Je flâne

Britauthor, Will Self has become a flaneur, apparently: a gentlemanly stroller of the city streets.

He walks for miles, experiencing the people and places of London unseen by the 'windscreen-based virtuality' of most passers through.

It has no doubt alerted him to the poor esteem in which pedestrians are held by city planners. Cities, despite being full of people, are well and truly designed with the motor vehicle in mind.

But this is changing, and many town planners I know will talk passionately of a pied-a-terre and of urban villages; trying to put ‘people’ not ‘cars’ at the heart of city designs.

It will be a slow process. There are many decades of vehicle-based urban infrastructure already in place, with huge inertia built-in to both the thinking of city leaders and of the ‘people’ themselves: so accustomed to a voiture-a-terre we have become.

And despite the benign visions of post-modern liberal urban planners, billions continue to be sunk into an urban infrastructure where walking is not even part of the thought process.

In an end-piece in last weekend's Courier-Mail, Kathleen Noonan recounts Self's transformation into a flaneur. She too seems too lament the ironic inaccessibility of a city to its people.

Noonan declares "Brisbane City Council should employ a flaneur to experience the city at street level, at a human pace, to advise planning changes."

As a part time flaneur (well, perhaps not gentlemanly) I absolutely concur.

Though Brisbane is one of the more accessible cities I have lived in, it remains replete with frustrations for pedestrians [and cyclists], which for the most part, would not entail an entirely new urban planning paradigm to sort out.

1. Inequitable traffic light timing: Too often a couple of hundred pedestrians are made to wait before crossing a CBD intersection, whilst a mere dozen single-occupancy vehicles rush through. (Think Edward Street at its junctions with Anne, Adelaide and Queen Streets.)
2. Bikeways and footpaths that are interrupted by busy roads with no pedestrian / cyclist right of way. (Two particularly poor examples are on Kedron Brook bikeway, intersected by Shaw Road and Melton Road at two exceptionally busy sections.)
3. Convoluted pedestrian routes across major arterial roads. (One particularly laughable example is crossing Gympie Road at its junction with Murphy Road. A pedestrian must cross a zebra crossing and wait at three sets of traffic lights to cross one road. What should be a 30 metre crossings becomes a 150m hike which can take up to 5 minutes.)

These are three examples I know intimately, but there are doubtless thousands of others across the city.

But sadly it wont be just a case of employing a flaneur. We already know what and where the issues are, and how they can be resolved.

In all these examples, pedestrians and cyclists have been considered, but then promptly ignored in favour of the sole guiding principle of transport planning: never impede the motorist: Their time is far more important than yours.