Low Traffic Neighbourhoods: repurposing and reimaging our public spaces

In recent weeks, work has started on the Arthur-Grey Low Traffic Area, one of the first pilot projects in Tāmaki Makaurau stemming from the Waka Kotahi/New Zealand Transport Agency’s Innovating Streets for People programme.

The pilot project has come with the inevitable cacopho-spectrum of angst, disquiet, celebration and acclaim. There is undoubtedly validity in some of the criticism – the limited time and budget available to get the project off the ground didn’t allow for as much nor as broad an engagement with the local community as the project team had hoped.

But some of the concern also stems from a need to better articulate what Low Traffic Areas (or Low Traffic Neighbourhoods as they're more commonly known) are trying to achieve. 

Fundamentally, these projects aren’t just about addressing local transport issues. They aren’t just an attempt to reduce speeds on our roads – an important outcome given the speed factor that generally pervades road traffic accidents – but that would be a ‘slow traffic’ neighbourhood not a ‘low traffic’ neighbourhood and yes, something you could probably achieve with a few well-placed speed humps.

They’re also not going to magically resolve the traffic issues in adjacent streets because that will require a much, much, much more significant shift to the whole city’s planning, design and investment in land use, development and transport. A shift that needs to make a significant move away from an inefficient system focused on the needs of individuals to one that caters better for more of society as a whole. 

They also aren’t just about building safe routes for people on bikes, scooters and other ‘active transport’ modes and ‘micro-mobility’ devices. Again, this is an important result given the climate outcomes we’re trying to achieve as a region and the need to radically shift our transport habits, but Low Traffic Neighbourhoods are about something much deeper and more fundamental. They are about restoring the social and community fabric that needs to sit at the heart of our neighbourhoods if we are to successfully rebuild from COVID whilst also preparing for the shocks and stresses to come because of things like climate change and rising inequality.

What Low Traffic Neighbourhoods are attempting to do is to repurpose and reimagine the public space that currently has the sole, limited and highly inefficient function of moving metal boxes around the city. 

Roads make up a significant proportion of Auckland’s urban area (estimates range from 15 to 19 per cent of the region's land area). These public assets could and should be doing so much more for our communities, particularly as we intensify our urban areas and need them to work harder and deliver more. Our streets should be places where people can come together. They should help build a stronger sense of community, identity and collective purpose.

And they can. They can if we reduce the amount of traffic that currently clogs them up. They can if we take that space and carve out pocket parks and community places for people to gather and connect. At the Arthur-Grey Low Traffic Area, a pop-up crate-painting afternoon last weekend highlighted the community building opportunity of these repurposed public spaces.

But to make these neighbourhoods a permanent reality we need to test and trial interventions that reduce traffic on our streets – because there is no one-size-fits-all solution to roll out. We also need to remember that these interventions are trying to drive change across a much wider area, beyond the visible physical structures, to effect change in neighbourhoods at the social and community level.

And we need communities to be open to the opportunity for change, to look positively on the potential to do things differently and to provide their feedback on both the process and the trialed interventions. Change is hard and uncomfortable, but change is a constant that we can either embrace, or risk stagnation as the world around us moves on.