The Grafton Gully Multiway Boulevard
Kent Lundberg has shared his team’s proposal for a multiway boulevard in Auckland, New Zealand.
The plan beautifully identifies the space required, and the development opportunities it opens up.
There’s a lot more detail over on their blog, including the presentation made to council.
I love this proposal of course. My two design nit-picks from the cross-section above are:
- The segmentation of the access lane. Most importantly, I’d want parking on the outside of the access lane, by the tree, not on the inside against the sidewalk. This will help ensure the whole access lane has pedestrians crossing it. I don’t like the specifically marked bike lane either, as I fear it will stoke pedestrian conflicts. If there must be one, I would consider putting it between the parked cars and the trees, i.e. closer to the ‘thru flow’ centre lanes. Better yet, I’d just have a smooth concrete strip up the middle of the cobbled/textured access lane - perhaps also acting as a gutter - so that citizen cyclists take that and enforce slowness there. The cyclist on this Vancouver woonerf shows the idea:
- The grading of the access lane. I’d prefer to do away with all curbing, so that it’s clear the whole access lane is an extension of the pedestrian realm. Again I’d copy the image above with the bollards on the right to demarcate space.
I also wonder about the possibility of making the three major intersections (Nichols, Parnell, St Georges) into slowed places, with a roundabout, a square-about, Blackson twist, or some other kind of signal-less slowing-by-wiggle-inducing design.
But bravo to the team on a great proposal. Now to convince the engineers…
Appendix A: Parking Examples
Examples of parking on the tree side. Both Italian, coincidentally, but the French do it plenty too.
The Danes also, below. Also note the additional pedestrian space outside the parked cars. When I talk about putting the bike lane on the outside I imagine a scaled down version of this. Also note how the curb (very low) goes all the way along the access lane edge, right to the middle, like the access lane is one huge sidewalk.
This is California’s Octavia Boulevard which the designers later admitted made design errors that encouraged flow and speed in the access lane, namely: parking on the curbside, wrong texture, and too wide.
Appendix B: Further questions
Firstly, I wonder why the trucking lane is on the outside not the inside. The outside would be the turn lane, I imagine, yet I would expect trucks to be passing through more than turning off. EDIT: apparently it’s related to how trucks would join the route, which makes sense. More analysis required.
Secondly, the presentation includes this 32m cross-section for narrower parts, which commits the sin of the two-way on-street cycle track. These are dangerous at intersections.
Instead the whole area should be 'shared’, or a wide cycle track marked by texture (concrete amid bricks), but it should be clear that contraflow is illegal and so to be performed cautiously, not at speed.
7 Notes/ Hide
- camanoape liked this
- kuritomo liked this
- gavinovz liked this
- dr-beakman liked this
- stroadtoboulevard-blog posted this