Living Streets Hamilton

Notes from meeting held Thursday September 13^th 2007, at CCS Disability Action, Claudelands Rd, Hamilton

 

Present: Barbara Crawforth, Celia Hope, Tony Ryks, Frances Nin, Raewin Peck, Maxine Fraser, Don Murray, David Peart, Kate Hayward, Daphne Bell, Dennis de Jong, Peter Bos, Dianne Yates

 

We began the evening with presentations from our guest speakers: Raewin Peck and Frances Nin, Travel Planners from HCC, and Dennis de Jong, D.Phil student from Waikato University who is working on participatory design for roading.

 

Raewin and Frances are school travel planners with HCC and talked to us about progress in identifying schools that meet the criteria for 40kph zones to control traffic speeds at crucial times of day. Seventeen schools have been identified as meeting the criteria for 40kph zones, due to factors including speeds monitored outside the school, vehicle counts, and accident histories. These schools are: Fairfield Primary and Intermediate, St Joseph’s, Deanwell, Frankton, Aberdeen, Pukete, Vardon, Peachgrove Intermediate, Maeroa Intermediate, Hukanui, Hamilton East, Bankwood, Insoll, Woodstock, Silverdale, and also Marian and Rototuna, which are the two schools already participating in a pilot programme.

 

The 40kph zone will apply around the starting and finishing times for these schools, not for the entire day.

 

School travel plans are written by the school in conjunction with HCC, and are unique to each school because different problems prevail in each instance. The role of the planners is to support the school in the measures they identify as being needed. The principle is to minimize congestion at the school gates, and get children to school safely and in a sustainable manner. Methods of transport being considered include walking, biking, scootering, carpooling and buses among others. The intention of the programme is to select 8 schools from the 17 that have been identified as the most in need of travel planning, and use them as a 2-year pilot project. HCC will assist in such things as street audits of surrounding areas to identify safest routes (checking for conditions of paths, presence of dangerous dogs, illegal parking problems etc) and will survey residents. The 40kph zone signs may be static or digital, and will be placed on the most congested feeder roads for the schools. The aim is that these will slow traffic and possibly persuade some drivers to find alternative routes to reduce congestion. At this stage it is not clear how far from the school the signs are likely to be placed.

 

LSH members had a number of questions regarding the programmes:

 

1. How closely will the speed limits be monitored?

This requires police input, and there is also the need to liaise with engineers and other council staff to ensure safer routes outside the immediate 40kph zone, in order to allow children to safely walk or cycle the full distance to school.

 

2. Cycling can often be unsafe due to parked cars – is there any chance of altering paths or changing parking?

Raewin commented that council advises that only children over 10 years of age should be allowed to bike to school but that many schools have a policy that children under 10 years old do not ride to school unaccompanied by an adult" – this was felt by LSH members to be still a major hazard even at this age, as adult cyclists also have difficulty dealing with parked cars. Raewin and Frances commented that they are trying to operate by education rather than legislation to improve safety, and expressed the hope that children will educate their parents about safety for walkers and cyclists. They see the process as being one of gradual change rather than alterations in laws. Concern was still expressed by LSH members that to get cars out of the equation, alternative transport routes have to be made safer.

 

3. Had any studies been done to show what happens at schools that have the least number of children delivered by private car? (ie could we learn by looking at the best cases as well as identifying the worst?) This had not been carried out, and the emphasis was on dealing with the worst situations first.

 

4. What is the technical background on how the criteria for intervention were fulfilled (eg what weighting was given to the various components such as traffic speed, number of collisions, etc) Details of this were unavailable, as these criteria had been evaluated by a separate agency, not by the travel planners themselves.

 

5. Are there any plans for “cycle trains” to complement walking school buses? Raewin commented that this is more difficult because of the age restriction on children cycling, but that it could still be possible. There is a focus on developing methods for teaching cycle safety, and getting bike “WOFs” at school, along with getting a “bike licence” to show that a child knows the road rules and can handle a bicycle sensibly

 

6. There has been a huge upsurge in the proportions of children being taken to school by car, and have the societal factors involved been investigated?

The main factors seem to be a perception of unsafeness, increased numbers of children living a considerable distance from the school they attend, and a lack of time on behalf of parents. It was noted that changes are happening – the Orbiter service is running extra buses to cater for the school load, some schools are already running their own buses, and this may become more widespread as fuel prices continue to rise.

