Tight squeeze: Pedestrian and disability access issues in city laneways
Adelaide City Council has reviewed access through popular outdoor dining areas after traders sought more room. CityMag examines the issue and what it’s like trying to navigate the zones in a wheelchair.
The narrow small bar and dining precinct of Peel Street has been flagged as having less than one metre for pedestrians to pass through when the popular hospo zone is pumping.
Peel Street was included in a council review of Leigh Street and Topham Mall that was triggered by a petition from traders asking to change their outdoor dining set-ups.
The petition, signed by 14 Leigh Street businesses, asked Adelaide City Council to change its current practice of having a 1.5m walkway between the building line and the outdoor dining area, as well as a walkway in the centre of Leigh Street.
In light of the review findings, the council will likely keep outdoor dining furniture the way it is in Leigh Street despite requests from traders who were keen on more flexibility.
Leigh Street has approximately 25,000 pedestrians walking through each day.
For Diana Divine, an artist, access consultant and disability advocate, the problem of navigating small city streets hits close to home. Diana told CityMag they pulled out of a TAFE course due to the street access to the city campus.
Diana says when they’re out in their wheelchair, they opt for laneways to escape busy main streets, like Hindley Street. But, it’s not always easy to do so.
“Even Hindley Street itself, because it gets so full of patrons and people you know, standing around essentially when it’s in its heaviest use, and then is also so full of traffic.
“To me, the laneways are kind of like escaping that hubbub, and, yeah, just kind of getting away from the crowd and to me, I see them as shortcuts and ways to, like, circumvent the access barriers.
Diana says the findings about access on Peel Street and Leigh Street would “create all of those problems in those spaces that I would see as an escape”.
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Peel Street at a recent lunchtime. This picture: InDaily
While the Leigh Street trader’s petition said they would make sure pedestrian access remained in the centre of the street, it’s understood they wanted the option to set up furniture along their building lines rather than the kerb-line, particularly for those with liquor licenses.
But the council’s review, which includes a report by an access consultant that makes sure the streets adhere to the design standards and requirements for the Disability Discrimination Act, explains why outdoor dining needs to stay on the kerb-line in Leigh Street.
The report was presented to the council’s City Planning, Development and Business Affairs Committee on Tuesday night. It included discrimination warnings if outdoor dining is set up along the building line.
“Within the current design and layout of Leigh Street, we do not recommend that trading/dining/queuing zones be permitted along the building line at any time of day or night,” the report said.
“Should trading be permitted in this location, it is our professional opinion that this would result in a condition that would be discriminatory for persons with disability.”
The report said Leigh Street currently has a consistent clear footpath on the building edge allowing those with visual impairment to use the buildings as a shoreline to navigate the street.
Because Peel Street is a narrower street, businesses there are allowed to have outdoor dining along their building lines.
Some venues, like Maybe Mae (pictured left) have barriers that mark their dining zones. This picture: Helen Karakulak/CityMag
The report said some premises do a good job of sectioning off their outdoor dining with low fences or fixed planter boxes.
But, “other premises use no barriers and it was observed that furniture of some tenancies was set up a long way out from the building line and impeding the pedestrian path”.
This pointed to less than one metre left for pedestrians in some cases.
Diana says that when people are gathered in narrow streets it’s even harder to get through.
“Stationary crowds are one of my biggest access barriers personally as a wheelchair user,” they say.
“They’re not looking around, they’re not looking down and it gets really overwhelming being in a crowd like that.”
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At the committee meeting, Councillor Arman Abrahimzadeh, who asked for the report after the trader’s petition was presented to council, said he thinks the report was “quite conservative” but “an interesting piece of work”.
“I see that we aren’t going to change anything, that we are leaving things as they are,” he said.
“The accessibility consultant’s report was an interesting read.
“They made a number of observations, amongst one of those was the seating in front of the ODASA building on Leigh Street and I think the report essentially talked about, if there are people sitting on those seats, that it might be that those people, and I guess their bodies and their legs, could potentially prevent access for people walking past.”
The front of the Office for Design and Architecture SA (ODASA) building in Leigh Street. This picture: via the ODASA website.
When people sit to dine, we tend to spread out and push our seats back while enjoying a drink. Diana says particularly with diners who are drunk or “drunk on socialising” they’re often hard to get through to in order to get past.
“So even though they’re seated at my level, so it’s a little bit easier to visually get their attention, there are still so many barriers behind firstly, like getting them to move in a way that is actually helpful,” Diana says.
“Especially once again, with drunk people, or even just, you know, hyper-excited people, they will do what they think is best, which unfortunately, is not always the best thing for me.”
Diana says it’s a difficult situation when it comes to crowds prohibiting access because they want to enjoy the nightlife too.
“While I’m really hesitant to speak out against things that support small businesses and hospitality, especially as an artist, I want to be seeing these spaces thrive, because I’ve seen so many shut down recently,” they say.
“The options for nightlife as a disabled person are so limited, the options for performance as an artist are so limited when I’m disabled.”
A City of Adelaide spokesperson told CityMag that the council was regularly in conversation with traders in the area about outdoor dining.
The spokesperson says the key Leigh Street traders that requested more flexibility were understanding of the accessibility reasons that prohibit outdoor dining to be moved to the building lines.
While at the moment, the streets are up to code in terms of access, Diana hopes more can be done.
“I’d be really interested in seeing what a round table with an access consultant and a representative of the traders would look like, and what they would get to,” Diana says.
“I think there are so many creative access solutions that people don’t think of because we do have these standards with the DDA [Disability Discrimination Act], which are not, well they’re not that amazing.
“I think people are a bit distracted by reading the standards and making sure to code, rather than thinking in practice, what could we do? What tiny, small things that aren’t on this list of ramps and grab rails that we can actually do to just like you know, maybe we’re creating bigger gaps between our tables.”
“The idea from the traders of what they want, and then the standards of the DDA saying, ‘No, that’s not acceptable’… there’s no kind of consideration that there is a middle ground.
“There are things we can do to make both a little bit happy.
“Basing everything off of the written standards rather than practical access is what kind of distracts us from the ways we can truly improve access to the city.”