Revitalising Adelaide
Michael Robertson. Urban Ecology Australia. 2005.11
(See also longer version of this article, Revitalising Metropolitan Adelaide - UEA submission to the Planning Strategy for Metropolitan Adelaide, August 2005)
Introduction
Adelaide's urban environment can be improved by reducing motor vehicle traffic, greening local streets and making them safer for children, calming main roads, and revitalising urban centres with mixed use development.
Urban Centres
Increasing the range of activities and facilities at urban centres will make them more interesting places for locals and visitors and better integrate the life of the city with its public transport system, thus reducing car dependency.
Urban centres can be revitalised with a mixture of residential, commercial and community functions. Residential development should cater for a range of income groups and lifestyles.
Commercial development should encourage enterprises of all kinds to cluster side by side. Community facilities such as libraries and meeting places will pack in more activity, and allow centres remain active after the shops close.
Residential units suffused throughout an urban centre improve security through passive surveillance, and by preventing the public space feeling "abandoned" after-hours.
The outdoor spaces at urban centres, especially where activity focuses, should consist of gardens filled trees and other vegetation, and threaded by pedestrian and cycle paths. Surface carparks, if any, should be small and located at the periphery.
Regional Centres
Regional centres should be upgraded to provide many of the functions that the Metropolitan Centre now provides such as a comprehensive range of shops and other services, offices for government departments and major firms, and (active) cultural facilities. The shopping facilities at most regional centres are fairly well developed.But office and cultural facilities need to be increased.
The mix of shops should include a range of more marginal or experimental shops, eg shops which emerge as an extension of people's hobbies. Setting aside shopspace with low rental for alternative, specialised ventures will add to the variety and character of commercial activity at these centres.
The Metropolitan Centre
The Metropolitan Centre (the CBD) should give priority for specialised activities that need a metropolitan-wide catchment to support them. Offices in the metro centre should be used to bring together people in specialised areas to work together and share ideas, perhaps one or two days a week, while spending remaining work-time at regional offices, or local telecommuting centres closer to homes.
Facilities such as cheap studio and gallery space dedicated to experimental arts and cultural activities, will help Adelaide emulate larger cities in its cultural and artistic life.
Local Centres
Local centres within walking distance of homes should pack in a variety of services and workplaces, to enable many people to walk to work, and in general to reduce people's need to leave their local area on a daily basis, thus increasing the life of local areas as well as reducing car use.
Local Shopping Centres
Small shopping centres offering a variety of products should be established within walking distance of most homes.
"Mail runs" several times a day could supply a shop with a large variety of goods from regional, multi-product warehouses, so that shops could be supplied within an hour or two of putting in a restocking order. This will allow shops to maintain smaller inventories with a greater variety of goods in limited storage space.
Just-in-time, online information about all products sold will increase the effective knowledge of staff and customers about a wide variety of products.
Better designed appliances, eg with greater standardisation of components between brands, will enable small workshops to service a greater variety of models.
Telecommuting Centres
Telecommuting centres (with shared internet and office facilities) should be established across the metropolitan area - at shopping centres, schools, colleges, hospitals, railway stations, bus interchanges, etc, to allow more people to walk to work.
Whole-of-Government Offices
Small, whole-of-government offices should be established within walking distance of most homes. To provide a onestop government service-point for all three levels of government, and as telecommuting centres for government and other workers living locally.
To allow a small staff to be conversant with the functions of all government departments for the purpose of assisting the public, the complexity of government-public interaction should be reduced. For example,the large variety of forms for people to fill out should be consolidated into a smaller set, so that a single government worker can be familiar with all of them.
Car Parks
Many urban centres are blighted by (mostly treeless) surface car parks. The land set aside for car parks can be reduced by building multi-story car parks and by shifting people from cars onto public transport, bicycles and footpaths, and reused for buildings and gardens.
Remaining surface carparks should have permeable (eg dirt surfaces), and be filled with trees and other vegetation, to allow them to serve as green space.
Transport System
Currently the people-movement task in Adelaide is dominated by the private car, due to the poor service offered by public transport, road environments that discourage pedestrians and cyclists, and urban sprawl which increases the distances people must travel to access workplaces, shops and other facilities.
Improving public transport and road environments, and reversing urban sprawl, will reduce the number of cars in daily use, and free up land for gardens, buildings and other uses that enhance the life of the city.
Local Streets
In order to improve the walkability and "cyclability" of local streets, traffic speeds should be slowed, and the quality of the road environment improved through increased density of vegetation.
