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INTRODUCTION

bike map, launceston

Many people, especially those involved in bicycle advocacy, hold a quaint misconception that travel mode choices are made voluntarily. They suppose that whole cities will swap cars for bikes when they have their awakenings. However, travel mode share of any city is not a matter of cultural practice. Mode shares are built.

 

No city opens our eyes to this factbetter than Rotterdam. In most Dutch cities the highest mode share belongs to the bike. Rotterdam is the exception, with car trips outnumbering bike trips by a factor of 4. How can there be such a difference between Rotterdam and somewhere like Amsterdam for example, when both have the same cycling heritage, the same “strictliability” laws to make drivers go slow around bikes, the same flat terrain that aids cycling everywhere, the same public transport and the same world beating bike infrastructure? It is the presence of structures built to serve driving which means Rotterdam has twice as many car trips, and half as many bike trips, compared to a Post-war reconstruction meant Rotterdamwas able to build motorways discharging cars near the heart of the city as well as multi-storey carparking stations to store them. It is the motorways and parking that makes this a car city.

 

Outside of Northern Europe, most cities are car cities in the sense that Rotterdam is a car city. Most have major roads aimed squarely at town centres where car parking stations are built to receive them. We can see the design decisions flowing from car access in any car city.

 

In this report we reveal how car dependence has been built into the fabric of the city of Launceston,Tasmania. While the street grid dates to the age of walking and horses, it has been systematically inscribed with the tell-tale signs of car dependence for the past 60 years. These include: surface treatments that tell drivers they have right of way when crossing the footpath; new buildings with internal access garaging; traffic engineering that prioritises high speed traffic flows rather than bike or pedestrian safety; door-zone bike lanes that are known to cause death and injury; a dearth of bike racks outside of shops; on-street car parking at the expense of street trees or protected bike infrastructure; mid block car parking at the expense of any greenery; and footpaths built in the 1930s and 40s beside roads that meet latest standards.

 

Launceston has not been chosen because issues here are unique, but because they are universal. It also happens to be the city where our team of researchers is based – a group of final year Master of Architecture students in the School of Architecture & Design at the University of Tasmania. The research employs a range of cartographic methods. Cartographic representations are a familiar component of the architect’s toolkit. They are typically one of
the first devices through which we seek to understand the physical characteristics of the ‘site’ and the broader  terrain. From Giambattista Nolli’s familiar abstractions of public space highlighting figure and ground to the seminal work of Kevin Lynch on mental maps, or the more peculiar mathematical orientations of Hillier and Hanson’s spatial syntax, numerous mapping practices have become part of the lexicon of architecture as a means to explore the texture of the urban landscape.

 

Written by Research Supervisors:
Ceridwen Owen (PhD) & Steven Fleming(PhD)

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