Why Don’t Town Planners Design Better Road Junctions?
Who’d want to drive around this?!
Danish architect Jan Gehl (who famously turned the gridlocked city of Copenhagen into the most walkable city on earth) says that the problem with town planners, is that they are always thinking from a car-centric point of view. He says they should get out of their vehicles, and think ‘people first, cars second’.
Many of today’s town planners wrongly assume that nearly everyone drives or has a car. They don’t. People are broke, ill, have no money to buy or even rent a car. And so when town planners design supermarkets and stores out-of-town, it ends up isolating communities.
England is also sadly home to some of the world’s most complicated road junctions. Opened in 1972, spaghetti junction (the Gravelly Hill interchange) is a tangle of roads and flyovers that would give most of us a breakdown to travel around the north of the city centre. Built in 1972, it links the M6 motorway with key routes. But is now criticised as a confusing example of road architecture.
It’s also listed (along with the Arc de Triomphe roundabout in Paris and Junction 9 of the M25 at Leatherhead) as one of the world’s most unsafe road junctions.
Carrying over 200,000 cars and lorries each day, others say it’s noisy to live near, and there are problems with local drug addicts and graffiti. The area is also worryingly home to lots of native birds and wildlife, including swans on nearby canals.
Locals who have lived there since it was built, remember their parents being given ‘free cheap double glazing’. Today some say it’s more akin to living in Beirut, with litter, noise, drug-dealing and air pollution. The local petrol station is lit up 24 hours a day.
The answer as ever, is for town planners to focus on walkable communities. Until we get these, town planners will keep funding the building of busy motorways. You’ve heard that if you put another lane in, it just fills up with more traffic. Until something is done.
First life, then spaces, then buildings. The other way around never works. If you make more roads, you will have more traffic. Jan Gehl
Milton Keynes (a town of countless roundabouts)
Milton Keynes sits about 50 miles north-west of London. This new town is planned on a grid road system with countless roundabouts, but is mostly known for being home to over 22 million trees.
Milton Keynes: A town your mum could have built. Jonathan Glancey
Most other countries don’t have roundabouts, although they seem to work quite well in England. Reasons given are that in the US, they would be too expensive to build, and there are no national rules, on how to use them. So you could imagine:
In England, we politely queue. In the USA, you may get ‘I’m an American, America first, you wait your turn!’
It would lead to absolute chaos.
Chaos due to the ‘Gateshead Flasher’
The so-called Angel of the North’ was very controversial when built, some likening it to a Nazi propaganda statue, looking over Newcastle and Gateshead. Others now call him the ‘Gateshead flasher’.
But on a serious note, why would town planners allow a massive statue by a busy motorway? It’s obvious that people driving by are going to look up, and it has been panned as a silly idea, on safety grounds.
