Lisbon City Hall's "rapid urban interventions" team created an unusual solution in the Santa Cruz de Cima neighborhood, in Benfica, that preserves car parking and pedestrian circulation.
Compatibilizing the demand for parking with unobstructed pedestrian spaces and safer (and less traffic) streets is not always an easy taskbut the solution can often be to stipulate one-way streets. This is what was done in the Santa Cruz de Cima neighborhood, in Benfica, where, in two days, traffic directions were changed to give more pedestrian space and solve the problem of informal parking on sidewalks.
The intervention was carried out by Lisbon's Territorial Coordination Unit (UCT), a division of the City Council dedicated to small works that can make a big difference. The main change was made to Rua do Parque, a two-way street that runs through the neighborhood. On Google Street View, you can see pre-building images of how residents improvised parking spaces on the sidewalk to leave the canal space clear for automobile traffic.
The solution now implemented by the UCT teams solved this problem in a simple way without hindering the parking supply: the Park Street lost one of his sensesThis meant moving other streets in the neighborhood (most of them were already one-way streets and only had their directions reversed). Formal parking spaces were created on the road that was lost, which do not take away space from the pedestrian; and since the road that was left would still be too wide, a small buffer was created with orange paint and bollards in order to increase the useful pedestrian space on the other side - The more road you give to cars, the more they tend to speed up, so by reducing the roadway you can achieve more pedestrian-friendly space and make the whole environment safer.
The intervention on Rua do Parque also included a gymkhana with the exchange of the parking side of the street, in the middle of it, to try to calm down speeds. The entire Santa Cruz de Cima neighborhood is zone 30, although, in practice, this speed limit is often not respected. All the work was done with paint, bollards and vertical signs - a solution pop-up and therefore cheap. Eventually, in the future, this street may be rehabilitated to make the temporary infrastructure more definitiveBy increasing the width of the sidewalk or creating a whole coexistence zone there.
🚧 The Santa Cruz de Cima neighborhood will undergo changes in traffic directions.
- Ângelo Pereira (@Angelo_fPereira) February 16, 2023
The streets Helena de Aragão, Parque, Maestro Raul Ferrão, Actor Nascimento Fernandes, and Actor Alves da Cunha will become one-way streets.
These changes meet the requests of the residents. pic.twitter.com/GJNkQn89oV
The solution adopted in Rua do Parque and Bairro Santa Cruz de Cima could be adopted in other neighborhoods in the city, where one-way streets can also be created to preserve parking and sidewalks, while trying to calm speeds.
