Focus of work
Headington Liveable Streets is a group of residents from Headington in Oxfordshire who have who have come together to make better, safer and healthy neighbourhoods for everyone. The group aims to reduce traffic in the area and is inspired by the model of low-traffic neighbourhoods.
For this project, the group is putting together a series of visualisations of how Headington streets could look and function if they were designed to prioritise the safety and convenience of people walking, wheeling and cycling.
Most people in the UK haven’t seen or experienced the superior active travel infrastructure and people-focused street design in countries like the Netherlands, so aren’t aware of what’s possible. Even for those who are aware, it’s difficult to imagine how those design features could work on the roads and junctions they use every day. 3D visualisations make it easy for people to understand how good active travel infrastructure can be achieved on their roads.
Impact
The road designs produced by the Highway Authority regularly fail to properly prioritise and enable active travel or comply with applicable standards and guidance, taking a car-first approach that often doesn’t provide for active travel at all or includes provision that is difficult or even dangerous to use. This largely results from motor-normativity and lack of ambition and imagination on the part of engineers and briefing officers.
Headington Liveable Streets hopes that the visualisations will raise the bar for officers and councillors and help overcome this design quality deficit. It also aims to get people excited about the possibilities for change on their streets and help them recognise how inadequate and inequitable current road designs are, inspiring them to become advocates for change on their local roads.