Parking, pedestrians and government borders

Here is a recent press advertisement for a new office building in Subiaco. The developers and photographer have found the best angle for the building to make it look good and help sell the office space. That camera position is about ten metres off the ground, at the second floor level. None us will ever see the building from that angle unless we hire a cherry picker and stand in the bucket high above the middle of the road.

This is how it appears for pedestrians at eye level. Not so good. The Railway Parade side of the building has eighty metres of blank wall punctuated with metal vents for the car park behind.

If you get back far enough, it looks OK, but for a person walking it offers nothing of interest. There is also no awning to provide any weather protection. An artist impression below, which must have been used during the pre-construction approval stages, shows a hedge on this side of the building. There is now no room for a hedge.

It is disappointing that the City of Subiaco has allowed such a bleak addition to the street scape. Imagine if every building was like this: it would be like walking in a concrete trench.

There are 133 cars bays in this building. 

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The photographs show what 133 cars look like on the road. The City of Subiaco's outdated planning rules stipulate this is the minimum number that must park in the building. One car for every 40 square metres of office space.

It seems the City of Subiaco also have limited controls in place for how the parking is arranged. If the developers of Westgate had been required to put the parking below ground-level the street-level conditions for pedestrians could have been greatly improved. There is no basement in this building: there is a ground-level off Bagot Road, and another lower ground-level off Railway Road.

This building is 350 metres from the Daglish train station. The number 27 bus stops at the front door and the PSP (bike path) is only 50 metres away. This building has better transport connections than most of the office accommodation in St Georges Terrace, the heart of Perth's central business district.

Westgate in the City of Perth

If the Westgate building was constructed just two kilometres to the east, it would be out of the City of Subiaco and into the City of Perth's local government territory. The City of Perth have a completely different attitude to parking and the effect vehicle movements can have on a community. They stipulate  the maximum amount of parking allowable, not minimums. The calculations for car bays are done on land area and not lettable floor space. And they are much less. I am happy to be corrected, but my interpretation of the CoP parking policy gives a result of just 16 car bays if the Westgate building was over the border. 

That is a big difference:

• 117 less cars in the lower levels of the building. Less blank walls and fewer vents. The architects could do something interesting with the ground floor. 
• There would be over 230 less vehicle movements across the footpaths each day.
• Out on the street, there would be a lot more people walking, using public transport and riding bicycles.

Westgate in the Town of Cambridge

Another comparison, which will make you despair if you care about walking. If Westgate was about one kilometre to the north of Subiaco, across the other border into the local government area called the Town of Cambridge, the number of car parking bays required in the same building would be 180. One car space for every 30 square metres of lettable office space.

Developers, if interested, have the ability to plea for a reduction in these numbers but with such a high starting position the negotiations may only give a reduction to levels that are still considered excessive in other local government areas.

For example, the developers of this mixed-use building under construction at 3 Loftus Street West Leederville managed to have the parking requirement reduced from 227 car bays to 129 (ToC council minutes PDF ).

Time to change the planning polices

There are parts of the Town of Cambridge, such as West Leederville, that are just two kilometres from the heart of Perth city. Subiaco is a similar distance. To have such dramatically different planning rules from the City of Perth makes no sense. These inner urban areas are really part of the city. These areas should be setting maximum parking requirements for buildings, not minimum.

Parts of the City of Subiaco look like this:

And there are parts of the City of Perth that look like this:

Trying to squeeze a lot of cars into buildings will continue to compromise the design and street scape in ways that are detrimental to pedestrians. We do not have to keep doing it.

If the The Shard was in the City of Subiaco instead of London? With its 110,000 square metres of floorspace it would be required to have a minimum of 2750 car bays.  It has just 47.

Swan River Bicycle Ferry

Could the bicycle-ferry be a solution to Perth's traffic congestion?

I have an idea. A ferry from Point Walter jetty in Bicton to the Nedlands jetty. There is nothing new with that, people have been asking for more ferries on the Swan River for a long time. When trains are cancelled, or when road congestion gets particularly bad, the idea sometimes gets some airing in the media. What has been missing in the previous discussions has been bicycles.

