This article is more than 9 months old

This article is more than 9 months old

In every city there are places where the road should be just a bit wider, where the bus stop would be better a few metres down or, perhaps, a multi-lane highway simply should not exist.

Bad urban design is a barrier to what should be the smooth flow of life in cities. It ruins commutes and can make daily life unnecessarily difficult for disabled and elderly people.

Guardian Australia spoke to experts and chose a few of the worst examples across Australia – from the crossing chaos of Sydney’s Central Station to the train stations in the middle of freeways in Perth.

But we want to hear your examples too, both general and specific. Tell us your experiences in the comments below.

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Sydney: ‘Urban design mistake 101’

Crossing in almost any direction from Sydney’s Central Station is an ordeal.

But on the east side, the voyage across Elizabeth Street is such a crush of bodies that police are sometimes deployed to manage the crowd.

“There are three crossing points that are missing,” says Benjamin Driver, senior urban designer at Hill Thalis Architecture. “It squashes hundreds of people at one time between two columns. That to me is urban design mistake 101.”

Benjamin Driver 💧 (@benji_driver) We have a major design fault compounding at Central Station. One of the busiest in the city with 10,000’s more ped’sthan vehicles daily, yet light rail has made crossing even harder. Today police are managing crowds, and light rail and metro not open!#nswpol #transport pic.twitter.com/e91zcrS8Qi

Driver’s solution is to add multiple single crossing points all around, or to make the entire thing a large, square scramble – like the one at the corner of Park and George streets in the CBD.

The installation of the new light rail station – due to open on 14 December – has made the problem even worse. That one crossing is now a bottleneck for pedestrians, train traffic and a bike path that is frequently blocked by crowds of people waiting to cross the road.

The crossing signal for the light rail tracks is so close to the road, its sound frequently gets confused for the road crossing. People can often be seen stepping out into the traffic on busy Elizabeth Street after hearing the light rail signal.

“This is one of the most intense intersections in the city,” Driver says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The ‘intense’ intersection outside Central Station in Sydney. Photograph: Screengrab from video of intersection near Sydney's central station./Guardian Australia

On the other side, the situation is hardly better. At Railway Square, where George Street becomes Broadway, the pedestrian crossing narrows to a very small triangle.

From two wide and busy crossings, people are funnelled into a small area with barely enough standing room, as cars and buses whizz dangerously close by.

“It comes historically from the way the trams used to meet and interchange,” Driver says. “It used to be a big, beautiful flat square, people used to get off the tram and just walk across that square.”

But the popularity of cars has widened Broadway, and made the crossing increasingly hostile. Driver says that if infrastructure was better in other parts of the city – such as having more light rail through the inner west – that would reduce the number of buses and cars needing to travel down Broadway.

“You could take back a lane on each side of the footpaths,” he says.

Melbourne: ‘A bridge that is too low’

The Montague Street bridge needs almost no introduction. Its story can be told in two perfect headlines. From May 2016: Safety upgrade to begin on Melbourne’s accident-prone Montague Street bridge. And June 2016: Upgrade to Montague Street bridge fails to stop truck getting stuck – again.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A truck wedged under the Montague Street bridge in Melbourne in June 2016. Photograph: @samcos73

It is, quite simply, a bridge that is too low. Or, looked at another way, it is a street that frequently bears trucks that are too high.

The three-metre-high bridge in South Melbourne has its own dedicated webpage: howmanydayssincemontaguestreetbridgehasbeenhit.com. It’s at 29 at time of publication.

ABC Melbourne (@abcmelbourne) "In 2050 I don't wish Melbourne to have flying cars, but i wish to see the bridge in Montague Street have higher clearance"

Some solid ideas from our listeners this morning on what they want for Melbourne in 2050 pic.twitter.com/2jwxr1CqPc

Katrina Sherlock (@Sherlangers) Montague st Bridge strikes again @MontagueStBridg #gogetwmmonty pic.twitter.com/JbMBZLvZHH

Adelaide: ‘Not enough footpath to walk on’

The bugbear of Daniel Bennett, the South Australian president of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects, is how car-centric Adelaide can be.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bars on Peel street, Adelaide. Photograph: Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

“We have 300-odd laneways in the city, and in my former role at City of Adelaide we converted a lot of those,” he says. “The ones that we haven’t done are infuriating because there’s no footpath, there’s a little bit of bitumen and curb, there’s not enough to walk on.”

Three in particular stand out: Coromandel Place, French Street and Chesser Street behind Grenfell Street where “most of the buses come in”. Instead of being comfortable pedestrian spaces, Bennet says, residents are constantly in fear of getting hit by cars.

A similar issue is West Terrace, on the west side of the city centre, and how it intrudes on to the CBD.

“Adelaide is brilliant because it has this parkland 770 hectares around the city,” Bennet says. “But there is one bit of the main road that comes into the city, you’ve actually excised a tenth of the parklands by one road – West Terrace.

“It is impossible to cross, it takes you forever, it is really unfriendly to people trying to cross through it to parklands. If we made it smaller, maybe two or three lanes in each direction as opposed to seven or eight, and pushed all the traffic outside the parklands, you’d solve it.”

Brisbane: ‘Noisy and ugly infrastructure’

“Any Brisbane street in which the roadbed is wider than the bordering buildings are tall is an example of terrible urban design,” says Dorina Pojani, a senior lecturer in urban planning at the University of Queensland.

They create a sense of streets being “barren”, she says, which makes them simply unpleasant to walk on.

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“Closer to the centre, an example is, sadly, Stanley Street. I say sadly because this street is lined with charming old buildings, shops and cafes. It’s a live reminder of the city’s history. Yet the roadbed is overpowering. Too wide compared to the height of the buildings.”

Pojani says this could have been reduced by creating a two-way bike path along one side of Stanley Street, with a green strip.

Other than that, there is the small matter of the Pacific Motorway interchange itself.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Riverside Expressway is seen in Brisbane. Photograph: Regi Varghese/AAP

“To the west, Stanley Street is bordered by that spaghetti bowl of the Pacific Motorway interchange. That type of noisy and ugly infrastructure has no place in a city centre, let alone right next to the city’s most attractive parks (Southbank and the Botanical Garden) and two major hospitals (Mater Children’s hospital and Queensland Children’s hospital)”.

Perth: ‘Vulnerability to sea level rise’

Julian Bolleter, co-director of the Australian Urban Design Research Centre, says “bad urban design” is something that doesn’t provide flexibility for the future.

We are currently designing apartment blocks around the river that are literally 1.2 metres above water level Julian Bolleter

“Most urban design decisions involves trade-off in certain things,” he says. “I don’t think there are any really, really bad examples of design, I just think some of the trade-offs are not ideal.

“What constitutes good urban design is a structure that is resilient for potential futures. Bad urban design is a design that locks in vulnerabilities to future scenarios.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Swan River and Perth CBD. Photograph: Richard Wainwright/AAP

He can think of two examples in Perth.

“In Perth … we are currently designing apartment blocks around the river that are literally 1.2 metres above water level. They are are already needing to pump out those basements. That is locking in a vulnerability to sea level rise.

“We have many train stations in Perth that are effectively designed by transport planners, not urban designers, which means you have generic rail stations in the middle of freeways that are not connected to urban activities.”

He points to stations along the Kwinana Freeway and the Mitchell Freeway.

“They are essentially transit hubs where urban design is an afterthought. Train stations are often in the middle of freeways, because it’s easy. In the end it doesn’t really leverage great connection to the city.”