Picture Wellington Street on a summer afternoon. The kids from Clifton Hill Primary are spilling out the gate, crossing at the raised zebra while a few families in cars and a few more on bikes wait. A neighbour stops to talk over a front fence. The new trees cast more shade in the afternoon sun. The non-local traffic is gone and the street is a pleasant place to be again.
This is what Wellington Street will be like under the proposed shared street option.
- Reduce non-local traffic
- Safer, greener street
- More liveable neighbourhood
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What makes it possible
The key change is removing non-local traffic from our neighbourhood. Partial barriers and a reduced speed limit discourage vehicles from using Wellington Street as a shortcut between Alexandra Parade and Queens Parade. With those trips filtered out, what remains is the traffic that actually belongs here: residents, school families, deliveries, visitors, the church community.
The speed limit drops to 30 km/h past the school, between Alexandra Parade and Hodgkinson Street, with a raised zebra crossing at the school gate that enforces the slower pace and pedestrian priority at all times. Eleven more trees go in on the Clifton Hill section, giving more shade and making the street a more pleasant place to walk.
For cycling, the northern stretch from Hodgkinson Street to Queens Parade gets physically separated lanes. Around the school, people on bikes and vehicles share the street at a reduced speed of 30 km/h. Wellington Street is already one of the most-used cycling routes in the inner north and these changes complete the corridor.
Council calls this Option 1, we call it the shared street. The options page sets out what each option involves and how they differ, but we think the shared street option provides the most benefit to our community.
What stays the same
Local access is fully retained. The barriers filter non-local traffic, not local access, so anyone with a destination on Wellington Street can still drive there. What they prevent is vehicles using Wellington Street as a through-route to somewhere else.
Under the shared street option, most parking bays are retained, with both accessible bays kept. Almost all of the 13 spaces removed on Wellington Street are in the northern sub-section near Queens Parade, where parking is readily available around the corner. Parking near the school is largely unchanged, with three spaces removed to provide safe pedestrian crossings at Page and Council streets.
(You may have heard a figure of 66 spaces. That is the figure for Option 2, not the shared street option. The parking page explains this in full.)
Why it works
Streets like this have been built in Yarra and elsewhere, with consistent results.
Yarra’s own 30 km/h trial on local streets produced a 51% fall in all crashes and a 70% fall in serious crashes.
When streets are filtered to remove non-local traffic, those trips don’t simply shift to the next street over. Studies consistently find a net area-wide reduction, with many trips disappearing entirely, as people find another route or decide the detour is not worth making. The concern that Noone Street or Hodgkinson Street will absorb the Wellington Street commute is understandable, but the evidence does not support it.
Napier Street in Fitzroy has operated as a shared street since 2019. Page Street, which runs through Clifton Hill Primary’s school grounds, has had a traffic barrier since the 1970s, installed after local residents petitioned the then-Collingwood Council about dangerous conditions at the intersection with Gold Street.