Local streets should be safe for children to play on. Thus cars on local streets should be slowed to 30 km/h or less to enable them stop quickly. Hence the need for speed limits combined with physical traffic calming features such as speed humps and chicanes.
Many Adelaide streets with low traffic densities are unnecessarily wide. Reducing the width of carriage ways and the number of paved car parking spaces (eg by allowing parking on nature strips), will make more room for trees and other vegetation.
Main Roads
Main roads are often unpleasant environments due to noise and air pollution from motor-vehicle traffic.
Reducing motor vehicle traffic will improve the local environment and free up road space for cycle lanes, and bus (and truck) priority lanes.
The speed limit on main roads should be reduced, eg from 60 to 50 km/h, in order to increase safety for all road users, especially pedestrians and cyclists.
Road Use Charging
Congestion is an effective limiter for traffic on main roads, but it causes pollution and consumes fuel. Instead, roaduse charging should be used, with prices set to keep traffic density within acceptable limits during peak periods.
Cameras at major intersections could read bar codes on cars that identify prepaid accounts, and deduct a small fee as the car goes past.
Cycle Lanes
Cycling has a great potential in Adelaide as a cheap, nonpolluting alternative to the car and an activity that keeps riders fit and healthy.
Cycle lanes on main roads should be safe and easy to use. They should be continuous - not disappear suddenly, dropping cyclists into other traffic. Where cyclists and motor vehicles are expected to share lanes, this should be clearly indicated, so that drivers will anticipate and respect cyclists in their path.
Public Transport
To make the public transport network an effective substitute for car-use, public transport services should be made more frequent, faster, and more reliable.
The public transport system should be easy to use, and should minimise the need for passengers to consult timetables to organise their journey.
Creating bus priority lanes and intersections will make buses more reliable, and shorten journey times.
Headways of 10 minutes or less on most routes most of the time will allow many passengers to use the system without need for timetables and with the assurance of a good connection between services.
When, because of low demand, scheduled headways increase beyond 10 minutes, the schedule should be regular, and so, easy to remember.
More legible routes would make map reading easier. Bus routes should go in straight lines wherever possible and avoid meandering. Exception: variable route buses which depart temporarily from the main route to drop people close to their door.
The number of bus routes should be minimised, and all should operate on weekdays, weekends, evenings and public holidays. Exception: extra peak hour services. Plus late night services, when not all routes need to operate.
Buses
Increasing bus frequency on most routes will require enlarging the bus fleet. New buses should include minibuses with 10 to 20 seats. Most of the buses in the current fleet are larger - 30 to 60 seats; they do not fit well down narrow, winding roads, and are wasteful of fuel when only carrying a few passengers.
New buses should have improved fuel efficiency, comparable to the advances made by hybrid cars.
They should allow rapid boarding by wheelchairs without driver intervention (at least at bus stops with suitable platforms), to reduce dwell time.
Ticket checking should be streamlined to reduce dwell time at bus stops where many passenger come on board.
Bicycles on Buses
A selection of bus routes should be made into bicycle carriers, in particular, for routes going up into the Adelaide Hills. Bicycle carrying buses should be designed so that bicycles can roll straight onto the bus and be quickly secured inside, to minimise loading dwell-time.
Cars
The development of fuel efficient low-pollution cars such as hybrid cars should be encouraged (eg through fuelefficiency standards). However, replacing all current cars with fuel-efficient cars would be expensive and take many years.
Upgrading the public transport fleet to fuel-efficient vehicles will be cheaper than upgrading the car fleet, because fewer vehicles are used, and more extensively.
Good public transport, safe commuter cycling paths, and the development of car sharing will further reduce the need for car ownership.
Car Sharing
Car sharing gives people access to a car without having to own one. A variety of vehicles available for short term hire, stationed within walking distance of people's homes, would allow people to use a car only when needed, and to choose the type of car (van, truck) that best suited their immediate needs.
Car sharing allows cars to be used more often, and so reduces the number of cars that the community requires.
It allows people to pay only for the time used and kilometres driven, with minimal up-front costs. This advantages those who only drive occasionally, preferring to use public transport, walk or cycle for most journeys.
Conclusion
Cheap oil has led to sub-optimal cities. The need to rethink urban transport arrangements, to respond to global warming and increasing fuel prices, gives Adelaide an opportunity to improve its transport and social infrastructure, and so become a more people- and nature-friendly city with minimal cost.
2007.10.6