Road to recovery – What your council needs to consider for their ‘parklet’ project

In the post-COVID-19 economic recovery phase, ‘parklet’ is a term you will hear a lot.

What is a parklet, and how can councils create one?

‘Parklets’ are new, shared outdoor spaces that are being introduced to help manage COVID-19 risks associated with people gathering in public places. These hyper-local, ‘flexible use’ kerbsides are popping up all around in the lead up to the summer, with cities and towns transforming footpaths and on-street and off-street parking into an urban space that typically provides seating and landscaping to the vicinity and alfresco dining.

Transforming streets into shared spaces helps support retail as well as ensures safe social distancing and promoting social connection by subletting the kerb and enabling a bottom-up solution.

If you have been tasked with the job of making parklets a reality, you’ll know it’s a complex project. You and your colleagues are entirely behind this temporary activation project, but have little time to plan street intervention, are understaffed, and might not have sufficient time to complete a traffic survey and deploy tube counters to study the impact of a project such as this. Understanding traffic and the movement of people when designing a parklet is complex. 

In addition, to this, you are running a truncated engagement process with the community and retail to garner support and ensure participation, all the while likely developing an ‘Expression of Interest’ application and assessment process, scoping a design for approval to meet tight state government funding timeframes, along with drafting a lease agreement. 

And what if the high street or car parks you’ve chosen for the project is on a free-flowing main road or the main bus route, requiring re-routing? Or your activation team wants the design to include a bike lane? 

Once you have identified your data gaps and are comfortable with learning as you go, you’re at the point of a trial.  

For this, you will need to measure the impact on traffic volumes and speeds around these high pedestrian areas, assess intersection hotspots, and take corrective action throughout the project. It will be a process of ongoing evaluation, letting the data guide you for prioritising and resolving issues as they arise. Such as, knowing when the project has led to an increase in traffic volumes, is causing safety concerns, and requires the deployment of barriers between traffic and patrons.  

It’s this type of situational awareness that’s going to lower the pain of street conversion and inform: 

• Monitoring and evaluation of your intervention  
• Gauging if it was a good idea, had an impact and if you chose the right location, and  
• Understanding whether knocking out parking spaces has meant more delays and congestion, so you can advise the council on whether to make it permanent and scale-out or recalibrate.  

The US has been leading the charge when it comes to repurposing parking bays and downtown streets. San Francisco citizens reclaimed the public land that roads and parking were built on in 2005, and the city then rolled out parklets in 2010. In another instance, UCLA put out a Parklet Toolkit in 2012 to help accelerate such kerbside deployments. Fast forward and some promotors of this ‘Strong Towns’ approach now want councils to hold annual auctions of the kerbside, putting a price on the kerb and letting the market decide. 

Over this side of the pond, we’ve seen parklet pilots in their early days, such as City of Unley (2014/15) in Adelaide, but it’s COVID-19 that’s led a plethora of Australian councils now trailing parklets and shared spaces.  

NSW councils are currently testing the public appetite for further street interventions, trialling streets as open shared spaces to support retail, while ensuring safe social distancing. Under its Your High Street grant program, the NSW Government announced funding for 48 temporary demonstration and pilot projects, across 27 regional councils and 14 councils in Greater Sydney.  

Outside of Sydney, Lake Macquarie Council kicked off their ten-month VibrantSCENE initiative in August 2020 – a 10-month pilot program designed to support hospitality businesses within Lake Macquarie.  

For Lake Macquarie, the pilot program is an innovative experiment. They are trialling new ways for the community and businesses to interact, allowing businesses to use Council-owned land for free while enabling them to serve more customers safely. 

According to Samantha Hardie, Strategic Landuse Planner for Lake Macquarie Council, “The council invited interested hospitality businesses to enrol for the pilot program and extended all of the support required to design outdoor dining precincts.” 

 Hardie adds, “In the initial phase, the criterion for location selection for this project was, the willingness of business owners to participate in the project, a no-objection note from surrounding businesses and general common sense, like you can’t have on-street dining on an 80 km speed zone. The rest we have learned and reformed on the go, based on intel, we gather about the economic impact for the business and general customer feedback on the experience.” 

As Victoria comes out of COVID-19 restrictions, Victorian councils are also working towards trialling open shared spaces for dining. The latest is Mornington Peninsula Shire Council, who have ‘opened applications for a free, temporary Outdoor Dining Permit to use extra footpath space, parking space or street space for outdoor dining and takeaway.’  

Wyndham City Council, in Melbourne’s west, will also be promoting dining on footpaths, streets, parking spaces, and rolling out pop-up alfresco areas.  

