Urbanism

The bungled opening of the final stage of WestConnex, the Rozelle interchange, is bad enough that veteran transport experts such as Michelle Zeibots at the University of Technology Sydney say only a royal commission can open the lid on how such debacles can happen.

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“We need to know who thought it up, who pushed for it, who in the private sector and public service designed, sanctioned and signed-off on its various stages and what the nature of the interaction was between government and private sector business interests.”

WestConnex now looks likely to compel a second harbour tunnel, the proposed Beaches motorway and another segment of the M6 tollway.

“It’s a cycle. It goes on and on and on, where they just build a new motorway,” Zeibots said. “You get induced traffic growth, it creates a new bottleneck, a new set of traffic jams, they are bigger and they are more difficult to contend with than the previous one.”

“What a private toll-road company is motivated by is completely and utterly anathema to what a city needs in order to have a good and adequate transport network to support its economic and social exchange functions,” she said.

Motorist deaths in Melbourne have fallen by half over the past decade, but there’s been no reduction in deaths among pedestrians, motorcyclists and bicycle riders over the same period.

It is in this context that City of Yarra councillors voted last week to expand a trial of 30km/h speed limits across all of Fitzroy and Collingwood, other than major thoroughfares and pending state government approval.

A growing number of major cities including London, Paris, Toronto and Barcelona are adopting 30km/h limits on their streets and say it has made their cities safer. The World Health Organisation has called for it to be the maximum where vehicles mix with pedestrians and cyclists. But Victoria Police’s chief commissioner, Shane Patton, scoffed at the plan last week, saying he was not aware of any evidence that it would reduce road trauma. “I think no one is going to obey it ... it’s ridiculous,” he said.

Patton’s view – although perhaps widely shared – may have been a shock to Victoria Police’s fellow members of the Victorian Government Road Safety Partnership, made up of the Transport Accident Commission and the Transport, Justice and Health departments.

The partnership told a state parliament inquiry into road trauma earlier this year that successive studies had shown that 30km/h was the “maximum impact speed for a healthy adult before death or very serious injury becomes increasingly likely”.

Someone hit by a car at 50km/h has a 90 per cent chance of being killed, compared with a 10 per cent chance at 30km/h, those studies show.

I must admit I misinterpreted the headline. "Wait! This is the era of post offices? How wonderful! Why has nobody told me?"

Martinez Ferrada said the federal government is looking to support downtown revitalization through several agencies, but there are also opportunities to rethink the core purpose of downtowns, creating new ways to bring people back without relying on office workers.

“One of the opportunities that we see is for those cities to develop kind of a new stream of how can we use downtown cores,” she said.

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Montreal’s Morizio said the long-term solution may be to re-establish downtowns as a place for social connection rather than just going to an office.

She said Montreal has begun installing pedestrian-only streets to create public spaces, but such projects are costly and not applicable everywhere.

“People aren’t going to come to work more than two or three days a week ? So, I think to be able to counter that, what we need to do is we need our commercial streets to almost be our third place,” she said, referring to a familiar public spot that people can go.

“Besides our dwelling and where we work, we need a space where people can come and connect. That’s a lot of what we lost during the pandemic.”

Many offices are sitting empty following the rise of working from home, while cities around the world face housing crises. Building new housing is extremely carbon intensive. Could converting unused offices into housing help solve both problems?

When we replaced our traditional pattern of development with the Suburban Experiment, there were some unforeseen consequences. Why did we do it, and how can we fix it?

Car-dependent suburbia is subsidized by productive urban places. That's why American cities are broke. But how bad is it, and who is subsidizing who?

Sprawl is malfunctioning. It has underperformed for decades, but its collapse has become obvious with the recent mortgage meltdown and economic crisis, and its abundance magnifies the problems of its failure.

Let us be clear that sprawl and suburbia are not synonymous. There are many first-generation suburbs, most of them built before WWII, that function well, primarily because they are compact, walkable, and have a mix of uses. Sprawl, on the other hand, is characterized by auto-dependence and separation of uses. It is typically found in suburban areas, but it also affects the urban parts of our cities and towns.

Sprawl's defects are not limited to economics. Sprawl is central to our inefficient use of land, energy, and water, and to increased air and water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and the loss of open space and natural habitats. Because it requires a car to reach every destination, it is also to blame for time wasted in traffic, the exponential increase in new infrastructure costs, and health problems such as obesity. Social problems have also been linked to sprawl's isolation and lack of diversity.

If demand for storefronts is down, why don't landlords just lower the rent and get a tenant in there? That's supposed to be the magic of capitalism — its ability to auto-adjust to anything the world throws at it. But that's not what is happening with vacant shops. Even before the pandemic, one study found, street-level retail spaces in Manhattan were remaining vacant for an average of 16 months.

So if COVID isn't to blame for all the shuttered stores, what is? Well, when a landlord doesn't lower the rent to get a new retail tenant, it's because that landlord can't. The market that sets retail rents isn't only between tenants and landlords. It's also between landlords and the banks that finance the buildings. And the banks, in many cases, won't let property owners lower their rents enough to fill their properties. The pandemic may have emptied out America's storefronts, but it's banks that are keeping them that way.

The owners of the Corkman hotel site in Carlton will build a replica of the heritage pub they illegally demolished seven years ago.

In 2016, Raman Shaqiri and Stefce Kutlesovski knocked down the pub that had stood on the site since 1854. They had no planning permission or building permit.

The pair bought the Corkman Irish Pub for almost $5 million in 2015 and plans obtained by The Age soon after the demolition showed them considering a 12-storey student housing project on the site.

After public outrage at the brazen demolition, then planning minister Richard Wynne ordered that the pub be immediately rebuilt. But after a drawn-out legal battle, the pair were given an alternative: get a new plan for the site approved by the planning minister or rebuild the heritage facade.

Major cities have scaled back those requirements in recent years while others like Portland and Minneapolis have gotten rid of them altogether. San Jose, which has only a few thousand fewer residents than Austin, did away with the requirements last year.

Austin City Council Member Zohaib “Zo” Qadri, the proposal’s author, said keeping those requirements makes no sense as the city faces an affordability crisis and pumps billions of dollars into expanding public transit.

“It gobbles up scarce land. It adds burdensome costs to developments that get passed on to renters and buyers. It makes it harder for small businesses to get off the ground. And it harms walkability and actively works against our public investments in transit, bike lanes, trails and sidewalks,” Qadri said Thursday.