Local street needs attenton



Figure 1 taken by Lydia Zou



Seafield View Road is a small local road located in Grafton. Its narrowness  put many pedestrians and divers to inconvenience. According to the rough measurement myself, the width of footpaths on both sides of the road is 0.84 meter. It is so narrow that it hardly admitted of two persons walking abreast. Sometimes, pedestrians cannot even be able to walk on it  becasue some parts of it is occupied by rubbish bins and trees (figure 1), therefore they have to use driveway.



Figure 2 by Lydia Zou

 The whole road is about 5 meters wide. Apart from on street parking space and yellow lined bicycle path (figure 2), the rest space only allow one vehicle driving through at one time.   As we can see from the figure 2, the road is too narrow and it is impossiblet to allow one vehicle and one bicycle can travel along together. It is even difficult to let pederstrian walk on the side of the road when a car is passing through. Common traffic rule in New Zealand is the vehicle should be yield to pederasians, but seems that it not applies here. If the road is small and messy like this, what the difference to build footpaths and draw a bicycle line?

My suggestions to this road are: build a car park nearby to solve problem of on street park and remove the bicycle line in which to extend the width of footpath, leaving more space for pedestrians. After all, it seems unrealistic to have a bicycle friendly environemnt here, we have to put pedestrians' interest as top priority in this residential area.

Seafield View Road is one particular example out of hundreds of local streets in whole Auckland, however, it reflects the fact that no matter how small it is,bad roading condition will always has serious impact on local residents' daily lives. They deserve public and the Coucil's attentions just as those large and important traffic roads.