Yaşayan Muğla

Muğla Metropolitan Municipality wanted to know what its streets could be before committing money to rebuilding them. We picked three sites in Menteşe with them — a school street, a commercial street and the transport hub where the city's bus network converges — and worked through them in stages: count, train, test small, test big, measure again.

Everything that follows was built in paint, chalk, borrowed barriers and depot furniture. Nothing was poured.

TRAINING THE COUNTERS

The data had to come from people who would still be in Muğla after we left, so we started by teaching a group of volunteer university students how to collect it. Between 20 and 27 October 2025 we ran the training at the municipality and then went into the field with them: pedestrian counts broken down by age and by whether someone was walking alone or with a carer, vehicle counts by type, pocket-radar speed readings, desire-line tracing, activity mapping, face-to-face surveys, time-lapse cameras and before-and-after photography. Sixteen students took part.

They counted on three days — Wednesday the 22nd, Friday the 24th and Saturday the 25th — in fifteen-minute blocks at the morning and late-afternoon peaks.

What came back: an average of 546 vehicles through the area every fifteen minutes. Average speeds of 31 and 34 km/h on Zübeyde Hanım Caddesi against a posted limit of 50, with the fastest vehicle recorded at 55. Nine per cent of pedestrians walking in the carriageway, because in places the footway had simply run out.

Seventy-one people answered the survey. Just over half were children or young people. Forty-five per cent were there to get to school and twenty-one per cent to get to work. The largest group — thirty-eight per cent — said what bothered them was the traffic. Forty per cent wanted somewhere to sit and some shade.

A DAY AT THE SCHOOL

The first test was the smallest one. On 26 October, the day after the counts finished, the car park outside Emirbeyazıt İlkokulu was cleared of vehicles and handed back to the neighbourhood for a day. Lime, chalk and tape on the ground; a line of safety barriers to hold the edge; a couple of tents and some borrowed furniture.

The point of a one-day pop-up is to find out whether an idea is worth the price of a longer test. This one was.

THE TRANSPORT HUB

The hub is one block, between the Atatürk Stadium, the provincial sports directorate and the edge of the centre. Everyone arriving from the villages and the outer neighbourhoods passes through it, and most of them are schoolchildren. It was somewhere to stand rather than somewhere to be: four arms of traffic, a parking apron, two bus stops, and no room on the footway to wait.

The geometry did the work. Lanes narrowed, corner radii tightened, the excess asphalt at the corners and along the parking apron pulled back into the footway. Seven pedestrian crossings across the three main axes, and a gap cut through the central median so that one of them could land somewhere. Vehicle access to the stadium and the sports directorate stayed open, held by delineators rather than kerbs.

Everything reclaimed was painted. The municipality chose the pattern with us over a series of working sessions: opal green, pastel green, sulphur yellow and oyster white.

FOUR DAYS IN DECEMBER

The trial went in between 9 and 12 December 2025, built by the municipality's own crews and split into two zones so the area never closed completely. Day one: clear the remaining cars, break through the median, set out the grid. Days two and three: pattern and paint, zone by zone, delineators following behind — the road-surface patterns came off the list when the rain arrived. Day four: olive trees into the planters, furniture out, crossings and bus stops marked, and the area opened with the students who had collected the data.

The materials came out of the municipality's own depot. 250 delineators, fifteen benches, ten metal planters, six plastic pots, three barrels, a picnic table, thirty-five wooden pallets.

WHAT CHANGED

We went back between 16 and 20 December and repeated every count, on the same weekdays at the same times. The weather did not cooperate: 18–20°C in October, 6–7°C in December.

Total pedestrian numbers fell nine per cent in the cold. But the share of people using the footway rather than the carriageway rose on every arm except in front of the stadium, where construction work at the entrance was blocking it, and the twelve-to-twenty age group grew by six percentage points. The new crossings were used — eighty-seven per cent on one axis, seventy-seven on the second, forty-eight on the third, where people kept cutting diagonally across. That last number tells us where the next crossing belongs.

Illegal turns dropped by eighty-one per cent once the turning radii were tightened. Cars fell three per cent, buses twenty-one per cent as the reshaped apron let them do in one movement what had taken two, and motorcycles rose eight.

The clearest change was in what the space was for. Before, it was a place to wait. After, the dominant recorded activity in the new central area was conversation. Eight and a half per cent of people surveyed in October said they were there to socialise; in December it was forty and a half. Seventy-seven per cent called the intervention good. Eighty-nine per cent wanted it made permanent.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

Six hundred and fifty square metres came back from the carriageway, four hundred and thirty of it as new public space, for a few days of municipal labour and what was already in the depot. The measurements now sit with the municipality as the evidence base for the permanent design — including the bus stop layout, which needed the trial to resolve.

The commercial street is surveyed and waiting.