My proposal is for the ferries to be specifically designed to carry bicycles in addition to people. This would be at all times of the day, unlike Perth's trains that have to exclude bicycles during peak times. They would have easy roll-on, roll-off access and good bicycle racks on board. This will allow the rider to do all the handling of the bicycle and ensure a fast service.

Swan River showing Point Walter to Nedlands route

By designing the service for people riding bicycles, the catchment area for potential passengers is greatly extended compared to walking and will help overcome the problem of lack of urban density at each of the ferry terminals.

This rough map of the Point Walter area shows the distances for ten minutes walking compared with ten minutes riding a bicycle.

Point Walter and surrounding district

Up to now, Perth's low urban density and car-based “park and ride” thinking has prevented ferries being established as viable transport links. The residents of the expensive riverside neighbourhoods would not be in favour of large car parks radiating from their local jetty in the way that currently happens at Perth’s train stations. With a bicycle-based plan, no additional car parking is required.

The Nedlands jetty is an easy one kilometre ride to the University of Western Australia. The huge QEII Medical Centre is only three kilometres using the existing separated shared paths, or 2.5 kilometres if you are happy to use the road. Subiaco is five kilometres away and you can get to the Perth CBD from the Nedlands jetty using a fully separated shared path beside the river.

QEII Medical Centre employs many. This is just the car park.

Once the service is established, the ferry service could be extended to link through to the Perth CBD at Barrack Street but adding this extra leg to the journey would probably double the number of vessels required to maintain the same frequency. 

Shared path from Nedlands to Perth CBD

The combination of ferry and bicycle could result in journey times that are similar to car travel at peak times. For example, a person living in Bicton who works at QEII Medical Centre in Nedlands could get to work using the following methods:

1. A 20 km bicycle ride around the river using the shared paths. 60+ minutes.
2. Two buses, plus walking. 50 to 70 minutes.
3. Car via Stirling Highway. 30 to 40 minutes depending on traffic and time of day.
4. Bicycle ride for 2 km on suburban streets, the bicycle-ferry 4 km, bicycle ride for 3 km on the separated paths next to the river and Kings Park.  45 minutes.

Transperth, the Western Australian State Government transport authority would be the logical service providers. The ticketing could be done using the excellent Smartrider automated ticket system and the Transperth journey planner could be expanded to include travel times for bicycles. Transperth would also have the ability to adjust their buses to connect with the ferries for those disadvantaged souls who don't own a bicycle.

In fact, the existing Transperth ferries would need very little adjustment to make them suitable. Transperth currently has two ferries which provide a shuttle service between South Perth and the Perth central business district. These ferries already have a section allocated to carry bicycles, but only four per trip.

Current bicycle rack

To provide a viable Point Walter to Nedlands bicycle-ferry service, Transperth could continue with the same type of vessel and simply adjust the interior seating arrangement. The current configuration has seating for 122 people, some clear areas for prams and wheelchairs, plus a rack to suit four bikes. A new configuration could provide capacity for 30 bicycles and still have room for about 70 people. A good capacity is essential for the ferry to function as a reliable service for people riding bicycles. The current South Perth to Perth CBD service will not accept bicycles on-board once the four places are filled. This might be OK for a ferry that takes tourists to the zoo but not for a commuter orientated Point Walter to Nedlands route.

Bicycle storage area in foreground

Apart from the South Perth to Perth CBD ferry, there are no regular ferries operating on the Swan River. This will seem surprising to anyone not living in Western Australia. Having a city of 1.8 million  people surrounding such an impressive body of water you would expect us to have several transport connections using ferries but it has not happened.

The population of Perth’s metropolitan area has expanded along the rail and road corridors. The urban density near the river is generally low, apart from the CBDs of Perth and Fremantle. This lack of density is one of the main reasons conventional ferries routes have not been expanded on the Swan River. 

Perth city from South Perth

There was an attempt at a passenger ferry between Fremantle and Perth about ten years ago. It was a commercial non-government operation and failed because not enough people used the service. Although it would have been a pleasant way to travel, the journey time by train is 27 minutes compared to around 50 minutes by ferry. There are some speed restrictions on the river that prevent the ferries travelling fast, particularly near the Fremantle end. At any of the ferry-stops between these two relatively dense urban areas there would have been very few passengers. I think the frequency of the ferries was also low because the operators only had one or two vessels making the complete journey. It would have been a long wait between trips and passengers would have needed to plan their journey carefully.