The timing is right in the major cities, with fewer cars driving downtown in Sydney and Melbourne already relieving some of the pressure on the kerbside; a trend that is being reinforced by the cultural shift to remote working. 

Although parklets and shared spaces can be installed quickly and relatively cheaply, their deployment may not take into account the broader impact on traffic and parking after the street is blocked off.

Smart Mobility Project Manager and Business Consultant, Trisha Rogers, works closely with councils to improve kerbside usage and highlights the trade-off between speed to value, planning and measuring the impact of the interventions.

“The speed of implementation challenge is around providing the space without first analysing and setting up your measurements. At the moment, the approach is, “The prime focus is about speed, and we will look at measurements later.”
“If you have your kerb digitised you would be able to map and track it. Few places have that, and this will test the council’s capabilities. It’s a learning experience,” adds Rogers.

In situations like these, where the speed of implementing a project is imperative, councils get little to no time to assess the impact, complete traffic surveys to understand possible disruptions to traffic flow, impact to the parallel and connected roads. An online traffic analysis tool like INSIGHT can help.

With real-time data, councils get immediate, scaled out access to traffic volumes, speeds, and delay times. They analyse the 12-month average volumes and speeds on the streets they plan to convert, to help inform the design. For example, if the average speed is over 25 kilometres per hour, but peaks over 35 kilometres per hour when the tourists arrive, they might err on the side of caution and deploy a concrete barrier between the traffic and people seated in a wooden parklet.

Once implemented, online traffic data and insights give you a command centre for monitoring daily, hourly, and 15-minute increments of traffic to assess impact, issues, and work closely with the shopfronts and community. This includes assessing: 

• Peak and off-peak traffic flow and volume, updated every 15 minutes 
• Minor road coverage of vehicle counts; allowing analysis of what is actually happening, rather than what’s perceived 
• Heavy vehicle versus light vehicle usage to see if you need to re-route trucks or stager certain types of vehicles 
• Delay times on inbound versus outbound traffic  
• Origin & destination, and trip data to understand where the traffic is coming from and going to; and 
• The traffic and economic impacts on retail revenues 

After any pilot, comes the all-important evaluation, impact assessment and post-implementation review. What impact did the pilot have, good and bad, intended, and unintended, and should the council ‘rinse and repeat, scale-out, make permanent or take corrective action?  

The cost-benefit analysis will need to consider not just financial costs but importantly, the economic returns to the local economy – the original goal. This is where Origin-Destination traffic data can help underpin the economic analysis and help assess whether the parklets attracted more out of town visitors and boosted retail spending. 

It’s this last point that is paramount for councils to hone in on for the evaluation, says Rogers, “What I would suggest is asking what were the economic impacts? Have you had positive outcomes? Has it moved traffic to other locations and is causing issues there? Has reducing the width of the road pushed congestion out into other areas?”  

Assuming the pilot is a success, you will be asked to design an expanded program, which may extend onto busier high streets. What types of insights would help you in scaling out? Says Rogers, “Have an engineering approach to consider safety, then consider the use case. If you are mixing uses, is the speed appropriate? Is it a major thoroughfare? Have you thought about the bad actors, and is the structure right to protect people? How much of the kerbside is available, and how do Ubers drop people off at cafés?”  

Easy access to daily traffic data and insights is key for informing safety and design. Origin-Destination data might show that Sunday traffic has an average speed five kph higher than weekdays, with 60% of inbound traffic coming from outside the area, raising concerns that many of these drivers may be unfamiliar with your speed limits and mixed zone rules. You will need to know:  

• How significant is the increased flow and speeds during peak times? (lunch and dinner), when there’s high pedestrian activity, and how quickly does it ramp up? What’s the role of weather in determining demand? 
• What’s the pilot’s impact on increasing delays and travel times?  
• How successful were you in lowering speeds, especially at lunch and dinner peaks? 
• Was there ’rat running’ in suburban streets? 
• How many cars still head to that street expecting to park? 

You may have started with a single parklet trial, but the project can trigger wider concerns and issues.

It is this program of works that Rogers understands full well in terms of the internal competition for the kerb within the council, not just by drivers, delivery vans, cyclists, and pedestrians. “You have multiple teams using the kerbside space and need to have real-time datasets to manage that and the different scenarios planned. You need to have a variety of data sources to understand current usage and do ‘what if’ scenarios for issues such as repurposing parking spaces and the likely impact on end-users and planning.”

As Rogers concludes, “Data and how it is used is quite new. People will understand through this parklet process, how data would have allowed councils to react quicker and with more certainty if data was available in a useable form at their fingertips.”

Real-time traffic analysis will strengthen the business case for wider deployment, your multiuse design and your project’s integration into a smart city and parking initiatives to help you lead your community and businesses through uncertain times.