F E AT U R E
The Avenues: future proofing Glasgow’s Streets 1
As the world’s attention turns to Glasgow, an enduring legacy has been created in Sauchiehall Street. Ian Hingley
Urban Movement
Sauchiehall Street Avenue was completed in 2019, transforming a hostile, degraded and vehicle dominated four-lane highway into a humanised public space. Traffic was squeezed into a single running lane with a second lane for bus stops, taxi ranks, loading and disabled parking. This created room for the new public spaces and more favourable conditions for life on the street with calmed trafficresulting in reduced noise and air pollution. The initial £6.5 million investment in Sauchiehall Street has given Glasgow a new high functioning public realm, that is equipped to meet the needs of the 21st century citizen, setting the 52
standard for the upcoming Avenues.It provides an infrastructure that enables more of life to be lived out in the street in safe, comfortable and accessible spaces and will act as catalyst for an active travel revolution in a city where obesity levels are relatively high and life expectancy is relatively low. Encouraging more people to walk, cycle and use public transport, rather than drive, is one of the programmes primary objectives. In addition to providing the actual physical infrastructure (footways, cycle tracks and bus shelters etc.) Sauchiehall Street now demonstrates all of the ten indicators of TfL’s ‘Healthy Streets’ initiative. The design introduced two new principal components: a 2.5m wide multifunctional verge / furniture zone next to the carriageway (which hosts the trees, seats, cycle stands, decorative lighting and all other street furniture), and a 3m wide bidirectional cycle track. These new components, when combined with the widened and resurfaced footway, create a single linear ‘public’ space on the north side,
framed by the trees. On the southside, the footway was also widened, decluttered and resurfaced, and now has ample licensable space outside cafes and bars along with extensive public seating. The most dramatic new physical element, however, are the trees. A single straight line of thirty-eight semi-mature (40-45cm girth, 7m high) mixed species deciduous and fastigiate trees run down the centre of the street. They were planted into a 2m wide trenched rootzone, created with structural crates and surfaced with Caithness slabs and detailed with permeable joints to allow surface water to penetrate. The new segregated cycle track allows cyclists to travel west, legally, for the first time since the introduction of the one-way system, and initial counts by the council show that cycling levels have increased by 80% eastbound and 600% west-bound. Walking is encouraged by increasing the width available to pedestrians by widening footways,
1. Sauchiehall Street Avenue. © Ian Hingley
