2023 Freetown DAT Report - Flipbook - Page 9
Freetown DAT
Creating a Sustainable
Transportation System
While transportation systems across the globe may vary
significantly in design, quantity and quality, all share the
common goal of moving people and goods efficiently
in order to achieve greater ends: whether that be a vital
economy, access to resources and services, fostering
community ties, dispatching emergency services and
much more. This is just as true in Freetown as it may be
in Tokyo, yet the compromised efficiency of movement
in the former hinders achieving community goals. When
it can take an hour to travel just two miles by any means
as it does in Freetown at peak times—whether driving,
riding or walking—the transportation system is not
helping the economy, getting children to school on time,
promoting tourism, providing healthcare access and so
many other essential parts of daily life in Freetown.
There are many ways to reduce the time it takes to get
between destinations, but the most effective method is
always to bring the destinations closer to one another.
In Freetown and anywhere, providing more services,
goods, community resources, etc. in neighborhoods,
close to where people live, is the best way to reduce
vehicle trip-making. Freetown is replete with local
commerce providing a wide variety of goods near many
homes, more than is seen in most cities outside Africa.
Yet streets lined with goods and vendors are oriented
towards larger roadways to capture passing customers,
forcing many households located away from arterials to
travel further for basic needs. This worsens the further
from downtown one resides, putting pressure on limited
arterials to provide space for commerce that competes
with space for travel. Commercial activity along corridors
rather than at nodes or within neighborhoods causes
notable friction from exchanges and deliveries. For
longer trips to necessary work, healthcare, educational
or other non-local destinations, travel along these
arterials is constantly delayed during all commercial
hours, especially at the end of the work day.
A typical congested arterial in Freetown.
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While the immediate focus of alleviating Freetown’s
congestion should concentrate on expanding capacity
for more travelers, the goal of simultaneously bringing
local destinations and services closer to residents
to reduce their trip distances is essential to growing
Freetown sustainably. With the creation of any new
transportation facilities, leadership should also plan
how infrastructure can promote or provide new localserving uses, critical services, jobs, educational facilities,
healthcare, recreational opportunities, libraries and
more. The recent construction of the Hillside Bypass
highway was a valuable capacity improvement, but it
does not reduce trip-making and may by virtue of its
walls, median and drainage structures cause many
residents who walk to travel further out of their way
to get to local destinations, eventually encouraging
more driving trips to avoid the barrier it has made. Yet
the Bypass can still be valuable if safer crossings are
made, drainage is covered with safe sidewalks and
bikeways, and new needed land uses can be inserted
along its wide right-of-way to aid the neighborhoods it
bisected. Without a more balanced, citywide approach
to transport and land use, the Hillside Bypass—and other
future, capacity-focused roadways—will simply become
congested in short order with more traffic taking longer
distance trips.
Modal Efficiencies
The recently opened Hillside Bypass cuts through several neighborhoods and caters to cars, even though the primary
travel is across it on foot, which is poorly accommodated with missing sidewalks and unprotected crossings.
While the history of transport capacity expansion is
replete with space-consuming roadway construction that
often physically and emotionally divides neighborhoods
with unintended trip-making consequences, the allure of
freely driving in a motor vehicle is quickly replaced by the
frustration of waiting in traffic, so cities across the globe
have successfully advanced other modes of travel to
alleviate congestion. As Freetown’s congestion forces it
to expand capacity to maintain its economy, it can learn
from the mistakes of other cities and deploy a multimodal approach to capacity expansion—one that also
caters to more local-serving land uses. To be successful
