Throughout the development of the Aotearoa urban street planning and design guide our partners identified a number of ‘key challenges to creating good urban streets’. They also signalled a desire for opportunities to work together as a ‘community of practice’ to support each other in addresses these challenges. 

From early 2023 the Urban Street Guide team will be working alongside other teams across Waka Kotahi to share more information throughout Aotearoa about the urban street guide and create opportunities for discussions and shared learning around street planning and design. 

If you would like to be kept up-to-date on these opportunities, please email the Urban Street Guide team at streets@nzta.govt.nz

Waka Kotahi webinars

Multimodal training webinars

These webinars are designed to help keep the transport sector informed on the latest design and technical advice around walking, cycling and public transport.

Multimodal training webinars

The Street Guide features in the Introduction to multi-modal guidance training video  – 18 August 2022. Watch the video: 

Capability Sessions: Learning Together

This urban mobility webinar series features international speakers. The sessions motivate practitioners to keep learning, make new connections with peers, and adapt processes to respond better to new context, needs and desires.

Capability Sessions: Learning Together

Resources

The Aotearoa urban street planning and design guide draws on national and international best-practice to provide a framework for well-functioning urban environments across New Zealand. It also incorporates key New Zealand national transport strategies and tools. Links to some key resources are provided below.

Transport Transition – Waka Kotahi has a critical role in planning, developing, and operating the land transport system to keep everyone moving. Our transition will require us to change the way we do things over the next 30 years. There are major opportunities to make society more inclusive and equitable, by transitioning to a zero-carbon transport system.

Road to Zero – NZ’s road safety strategy – a vision where everyone, whether they’re walking, cycling, driving, motorcycling or taking public transport, can get to where they’re going safely.

One Network Framework – our new national classification system. It will be used to determine the function of our roads and streets, and inform decision making.

Urban design and landscape – links to Waka Kotahi’s Environmental and Social Responsibility Policy and Standard, urban design and landscape resources.

Keeping cities moving – a plan to deliver on social, environmental and economic outcomes by growing the share of travel by public transport, walking and cycling (also known as mode shift).

Innovating Streets for People – a programme aims to make it faster and easier to transition our streets to safer and more liveable spaces.

Urban mobility and liveable cities – a series of free webinars focused on creating vibrant towns and cities hosted by Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency and partners.

Adaptive Urbanism Handbooks – coming soon, to supersede the Tactical Urbanism Handbook – developed as a tool to help councils and communities deliver tactical urbanism projects to a high standard, using a collaborative best-practice approach.

Resources available in the Street Guide

Section five of the Street Guide, ‘Putting it into Practice’, and the appendices feature extensive resources for everyone involved with street planning and design, these include:

Thematic case studies:

  • Streets for Health, Wellbeing and Equity
  • Green Infrastructure within Streets
  • Streets with Access for All
  • Streets for Play
  • Street Space Management
  • Streets for Services and Utilities 

Resources and links:

  • Waka Kotahi resources and guidelines
  • Central government resources
  • Partnership and engagement
  • Global Designing Cities Initiative (NACTO)
  • Other global resources
  • Key stakeholder links
  • Adaptive Urbanism 

Aotearoa urban street planning and design guide: Section 5 Putting it into practice [PDF, 16 MB]

Aotearoa urban street planning and design guide: Appendices - resources and links [PDF, 1.1 MB]

Aotearoa urban street planning and design guide (complete guide)

Pilot New Zealand Healthy Streets Design Check Tool

As part of the Street Guide’s development, Waka Kotahi committed to developing street indicators to assist practitioners in assessing broader outcomes for street planning and design, that align with our current policy settings. This includes a focus on emissions reduction, road safety and creating a sense of place. 

We have worked with Lucy Saunders at Healthy Streets to adapt the Healthy Streets Design Check Tool into a pilot version for an Aotearoa New Zealand context.

Pilot New Zealand Healthy Streets Design Check Tool