design goal is maximal comfort and convenience for cars, we’re doing pretty good. However if you want to make walking a reasonable option you’re looking at a pretty deficient design here.

How should we do it then?

Look at the designs in Robert Weetman’s posts — even though the context is quite different you should still get a pretty good idea. Bycycle Dutch has written a post about this as well.

A design I’m familiar with is the standard around where I grew up. Footpaths *3 have a continuous mountable kerb. At first blush a mountable kerb seems the wrong choice, however it means that at driveways there is no change at all in the design. It makes it look like you are going to cross the footpath at just a random spot.

It is so simple to get this right.

(*1)

More reading: some details, nitty gritty details.

If you’re wondering, New Zealand is pretty well represented by the British designs in these posts, including some half-assed designs in eg. Ponsonby and Grafton.

(*2)

The crossfall is much more than the 1:50 you often see mentioned in accessibility requirements for buildings. And, indeed, in AT’s own advice for driveway crossings (which is ignored in practice of course).

(*3)

In many exurban areas in Belgium these footpaths are also the bike lanes, making them de facto shared paths. Foot and cycle traffic is low — but it is still higher than what you usually see in Auckland. So how do we make this work? Short answer: don’t be a dick.

Also interesting: despite the apparent lack of protection you almost never see these paths blocked by parked cars. You are allowed to park on the roadway, but not on the cycleway.