Clipsal Bowden Development

Back in 2008, our State Government bought a very large parcel of inner city land where the Clipsal factory used to be. It is on the corner of Park Terrace and Port Road in Bowden. The plan is for the site to be developed into Transport Oriented Development known as Bowden Village.

Rather than the usual style of development, which consists of carving up a piece of arable land and plonking showhomes on it, this is being carefully designed from the outset. Developers are required to follow specific design guidelines. Already, properties are for sale:



They include townhouses:



and 3-level terraces as well as others:



Already, you can see how the streets will look. They are built in such a way that slow driving is encouraged:



One of the artist's impressions shows a large bridge:



Whether it is pedestrian only rather than an awesome bike and pedestrian bridge is unclear. It is also not clear where it goes. Time will tell.

The whole thing is organised by a new agency called Renewal SA which is run by that clever fellow Fred Hansen from Portland Oregon. He was responsible for putting their public transport system (Tri-Met) on the map.

As I understand it, the development is one of the reasons the tramline was extended to the Entertainment Centre, although I think whoever planned that may have forgotten that there was already a railway station there - closer to the site than the tramstop is.

One of the reasons for developing the site close to transport is to give residents the choice of using modes of transport other than cars and potentially not to have to own a car at all if they wish. The tram's ok but it's pretty slow from the Entertainment Centre to the CBD. It's also a bit of a walk from the other side of the redevelopment. The train is faster but not all trains stop at Bowden station so you can have a bit of a wait. It also used to be a bit dingy but that has improved significantly since the Loose Caboose café opened there.

Given the development's proximity to the CBD, you have to wonder why cheaper forms of transport are not being considered (or at least don't appear to be). Just across the other side of Park Terrace begins a safe cycle route all the way into the city. Much of the way it is pretty wide and in places has already been upgraded:



And who would not want a view like this on their morning commute:



This fairly rudimentary map shows the development relative to the city along with the current bike and walking route in purple:



As I say, a lot of the work is done. The trick is tidying up the loose ends. That is, making it part of a wider network. Join it up to the development using either the bridge or a decent signalised crossing. And at the other end, make it join seemlessly to the major roads through the city - where decent protected paths will of course be in place by then (!). Half the work is done. You also of course need to ensure that developers accommodate all of this as well. It's one thing to be able to get home or to your destination but you also need somewhere safe and easy to put your bike once you get there.

There really is potential for this sort of thing all over the place.

The point is, you don't need to spend $100m on a tramway to provide a decent, economical (and very cheap) alternative to driving.


I should add that I stole the pictures of the townhouses and terraces from the pdf's I linked to. They're on the lifemoreinteresting website.

Also, if there are ever any plans to develop pedestrian and cycling links from Bowden to the city, they really need to work on the signalised crossing over Park Terrace that is next to the railway crossing there. I had to wait 4 mins and 50 secs after pressing the button!

An illustration

So there I was. It's 5.30. I am still at work on the wrong side of the Central Markets. I have to be at the Palace Nova on Rundle Street in time for a 6 o'clock movie. Don't have the bike. I'm in a suit.

In that situation, you have a choice. Taxi? Meh ... possibly but at that time of night, my slow wheezing jogging along Wright Street was faster than the line of cars going in my direction. In any event, you still have to get to Victoria Square to the cab rank and there's no guarantee of getting a cab. Even if you do, having to pay for it is a bit of an imposition, especially if you're a tight-arse.

The second option is the tram - from Victoria Square to Rundle Mall. It's slow and it really only saves you about 700m of the total 2½ km trip. Hardly worth it and a complete waste of time if you have to wait for longer than a minute.

I settled on walking/running. This is the route I ended up taking:


In the end, I just made it - hot, sweaty and puffed out. In fact, when I arrived, I did the decent thing and warned everyone I was smelly. I took off my jacket and the children said, "dad, dad, don't take off your jacket. You've got totally sweaty armpits."

Now this is one of the many illustrations that show the need for a decent bikeshare system - but with two qualifications. First, a quick comparison between Melbourne and Dublin shows that the one difference between the two (the dreaded "H" word) is a significant obstacle to spontaneous use. You would have to have an exemption for the system. Second, hiring bikes with our roads in their current state is a waste of time. Nobody in their right mind is spontaneously going to hire a bike to get across town if they have to dodge trucks and buses. That's really just another way of ending up with sweaty armpits.

In the childish wonderland that is in my head, there are bikehire docks across the CBD:


(From Wikimedia Commons)
They are connected by smooth wide bike lanes that are separated from fast-moving traffic and have their own lights at intersections.

People in suits, who are running late, can ride them 2½ km across town in 5 minutes. When they get to the Palace Nova, they dock the bike and walk in looking urbane and sophisticated - a bit like James Bond after he's had a fight.

