Good streets can become even better: parklets as indicators of streets’ urban design capacities

The need to identify ways to make Melbourne’s streets better places has become increasingly pressing, due to both ongoing pandemic restrictions that have encouraged local walking and consumption, and the advent of driverless cars and ridesharing that could drastically reduce street parking demand [1]. The widespread development of parklets during the Covid pandemic has been a large-scale experiment that provides a useful indicator of the varying capacities of streets for both short- and long-term transformation to enhance urban vitality. The distribution of Melbourne’s many parklets reveals both the potentials and impediments for converting existing carspace on streets for new and more varied uses.

A parklet is a small, barrier-protected space for public use which is temporarily installed onto a street-side car-parking space [2]. Its origins lie in experimentally reclaiming under-utilised urban street space for broader public benefit, providing extra room for leisure, socialising, artistic expression and greenery. In 2010 the City of San Francisco installed the world’s first trial café parklet, as part of ongoing traffic calming and economic revitalisation efforts for a down-at-heel commercial precinct on a busy four-lane arterial street with narrow footpaths. The subsequent spread of parklets worldwide has focused on reallocating parking spaces on commercial streets from convenient customer parking to spaces for outdoor dining, resulting in increased hospitality business income. By 2019, San Francisco had 76 parklets, and in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses there installed over 1300 new ones during 2020.

Over summer 2020-21, hundreds of hospitality parklets also incrementally transformed Melbourne’s streetscapes, 16m² at a time. With few pedestrian-focused plazas, Melbourne’s wide, straight streets are some of the city's most important public spaces. Temporary parklets demonstrate how these streets could quickly become better places for pedestrians to walk and linger.

Parklets are one among a suite of tools for pursuing strategic, incremental ‘right-sizing’ of streets, or ‘road dieting’, that is, minimising the right-of-way area dedicated to cars, in favour of expanding other people-oriented uses [3]. They are unique in specifically demonstrating the possibilities for higher and better use of individual kerbside parking spaces, which are not always an efficient, equitable or practical use of limited and expensive publicly-owned street space [4] [5].

Investigating Melbourne’s parklets

As part of an Australian Research Council funded project investigating Temporary and Tactical Urbanism, we are studying parklets across Australia. We are analysing their history, extent, urban contexts, design approaches, uses and governance policies, their proliferation during the COVID-19 pandemic, and what parklets can reveal about future possibilities for managing urban space.

Using aerial surveys and field observation, we identified 594 parklets across metropolitan Melbourne which were then examined for a range of urban design factors across various scales that positively and negatively impact the supply and demand for parklets in individual streets, including:

• The street’s importance within the urban traffic network
• The streetscape’s physical layout and its overall spatial quality
• The size, centrality, density, accessibility and land use mix of the retail precinct in which the street is located
• The site layout and business types of individual businesses that host parklets
  

Our analysis confirms many things urban designers already know about good streets, and some that are less obvious. It identifies where capacity might exist to make streets better for local pedestrian and commercial activities, and challenges policy-makers, planners and designers to consider how to address a range of impediments to improving and extending pedestrian-friendly street environments.

Mapping Melbourne's parklets

Our mapping shows that 35 of the 51 major retail precincts within 12km of Melbourne’s CBD host parklets. Parklets thrive on traditional ‘high streets’ that have small-scale shopfronts, mixed use, pedestrian density and good transport links, but relatively little through-traffic. Many parklets cluster along tram routes, which slow traffic and enhance access, and also the commercial streets terminating near Melbourne’s bayfront.

Our mapping found a concentration of parklets along five major north-south retail streets:

1. Chapel Street (Prahran)
2. Glenferrie Road (Hawthorn)
3. Lygon Street (Carlton)
4. Brunswick Street (Fitzroy)
5. Smith Street (Fitzroy)

These corridors are the least trafficked major streets in Melbourne’s extensive grid, where car traffic spreads across numerous alternative routes. These north-south streets also receive lunchtime sunshine on both kerbsides which attracts more people.

Parklets are scarce where retail precinct streets lack pedestrians. There were none around internalised shopping malls such as Highpoint and Chadstone, and few in the new mixed-use precincts of Southbank and Docklands. These precincts have different urban morphologies that largely segregate streets and cars from ample pedestrianised promenades, private interiors and off-street outdoor dining spaces. They also seem to have far less capacity for incremental transformations of the street edge. While they may provide more generous space for current needs, they are less adaptable for future needs as there are few business-to-street interfaces where parklets could intervene. Some recently-planned city-fringe shopping centres, such as Caroline Springs and Craigieburn, do have parklets, because they incorporate traditional pedestrian-oriented streets where hospitality businesses open onto tree-lined footpaths and kerbside carparking.

Street design and management factors than hinder parklet development

By examining 18 Melbourne retail streets that lacked parklets, we have identified several key street design and management factors that hinder the development of parklets. We suggest these constraints also broadly impact on the social and economic vitality and adaptability of local commercial streets.