I am not an expert, but I know an important part of getting public transport to succeed is getting the trip frequency to a level where passengers do not have look at timetables.  A more frequent service could be achieved by not going all the way to Fremantle and avoiding the slow and narrow section of the river. The section of river between Point Walter and Nedlands is wide and therefore has very few speed restrictions. The distance between those two jetties, at approximately four kilometres, is relatively short which allows both a fast and frequent service to be provided with fewer vessels. It will be more efficient to just operate between these two points instead of trying to provide a Perth to Fremantle ferry.

A gut-feeling tells me a bicycle-ferry could make a very effective transport link for a relatively low infrastructure cost. There are existing jetties at both locations. Ideally the jetties would be upgraded with adjustable decks to allow entry at the same height, but a service could get started without doing that modification. The South Perth to Perth CBD ferry is operated but just one person, yet is able to provide a level entry for people in wheelchairs because the jetties have the ability for height adjustment. Wheeling a bicycle on board is no problem.

Jetty height matched to ferry

The Point Walter to Nedlands connection could be the first part of a bicycle-ferry network. The next stage could be a link from Point Walter to the Claremont jetty. The map below shows four private secondary schools and a university campus within two kilometres. There are thousands of students attending these schools. How many get driven by car from homes that are south of the river? School traffic creates a lot of congestion on Stirling Highway. This ferry link could help save the highway from the current plans to have it reamed wider to resemble a freeway.

Claremont Jetty linked to Point Walter 

Here is a list of the schools within bicycle riding or walking distance of Claremont Jetty:

• Christ Church Grammar School - 550m
• Methodist Ladies College - 1 km
• University of Western Australia Claremont Campus - 1 km
• Scotch College - 1.5km
• Presbyterian Ladies College - 2.6 km
• John XXII College - 3.4 km
• St Hilda’s Anglican School for Girls - 3.6 km
• Shenton College - 4 km (17 mins)

And some other places:

• Bethesda Hospital - 400m
• Claremont Quarter Shopping Centre - 850m
• Claremont Showgrounds - 1.5 km
• Swanbourne Beach - 3.4 km

All these destinations could be connected by bicycle to the suburbs of Bicton, Palmyra, East Fremantle and Attadale with the addition of a bicycle-ferry.

One final point: these new ferry services should not be half-done. They need to have a frequency and time span that will give reliability to commuters and make it easy for people to adjust to not using a car. I'm thinking: 6am to 9pm from Monday to Friday. Departing every 15 minutes during peak hours and every 30 minutes at other times. Weekends 8am to 7pm every 30 minutes.

Road congestion in Perth has increased in recent years and some of Perth's best bicycle infrastructure is beside the river. Our population is growing rapidly. Perhaps now in the right time to expand our transport network onto the river and combine it with the flexibility of the bicycle.

Do you think a bicycle-ferry between Bicton and Nedlands has a good chance of succeeding? Would you use it?  Am I dreaming?  Let me know your thoughts.

Swan River and Perth CBD

Black-spot under construction

Part of Cambridge Street is having a make-over. It is a section about 400m long in the inner-western suburb of West Leederville. This area is controlled by the local government authority, the Town of Cambridge, who state the aim of the project is "to create a pedestrian friendly precinct along Cambridge Street, while retaining it as a traffic route". Unfortunately there is no consideration to accommodate bicycle traffic and the changes will result in more dangerous conditions for riding.

Cambridge Street, West Leederville

The existing road had two lanes in each direction. The centre lanes carrying the majority of traffic and the outside lanes having a mixture of parking bays, loading zones, bus-stops and no-standing zones. These outside lanes were only used for continuously moving traffic in peak-hour periods. I had noticed in these peak times the traffic volume did not seem to justify having two lanes in each direction. The people at the Town of Cambridge must have agreed because their plan is to reduce Cambridge Street to one lane in each direction.

This might appear to be a modern approach: restricting the movement of motorised traffic and allowing more space for other modes of transport. However once the roadworks are complete, motorists will barely notice a change; pedestrians may have some improvement; and bicycle riders will be worse off. This is more of a landscaping exercise than a revision of traffic management. The project is like something from the 1980s.

