The motorway lanes at St Lukes have been parted as part of the project to widen the St Lukes Rd bridge.

St Lukes Motorway Median

In many other cities when you see the motorway parted like this it would be for a busway or rail line to be installed. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if this work was for the creation of a Northwest busway (Admittedly it probably isn’t quite wide enough).

Below are a couple of examples of median running transit.

Perth

Perth Rail Median

Los Angeles

LA Rail Median

Bogota

Bogota BRT Median

Istanbul

BRT Istanbul

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16 comments

  1. What I’d be interested in – once we get a government that gives more than lip service to PT, how quickly can be re-designate some of that excessive car space to a busway? Those concrete barriers can go in pretty quick… only how to get them through the interchanges could be tricky.

  2. You only need the buses to enter and exit the motorway at the start and end of the route. You could build stations under overbridges and then have stairs / lifts up to the local roads to waiting feeder services. Saves big ramps but offers convenient station locations (and no big park n ride either!).

    1. No Pete you are mistaking a transit service for how cars work. They need stations, but unfortunately Motorways are poor bedfellows for transit systems really, whether rail or bus, as they isolate the stations along the route. See Remuera or Albany stations. Of course it can be made to work but with more effort to expand the catchment, especially with feeder services, and a lot of attention to walking and cycling approaches.

      The NW could work fast with well designed stations, but the buses also need their own ROW, not just shoulder lanes that disappear at the ramps.

      1. Ok agree with you on the Remuera station example. My idea was for a quick role out solution taking off the centre lanes for mid motorway running. But if you want A grade long term BRT then own ROW with intergrated stations with good walk up / cycle access is the way to go.

  3. Stations in freeway medians are horrible to use though. They are uncomfortably noisy and the air is foul.

  4. Showing us what most other places build when they split the median like that, and knowing we’re not going to get that … this post is depressing 🙁

  5. I wish our tar seal was a lighter colour like the LA and Bogota examples above. There’s something dreary about Auckland’s palette of charcoal roads, asymmetrical damp and scrappy subtropical bush and grey and white CBD skyline — particularly with overcast weather.

  6. @mathew
    True that. The Ellerslie station is a dreadful noisy fumy unpleasant waiting place. The upside is the flash electrics stop there.

  7. As a hospital user the walk from Ellerslie station to the bus stop on the Greenlane hopsital side of the Great South road is pretty hard. There doesn’t seem to be any way the bus user can do anything else. There are quite a few geriatrics besides myself that need to use it so the buses on the Great South road get preference for me at the moment.

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