Walk the line

Since 16 May 2010, both lanes of Avenida Almeida Ribeiro – or San Ma Lou – have been off-limits to private cars on weekends and public holidays; only public buses and cabs are allowed to circulate. The initiative, which ran in experimental mode until 27 February 2011, has been regularly implemented from that date onwards, according to information provided by the Transport Bureau (DSAT).
Speaking to Macau Business, Bureau spokesperson Lei Ian explained that one of the goals of the plan was to reduce the number of private vehicles plying the road. “It is a strategy created to encourage residents and tourists to opt for public transportation in their daily movements from and to Avenida Almeida Ribeiro,” Lei noted.
Another goal DSAT anticipated by implementing the “exclusive corridor for public transportation” in San Ma Lou was to “attenuate the conflicts between people and vehicles in the streets.”
In other words, the Bureau was looking for a solution to alleviate congestion. For the time being, however, it will remain a weekend option: “DSAT will [however] consider expanding the implementation of the ‘corridor’ solution, and will study the feasibility of creating exclusive corridors in other areas of the city, although we could say that is not yet on the schedule.”

Partly pedestrian
While exclusive public transportation corridors have been in operation for a few years now, plans for either broadening sidewalks in San Ma Lou or completely converting the area into a pedestrian zone have not yet passed the bar of draft proposal state.
Speaking to Macau Business, José Chui Sai Peng, a deputy in the Macau Legislative Assembly, said that he proposed to the MSAR Government that they widen the pavements of Almeida Ribeiro nearly ten years ago.
The appointed representative, who is a fierce advocate of the professionalism of urban planners within the Administration, says it is possible to create a pedestrian block-way system linking San Ma Lou to the Ruins of Saint Paul’s in a simple way.
“Right now we have three lanes [on San Ma Lou]. The big problem we have is the width of the pedestrian lane, which is only one and a half metres or so. It’s too narrow. If we create an interesting canopy on both sides, we can widen each pavement by one and a half metres, and we would still have two [road] lanes left,” he explained.
Although this would only serve as a partial solution regarding the full conversion of San Ma Lou into a car-free zone, Chui Sai Peng suggested that it would still enable the widening of the street for pedestrians. “If you make the crowds less prominent, you alleviate the situation, and alleviation is also one of the strategies to solving the problem.”

Divided opinions
Mrs. Lam, a salesperson for EP, a high-end women’s fashion wear outlet located on Avenida Almeida Ribeiro, believes that closing the street to vehicles would be a good idea, bringing more people to the area. “Customers would come more often to buy clothes, walk down the street, eat something. Besides, for us here there’s too much noise and too much pollution,” she told Macau Business.
“The government should centralise and plan better. Otherwise, it will continue to be too chaotic for both retailers and customers,” said Mrs. Lam.
Kwan Iat Chao is an assistant sales manager at the Seong Hei Jewellery store, where he has been working for the last forty years or so. He has witnessed many changes in the street: “Too many shops have closed, and business now is not as good as it used to be.”
Asked if he thought a pedestrian lane would help improve business, Kwan hesitated. “With no cars, it would maybe be better. But at the same time, I think that cars should keep running. Only here, near Leal Senado, they are still doing good, but down the road, close to the Inner Harbour, there’s nobody, nobody comes to walk. Tourists only walk at the Senado and its surroundings then hop onto a bus to A-Ma temple.”
Lam Ken Ip, manager at Chow Tai Fok, another jewellery store in Avenida Almeida Ribeiro, however, has a different opinion. “I don’t think it would be very good if San Ma Lou were closed to traffic because it’s very central and important to the city. Many vehicles pass by here transporting goods, and people take the bus to go to work from here, too.”
In a coffee shop down the lane, closer to the Inner Harbour end of San Ma Lou, Ally Fok told Macau Business she also thinks that the road is too important a link, connecting people, trade, and business, to be closed to traffic. “It would be necessary to keep it running for public transportation, our own cars, so we can drive through Macau.”
But she agrees that because “everyone has a car” in Macau this is also the source of another problem in the avenue: pollution. “In the end, there are too many buses, too many casino shuttle buses as well. I think the government should improve the public transport system by choosing to run electric buses, for instance, and control the number of shuttles from casinos,” she proposed.

