DRIVING IN THE CITY CENTRE
SLIP LANES In the Australian traffic culture there are some remains from the earlier days car dominance. Slip lanes are one of them. Here cars are allowed to take left turns at their convenience and against traffic lights. In a world city with thousands of people on foot this an unfortunate habit which works against any common sense seen from a pedestrian perspective. Thus it causes many dangerous conflicts and accidents. Further this turning practice also works against the development of a strong cycling culture.
GREEN ARROWS BEFORE PEDESTRIAN LIGHTS The phasing of traffic lights have a great importance for the general traffic behaviour. Thus the general movement pattern needs to follow some basic logical principles in order to make people behave as it is expected. If traffic lights work against people’s basic logical principles, they start behaving more autonomously, not necessarily obeying to the traffic rules.
TRAFFIC SIGNS Another clear sign of a traffic dominated culture is the use of large scale traffic signals in downtown city places. These freeway signs appear completely out of scale with the context and fail to recognise the city quality turning city streets into means of serving an overall freeway system.
In most cities vehicle green is followed by pedestrian green. This is not the case in Sydney where in certain intersections (eg. Market Street /York Street) vehicule green is followed by vehicle green arrow and no pedestrian green. This is obviously to some surprise for the main part of all pedestrians and as such interesections like these are made more dangerous by pedestrians failing to obey the rules in a traffic environment, which they generally feel is not accomodating for them.
THE PEOPLE
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