Tuesday 5 September 2017

We paint streets and ignore parking

Reading Mark Wagenbuur’s recent blog post about creating a contra-flow cycle facility in the Dutch city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch reminded me of a stupid Australian version in Adelaide.

During the Velo-city conference in 2014 we visited a couple of primary schools to learn about the Way2Go education program in South Australia. At Sturt Street Community School we were shown   how the school’s main outdoor sports area was located a few blocks away. The local government (City of Adelaide) was in the process of improving access to the sports ground and proudly showed their proposal to allow contra-flow cycling on Little Sturt Street.


Travel south from the school to reach the play area.

Little Sturt Street had one-way motor vehicle traffic in a northerly direction. There were parking bays on both sides of the street and a central travel lane. I was astonished to learn City of Adelaide's “improvement” for the children was to encourage contra-flow cycling in the existing travel lane, but planned to keep both rows of car parking. The law was changed to allow cycling in both directions, yet no additional space was allocated.


Little Sturt Street, Adelaide

The City's strategy involved painting a short entry lane to feed cycle traffic into the path of oncoming cars at the northern end; and to provide another short section of painted lane at the southern end for anyone who survived. These treatments have now been completed and can be seen on the current Google Street View images below.

Painted lane at northern end 


Southern end

Another element attempting to encourage cycling was the addition of a painted design on the street surface at the intersection with Maxwell Street. This place-making exercise involved the neighbourhood children with intention to slow traffic and give the children a feeling of ownership.

Maxwell Street intersection 2014

City of Adelaide has taken a lot of care to consider the minor and decorative details of the street. But, they have not solved the obvious problem: there are too many parked vehicles occupying valuable space that should be used to provide a safe cycle track.

The s'Hertogenbosch street described on the Bicycle Dutch website had one row of car parking and one travel lane. All of the car parking was removed to ensure enough room for safe cycling. The Adelaide street is wider, only half of the car parking would need to be removed to achieve a similar result. Is that possible?

The City of Adelaide currently has 44,700 publicly available car parking spaces. This is the most parking of any Australian city, more than Sydney and Perth combined. Adelaide's total includes 18,400 on-street parking spaces in an area of just 15.5 square kilometres. 

It is interesting to compare the two Dutch and Australian streets. Both are inner city streets with a mix of residential and commercial use. They are a similar length: 150 - 250 metres. Both had a need for contra-flow cycling. The potential cycling traffic in the Dutch street would be a mixture of people of all ages. In the Australian street there could be people of all ages, but it was specifically targeted at the needs of primary school children.

In both cities car parking is considered a valuable commodity, however car parking is probably more valuable in the Dutch city. As Mark Wagenbuur describes, the s'Hertogenbosch municipality have a waiting list for people wanting car parking spaces, with 200 listed as of late 2015. When the residents finally manage to get a permit they pay €208 per year for the privilege. 

So how did the Dutch city manage to remove eight highly prized on-street parking bays from their city street, yet Adelaide could not? 

Surely Australians care for their children as much Dutch people care for theirs? Have we become so obsessed with our car parking spaces we've become disconnected from logical reasoning?

It has become standard practise in Australia to fiddle around with paint on streets. We upgrade paving, plant trees and create websites to encourage behaviour change yet do very little to remove cars. We are dancing around and ignoring the elephant in the room.

How many local and state government bike plans or cycling strategies include parking management?
Queensland recently released a cycling strategy: the state's vision for the next ten years. The action plan called for leadership from six different state government departments yet I could not find anything about reducing car parking.

On-street car parking is a major restriction for building safe cycling infrastructure. While there continues to be an abundance of car parking in Australia, we will continue to drive. Any long term cycling plan should include a strategy to reduce this problem.

Back in 2014, we watched the children from Sturt Street Community School being taught cycling skills in the small playground at the side of the school.



When leaving I noticed this sign on the street-side gate. I took a quick photograph because I thought it was slightly strange.



The puzzle has been solved with the help of Google Street View. On a normal school day, when Bike Ed is not happening, it seems the staff squeeze their cars onto the school grounds and take over what could be a playground for children. This is an inner-city school with limited space for outdoor play.

Elephants in the room

3 comments:

  1. I'm curious about this comment:

    >The City of Adelaide currently has 44,700 publicly available car parking spaces. This is the most parking of any Australian city, more than Sydney and Perth combined.

    Where are these figures from? In particular "City of Adelaide" is a local government area, and just a fraction of "Adelaide". Are you comparing with City of Sydney and City of Perth (pretty arbitrary comparisons), or are you comparing the whole of Adelaide with the whole of Sydney and Perth?

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    1. The figure of 44,700 comes from the City of Adelaide’s website. I embedded a link in in the paragraph. Here it is again in text version:

      http://www.cityofadelaide.com.au/explore-the-city/city-travelling-transport/parking/car-parks

      The figures for the other cities were quoted in this article in The Advertiser in 2011. Perth at “about 10,000”, Sydney at 30,000 and Adelaide at 41,000.

      http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/glut-of-inner-city-spaces-hampers-traffic-reform/news-story/7e2152c4cb62ea6501049d81c0ee1515

      The figures apply to the local government areas. I agree the comparison between the Australian cities is not very accurate. It would be better to compare the number of bays per square kilometre, plus some reference to population density and number of workers for the areas as well.

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  2. City of Yarra allow bi-directional bicycle travel on one-way streets. This is both official (signs & markings) and unofficial (you'll never get fined for riding the wrong way on a one way street). To some extent, this does work to calm traffic (removing parking may just increase road width and the speed of motor vehicles). In other locations, motorists get irate if they expect a clear (and fast) rat-run. My preferred option is filtered permeability - a one way rat-run is still a rat-run. It allows retaining parking, but removes traffic volumes. While I'm in favour of reducing on-street parking, it's something that gets officials voted out of office, but I'm hoping the tides are turning in terms of public perception. The other tactic I'd like to see employed is a staged reduction (e.g. remove 15% of spaces every year). Removal becomes less contentious, and allows 50% removal in 5 years.

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