You know it makes sense. Here's the alternative:

  (Not me but it might as well be. Borrowed from Bubblews)

Countdown Lights

In enlightened countries where pedestrians are treated with just a teensy bit of respect, they have traffic lights that tell pedestrians how much longer they have to wait. We have all stood on the side of the street, silently cursing while repeatedly pressing the button and pleading to be given permission to cross. A wait of three minutes can seem like an eternity - because we don't know when it will end. It's like a mild form of psychological torture.

If you have real time information about how long it will be before the lights change (or indeed how long it will be before the next bus), the pain is usually alleviated.

This is what they look like:

 
(Borrowed - hopefully legally - from a post on Twitter by Brooklyn Spoke)

And this is what we have:



They are on King William Street (Pirie Street intersection) and North Terrace so far (or at least those are the ones I have seen).

There is a subtle yet crucial difference between the two. The overseas ones tell you how long it will be before you can cross. Ours don't give you that information. Instead they give you a countdown telling you how much time you have left to scurry across the road.

It's like a silent Sergeant Major barking orders at you to get out of the way.

Nice idea. Poorly executed.

Accepting the the malcontents' mantle

For as long as any of us can remember, the phrase 'whinging poms' has been used to describe the English. However according to a recent editorial on the Guardian website, 'it's time for Australians to accept the malcontents' mantle'.

Yay. Here goes.

On the corner of Regency Road and Main North Road is Northpark Shopping Centre. On the opposite side of Main North Road at the same intersection is Regency Plaza, which contains a Woolworths, a Cheap As Chips, a bread shop, a cafe and a pub complete with pokies room. It is all surrounded by a car park the size of a high school which also serves Sefton Plaza just to the south. Here's an aerial shot:



The council provides a community bus for pensioners and others who do not have access to a car. It is run by a part-time coordinator who is then assisted by volunteers.

It runs a few services including a shopping run to Northpark and Sefton Plaza each week. You just telephone the designated number to book your seat. The catchment area served by the bus is quite small but non-motorised forms of transport are difficult to use because of the many physical barriers in the way. Hence the need for the bus.

At Regency Plaza, there is a stop set aside for the bus. You can see its two little shelters in the aerial shot above. It is just to the right of the building marked 'Woolworths Regency Plaza' and next to the green car.

Here it is:



You can see that despite the provision of a carpark the size of a football field, people are still that arrogant that they park their crappy cars where the bus should go. If there was any confusion, you'd think this might resolve it:



I can't quite see why people insist on parking there. I can only assume it is because the shelters provide a bit of shade. Not sure it makes a difference given that most shoppers pop in an out quickly and use the Woolworths as their corner shop - because all of the corner shops have been put out of business.

The most tragic part of all of this is that the big destination that the bus goes to is this:



A beige box with a large Woolworths sign. Although this picture looks like the arse end of the building where the bins are kept, you'll see in the distance that it is actually the entrance. Just to the right of the entrance is the community bus stop. It is one of the most drab and depressing buildings I know. How it got past the planning committee still amazes me to this day.

In case you were wondering, the two cars are a Mazda 3 with registration S674AVV and a Mitsubishi ute with registration S841ASG. Sunday, 24 March at 1.15pm..

Service Streets

Adelaide is blessed with not having freeways running through it. We came close but thankfully escaped that fate. There is a designated ring route around the city but it is a normal, yet wide, street with multiple lanes. There are no flyovers or highway junctions, just regularly spaced traffic lights.

On parts of the ring route, the streets are residential. Robe Terrace in Medindie is one of them. The houses along that street are generally large turn of the century mansions. Once upon a time, the residents lived pretty much on the ring route. However, a few years ago, the position was changed and service streets were built along there with large walls or bushes used to block the noise from all of the traffic.

In most places, the service streets are not through routes which means that once residents are off the ring route, they have a quiet route leading to their door step or driveway.

Another great thing about service streets is that they can be used as a designated cycle route. Currently, the ends are blocked with obstacles in the form of bollards, walls and shrubbery.

Nevertheless, they cover a pretty decent uninterrupted portion of the city ring route around North Adelaide. Here they are shown in red:

If you start at the Wine Centre on the corner of Hackney Road and North Terrace, you have the space that is currently car parking:

That continues alongside Botanic Park where there is plenty of space:

You then hit the bridge over the Torrens. That clearly requires a bit of remedial work. Indeed, a separate bicycle bridge would work best:

What's good is that it intersects with the Linear Park shared path. In this next picture (taken from the bridge), you can see a cyclist dressed in fairly typical Australian cyclist attire:

Then you hit the intersection with Bundey's Road which also requires a bit of remedial treatment to turn it into a friendly intersection:

Beyond Bundeys Road, there is space to move away from the road:

and then join Mann Terrace:

before crossing Melbourne Street:

and carrying along Mann Terrace. The route then crosses Robe Terrace:

and uses the service street to travel west along Robe Terrace:

The service street eventually crosses Main North Road to another service street:

And so it continues.

