Evaluation

Once complete, Tullimbar will enable and encourage active living by virtue of its careful design and planning. This innovative development fulfils the PCAL design objective for ‘cities, towns and neighbourhoods’, namely that they should provide ‘activities and facilities clustered in accessible centres and local destinations’. Designed specifically as a dense, walkable development, with the objective of ‘minimising dependence on the private car’ explicitly written into the DCP, Tullimbar includes a great many features that together will help achieve this aim.

Tullimbar demonstrates the application of a number of the design considerations not only for cities, towns and neighbourhoods, but also for ‘streets’ and ‘walking and cycling routes’. These include:

• Concentrate the highest appropriate densities of housing, employment, services and public facilities in centres within an acceptable walking distance (400-800 metres) of major public transport nodes, such as rail stations and high frequency bus routes.

The Tullimbar DCP requires that at least 60% of dwellings be within 400 metres actual walking distance of the town centre retail node and bus stop or the southern neighbourhood centre and bus stop. It should be acknowledged that the development is located on the outskirts of Albion Park and may therefore be costly to service with a high frequency bus route (at least until it is completed). However, the range of services and facilities provided in the Tullimbar Town Centre should help to reduce the need for residents to travel to Albion Park as often as they might if this were a more typical suburban residential development.

Within the development itself, the principle of clustering high densities of housing close to services and facilities is clearly being applied. For example, the DCP requires the number of dwellings located more than 800 metres from the primary school to be minimised, thus encouraging children to walk or cycle to school. The town centre will be located within 500 metres, or 5 minutes walking distance from most residents of the development. This will be a high density town centre, built over four levels, and supporting a concentration of housing, employment services and public facilities. The developer is aiming to encourage the maximum range of retail, commercial and community services in the town centre, including around 30 shops, cafes, a pub, a supermarket, numerous public buildings, a town hall, and a church. Many residents will actually live in the town centre, as it includes higher density apartment living clustered around this centre, as well as a retirement/aged care facility and serviced apartments. It is expected that between 600-700 jobs will be located in the town centre, including a number of home-based businesses.

• Encourage a mix of housing, employment, services and public facilities in accessible centres, to provide opportunities for social interaction and activity at different times of the day and night.

This development includes a very diverse mix of housing, as well as commercial and community services and facilities. While the homes already built are in a lower density precinct, they are still diverse, ranging from two- to five-bedroom, including attached and freestanding homes, and incorporating a number of studio apartments or ‘granny flats’ built above garages (which has the added benefit of providing passive surveillance over the rear lanes). Town centre plans include a mix of higher density dwellings, including residential apartments with retail/commercial premises below, serviced apartments, courtyard apartments, Torrens title dwellings and a retirement centre.

In addition to a mix of housing, the development will provide a variety of local employment opportunities, services and public facilities. As well as the many jobs that will be located in the town centre, the development also includes a large number of dwellings that have been designed to suit home-based businesses. Dwellings with separate entrances allow people to work from home, helping to promote a lively, mixed use residential precinct with activity during the day. In addition to the already constructed primary school, community services and public facilities intended to be located in the town centre include a town hall, retirement/aged care facility, church/chapel, preschool/childcare centre, sports pavilion, pool and gym, pub and public toilets.

In the Building Design Guidelines, the town centre is envisaged as the ‘focus of community life’, and a number of requirements will help to achieve this. One of these is the specification that most buildings in the centre will have mixed uses – with retail and commercial use at ground level and residential on the upper floors. This will help to ensure that the town centre is lively and active at different times of the day and night. The provision of public spaces in the town centre is also intended to provide opportunities for social interaction and activity, including both formal events and informal public gatherings. Public spaces specified include a village green, civic place and village square. The land allotted for these uses will be dedicated to Shellharbour City Council, and the Building Design Guidelines require any development applications for land adjacent to these spaces to include their development as public spaces.

• Locate key land uses within safe and convenient walking distance of each other to encourage linked trips (e.g. shops, childcare centres, bus/rail interchanges).

The whole development is designed to support walking and cycling, with footpaths on both sides of the streets, shops and services located in close walking distance from homes, and careful attention paid to creating safe, convenient and attractive walking and cycling routes between all the major land uses.

As noted above, the Tullimbar DCP requires that at least 60% of dwellings be within 400 metres actual walking distance of the town centre and bus stop or the southern neighbourhood centre and bus stop. The clustering of services and facilities within the dense and compact town centre, and the proximity of these to residents’ homes will help to encourage linked trips by foot or bicycle.

• Align centres within corridors to support high frequency public transport services and further boost the effectiveness of centres.

