Importance of Good Design – afterthoughts from first AGM

It was a pleasure attending the well-attended AGM on 26 July 2012. It’s great to see the community backing this fantastic proposal. You asked for contributions for your newsletter and / or your new website, so here are some thoughts from me.

At various points, the guest speaker [Grant Porteous, formerly Planning & Design Manager of New Plymouth District Council] stressed the importance of good design. Don’t do a rushed or shoddy job, do it properly, he told the audience. At various times during the evening, though, precise dimensions were mentioned for the proposed pathway. One width was given for the new bridge at Ferrymead, and another width for the remaining pathway.

I would like to caution that the determination of the pathway width must be an integral part of the design process and is not something that can be casually established. The conflict between cyclists and pedestrians was mentioned during the AGM (you might think of Hagley Park as a high use area that suffers from that problem). Whilst this can never be fully avoided, in the vast majority of cases, I suggest that conflict has been ‘designed into a shared path’ by making it too narrow.

Our company (ViaStrada) was asked by VicRoads (the state transport authority of Victoria, Australia) to develop a guideline for dimensioning shared pathways. This was cutting edge research, as it hadn’t been done for Australasia before. Our website has a brief article on the project, with a link pointing to the resulting design guide:

http://viastrada.co.nz/project/2009/shared-use-path-width-investigations

As the design guide outlines, what should be taken into account are expected use numbers for cyclists and pedestrians, and whether flows are tidal or even. It also says that beyond certain volume combinations, you would provide separate pathways for the user groups (which will have to be separated by something more imaginative than a painted line for this to work). To determine future usage is a seriously challenging transport planning question – something that we at ViaStrada can provide.   And coming back to Hagley Park, not a single shared pathway there complies with this design guide.

If Christchurch gets serious about providing for cyclists, I have no doubt that we could achieve between 15% and 20% of trips made by bike. Add to that the attraction of a coastal pathway for pedestrians and you will get a large number of people wanting to use the proposed path.  I promise you that not too many people would be keen to see a seawall shifted in 10 years’ time because due to increasing use, the path is far too narrow by then.  So we better get this right first time round.

So what it comes down to is to get the design right, and part of that is the involved process of determining future usage. This approach will mitigate conflict between pedestrians and cyclists, and will result in a pleasurable experience for all users of the Christchurch Coastal Pathway.

Axel Wilke, ViaStrada

Director, Senior Traffic Engineer and Transport Planner

Published on Tuesday, July 31st, 2012, under News