The space is there. All it needs is the little joined up bits to be fixed. Improve the intersections, remove the obstacles and close off the entrances that allow the service streets to be used as rat-runs, especially by Wilderness School mothers in their Lexus 4WDs.

Turning service streets into part of a joined up cycle network is easy. To see how, look no further than Bicycle Dutch:



On the rest of the ring route around the city, with a bit of imagination, you could easily find space to continue a wide uninterrupted bi-directional path. There are service streets along Fullarton Road (as well as the parklands) and the same applies to Greenhill Road. West Terrace already has a path (although it is too narrow) but it is not connected to anything.

Update (18 May 2014): I found this by accident when playing on Google Streetview (as you do). It shows how a service street connects with a two way cycle lane; for example, at the end of Mann Terrace in the picture above. It is on Gordelweg in Rotterdam :

Update (March 2015):

The crossings at Melbourne Street and joining Mann Terrace have been widened and improved so you can sail through them without slowing down rather than feeling like you're on an obstacle course. The improvements are part of updates to the Parklands Trail and there are plans to include off-road bike lanes along Hackney Road as part of the O-Bahn extension.

There are d**kheads everywhere

This is one of a collection of Danish handlebar videos on Cyclodeo:


Within 10 seconds of starting, you see one selfish geezer who has (illegally) plonked his crappy Volkswagen Caddy on the pavement and bike lane. Then to top it off, without bothering to look, he whacks his door open into the path of the oncoming cyclist.

It just goes to show.

Still, the rest of the video shows pretty well the Danish way of keeping cars and bikes separate - a method we could adopt without too much fuss at all.

You then compare it to the Dutch though and you see just how well they do it. The video is from a small town called Harderwijk (population 47,000 - about twice that of Mount Gambier. It's about 10km across so twice the size. Just saying).

Rat runs

Every so often, a local council will recognise that allowing motorists unlimited used of local streets, regardless of whether they are local residents or just passing through, is a very expensive exercise. Contrary to popular belief, motorists do not "pay" for the road through registration and petrol tax. The bulk of registration fees are insurance premiums and the cost of administering the system. The cost of building and maintaining main roads comes from general revenue. In the case of local roads, it comes from the local ratepayers.

One way of lowering the maintenance burden is to cut down on the amount of traffic. The easiest way of doing that is to prevent "rat running". That is, allowing local residential streets to be used as thoroughfares by people who are just driving through the area.

Any suggestion is generally treated with the usual howls of protest, the loudest coming from people who do not use those local roads but feel a towering sense of entitlement to use them. After all, they "pay" for the roads, don't they? The howling is dressed up in other reasons such as; it will make other roads more congested, it will damage local businesses and the crowning turd in the cowpat - it will stop emergency services vehicles from getting through.

All complete nonsense of course.

In most areas, there is generally no designation between roads. The main difference between main arterial roads and residential streets is the width and the fact that the arterials have a 60 km/h speed limit while the residential streets have a (inappropriately high) 50 km/h speed limit. Other than that, anyone can use them as they wish.

You can see that in almost any suburb. This is a side street in Kilburn close to the corner of Regency and Churchill Road. I took this street at Random. It is Alabama Avenue and runs parallel to Churchill Road. After visiting Bunnings, I turned on it from Churchill Road to head east:

Here is the view looking back towards Churchill Road:

Here is the view towards Prospect Road at the other end:

You can see it is an invitation to all motorists to use it as an alternative to Regency Road. Nothing to slow you down except a couple of junctions. The signal is clear. This is space for cars with no obstacles to slow you down. You can speed through there with blinkers on. You would never believe this is a place where people live. All sense of neighbourhood is destroyed. Tragically, the two east-west streets either side are exactly the same.

This is a big problem right across Adelaide's suburbs. The street should be blocked to through traffic. Not just traffic-calmed with speed bumps. They make no difference to traffic levels. They merely provide a slight irritation for drivers and an even bigger one for anyone on a bicycle. The road should be blocked. It should be physically impossible for through traffic to be able to use it.

It is not hard to find somewhere that proves that blocking through traffic does not result in the sky caving in. This is a small part of Modbury Heights in the north east:

You can see that the streets inside the yellow coloured main roads are not open to through traffic. If for example you turn onto Minerva Crescent from Ladywood Drive, you very quickly end back there. There is no way to drive through to the other main roads. You have to use the main roads themselves to do that.

These neighbourhoods are doing ok. Emergency Services vehicles are getting through. Properly categorising streets by use can make a huge difference to local amenity. It is not the only thing of course. It should be part of a number of things done together to make our suburbs suitable for people rather than motor vehicles but it is a pretty easy one.