I have been discussing Sydney’s issue with
traffic and its deplorable public transport system, along with its non-cycling
friendly streets. I am certainly pro-cycling within cities, due to my love of
bikes and that has shown in my last couple of posts.
More to the point, I am exploring
alternatives to cars within cities and I may have skipped over one of the
easiest and most important options, the joy of walking.
Pedestrians are incredibly important in the
overall fabric of a city.
There are a number of advantages of walking
around a city.
·
It is the easiest way to move
around
·
It doesn’t cost anything
·
It promotes a healthy lifestyle
for people to be active and,
·
It is environmentally
sustainable.
So let’s look at the city of Sydney and its
walkability.
The Sydney CBD has areas where it is very
easy to walk around. The Domain, Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, the Botanical Gardens,
the Rocks and Hyde Park are all centrally located, ‘green’ and cultural areas
that represent lovely opportunities to walk around.
However, once in the very heart of the city
a pedestrian will soon find themselves at the mercy of cars, buses and very
narrow, bustling sidewalks, making Sydney not very pleasant for the mixture of
tourists and workers who move around.
So how to promote walking within Sydney?
There was actually an article in the
Saturday Sydney Morning Herald on the 2nd of May that discussed a
$60 million upgrade to the Sydney streets to make them more pedestrian
friendly.
The City of Sydney Council set out a
Walking Strategy and Action Plan that intends to:
·
To boost the number of commuter
trips by foot
·
Reduce delay times to journeys
·
Reduce traffic collisions with
pedestrians by 50%
·
Widen footpaths
·
Improve access to shops
The article states that 90% of all journeys
into the city are made by pedestrians, with 15% of people are coming in on cars
(these statistics are straight from the article, I know they make up 105%).
I think that this is a step in the right
direction for Sydney, yet I believe this Action Plan is only touching the
surface of the walkability of the city (I’m also not sure how correct the
figures are that the article gave)
A more radical step would be to make a
number of main streets pedestrian only (such as the George St renovation at the
end of 2015). This would ensure that people are constantly moving around the
city on foot, rather than by Taxis or cars.
Lastly, while putting into place a number
of initiatives that ‘encourage’ walkers in a city, there needs to be more
impetus on the streets of Sydney to get people walking. Street art, food
vendors, entertainment are all reasons to move around on foot, Sydney just
needs to find the right balance.
So for my next post, again I will continue
to explore alternatives to driving. I feel this will be such an important
aspect for cities in the next 20 years and it needs to be discussed.
If you want to read about the Action Plan
that the Govt. will put in place, have a look here;
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