The lack of adaptability of so many town and city centre relief roads I swell noted. Built with little or no thought for how urban areas change, they now physically inhibit the growth of the centres they were intended to liberate.
It’s quite possible that, if you read that column, you may have thought, ‘That’s all very well, but what’s the alternative? If there are good reasons for wanting less traffic in the centre and if modal shift alone can’t rise to the challenge, then the displaced traffic has to go somewhere outside the centre.
Right? And if there isn’t sufficient highway capacity already available in a suitable location, we’ll have to create some. So the key issue becomes where we put that new capacity.
And since you, John, think the edge of the existing centre isn’t the right place, because it might want to grow one of these days, are you suggesting that we should build our relief road further out than we’d otherwise have done?’
Well, no. You see: despite what I may have appeared to say last time, my criticism of almost every relief road I’ve seen in this country is not so much that they’re built in the wrong location but that they’re built in a form that is unsuitable for the location they’re in.
Put simply, urban areas are no place for non-urban roads. By the latter term I mean highways with few junctions, designed primarily for the expeditious (i.e. as fast as feasible) movement of motor vehicles, lined and centre-lined with guard-railing, crossed by way of subways, footbridges or well-defended ‘sheep-pens’ and never intended to be appropriate settings for fronting development or attractive places for longitudinal movement on foot or by bike.
High Street Kensington – is this really the only great street that Britain can boast of?
Renshaw Street, Liverpool – not exactly utopia, but a better street than it was
Towns and cities are no places for roads like this, or perhaps roads of any kind. They’re places for streets. I’m quite clear about what the difference is and, if you’re not, I trust you’re about to be.
Check out almost any dictionary you care to name and it’s plain: ‘roads’ are transit corridors, whose primary purpose is to expedite movement between one place and another. By sharp contrast,‘ streets’ are places, albeit linear ones, where the emphasis is much more on the mix of activities and buildings to be found there.
You don’t hang around on the road corner, do you? Neither do you take the street from Oxford to Birmingham. Most telling, perhaps, whoever heard of ‘road life’?
Sadly, and too often, the vibrant, multi-functional streets that should be the lifeblood of our towns and cities have been dumbed-down into pedestrian-only areas that die when the shops shut and the traffic that was displaced has been dumped onto new roads that were carved through some other part of town and designed to be dominated by vehicles.
In essence, we’ve sought to segregate pedestrians from vehicles and of course we’ve done so with honourable intentions, believing that the two cannot mix without severe peril to the former.
Our genuine fears in this regard were perhaps most memorably expressed in the foreword to Traffic in Towns (1963): 'It may be that future generations will regard our carelessness in allowing human beings and moving vehicles to use the same streets and our apparent callousness to the inevitable results with the same horror and incomprehension with which we ecall the indifference of earlier generations to elementary sanitation'!
These fears have underpinned UK highway design orthodoxy for over half a century, with both Design and Layout of Roads in Built-up Areas (1946) and its successor Roads in Urban Areas (1966) proclaiming the following: 'Traffic segregation should be the keynote of modern road desig.'
Streets didn’t really get a look-in. So, in the classic case of centres being thought unsafe and/or unpleasant for pedestrians, it never really occurred to us that we could address the issues by redesigning streets to facilitate a more appropriate balance between different user groups and/or that, if some displacement of traffic was necessary, that we could have designed a ‘relief street’ where a variety of users and activities would be welcome.
Our post-war adherence to the dogma of segregation has robbed us of the wit, the confidence and the desire to design streets that successfully accommodate significant volumes of both vehicles and people.
This legacy also means that we have precious few models of great British streets to learn from and be inspired by and often have to resort to citing examples of great streets in other countries.
This may be why we hear so much about the new High Street Kensington, which has recently and successfully demonstrated that you can, in Britain, design streets that are shared by people and traffic and are popular with both. Renshaw Street in Liverpool, which I’ve also pictured, is far less glamourous and so far unproven.
But it’s one of ten DfT Mixed Priority Routes projects for which the specific remit was to redesign streets for a better, safer balance of vehicular and pedestrian activity. Completed just last month, I look forward to seeing how successful this redesigned street can become. I hope to feature Mixed Priority Routes in this column in the not-too-distant future.
Roads and empty streets can harm our towns and cities; but great streets make great places. They don’t have to be big but they have to have life, of different types and at different times, and they’re where people want to be. I think my local high street, Northfield Avenue in Ealing, is great.
It’s not famous, it’s had next to nothing pent on it for ages, it’s a busy distributor road and an important bus route and contains loads of different shops, cafes and restaurants. It could do with an extra zebra crossing but it’s loved by locals.
Where’s your nearest great street? Email editor@rudi.net with your suggestions.
John Dales is on the Commission for Architecture & Built Environment’s enabling panel and is responsible for helping to deliver CABE’s ‘Streets for People’ programme of urban design training for highways and transportation professionals. He is director of transport and movement at urban design consultant Urban Initiatives. This series of articles was originally commissioned by and published in Local Transport Today magazine.
