The Wrong Side of my Car

The blog that wants to go obsolete

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.

This is AT’s drawing, and indeed, so-called bicycle advance boxes are never a good sign.

This involves moving kerbs around so it is a fairly invasive intervention. When doing this you don’t have to ask what you want the street to look like tomorrow, but how should it look like in 20 or 30 years from now.

Where are we

We are here, in Three Kings:

If you look to the wider street network, you will see that these side streets are of the smaller residential kind. To the north are a few shops marooned in a parking lot.

The streets to the south are an obvious candidate to create a low traffic neighbourhood:

So what is the circulation plan? This is important because you need to decide which directions and turns to allow on this intersection. And whether you expect lots of traffic or not.

Making the drawing

The first step in this drawing is how much space do we actually have? A fair bit — I started with filling all that space with footpath shading:

And what to include? I left out bus lanes. Like most arterials, we have 1 chain of width, or 20.1 m. That is too narrow for a pair of bus lanes, car lanes, bike lanes and footpaths. If you want both separate bus lanes and bike lanes, you basically can’t.

Next, the roadway. A pair of lanes is only 6.5 m wide. Do we really need all those turning lanes? Let’s be generous and keep the right turn lanes. But the left turn lane? No, get rid of it. Flush meridian? No. On-street parking? Hell no. Roads are for driving, not for parking.

Add a few island and pedestrian crossings.

For Dornwell Road and Hayr Road a 5 m roadway will be more than enough. If you want it two way — where is that circulation plan? If one-way the roadway can shrink further to 3 m. I will for now assume, as in the proposal, it will be entry only into these streets, but honestly, can we not just make them dead ends for cars?

For the parking lot we kept the entry and exit driveways. About that, do we need two separate turning lanes? I don’t think so.

The bike lane comes next. Pretty obvious. Leave some room at the bus stops to let people off a bus.

On side streets and driveways you build continous footways of course.

Finally, let’s crop away all the stuff outside the scope of this work so it becomes more comparable to the Auckland Transport drawing.

Of course if doing just the intersection those bike lanes will be pretty silly. That is why you paint your entire network now, so this will become part of a longer term process of upgrading it bit by bit.

Did I something amateur level stupid? Probably yes, but compared to the strange layout of some intersections (look at the current one), I think it will work just fine. If you want to bicker about armchair experts, make sure the professional version looks at least half decent.

Ask that question. How do you want that intersection to look like in 30 years? Think about it. Using your brain before ripping up a road is much cheaper than doing it the other way around.

No comments