Time and Space in the City Centre

Patrick Reynolds is deputy chair of the City Centre Advisory Panel. The header image is from Walthamstow, London

The city centre now has a few stretches of street where the space has been repurposed to a people and place focused design from full time traffic use. These are a great improvement, an essential update to the whole tone and balance of the city centre from its previous condition. A condition set last century with the removal of the trams tracks and a re-ordering of city streets to serve the new motorway system, as described here.

These refreshes have been underway for more than a decade now as recorded in this NZ Herald article from all the way back in 2009 (in what now seems like a strangely factual and even positive article and headline on this kind of subject, absent catastrophising and outrage-farming, oh for the pre-culture war times).

These shifts are mostly spatial, changes in the use and design of space from one thing to another. This is always difficult, as the urban street about the most contested public space we have, with so many demands on its use.

I am fully in support of these upgrades, but as attention turns to the narrower side streets like High St, I think a different approach may be more successful, one in common use all over the world.

How do all those busy cities manage the practicalities of commerce, like service and delivery, as efficiently as possible while maximising the place quality that attract visitors and business in the first place? Especially those with narrow medieval streets that just don’t have six lanes to divide into different uses.

Through the cunning use of time.

Below is the famous Strøget in Copenhagen, in the morning, it is given over to delivery vehicles, and below, later in the day, when these are banned from entering and the retailers are fully focused on selling.

Delineating different uses for city streets and squares by time of day is so common in Europe that it can be considered best practice.

As far as I could find out Strøget is open to service and commercial vehicles from 4am to 11am. All street cleaning, provisioning etc happens in these hours. Business owners there can focus on receiving deliveries and tradesmen before 11am, and then fully turn their attention to serving customers from 11am till they close. Municipal services like rubbish collection and street cleaning in the small hours.

A key feature of this approach is that it separates street management from street design. No need for lots of different areas, barriers, or forests of signs, to describe and control each square metre of a street, for every kind of use along its length simultaneously. Just manage the entry points. This also means a city can introduce this change without investing millions in new street design. Don’t get me wrong, both refreshed operations and urban design are important but they don’t have to synchronise, it is possible to change them separately. Strøget above was changed to this pattern in 1962 without touching a paver, as can be seen in the photo below from its opening, the old vehicle street pattern still in place still in place:

In fact the pretty paving in the pics I took just prior to covid only date from the 1990s.

All over the world this sort of time based management is extremely common, then followed by physical upgrades once bedded in.

Here’s Ljubljana

How is it enforced? There are varying techniques, but the most effective one, seen all over the world is the rising bollard:

Though here’s Copenhagen again, a few Jersey barriers perhaps left over from a motorway project, not pretty but they do the job:

Of course this would mean working with businesses and delivery providers to work out a new time based system on certain streets. Probably worth trialling somewhere like High St. Clearly this is possible elsewhere, I see no reason why it couldn’t be here.

It’s not like our current all day access for everything system is without its problems:

The trade-off for service and delivery providers is use of the whole street, just for them, for the agreed hours, in exchange for no access at peak shopping hours.

Additionally, if we were to install rising barriers on all the narrow streets of the laneway network then it would be cheaper and easier to close them temporarily for events, like Diwali or other festivals. No cones or fences, or other forms of expensive and ugly temporary traffic management in order to create valuable party zones. The city centre desperately needs to be able to host more events more cheaply to grow its vitality and appeal.

The streets in pink above are envisioned as the laneway network in the CCMP. Some of them at least could benefit from this approach.

Walthamstow, London, a more suburban centre also with this treatment:

A key advantage in control access by time rather than only by space is it enables a much simpler surface design: a curb-less single level pattern suits all uses. Makes it easier to park all over it with commercial vehicles, then is also better when its just people.

Back to a city centre, Bourke St, Melbourne, here a permit system is used, with both a fee and limit access times

Retail area treatment, Walthamstow:

Strøget at 2:30pm on an October Thursday, shoppers, tourists, workers and residents doing their thing, largely unaware of the efficient provisioning and servicing that happened earlier to support their needs:

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