Your Street, Your Say: Better streets for Darebin

Your Street, Your Say is a Local Area Planning project proposed by Darebin City Council with a focus on placemaking around streets. The goal of this project is to recommend a series of interventions and sub-projects for translating streets into better public spaces by building on aspirations of the local community (gathered through an extensive survey).

The recommendations (ideation and conceptual designs) will be presented by the team of urban planners and urban designers from La Trobe University. The team will deliver a comprehensive report based on a sound review of innovative placemaking projects related to transport alternatives and analysis of transport-related data including traffic data, crash history data, and traffic management devices.

Participants

• Darebin City Council
• La Trobe University

Project background

Darebin City Council has identified the need to improve its transportation and street network using the voices from the community. The Council has undertaken a community survey using an interactive engagement platform in which it appealed residents to share their experiences of using streets in Darebin and provide location-specific feedback about particular issues.

Some of the common expressions were like: “I don’t feel safe crossing this road because there is too much traffic and no pedestrian crossings,” or “I don’t feel safe riding along this street because there is too much traffic and no bike lanes.”. Following on from the findings of this engagement process, the council intends to develop a series of place-making interventions for better utilisation of its street network as a public space.

This project builds on the community engagement reports and inputs from consultants (urban planning and transportation), to prepare a Concept Plan showing various place-making and mobility enhancement projects that could be used to address the issues on local streets in Darebin. These will mostly be minor road safety improvements and streetscape changes such as pedestrian crossings, raised threshold intersections, street closures, bicycle lane, landscaping, and street furniture etc. Draft concept plans will be presented back to the community for their feedback.

Geographic scope

As marked on the map below, the starting point for this work is in the Group A area, which includes Reservoir West, Preston West, and Thornbury West. The Group A areas are being investigated first because there have been no recent traffic studies in those areas. It is also the setting of current level crossing removal projects at Bell and Preston Stations and it includes the Preston Market Redevelopment site.

However, over the next 3 years all suburbs in Darebin will be involved in the Your Street Your Say program.

Project objectives

The objectives of this project are to:

• Provide tangible expressions and solutions to transportation and street issues based on the voice of the local community
• Recommend a series of placemaking interventions and transport land use improvements to addressing community concerns

Final report

Download your copy of the final report, Your Street Your Say: Final Report, at: Improving Darebin’s streets: The community speaks