Having lived off Ponsonby Road for the past 22 years, I have watched the slow decline of the road's user friendliness continue to this day. Ponsonby Road is an arterial route for many road users - car, bike, bus and leg inclusive.
A pedestrian friendly road is a good thing, but poor implementation of quick fixes is more dangerous than no implementation at all.
At the northern end, vehicles often struggle to even enter Ponsonby Road due to the steady flow of pedestrians within Three Lamps. This leads to Jervois Road and College Hill frequently seeing congestion spikes in the middle of the day thanks to a heavy pedestrian bias within such a short area. This has been an ongoing problem for over a decade with no attempted rectification. Removing the free left turn from College Hill and replacing the pedestrian crossings with - dare I say it - traffic lights would be a good start.
At night time, Ponsonby Road is nearly unusable to vehicles. The left-hand lanes are predominantly stationary due to a plague of Ubers, while the right-hand lanes have to play dodgems with those same Ubers - who suddenly feel compelled to perform unannounced u-turns. Having five-minute parks immediately within side streets to allow pickup points, as well as banning u-turns, will greatly increase the traffic flow and, importantly, the safety of all road users.
Raised tables are the latest poorly implemented safety 'solution' which do more harm than good. They create pedestrian entitlement by pretending to be footpath extensions when really they are roads. Many cars and cyclists are brought to a complete stop when pedestrians stride triumphantly across with no attempt to yield. The knock-on effect is that, because there is not even a vehicle-sized space between the mouth of the road and the table, all following vehicles are brought to a halt too. I have seen countless car, bike and bus near misses involving this sudden concertina - and all caused not by vehicles speeding, but by pedestrians impeding roads.
If the tables were made to look less like extensions of footpaths, and if the raised tables were moved even two metres further into the side streets - creating a space for vehicles to stop safely - these incidents would disappear. The excessive height doesn't help, either, with regular family sedans struggling to clear many of the Ponsonby Road raised tables (Brown Street is the worst I've observed). It is little wonder German SUVs are the Ponsonby vehicle of choice - they provide the ground clearance necessary to traverse the rough urban terrain!
Blake Roberts, Ponsonby