A new mobility intersection

Our cities’ kerbsides are busy places and are only getting busier. Kerbs are the nexus of vehicles moving through an area and people accessing places, they host parking and are locations for pick up and drop off.

Too often this valuable real estate is overlooked. Instead, we should be focusing on how kerbsides can support thriving places for people. The users are diverse and have competing needs. How do you ensure that what meets the needs of logistics operations supports pedestrians with impaired mobility? How do we ensure the requirements of daily commuters align with the opportunities of trade for local businesses?

FACT: Increasingly electric bicycles, scooters and skateboards and other micro-mobility modes are forming part of the transport solution. As adoption increases more parking will be required at places where we want to encourage access by micromobility, such as local high streets.

That’s the focus of a new white paper carried out by WSP for Uber. The Future Ready Kerbside (hyperlink) explores how the kerbside is currently managed and looks at approaches that bring about the best outcomes for people and places based on new mobility options.

FACT: Drone-based deliveries can enable quick service for people outside the delivery catchment of micro-mobility providers, which gives another opportunity for businesses and consumers. However, consideration is needed as to how they contribute to place outcomes including reduced human interaction, noise and safety factors.

Property frontages are generally active, and people dwell in the street to eat, chat and wait for transport services. There are good pedestrian facilities with wide footpaths featuring street furniture, plants, outdoor dining and good lighting. While offering good access for a variety of users, the Crown Street kerb could work harder to support increased access.

The second case study is set in Onehunga, Auckland. Onehunga Mall has evolved considerably over the years, changing from a road to a pedestrian mall and back again – with more change to come as part of future plans for Onehunga. There are many parallels between Onehunga Mall and those places across Australia and New Zealand that are set to experience rapid growth in residential population, increasing liveability expectations and performing a growing transport interchange role.

Currently the Onehunga Town Centre has an underutilised kerbside and lacks a sense of place, but is an area planned to go through significant transformation over the next 25 years.

Our research found that as the town centre undergoes revitalisation, the function of the street will need to perform much more of a Civic Spaces role which will require a reallocation of the kerbside towards more pick-up/drop-off and enhancing the urban realm to make it a more comfortable place to dwell and accessible to people of all ages and abilities.

There will also be a greater need for multi-modal access to the station and to local businesses and residences, to evolve Onehunga into a place that supports the local community. Plans for Onehunga to transform its park and ride into a mobility hub will drive a need for multi-modal access, both to the station and local businesses and residences.

Both case studies demonstrate that kerbside allocation doesn’t effectively reflect demand. The private car is only one of the modes that people use to access an area, yet it dominates the kerbside. Passenger pick-up and drop-off by transit or ride share, walking and cycling are key modes for people to access these places but are not well provided for.

Changing needs

FACT: The share of automated vehicles in the vehicle fleet is expected to increase rapidly after the technology is proven and accepted to be safe by the community. Automated vehicles could potentially form the majority of the fleet over a 50-year horizon. The uptake of automated vehicles has implications for the kerbside.

Currently the management and allocation of the kerbside is suboptimal and facing increasing challenges. With an increase in population, new modes of transport and technology, we are reaching the point where dedicating large areas of public space to parked vehicles isn’t responsible.

This is particularly true in leveraging opportunities delivered by investment in transport infrastructure. We believe we should be using space more productively to support the interchange of people between new mobility modes including ride-share and shared micro-mobility, with transit at the heart.

With the onset of electric modes for first and last mile transport journeys, what provision is being given, and should be given to recharging facilities? Furthermore, is this an opportunity for local businesses, or governments, to investigate new revenue streams?

Where our cities are prioritising investment in high quality pedestrian and cycling infrastructure to support greater uptake of active transport, will this also support emerging modes? We only have to look at the tension created by the introduction of shared electric scooter services to see the challenges.

These are big picture decisions that impact on communities. The starting point for the Future Ready Kerbside is a proactive focus on what the community wants from their places and to consider how mobility best enables that vision.

About

Louise Baker is a technical leader with a strategic focus on transport advisory, smart mobility and transport planning. Louise enjoys the challenge of considering how technology can help achieve policy goals and how transport systems can be changed in ways that improve the liveability of cities and towns.

Camden Fitzgerald is the Regional Executive for WSP’s NSW Transport Advisory and Planning team. His focus includes Strategic Transport Planning projects.

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