Flinders Lane to become ‘pedestrian first’ in trial barring cars from little streets

Flinders Lane will become a “pedestrian first” street this year and other thoroughfares in the CBD will follow as part of a council plan to close some local roads to car traffic for part of the day.

The City of Melbourne will spend $5 million prioritising pedestrians on Flinders Lane by raising the road to the same level as the footpath and installing cobblestone traffic-calming devices.

The council also wants to close the lane and other nearby streets to traffic at busy times of day. Little Collins street is already closed between 12pm and 2pm.

Once the infrastructure works at Flinders Lane are completed, the council will focus on the rest of the CBD’s “little streets”: Little Collins, Little Bourke and Little Lonsdale streets, along with laneways such as Liverpool Street and Crossley Street. The council has earmarked $250,000 to review the next streets to tackle.

Lord Mayor Nick Reece said the “major pedestrianisation program for the Hoddle grid” was a centrepiece of the City of Melbourne’s budget, which will be released on Tuesday.

“The little streets of Melbourne will become people-first, and we will be making the investment in infrastructure to deliver on that,” he said. “It’s very much designed to slow all the cars right down, make it very much a pedestrian priority zone.”

Reece said pedestrianising cities was a massive economic driver and provided a boost to shopping, retail and hospitality.

“We will be trialling closing the streets to cars for certain hours of the day to see how that works,” Reece said. “We will look closely at what it does to vehicle movements around the city. We will look closely at what it does to pedestrian movements around the city. My expectation is it will significantly lift pedestrian footfall in those areas.”

The City of Melbourne has taken inspiration from Greville Street in Prahran, which was remodelled to prioritise pedestrians in 2019, George Street in Sydney, which was also pedestrianised in 2019, and Oxford Street in London, where Mayor Sadiq Khan approved plans this month to ban traffic.

“The evidence is really clear: pedestrianisation of city streets, when done well and when done in the right locations, delivers a massive economic uplift,” Reece said. “That’s why from New York to London to Sydney, we are seeing this happen, and Melbourne is not going to be left behind.”

When Swanston Street was closed to traffic in 1992, the closure was executed in stages, and Reece said the pedestrianisation of other streets in Melbourne could follow a similar trajectory.

“We’re not going to come out tomorrow and say we’re banning cars – far from it,” he said. “We’re just going to very methodically build some of the new infrastructure, run trials of street closures, see how it affects the city, and then make an evidence-based decision about what we do going forward.”

Flinders Lane, Little Collins, Little Bourke and Little Lonsdale streets became “shared zones” in September 2020. Pedestrians were given right of way and speed limits were lowered from 40km/h to 20km/h. However, a review by the council found the changes did not go far enough, with motorists refusing to share the busy laneways and obey new speed limits.

Reece said there were “genuine safety issues” in Melbourne’s little streets, with people spilling off the footpaths onto the streets on busy nights.

The infrastructure works will be confined to the section of Flinders Lane between Elizabeth and Swanston streets initially. The access to office buildings’ underground car parks at the top of Flinders Lane has proved an obstacle to fully pedestrianising the street.

“Those car parks on the eastern end of the grid, that’s the subject of future discussion and future decision-making for council,” Reece said.

The council has also budgeted $23 million for “major footpath upgrades across the municipality”, and is four years away from completing the bluestone footpaths in Melbourne. Eighty-six per cent of the Hoddle Grid footpaths are now paved in bluestone.

“Remember Emperor Augustus – he found Rome made of concrete, and he left it made of marble,” Reece said. “Melbourne will soon be a city of bluestone.”

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