The Star: June 06, 2019
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<strong>The</strong> <strong>Star</strong> Thursday <strong>June</strong> 6 <strong>2019</strong><br />
18<br />
OUR PEOPLE<br />
Planning out the city’s transport system<br />
•From page 16<br />
We spent the whole weekend<br />
together. <strong>The</strong>re were five of us<br />
on that tramp and that was the<br />
only time I had met Julie. <strong>The</strong>n<br />
10 years later, we met again. That<br />
is how you meet these days, Find<br />
Someone, an internet date. It was<br />
before we got together that Julie<br />
showed her best friend my photo<br />
and she said, oh, it’s Axel. Julie<br />
and her best friend had done a<br />
lot of tramping together over the<br />
years. That photo was handed on<br />
to another of her friends and she<br />
said Julie, Axel was on one of our<br />
tramps. We said no, we would<br />
remember each other, wouldn’t<br />
we? We could honestly not<br />
remember each other. My wife’s<br />
recollection of that particular<br />
tramp is that she was tramping<br />
with four other women. But then<br />
the friend said I’ve got photos<br />
of that tramp and there we were<br />
sitting next to each other around<br />
the bonfire. We have absolutely<br />
no recollection of one another.<br />
Chance really stuffed that one up.<br />
Tell me a little bit about<br />
your work, what do you do<br />
day-to-day?<br />
I do a variety of things. I do<br />
safety audits, I design traffic<br />
lights, I do a lot of planning in<br />
the cycling space, I do a lot of<br />
design work. One of the things<br />
I really enjoyed, I did this really<br />
early on in my career. Going<br />
ADVOCACY: Axel Wilke helped redesign the plan to<br />
change Cranford St.<br />
through university I thought,<br />
no wonder nobody knows<br />
what to do because you simply<br />
don’t learn it. I had one lecture,<br />
45min that covered how you<br />
design for pedestrians, how you<br />
design street lights and how you<br />
accommodate cycling. <strong>The</strong> total<br />
of my undergrad for cycling<br />
was 15min. I thought holy s**t.<br />
I gathered a few like-minded<br />
people around me and said why<br />
don’t we get some professional<br />
training up-and-running and we<br />
did. We did it in a very deliberate<br />
way that made this a very slow<br />
process, it took us 18 months to<br />
talk some central Government<br />
agencies into it. We wanted<br />
their money and we didn’t want<br />
their money because we needed<br />
funding to do this, we could’ve<br />
already done it in our own time,<br />
in my case the Christchurch City<br />
Council was very supportive.<br />
We wanted money from central<br />
Government to have skin in the<br />
game. So we’ve been training<br />
since 2003 and have helped 1300<br />
engineers and planners through<br />
professional training. This is<br />
outstandingly influential. We<br />
have turned New Zealand around<br />
from not knowing anything to<br />
it being a lot better. You can see<br />
it up and down the country, it’s<br />
much better. It really didn’t take<br />
long for people to pick it up and<br />
know what to do. It’s fantastic.<br />
Out of that, going back to my day<br />
job, our company ViaStrada, we<br />
do a lot of guideline development<br />
work, engineering and design<br />
development for the Government<br />
and the New Zealand Transport<br />
Agency mostly, which everyone<br />
follows in the country. That<br />
comes out of having this idea<br />
back in 2001, let’s get some<br />
professional training going.<br />
Have you had any funny<br />
transport blunders? What’s<br />
the worst designed road in<br />
Christchurch?<br />
<strong>The</strong> worst designed piece<br />
of road we’re about to have is<br />
Cranford St, immediately north<br />
of Innes Rd. It is absolutely<br />
astonishing. <strong>The</strong> plans are for a<br />
minimum width facility, next to<br />
a minimum width facility, next<br />
to a minimum width facility<br />
and projected traffic volumes of<br />
more than 40,000 vehicles a day.<br />
Unbelievable. My colleague and<br />
I once had a really massive stuff<br />
up. It wasn’t a city intersection.<br />
When a state highway goes<br />
through the city, the NZTA or<br />
back then it was probably still<br />
Transit New Zealand – they are<br />
the road patrolling authority –<br />
they had an intersection where<br />
they changed the form of control<br />
from roundabout to traffic<br />
lights. <strong>The</strong>y ran the plan by the<br />
city council for sign-off and the<br />
transport planners thought this<br />
doesn’t look quite right, so they<br />
gave it to us designers to have a<br />
look at. A colleague of mine and<br />
I, we looked over it. What we did<br />
is we put these little post-it notes,<br />
tiny ones, whenever we found<br />
something wrong with the design<br />
on the big A1 plan and said what<br />
was wrong with it. When we<br />
finished, you couldn’t see the<br />
design any longer, the whole plan<br />
was covered. <strong>The</strong> guys made the<br />
decision rather than send it back<br />
to the consultants, why don’t we<br />
design it ourselves. We designed<br />
it with the city’s feedback and<br />
said here was a design that will<br />
work. Transit said thank you<br />
very much, it didn’t cost them<br />
a cent, ratepayers paid for it. So<br />
they built that thing, it opened<br />
and there was a crash once a day.<br />
We were absolutely horrified.<br />
What was happening was the<br />
intersection included this huge,<br />
sweeping slip lane. Whereby<br />
when people turned left there, the<br />
turn was such a large radius that<br />
many cars’ indicators wouldn’t<br />
reset. •Turn to page 21<br />
HAVE YOUR SAY<br />
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speed limits?<br />
We want to make Christchurch roads safer. We’re<br />
reviewing speed limits across our roading network.<br />
We are proposing to change the speed limit on<br />
Marshs Road<br />
Quaifes Road<br />
Shands Road<br />
Sabys Road<br />
Springs Road<br />
Kennedys Bush Road<br />
Halswell Junction Road Cashmere Road<br />
Hodgens Road<br />
Sutherlands Road<br />
Fountains Road<br />
Hoon Hay Valley Road<br />
Whincops Road<br />
Hendersons Road<br />
Downies Road<br />
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