Site plan

For motorists, the "one-lane" design will have additional right-turn pockets and the left turns will have a radius that allows for fast cornering. This will ensure the usual traffic flow.

Pedestrians will have wider footpaths in some areas and some wider central islands, but the dropped-curb crossing points will be away from the desire lines at several places.

Kimberley Street

Why will the new design be worse for bicycle riding? In practical terms, for the full length of Cambridge Street, the existing outer lane acts as a bike lane where there are no parked cars or vehicles in loading bays. It is not an ideal road, but motor vehicles can pass a bicycle without too much problem. There are plenty of sections where bike riders can move closer to the curb using the outer lane while the motor vehicles stay in the centre lane.

Google view, January 2010

Google view, January 2010

Once the modifications are completed in West Leederville, the new 400 metre-long section of Cambridge Street will have an almost continuous row of central islands and the outer lane will be gone. The carriageway will only be 3.2 metres wide. Bicycle riders need one metre, trucks and buses are 2.5 metres wide. That is 3.5 metres without allowing for a gap. With a carriageway of 3.2 metres, there simply is not enough space for both, and overtaking will not be possible.

Specification from Cycling Aspects of Ausroads Guides

Those people on bicycles who feel brave and are able to deal with aggressive drivers can take-the-lane and hold back the traffic. A bit like a rolling roadblock. The rest will need to get off and walk or avoid the place completely.

This situation is almost ridiculous. I wondered how the Town of Cambridge got to a position where bicycles have been excluded from what is meant to be a revitalised "high street" precinct. If we look back to the Town of Cambridge Bicycle Plan 2009 (PDF link) we might have the answer. It was done by the company Shawmac Pty Ltd who are civil engineers, traffic engineers and risk managers. In reference to Cambridge Street (page 39) it was noted that there were no bicycle facilities provided and the:

"Road environment not conducive to on-road facilities. Off-road facilities not recommended due to land use. Adequate parallel east-west routes provided."

The plan was to ignore Cambridge Street and provide a PSP (principal shared path) beside Railway Parade which is one block to the south and runs parallel. It has not been built yet. If it eventually gets done, it might be useful for commuting bicycle traffic but it will not much help if you want to visit the businesses on Cambridge Street.

In contrast to the Town of Cambridge Bicycle Plan 2009 there is another document that details an alternative option for Cambridge Street. The West Leederville Planning & Urban Design Study Transport Report (PDF 2.3 MB) done in December 2010 by Sinclair Knight Merz Pty Ltd recommended a bicycle route along Cambridge. You can see it shown by the pale blue line on page 81 of the report below.  This report had a more holistic approach and examined the improvements that could be made to the transport network and their potential to benefit the community.

West Leederville Stage 2 Transport Report

You can also read in the note in the box where the Town of Cambridge council has decided not to accept the recommendation of this report and preferred to stay with the earlier 2009 bicycle plan. It appears to be a case of town planning versus traffic engineering. The traffic engineers won.

There are a couple of odd things in the Town of Cambridge Bicycle Plan 2009. After stating there were adequate east-west routes parallel to Cambridge Street, later in the document (page 63), when explaining long term requirements,  Shawmac say the east-west links need improving:

"The major changes required to the existing Town of Cambridge Bike Plan predominately centres on providing stronger east-west links. The current north-south links are reasonably well catered for. Given the nature of the east-west streets throughout the Town, provision of cycle facilities has been restricted by commercial development, pavement width, on-road parking, property access, public utility installations (eg Western Power poles) and verge improvements (eg trees)."

The 2009 plan also includes a record of crash data provided by Main Roads WA. It gives information about all the crashes involving bicycles with motor vehicles in the 22 square kilometres of the Town of Cambridge for the five years leading up to December 2007. Fourteen percent of the crashes were in Cambridge Street.

There is enough room on Cambridge Street to have a protected bicycle lane from West Perth to City Beach. Imagine that. One lane for motor vehicles and one for bikes. All the way.

The discussion about Cambridge Street should be about the merits of a protected lane versus an on-road lane. Not about there being no provision at all.