Walking and Cycling given priority in five-step city plan

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alking and cycling in line with a “five-step plan” should have priority when imagining Shepparton’s town planning and infrastructure needs.

The need to acknowledge and implement that plan falls upon both the city’s paid officers and its elected representatives.

Let’s look at the plan.

A sign of the times
 in Shepparton.

Step one: The plan and it associated infrastructure must first and foremost be walkable.

Pedestrians must be able to use and access easily wherever it is in the city they want to go.

Step two: Once the needs and convenience of those on foot are attended to, the cyclist should be considered next, meaning that after pedestrians’ needs are resolved, facilities and amenities should be such that cycling is not only easy, but next to walking the preferred method of moving about.

Step three: Obviously, in city as geographically large as Shepparton, walking and cycling are not always feasible or possible and so the next option is public transit and so that should always be close to the top of the planning agenda.

With fossil fuels become less viable, private transport will become an ever reducing option and so the city needs to reinvent Shepparton around one of the many forms of innovative public transit systems.

Shepparton was recently visited by a fellow who explained how the city could be serviced by battery-powered, Google-controlled, driverless vehicles that would circulate throughout the city, taking both people and freight wherever they, and it, needed to go. Such “pods” are already technologically possible.

People and freight would arrive in the city by sophisticated rail and then taken around the city on their Google-controlled, driverless pods.

Step four: This is about land and property use – for a town or city to be walkable, there has to be somewhere to walk to and so our designers need to ensure the city is dotted with beautiful public spaces where people simply want to be.

Property use is also about ensuring the present and preferred idea of sprawl, that is growth at the cities edges, is reversed with the emphasis being put on infill and the development, or redevelopment, is concentrated on the inner-parts of the city where the infrastructure is at its most intricate and developed. The city’s rating system should reflect that, rates being the cheapest in the centre and more costly as you get toward the periphery,

Step five: When steps one through to four are completed, the city’s attention should turn to road transport, but not until all four of the first steps have been totally developed and all options exhausted.

Five fundamental steps toward making Shepparton a city that may just endure the rigours of the 21^st Century; a century that beyond doubt is going to be different from all those passed, particularly the energy-rich 20^th Century.

The contradictions and clashes between beliefs and reality

Beliefs and reality are often estranged.
Most believe the world is a violent place, and of course they are correct, but if considered historically, they are simply perpetuating a myth.

Dr Rodney Tolley

Traders invariably believe that customers need parking close to their stores as the resultant success of their businesses is linked, inextricably to the convenience of arrival by car.
That is quite wrong as surveys throughout the world, including some by traders themselves, have illustrated that customers seek a host of things, among them safety and the ability to easily access the store on foot, but have parking near the bottom of their hierarchy of needs.
Those two matters, it should be noted, are just two of many discrepancies between beliefs and reality.
Steven Pinker explored the changing realities about violence in his latest book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes”.
Pinker acknowledged that our world is a violent place with our sensitivities sharpened by the 24-hour news service that presently encircles the globe alerting us to every violent act, no matter how small, big or obscure.


Steven Pinker

However, comparatively few people today have to live looking behind, Pinker pointed out, in the fear that they will be murdered, assaulted, tortured, raped or abducted.
The belief is that people face all those dilemmas, but the reality is that we are in the midst of a peaceful epoch and violence in its absolute sense is something of a rarity.
Car parking is another troublesome myth, different obviously, but equally ill-founded.
Speaking recently in Melbourne the chair of the global movement, Walk 21, Dr Rodney Tolley, said traders unquestionable believed car parking was what had the biggest influence on their businesses, when quite clearly it was other things, among them their easy accessibility by pedestrians.
Dr Tolley was talking to a relatively benign audience of mostly planners and those interested in urban design and argued that most business owners didn’t truly understand what it was that customers really wanted.
He said that the walkability of towns and cities, and within that easy access to shops, was now “core business” and needed to be treated seriously by all in the community.
Dr Tolley was not simple theorizing as he was able to produce hard numbers illustrating how businesses had sharply improved once pedestrian access to them and the walkability of the general area had been enhanced.
Life, it seems, is not exactly what we believe; we live in haze of myths, of ill-informed fantasies and are surrounded by judgements that are demonstrably inaccurate and yet in the name of emotional comfort, arrogance, ignorance and pride we to persevere with beliefs that have humanity teetering on the edge of the chasm.

Deciding on Australia's top walking destination

Shepparton is one of ten places that could be named as Australia’s Best Walking Town.

The national health magazine, Prevention Australia, lists Launceston, Esperance, Adelaide, Bright, Canberra, Narooma, Port Macquarie, Townsville and Noosa as the other finalists.
Criteria for the title, it seems, is somewhat ill-directed with the emphasis being entirely on recreational walking, missing completely what it is that makes a town or city truly walkable.
In a place designed for walking, every walk becomes a recreational moment, whether you are walking to work, walking to shop, walking to a leisure event or simply walking to see a friend.
Fred Kent who created the US based Project for Public Spaces said: “If you plan for cars and traffic you get more cars and traffic, but when you design your community around people, you get more people”.
Shepparton, as is the case for most other towns and cities, has been structured around cars and traffic with the odd oasis where the emphasis has been on making the place appropriate for people as opposed to machines.
Walking in a place designed for people and around the community is always a recreational event.
Prevention Australia editor, Natalie Flintoff, said that research had shown that just five minutes of walking in a green environment lifted a person’s self esteem and confidence.
The Shepparton section on the Prevention Australia website quotes a city visitor who said: “In Shep, the Goulburn River winds its way through farms, orchards and native forests. On our walks, we watch for the abundant wildlife and get a glimpse of real Australian bushland—all just a skip away from the city centre.”
This observation, as true as it might be, is a little misleading as Shepparton proper is not really about walking; it is about driving.
Maybe Shepparton will be a winner – on the existing criteria that’s unlikely – but surely it is reason for the city generally, and the council in particular, to focus on the real value to the community in making our city truly walkable.
The switch requires undoubted physical changes, but the first and most important change is psychological as walking demands a whole new mindset.