Clearways and ‘side streets’

The most significant impediment to inner-city parklets was designated clearways as these are a feature of many long retail strips in Melbourne’s northern and south-eastern suburbs. The Victorian State agency VicRoads optimizes commuter traffic flows on over 600km of major Melbourne streets (shown in purple on Figure 1), by prohibiting parking on alternate kerbs during peak hours. Local governments therefore cannot allow parklets on these streets which prevents alternative use of existing road space.

However, by supporting increased vehicle access, streets with clearways can conversely support parklets on nearby streets, by bringing customers and reducing traffic on these streets. The five parklet-filled north-south commercial streets (shown in black in Figure 1) are all served by perpendicular east-west clearways. Low-traffic side streets intersecting clearways can add parklet capacity, particularly near street corners, if design conditions are right. Side-street parklets depend on the specific kinds of commercial uses and building facades that face those streets, as well as:

• The depth, design and use of property setbacks
• The existence of kerbside parking spaces
• The angles of street intersections
• The widths and design treatments of the streets themselves.

While parklets are inhibited by side streets that are designed just to maximise vehicular movements (such as those with wide cross-overs, street-fronting parking lots and dedicated left-turn lanes), they are also restricted by existing traffic-calming measures such as speed tables, mid-street traffic islands, and landscaped footpath widenings. All these factors limit available options for altering the streets’ design and use. But there is much scope to improve capacity and enliven the commercial frontages of lower-traffic minor streets.

Figure 2 shows how a very permeable, mixed-use neighbourhood can support vitality beyond its major, high-traffic commercial streets. 47% of Fitzroy & Collingwood’s 66 parklets are on side streets. This neighbourhood combines a critical mass of attractors including high-density living and good pedestrian connectivity with a good supply of accessible surplus width on its 20m-wide side streets. Shorter main-street blocks and hospitality businesses such as pubs dominating street-corner sites help facilitate the spread of parklets beyond main streets. Street-corner lots combine strong footfall, business visibility and access from main streets with greater space availability on their longer, low-traffic side-street frontages. Parklets on side streets were larger than on main streets, where businesses have narrower frontages, face competition from neighbouring businesses for parklet permits and parking spaces, where parking spaces are narrower and there are more crosswalks and tram stops.

Melbourne’s Central Activities District also illustrates traffic calming measures driving an expansion of pedestrian activity and parklets beyond main streets. Melbourne City Council has strategically deployed many parklets on the city centre’s four ‘Little’ streets to complement an ongoing plan to remove on-street parking and redefine these streets as 20km/h ‘shared zones’.

Street quality

Many factors that influence parklet creation in Melbourne are related to the design qualities of streets. They include the width of streets (both too wide or to narrow), the length of blocks, and the location of hospitality businesses along the block.

A number of main-street retail precincts in Melbourne’s suburbs lack parklets, although they aren’t clearways. We examined eight such streets to identify why and our analysis revealed a range of factors. The street-based hospitality precincts that lack parklets tend to be smaller precincts, further from central Melbourne, which people are more likely to drive to than walk to. These spaces have:

Parklets are also rare on commercial streets that already have wide enough footpaths to meet outdoor dining demand.

Comparison of three parallel commercial corridors in middle-suburban Glen Eira shows a complex range of factors that define street quality can influence the absence or presence of parklets. These include:

Our local analysis suggests that quality existing streetscapes can contribute more to parklet viability than urban centrality, urban intensity or transport access and that while parklets can add to existing pedestrian quality, they can't create it on their own.

Street capacity

The proliferation of parklets on Melbourne’s streets shows how such street transformations can occur experimentally and incrementally. Our analysis indicates that minor side streets provide capacity for parklets where major commercial streets don’t presently allow for such transformations. Parklets on side streets help to bridge the frequent 20m-wide gaps in high streets at intersections, and extend traffic calming and pedestrian vitality. Parklets can only occupy commercial streets that still have untapped capacity, which offer both supply of under-used kerbside parking and demand for expanded dining. Where wide streets have already been comprehensively traffic calmed with greatly-widened footpaths, parklets’ transitional, adaptive function is largely redundant.

This study also suggests that street amenity and safety issues may place an upper limit on the proliferation of parklets. Gertrude Street, Fitzroy shows how a continuous line of parklets along both kerbsides reduces the street to a timber-walled canyon with barely room for two passing trams or cars, putting bicycles and pedestrians in danger.

The future role of parklets

Melbourne has great streets. Their ample width and gridded connectivity provide excellent capacity for adaptation. The rapid rollout of parklets during COVID, and the strong levels of both support and resistance to them, demonstrate the need for a more considered, and informed debate as to what is the most efficient, equitable and practical use of public kerbside parking spaces. This research provides practical insights into the role of parklets in improving the quality of our streets, including the specific design and management factors that can contribute to their success or hinder their development. Parklets show where and how street capacity can be deployed to enhance urban vitality by reducing carspace and providing better environments for pedestrians.