The Star: June 06, 2019

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