Getting rid of cars?
“Closing Almeida Ribeiro would be, let’s say, an ‘ideal’ plan,” suggested José Luís de Sales Marques. The President of the Institute of European Studies of Macau (IEEM) – previously Head of the Municipal Council (1993-2001) – believes the question is more complicated than it sounds.
“Of course, the old districts on both sides of Almeida Ribeiro, closer to the Inner Harbour, would deserve revitalisation actions that could ascribe more value to them. The street itself could be an ‘entry door’ to another interesting part of the city.”
But halting traffic in the avenue presents other challenges. For one, as some of the people working on the street have pointed out, Almeida Ribeiro remains one of Macau’s main arteries.
“The kinds of transport that circulate there are not only for passengers. There are goods being transported, business going on, and so on. It would be difficult to transform the surrounding areas in order to accommodate traffic, if it is halted in San Ma Lou, while this would, in turn, engender the destruction of other parts of the old city,” explained Sales Marques.

Not really
The several government departments which spoke to Macau Business confirmed that although proposals had been presented in the past – which some acknowledged (IC) and others didn’t (DSSOPT) – there are currently no plans for transforming Almeida Ribeiro. In any way, totally or partially, it seems.
DSAT responded to this publication that “at the moment, it has no plans that would enable expanding the number of days [for the exclusive corridor] or even transforming the area into an exclusive pedestrian zone.”
Likewise, DSSOPT said “there are no current plans within the Bureau to propose new planning for the area of Almeida Ribeiro. In the future, when the need arises, planning will be elaborated [upon] according to the law on urban planning and the law on cultural heritage preservation.”
The Macau Cultural Affairs Bureau (IC) – of which opinions about urban intervention in the area are biding, since it is a heritage-protected cluster – also informed Macau Business that it currently “does not have plans to suggest to the government to close down Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro to traffic.”
The Municipal and Civic Affairs Bureau (IACM) spoke to us on the phone, saying it was not within the scope of the Bureau to issue opinions on the matter, suggesting we seek advice from DSAT.
The Urban Planning Council (CPU) had not responded to Macau Business queries before this story went to print.

A light at the end of the tunnel
And yet, it came to Macau Business’ attention that at least both the IC and the DSSOPT participated in a study produced in March 2010 by the National University of Singapore (NUS), in which they proposed the creation of a tunnel in Avenida Almeida Ribeiro in order to transform the area together with the surrounding zone leading to the Ruins of Saint Paul’s into a pedestrian zone.
Francisco Vizeu Pinheiro, an architect and professor at the University of Saint-Joseph (USJ) who had formerly worked at IACM, provided the information, explaining he had actually attended the workshop presentation of the study.
Contacted by Macau Business about its participation, IC replied affirmatively: “At that time, the Cultural Affairs Bureau was one of the members of the related inter-departmental working group, which included the Land, Public Works and Transport Bureau, the Macao Government Tourism Office, the Transport Bureau, and this Bureau.”
The IC, which was invited to “express its views mainly from the perspective of the protection of cultural heritage,” had not, however, provided more information about the “views” it produced during the study by the close of this story.
As for DSSOPT, it was less enlightening about its role in the 2010 study with NUS, claiming it “[didn’t] have more information about the area’s history.”
So, would the construction of a tunnel to channel cars out of the road be a sensible possibility? “It would entail a lot of work, but surely there [is] technology for that. In any case, I don’t think a flyover would be an option,” commented Sales Marques.
Pinheiro claims there are pros and cons in developing such a project, saying, “that avenue is one of the most polluted in Macau due to intense traffic, the narrowness of the street, and the height of edifices, which transform the place into a sort of ‘canyon’ which retains the pollution.”
No doubt, Sales Marques highlighted, “the fact that now there is Wynn Resorts at one end and casino Ponte 16 at the other does not help [diffuse] the pollution from San Ma Lou; rather the contrary, it has completely blocked the airflow.”

