Waiting to Happen
A commitment to making our cities safer places places for walking, biking and wheeling through the projects we work on and outside of our professional lives
Waiting to Happen is co-signed and supported by:
Architects Climate Action Network Scotland
Cycle Law Scotland (RTA Law Scotland)
Cycling UK
Get Glasgow Moving
John Gilbert Architects
Many Studios CIC
Pedal on Parliament
Raeburn Farquhar Bowen
Replace the M8
Woodlands Community Garden
In January 2023 our friend and colleague, Emma Burke Newman was killed whilst cycling from her home in the Southside to Glasgow School of Art.
She was a brilliant young woman and is sorely missed by us all at New Practice. She was also a confident and committed cyclist used to the challenges of urban cycling and found joy in the freedom a bike offers.
As a team we have been finding our wheels again and continue to be committed to making our cities safer places for walking, biking and wheeling through the projects we work on and outside of our professional lives.
Waiting to Happen brings these together
You can read more about the project here:
Through our daily experiences of commuting from the Southside to the City Centre, we have identified three junctions which provide a particular challenge: the Casino, the Clutha, and the Court at Glasgow Green.
These junctions are our focus of study as they feel like incidents-waiting-to-happen, and one is the site of Emma's death. We have shed tears at these junctions and we have felt other's rage, our own frustrations, and some of us avoid them to feel safer on our way to work. As urban designers we understand that sensible compromise is a core requirement of making urban infrastructure, and we seek to find solutions that respond to actual use where this differs from the design.
At each the combination of different types of active travel infrastructure: Core Paths, Shared Paths, Spaces for People Cycle Routes, and use of the Main Carriageway create situations where the use conflicts with the design, leading to unsafe interactions between pedestrians, cyclists and vehicular traffic.
Through Waiting to Happen we have gathered anecdotal, qualitative and quantitative data from surveys, open 3rd August to 6th October 2023. We received a huge number of responses, with over 1,000 survey participants and hundreds of ‘final thoughts’.
These are helping to inform solutions specific to these locations and create systems for a safer city for us all. Thank you to everyone who has shared their stories and ideas with us.
New Practice have reviewed the anecdotal, qualitative and quantitative data and experiences submitted by you and are bringing together solutions specific to these locations.
The data was presented to Glasgow City Council’s Active Travel committee via local councillors with the aim to promote safer design for junctions and the implementation of immediate changes to make our journeys in the city safer. Since then our team has been acting as a design stakeholder for junction design, inputting with a safety lens during design stages for both internal and external consultants.
We are working on a memorial garden with Glasgow City Council.
We are also keen to understand if you think any other locations or junctions have similar issues and challenges? Please share any final thoughts, ideas and other junctions below, or you can email us your thoughts directly at waitingtohappen@new-practice.co.uk