NYC's Department of Transport recently published a study they commissioned from Jan Gehl Architects regarding the future of their street designs, World Class Streets (PDF). One of the simple things that they did was to study the volume of people that travelled on different parts of certain roads in the city, which highlighted a disparity between the amount of use and the amount of space given to the various modes of travel, as shown in this diagram
In all, the sidewalk is carrying almost twice as many people as the roadway in less than half the space. And note that the roadway figures include the passengers on buses. Now, no doubt that's a severe case, but the pattern holds true elsewhere even if the magnitude is different. Even more damning in New York is that for most of the boroughs households without cars outnumber households with cars, in some areas by more than 50%. The median income for carless households is less than half that of those with cars, so it's no mystery which group has better access to influence planners ...
I wonder which parts of Adelaide we might find similar levels of skew? Perhaps King William St and Grenfell St, but maybe also Rundle St and Gouger St where the road/footpath ratio is probably close to 50/50 but the number of pedestrians must dwarf the number of drivers. And which of these would we be prepared to "correct"?
Footpath and roadway, what's the right ratio?
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Re: Footpath and roadway, what's the right ratio?
How very interesting! I believe that both Rundle and Hindley Streets (on weekends) both have greater pedestrian movements than car movements - at least 25% - which I think is a direct result of being an offshoot of the Rundle Mall precinct.
Re: Footpath and roadway, what's the right ratio?
when they redeveloped Grote St just west of Vic Sq, they did appear to give a greater ratio to the footpath, which is good. Its nice and wide now (except the footpath is bitumen). They changed the roadway from 3 lanes each way to 2 lanes each way
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