Historical street
“Almeida Ribeiro was for a long time a central area, used as a dynamic city centre. But it has been subject to a process of ‘desertification’ with the decentralisation of business once established there to other areas of the city,” explained Sales Marques.
“Today, it is still a commercial area but catering to a specific type of tourist. It is not a cultural centre, and there is no historical narrative prevailing there. Yet, Almeida Ribeiro’s history is extremely important; it is the confluence of the Portuguese and the Chinese city, the confluence of classes,” he remarked.
Could the historical, cultural, and functional role of Almeida Ribeiro be restored?
Tavares da Silva firmly believes Macau’s “old town” should be a pedestrian area, “subject to an urban renewal plan; to be progressively rebuilt with proper architectural heritage projects, progressively extending to all the old area.”
Chui Sai Peng also believes the plan should be reassessed. “We could seek other better ways to encourage the revitalisation of those derelict buildings, because they are falling apart. It is becoming a public safety hazard. And so it is time for us to look at it closely and practically, and find solutions that can actually give it a second chance,” he remarked.

A long trajectory

Projects for transforming Avenida Almeida Ribeiro into a pedestrian area are not new. As Macau Business learned, back in the early 1980s, Eduardo Tavares da Silva, an engineer who has been involved in several urban projects in Macau – including the planning of NAPE – was arguably one of the first to advocate the design of Almeida Ribeiro as an exclusive walking street.
Tavares da Silva explained that he backed a study of strategies for Macau’s urban development in which the preservation of the historical city was recommended: “In 1972, at the Council for Public Works, I publicly asked the government [Nobre de Carvalho] to preserve the buildings,
and organised a seminar with local and Hong Kong-based heritage protection groups in order to debate
the preservation of relevant buildings in Macau.”
He said the plan eventually started gaining traction when he gathered a consortium of two architects from Portugal, Siza Vieira and Fernando Távora, in addition to Euroconsult (The Netherlands), Delloite (U.K.), and Palmer &Turner (Hong Kong).
“We won three planning studies, and Almeida Ribeiro was one of them – the others were NAPE and Areia Preta. Further down the years, we started proposing Almeida Ribeiro for pedestrians only, following our plan for Leal Senado Square without cars.”
Leal Senado was a first, effectively closed to traffic in the early 1990s, when it was paved with the Portuguese calçada. But the plans for Almeida Ribeiro had not yet materialised.
The concept, Chui Sai Peng agrees, could indeed be extended to Almeida Ribeiro. “In front of the Leal Senado building, the pedestrian walkway is extremely wide. It’s twice or three times larger than a normal one would [be].
By making it wider, we can move people faster.”

Is a tram the way?

“Instead of intense traffic, trams, or electric cars, like the ones that exist in Lisbon and San Francisco, could be used, freeing pedestrian space which would enable accommodating more walking tourists as well as space for trees and green areas. The heavy traffic could be diverged to peripheral zones, or still, to a tunnel,” suggested Pinheiro.
The use of tramways in Almeida Ribeiro was also proposed in the past, according to a proposal by Tavares da Silva.
“In the 1980s, Singapore introduced advance traffic flood controls to protect the environment. In 1996, I started talking about a monorail associated with escalators and rolling carpets in Almeida Ribeiro, Horta e Costa, and the axis from Coronel Mesquita and Rua do Campo with a link to Areia Preta, to bring people walking to the centre.”
Asked by Macau Business, the Transport Bureau replied that such a plan did not fall in line with its current projects. “DSAT has not yet considered the circulation of electric [vehicles] in Avenida Almeida Ribeiro because the street is quite narrow. We would like to stress that it is important to strike a balance between different users in the process of planning and daily management of roads.”