Head to Head does pedestrian crossings

This week’s topic: That pedestrians in Sydney should not have to hit a button to cross the street

Andrew Woodhouse
I love buttons.

Not just on my double-breasted jacket (am I the only one still wearing these?) but also at ATMs (thank you, Ms Money), on mobile phones, and at airport seat-booking terminals.

It’s the power of one. One finger that is, like Michelangelo’s famous fresco on the Sistine Chapel ceiling of the finger of God stretching out to Adam.

I want that power. I want the power of touch, and I want it for all walkers. For all who’ve stood endlessly at traffic lights in freezing, Hobart-cold conditions in horizontal rain. For all those blown away by Mawson Base-force winds while people in their cocooned cars nonchalantly shuffle through intersections, with windows wound up and heaters, stereos and mobile phones blowing, blasting and bleating.

This is for you. This is for us. Now is the winter of our mass discontent. Now is the time to take up our umbrellas and our umbrage. Now is the time to take back our streets.

Legally, a ‘street’ runs from shopfront to shopfront and has since the 18th century.  So this second wave of annexation has been a long time coming I admit. We’ve been hibernating. Now we want more, much more.  More space, more pace and more grace. We want more room to move, higher-energy pedestrian traffic levels and more manoeuvering on our personal compass of daily activities.

So when I arrive at intersections I am Moses. Cars part like the Red Sea. I have absolute right-of-way just like signless, shared zones in European cities. Pedestrians are as important as convulsing cars with space-consuming inhabitants of one.  And I achieve all this with just one finger.

I press a button.

Electronics whirr.  Lights wink. Cyclopean cameras nod in obeisance and buttons genuflect as that little, green-lit, stylised walking man beckons me forward. Systems monitor my safe arrival on the other side and then anticipate another pod of pedestrians. I’m not Goebbels, Hitler’s repeat-the-same-message media führer (no comment please Mr Editor), but I will repeat this once more: A City Is Its People.

So people, let’s take it back.  Let’s start at intersections.

Peter Whitehead
Well let’s not give up all the traffic lights yet.

One day our infatuation with the car will end and the streets will not be piled with parked people-movers. There will be space in the public thoroughfares for all manner of variously powered modes of transport, from the traditional Shanks’s pony through all sorts of appropriate and sustainable public transports of delight to thrill-seeking jet-packers and high-wired flying foxes.

The fear of sudden death beneath thousands of horsepower will be a darkly shared memory of times best forgotten but as warnings for wide-eyed town planners. WRONG WAY GO BACK reads the sign on the freeway of love for the gas-guzzling avatars of our Machine Age hubris. The future is pedestrian.

Which is as derisive a term now as motorist will come to be – a sneering snarl of derision damning the moronically unimaginative.

But, until then it is too pedestrian to imagine a modern city of Sydney’s wealth and position without lights to control safe strolling along our roadways.

Town Hall must act on Jan Gehl’s recommendations for better footslogging in the CBD. “Sydney’s heart needs a major rearrangement to make the best use of its natural assets, and rescue pedestrians from clutter and an over-reliance on cars”.

Forget mucking around with a functional bicycle boulevarde like Bourke Street and facilitate more awnings and balconies over our footpaths to provide shelter from the rain and shade from the sun. Encourage hanging gardens in laneways to provide sheltered, scented passages away from the rat-running sewers of motorists. Make a fleet of bicycles freely available for inner-city public use and let visitors get something for their parking-meter money.

The folly of our love affair with the car is apparent to almost everyone bar Senator Steve Fielding. We can no longer sacrifice our quality of life in the pursuit of the car industry’s will-o’-the-wisp promises of turbocharged Nirvana.

Drive the hell-bent motorheads back on their tollways across their tolled bridges and down their tolling tunnels. Let heaven-intent walkers breathe secure.

Everyone, on your feet to reclaim the street.