This development is not located within an existing corridor, but rather is on the outskirts of Albion Park. This may mean that the development will not receive high frequency bus services, and may not support a bus service until it is completed. Nevertheless, the development has been designed to enable the addition of a bus service in the future, to link the town to its surrounding area and to the Albion Park rail station 4 kilometres away. A requirement of the Tullimbar DCP is that streets are designed to accommodate a bus route, with stops no more than 400 metres apart. Provision has also been made for a transit centre. Stopping bays for bus stops have been designed into the roads at various points throughout the development.

• Manage the location, supply and availability of parking to support walking, cycling and public transport access to major urban centres.

The Building Design Guidelines for the town centre aim to provide adequate parking but to ‘minimise the total area consumed by parking spaces, by maximising shared use of public parking’. One of the objectives of the Guidelines is to avoid the dedication of private parking for only one user per space. Provision for public transport is provided, to assist residents to access the existing urban centre of Albion Park by bus. Streets are designed with bus stopping bays at convenient locations.

• Integrate new development with the adjoining urban structure to improve connectivity and reduce local travel distances. For example, connect housing to local bus routes and community facilities through the street and cycle network.

The nearest existing urban area to this new development is Albion Park, approximately 5 kilometres to the east. The DCP provides for a bus route to link Tullimbar to Albion Park and other destinations, and the street layout in the development is designed to accommodate the bus route. Housing is well connected to this bus route, and to community facilities via an interconnected street network that the DCP states should facilitate walking routes that are ‘as short and direct as practical’.

• Slow traffic for safe streets and roads, especially in residential areas, near schools and in town centres. This can be achieved by traffic management and calming facilities, as well as speed limits.

While speed limits will obviously apply, the aim of this development is to control the speed of vehicles through the fundamental design of the development, rather than by relying on retrofitting traffic calming devices. The Tullimbar DCP explicitly states that streets should be designed as ‘multi-purpose public spaces’ that are appropriate to the needs of drivers but that also support pedestrians, cyclists, and social interaction.

• Create attractive and welcoming street frontages, with verandahs and shop fronts instead of high walls and garage doors.

The houses already constructed have been carefully designed to create an attractive streetscape, and feature verandahs and balconies overlooking the street, with garages provided via rear lanes so as not to dominate dwelling frontages. The Building Design Guidelines for the town centre explicitly seek to ‘prevent the dominance of garages and parking structures as viewed from the street’, and ‘minimise the number of driveway crossings to street blocks’. Basement car parks are proposed to minimise streetscape impact.

The guidelines pay careful attention to ‘village character’. They plan a ‘traditional main street’ such as those found in older towns in the area and seek to create ‘human scale’ street frontages with visual interest. They do this by specifying the preferred design for shop fronts and buildings, including wide verandahs for weather protection, and ‘activated facades’ that address the street and provide visual interest to pedestrians.

• Create safe places for people to walk and cycle, which are overlooked by buildings and have clear sightlines.

The streets of this development have been designed to incorporate cyclist and pedestrian safety. Rather than having separate walking or cycling trails or tracks, walking and cycling is facilitated throughout the development, with carefully designed footpaths on every street, and roads with calmed traffic that are safer for cyclists. The DCP also provides for ‘shareways’ in some areas, which are 3.5 metre wide pavements, designed for slow speed driving, and giving equal priority to vehicles and pedestrians. Other provisions to encourage pedestrian movement and increase safety include pram/wheelchair ramps at all footpath/road junctions, and minimum sightlines for traffic at intersections, to encourage a safe and slow speed traffic environment.

The DCP requires lots to be arranged ‘to enable dwellings to front streets to provide surveillance of footpaths and streetscape amenity’, and also to front onto parks to increase the safety of the park. Houses have been carefully designed to facilitate passive overview of the neighbourhood, and encourage casual social interaction. Balconies and verandahs raised above the level of the footpath allow residents to look over the streets, thus increasing both safety and the perception of safety. Housing designs are required to ‘minimise car parking dominating street frontage’, and on many lots, garaging is provided from rear lanes, with studio apartments overlooking these lanes(8) in order to provide surveillance and increase safety.

• Provide and maintain footpaths on all streets.

Tullimbar DCP requires footpaths on both sides of every street (with the exception of low-density residential precincts where they are required on one side only). Footpaths will be a minimum of 1.2 metres wide. In addition, the DCP includes a provision that, where no street is provided along bushland frontage, a dedicated foot/cycle path be built.

• Create stimulating and attractive routes to encourage repeated use with careful consideration of details such directness, lighting, shade, landscaping with appropriate species choice, pavement and edge treatments.

A number of initiatives will help create a network of stimulating and attractive walking routes within the development. High quality streetscape is a clear objective of the DCP, which requires careful attention to be paid to street design and layout. This includes designing streets to direct views to buildings or landscape features and including street trees, landscape elements and street furniture. The DCP provides detailed guidance on appropriate street and footpath design, including pavement and edge treatment.