MEASURING THE PLACE FUNCTION OF MAJOR URBAN ROADS

摘要

Roads have dual, and at times competing, functions: as links, based on their capacity to enable movement of people and vehicles, and as places, based on being a destination in their own right. Both are crucial, and increasingly the need to support and value the place function of roads, as part of road design, is being recognised in New Zealand transport policy and planning. However, although the means of measuring the link performance of roads - through traffic volumes, composition and speed data - is well established for New Zealand roads, the ability to measure their place function is much less so. There is an historical basis for this imbalance, stemming from the rapid increases in vehicle-based mobility throughout the 20th century. These increases led to road design being driven by demand and capacity considerations, with the result that roads tended to grow wider as populations increased. The place function of roads was, by comparison, not a primary concern.