 

Raewin and Frances commented that the 17 schools identified as meeting the criteria have just been contacted about the programme and need to state their interest in a very short time period (about ten days). LSH members expressed some concern about the short timeframe, especially if principals were busy and perhaps failed to perceive the significance of the project. Raewin and Frances said that follow-up approaches would be made if schools did not reply. There was urgency to get the issue to school boards before the end of this year so that the pilot study could get underway at the beginning of next year, and the HCC team had only been assembled recently.

 

Dennis de Jong is studying the application of participatory design to roading design, and assessing whether it can improve road safety. He commented that everyone uses roads in one way or another, and everyone has local knowledge that may be valuable. The difficulty in normal systems is that people have no way of getting this information across in conventional design processes.

Participatory design starts with the idea of recognising there is a problem and asking the public how best to deal with it. This can involve getting a group of people to help design roads alongside experts, contributing their local knowledge to the technical capabilities of the engineers and designers.

Dennis is focussing on the idea that participating in such design exercises can affect attitudes to road safety and driver behaviour. Results so far suggest that when people participate in a design exercise for a piece of road, they then give different responses to a survey about their driving speeds, compared to their responses gathered before the design exercise. The fact that a ‘theory’ session could apparently alter behaviour is interesting.

 

Several issues arose from Dennis’s presentation – in no particular order, they included:

• Complications of this style of design, including both domineering experts and disruptive ”lay persons”
• Still little idea of why participatory design sometimes fails
• Power imbalances – eg shopkeepers seem to have a great deal of influence when street design is being done or redone, often demanding that parking be retained even though it may present hazards
• Difficulties in changing attitudes, and in knowing whether measures are really working. An interesting discussion about road safety came up – hard to know whether the reduced road toll is due to better driver behaviour, or in fact due to improved safety features which minimise the effects of collisions!

 

We then progressed to a variety of items for LSH to take action on:

 

1. Safety at light-controlled pedestrian crossings. It was noted that the sequence for pedestrians is not long enough to allow even the able-bodied to get across an intersection before the lights change. Often cars get a green light when pedestrians have just reached the middle of the intersection, and although they should give way to pedestrians, the effect of being given the apparent go-ahead, and loss of concentration, can be hazardous. Suggestions include:

• Video interactions to have a record to present to council
• Note number plates of drivers cutting across in front of pedestrians and contact police. This can be done via the police website and motorists will be warned.

 

2. Request for help with walking group for elderly Chinese community. Philip Yeung has contacted us about the possibility of helping a group of people centred at the Temple of the Goddess of Mercy in Frankton. Maxine and Barbara are both prepared to offer some time to help with this, but the consensus was that we should also approach Max Weinberg at Sport Waikato to ask for his help, as he has long experience in setting up groups of this kind. Judy will contact him.

 

3. Specific approaches to HCC about pedestrian crossings.

There is a general feeling that so far, Access Hamilton has provided more for cycling than for walking, and concern was expressed about the lack of facilities to allow pedestrians to cross safely in many areas in Hamilton. Information that is needed includes:

• Costs for installation of crossings (light controlled and other types)
• What is the current budget for pedestrian-related matters in Hamilton

It could then be useful to put in a submission to next year’s annual plan to request an increase in the budget to allow for construction of new pedestrian safety measures on a regular basis. This would allow HCC to help fulfil its commitment to the International Charter for Walking, which it is a signatory to.

 

4.Involvement of LSH in the “active community” strategy that is due to commence early 2008. This is under the control of the HCC Strategic Unit, and could be expected to involve active transport along with other activities. Judy will contact Tegan McIntyre and try to find out more.

 

5. Alterations to intersection at Killarney Rd/Greenwood St

A major alteration is proposed by Transit New Zealand, replacing the roundabout with a light-controlled intersection. Public submissions are called for, closing October 8^th. Although the lights should certainly be safer than the existing roundabout, LSH expressed concern about whether enough thought would be given to allowing a long enough pedestrian phase for safe negotiation of what looks to be a 6-lane road. If turning traffic is given the green light too quickly, there is the potential for very serious accidents, considering the numbers of heavy vehicles using the road at that point. A brief submission was suggested, to highlight this potential danger. Maxine and Judy will work on this.