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HRH The Prince of Wales (far right, below) successfully crosses Queen Mother Square, while Master-planner Leon Krier looks on with consternation and considers the practical implications of shared spaces in the wider context of New Urbanism :
Update on Queen Mother Square (July 2012), Dorset Echo
The concept of "Shared Space"
Ah yes 'shared space'. It's so counter-intuitive. One Danish proponent proves it by blindfolding himself and walking across a share space plaza. The essence of the idea is to challenge a received idea about public space which began with Hausmann's plans for Paris involving segregation - using traffic lanes, subways and sidewalks to separate 'traffic' going at different rates. It's why traffic management in France is still called 'circulation'. The remedy for over much circulation in favour of speedier traffic has long been 'control' through bristling signage, lights, road markings, sleeping policemen, barriers, chicanes and of course police and wardens armed with CCTV and a host of regulations. Thesis, antithesis. The synthesis has been 'shared space' in which you dispose of all the street regulation - laws and objects and police - and make the space available to everybody and more or less every kind of transport. The idea sounds crazy but where it woks is that everyone entering the space however they are travelling has to 'negotiate' their passage through it with everyone else who enters it - car to car, car to bus, bus to pedestrian, cyclists to truck, truck to tram and so on. Politicians liable to face the legal consequences of risking removing the long maintained traffic regulations get rightly scared by shared space but I love it and it seems to me, after twenty years gestation, to be spreading, not least because it's less costly. The inventors of the idea say that critical to shared space working is the preservation of speeds that do not exceed 15mph. Apparently that is the speed at which people can maintain enough eye contact and facial visibility to do the 'negotiation' that underlies a concept so basic to the new urbanism. Given average traffic speed in cities in the UK is less than 6mph (TfL figures) 15mph doesn't seem such a tall order - and as I cyclist and walker and tram and bus user I embrace the idea as a way of recovering roads from the tyranny of car-dependency.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the principle, but there is more work to be done with this particular shared space.
ReplyDeleteIf you had driven through the square in dense fog, as I did last night, the absence of any white lines or cats'-eyes or anti-fog lighting, made it a potential death-trap. It was impossible to see the kerbs, the bends in the road, even the temporary roundabout.
Didn't that slow you down though? The same principle applies to not widening T-junctions or cutting away vegetation that hides the larger road from the view of a driver approaching the junction on the lesser road.
ReplyDeleteOf course, almost to a standstill. Perhaps we should create artificial fog!
ReplyDelete