22 comments

  1. The biggest white elephant in the picture is the traffic lights.
    Commerce Street is not a busy street. Britomart Precinct is a very pedestrian heavy area.
    Pedestrians will not use this traffic light, instead will just look both ways and cross. They should have used the money from those traffic lights and turned Commerce Street into a proper shared path instead of prioritising private cars which makes up very very small amount of trips in that street.

    1. I’m still waiting for the zebra crossing on Britomart Place, AT instead insists on handing all priority over to cars. This right at the entrance to Britomart’s eastern entrance.

    2. The trouble with buses is you can’t be sure when they’re going to leave and they’re difficult to see past. Maybe a crossing would work better (e.g. Manurewa train station to the bus stop) but it’s not an outrageous decision.

    3. Clearly you never go through this area. The major problem is the buses who do not give way and have no idea about how to drive when pedestrians are around. I run across this road multiple times a week, cars have never been a problem as there are so few of them, it is the buses which do not give way, park illegally and block lines of sight and start moving without looking at what is around.

    4. When a Double-decker bus is parked at the stops here it is almost impossible for pedestrians to see what’s coming towards them on the road (and I assume just as impossible for drivers to see whether anyone is about to cross the road from the bus stop side), therefore IMO traffic lights are a reasonable solution here…zebra crossing wouldn’t work at all.

      1. Yes, I tend to agree, but all will depend on the phasing and the volume of buses, as we there will be thousands of people pouring out of the station, it is likely to be pretty tricky to manage.

    5. Traffic lights will be essential once this becomes the main train station until CRL works are complete in this area. There will be so many people that buses wont be able to cross with a zebra crossing. Pedestrians need priority but here it’s just not practical in the short term.

    6. Please explain how vulnerable, old, slow, blind, disabled pedestrians are to get across the road? Are you going to stand there and help them across? Of course not. This road is one of the main bus stops in the CBD. Buses full of people won’t move if you have a zebra with people constantly crossing.

    7. They should not make it a pedestrian crossing but rather a vehicle crossing. Have all road traffic stop by default and when its detected by the lights have the pedestrians stop. Do it in reverse and give pedestrians the green light by default. Obviously it wouldn’t detect bikes so maybe a bike give way could work.

  2. I don’t wish to be churlish, but why such a grand temporary structure? How long will it be used for, and couldn’t they have just done something a little cheaper?
    Obviously we need something nice-ish for the tourist gateway but… when I was in London in Sept/Oct there was on-going long-term renovation work underway at Victoria Station and they didn’t require a whole new steel framed entrance building.
    If I’ve missed a previous TB post about the work (I understand the QEII Sq side will be closed for a year, while they excavate the new tunnel beneath it) then I’d love a link, cheers.

      1. Ok lets see, 40,000 users a day for four years… this temporary station will get used more than fifty million times. Probably worth something half decent, no?

    1. None of the facilities currently in CPO are able to be used so all have to be duplicated in the temporary structure. That means ticketing facilities, customer service, toilets, staff facilities etc. New stairs and escalators also need to be added through the glass box down to the first sublevel and they need to be protected from the elements. Finally the station needs to be able to handle the ever growing number of people passing through it.

      1. “None of the facilities currently in CPO are able to be used so all have to be duplicated…” That seems like an incredible lack of foresight. Its good to see the CTRL go ahead under the old CPO, but for goodness sake, why didn’t they plan ahead?

        1. Guy this is planning ahead. When Britomart was first built very few could even conceive of a CRL: so many were certain that no one would even use the station as it was.

          It is worth remembering they are building this extension on the carpark, lol, the idea of a carpark for a city station is so hilarious, but goes to show how duff the thinking was within our organisations very recently, and sadly still is at some levels, and in whole swathes of the public….

        2. Guy – a minor point, but:-

          CTRL = Channel Tunnel Rail Link (i.e. “HS1” in England)
          CRL = City Rail Link (Auckland, NZ)

        3. Thanks Dave – I was sitting there thinking that there was a T in the name, but couldn’t remember what it was for. Doh! Wrong side of the world completely@! On that note though, and maybe it is even sacrilege to say so, but do we need to have a snappier name than CRL ? i.e. with the Channel Tunnel, lots of Poms started calling it the Chunnel, which I guess was an improvement (in that affectionate names imply some degree of warmth and acceptance etc). Similar to the Gherkin, the Shard, the Cheesegrater etc, instead of 33 St Mary Axe, 40 Leadenhall St etc. Or, closer to home, Skypath. Inspired naming. Perhaps Transport Blog could lead the way with AT in coming up with a snappier moniker. No hurry though – you’ve got a couple of years…

        4. It’s not that the facilities are being demo’d for the sake of it, they’re having to redo and move the foundations for the entire building to make space for the tracks so it’s too risky to have anyone in there. The cost to do this back in 2001 might have been enough to sink the entire project that many already thought would be a white elephant.

  3. The only thing temporary about this structure is its location. It won’t simply be demolished once the CRL is done, it will be dismantled and rise again in some other place, returning further on the investment via straight up sale, lease or other community value.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *