The City Rail Link already proving a success, and we also know from many other projects, from rail to cycleways, that early bursts of growth aren’t a one-time thing, often taking many years for potential uptake to be fully realised.
There’s currently still a lot of capacity in the network, with trains nowhere near packed out; and Auckland Transport plans to increase services to 8 trains per hour per direction soon. Even so, over time the increased usage means we will need to further increase services to help accommodate that growth. More services to the west will put even greater pressure on the need to address the level crossings along the Western Line.
Auckland Transport has been starting to look at options for removing level crossings in the West – though frankly, this should have been started and sorted years ago. It undertook a high-level consultation earlier this year. Now, they’re starting to consult on more detailed options for each crossing, starting with the Inner West.
A guest post from Auckland Transport on the topic a few weeks ago foreshadowed that there would be options for each – so let’s now take a closer look at what’s proposed.
George St
George St is a steep zigzag through a light industrial/ commercial area that links Dominion Road to New North Road. Closing the road crossing of the railway line has long seemed the easiest decision of any of the crossings on the Western Line – and that’s exactly what’s being proposed.
Vehicles looking to get from Dominion Rd to New North Rd (or vice versa) would need to go a different way, most likely via Onslow and Sandringham Road.
That leaves the question of whether there would still be a crossing for pedestrians and people on bikes, and Auckand Transport has come up with four options.
The fastest, easiest and cheapest move (Option D) would be to just close the crossing to everyone. Auckland Transport says there are “generally low numbers” of people using this crossing by any mode, also noting that this part of the line also carries the most train passengers. So purely by the numbers, trains outrank all other modes – and closing the crossing entirely looks like a valid option.
That said, this area will likely be home to more residential development in future, so there will be higher numbers of people looking to access shops, transport and other local amenities.
And the alternative walking/ biking/ scooting routes aren’t great, whether you go the long way round via Onslow (with a shortcut option of the steep steps down Monkey Hill) or the “short” but much bleaker way, via the Dominion/ New North flyover/ flyunder (which has intermittent protected bike lanes, at least).
Option A and Option B would keep a pedestrian/bike crossing at George St, via either a bridge (A) or an underpass (B). These are expected to be the second and first most expensive options, respectively. Auckland Transport notes an underpass would have a “slightly smaller ‘footprint’ than the bridge option, but more complex construction”, and that both would take around 12 to 18 months to construct.
Perhaps the most interesting option here is Option C: a pedestrian bridge from Akepiro St to New North Rd. The end of Akepiro is already above the rail electrification wires, making for a simpler and cheaper build than the George St options.
Akepiro St is just on the other side of the Daisy apartment development and already sits above the wires
The main challenge with Options A, B and C is that the real long-term solution here is removing the Dominion Rd interchange, returning it to a normal at-grade intersection. Not only would this improve movement options for all modes (potentially including light rail!) it would also free up a bunch of land in an area ripe for redevelopment.
So perhaps the best option is Option D: close the crossing for now, and look to progress the flyover removal as soon as possible? What do readers think?
Removing the flyover would improve movement options and there is a significant amount of council-owned land surrounding the interchange that could be redeveloped
Morningside Dr
Morningside is a much busier crossing for all modes, which also provides access to the train station and is used by the 22N and 22R services which help provide a frequent connection from the train station to the St Lukes mall. Auckland Transport has looked at a number of options here, including realigning the rail line above or below the road – but doing that is likely to be both extremely costly and disruptive. Instead they’ve come up with three options.
Option A would close the road crossing, and only have a pedestrian bridge to provide station access
Option B would build a road overbridge at the current crossing location, which would also provide access for people down to the station. A big problem here is that to get the road high enough to clear the wires, New North Rd would also need to be raised. That adds to the cost and would likely have impacts on the neighbouring properties.
Moreover, the existing crossing would likely need to be closed for a large part of the construction period. Road traffic would be forced to find an alternative – and by the time the bridge was complete, it’s likely that traffic would have adapted. Therefore there doesn’t seem to be any real benefit for Option B over Option A.
Option C is the left-field option. This would see a bridge built from about the intersection of New North Road and Western Springs Road, across the tracks and down to Rossmay Tce. This does have some additional property impacts but has an added advantage over Option B, in that it could be built while the existing crossing is left open.
This option also assumes a pedestrian bridge would still be built for direct station access around the Morningside Drive area. It feels to me that Option C is likely the one that will end up being chosen here.
Asquith Ave / Rossgrove Tce / Baldwin Ave
Because of the close proximity of these crossings, Auckland Transport has grouped them all together for solving. The urgent need to address safety here has been highlighted by the recent tragedy at the Rossgrove crossing.
Auckland Transport has had a lot of feedback on these crossings, from residents and locals keen to maintain connections across the tracks.
They also note that a good chunk of the drivers using Asquith Ave are not locals, but people travelling longer distances and using this route as a rat-run, which isn’t the kind of movement AT should be looking to support and encourage here.
Auckland Transport has come up with five options, and all five include a pedestrian connection to the station from Baldwin Ave (they don’t specify whether this would also land at Margaret Ave on the other side of the rail line, but that would be the logical inference).
Option A is the cheapest option to deliver, and also the fastest, an estimated 12-18 months. It would close both road crossings, but build a new local access road along the north side of the tracks, reconnecting Rossgrove Tce to Asquith Ave. This would still provide easy options for people making longer-distance trips out of the area.
A number of properties would be needed to build this option, but this would also open up some redevelopment opportunities for the land that’s not needed for the road.
Note that one safety anomaly here is that the driveway for the units at 84 Asquith (top right of the image) connects to the road inside the level crossing barrier arms.
Option B and Option C both involve building a bridge. In Option B, the bridge would connect Rossgrove to Asquith, while Option C would keep Asquith connected. (AT says it would be one or the other, not both.) Given the road layouts and topography of the area, these options would be much more complex and costly, requiring a large construction footprint, resulting in a bigger structure, and taking two to three years to complete.
Auckland Transport has also highlighted Options D and E for consideration. These are road underpasses, along the same routes as B and C, with more significant trade-offs to consider. They would be even more costly to build and take longer, plus would have even greater impacts on the rail line.
To me, Option A easily looks like the best solution here.
Woodward Rd
The last of the Inner West crossings, and one of the busiest level crossings on the line: Auckland Transport has only two options for Woodward Rd.
Option B, the cheapest and fastest, is to just close the crossing and build a pedestrian bridge only. Auckland Transport’s concern with this option is the 12,000 vehicles a day that currently cross the tracks here, which would instead have to shift to New North Rd and through the Mt Albert town centre.
Option A would build a road bridge across the tracks – this would not only cost more, but also requires either raising New North Rd and/or partially lowering the rail line, either of which would create a lot of construction disruption. Shifting the rail line might also impact other plans AT have to add a short section of additional track just west of this crossing to act as a way to turn-back future higher frequency services.
My guess is they’ll go with Option A here.
Consultation on each of these crossings is open till Monday 28 September, so jump in and provide feedback. Note the individual pages also outline what options are not being considered, and why.
Auckland Transport expects to consult on the options for the rest of the Western Line early next year.
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For George Street, below is part of the feedback I gave during the initial consultation back in May. It’s a shame AT seem to have ignored this option completely, as you say.
“Also for the George Street level crossing in Kingsland it would be best if AT/Council could look holistically at the wider road network over a narrow focus on just this crossing in isolation. I say this as it seems a lot of the traffic using this crossing is doing so getting to/from New North Road and Dominion Road as the nearby flyover junction doesn’t allow for all movements. It would be preferable to close the George Street level crossing and at the same time demolish the nearby New North Road/Dominion Road underpass and flyover junction and replace it with a standard at grade light controlled junction. This would allow for traffic movements in all directions at this junction and so remove the need for a lot of the traffic to use the George Street crossing, which could then be closed.
This would also have the added benefit of allowing for new residential/commercial development around the removed flyover junction.”
I imagine it is like the rest of Dominion Road, waiting to see what happens with LR.
Are Labour even campaigning on LR this time? I haven’t heard a peep.
I wish National would just build a busway down Dominion Road and kill off LR for good. Not that I don’t want LR, but it will never happen and its preventing other options.
Sweet we’ve built a busway now. Oh no! The cities jammed with even more amount of buses than before, if only there was a solution to prevent this from happening.
I believe they can get replace the City Link buses with Dominion Road buses so it would actually be less buses in the city. Could also join it with NEX or similar so neither turn around and wait in the city. Not all problems need a $13 billion solution.
The Wynyard tram (Auckland’s light rail) cost about $8 million to build.
The indicative cost estimate for the ‘Auckland Light Rail’ project being in the range of many billions of dollars was largely due to over scoping.
https://www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2015/01/20/the-cost-of-restoring-the-tram-network/
ALR is a liiiiiiiiiiiittle bit more complex than the Wynyard Quarter tourist trolley.
Solution with trams is to extend the Wynyard tram along to Britomart. For the Viaduct, the piers are already designed for trams but the bridge deck the cheaped out on a temporary solution at the last second. Now the deck is well passed its use by date/the mechanism is also shot.
Then Phase 2, Britomart to Aotea Square, Phase 3 to over the motorway, then Phase 4/5/6/7/8/9 etc. down Dom Rd to Richardson Rd, terminating bus routes at wherever the tram stops, and forcing the transfer.
As the core issue is buses in the CBD, Dom Rd itself can last a few more decades with better bus priority (especially as the capacity issues cease to be the main issue as the bus routes are progressively replaced by trams in the busiest part.
Pretty much ATs original plan before they let NZTA take over and morph it into the mess it became.
AT just needs to get on with it, call it a heritage line/tourist thing until it hits Dom Rd.
AT can’t afford it, and no political party has that in mind (except maybe the greens).
I like that plan though (although not sure it needs that many phases!). The main thing is to forget Mangere and the Airport, they are what created the mess. Extending to Richardson Road would open up Roskill South to development, and is significantly cheaper than extending it to Mangere.
The other thing that created the ALR mess was the requirement for it to align with the new harbour crossing project, which is probably part of the reason for the recent announcement to do another Harbour Crossing business case
The reason it needs all the phases is because it should be done as part of regular road renewals. Your point about affording it is exactly the thing, a $100m or so is well within AT budgets, but doing big phases/doing it quickly adds massively to cost and becomes too big for AT to handle, resulting in NZTA killing the project with scope creep.
The reason it went well for Wynyard is small, manageable phases that aren’t big budget costs (compared to the normal road renewal costs).
Also the core issue it’s trying to solve is only really CBD, and over time the inner sections of Dom Rd, and eventually crowding on the whole route.
Extending the heritage tram to Britomart makes sense both for transport and tourism as part of the bridge replacement. It’s a small enough project of less than a kilometre.
Then extending the tram up to Aotea Square is a small project, also about a kilometre, as part of pedestrianised Queen St with PT and emergency vehicles only, and mostly removing buses from the street to replace the CityLink in that bit.
After that, too many buses coming into CBD, so another km allowing the Queen St buses to terminate just outside the CBD. And so on and so on over many years.
Relatively short and simple phases with clear goals/problems/solutions is how things get achieved.
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Re North Shore light rail, it doesn’t make sense (bar possibly Onewa Rd in the distant future), whatever serves the North Shore should be heavy rail or automated light metro (ideally both in 50 years), so they shouldn’t try to align the two.
Where are these trams going to be stabled, cleaned, maintained, etc? In the city?
It won’t cost $100m, more like $3 billion, and that is probably conservative.
Plenty of space in the Kinetic bus yard at Wynyard Quarter, they already have a contract to provide public transport services for AT, and a siding could be added to the site relatively easily
We already have trams stabled @Wynyard, plus extra space for them in multiple spots there.
That, combined with the current deal with Motat works fine for the extension to Britomart and to Aotea Square, as they can expand it a little bit and get an extra few trams. It’s not a PT line at that point, it’s a tourist thing that also has PT function, and it’ll take like a decade+ to get to that point.
And once out of the CBD to the Dom Rd interchange, there is space for an interim depot/actually buying some trams as that’s when the line moves from heritage/tourism to PT. Then eventually as the line increases in length more trams are needed and they’ll build a proper depot further out, but that’s many decades away.
You’re still thinking way too big in terms of the project, this is a glorified bridge replacement and some tracks, when the base of the bridge has already been built and it’s just the deck/bridge mechanism.
It’s the same scope creep that killed trams in Auckland before, you need very simple projects rather than spending $3b.
3 projects get the main benefits of trams down Dom Rd without needing to build trams down Dom Rd until needed. 1. Being the heritage line extension to Britomart, 2nd being pedestrianised Queen St to Aotea with trams replacing the CityLink, and 3rd being short stopping buses outside the CBD and forcing the transfer to prevent bus congestion in the CBD.
The Shore doesn’t need heavy rail and it shouldn’t even be on the table.
Spending tens of billions on that corridor when LRT could do the job a fraction of that amount is insane.
Heavy rail and ‘LRT’ don’t do the same job though
HR and LR do the same job in terms of moving passengers in carriages on steel tracks.
Where they differ is in terms of capacity, flexibility and cost, but they ultimately do the same job.
Mode dogmatism is something we should be avoiding, and it’s something that really hampers discussion in other transit circles like on reddit.
Rigidly defining LRT as ‘just trams’ and assuming that a blanket transit hierarchy can be universally applied is unhelpful, when light rail *can* achieve speeds of 80–100kph. Surface light rail is objectively the cheapest option for getting rail mass transit to the central isthmus and Māngere; it shouldn’t be ruled out just because some people can’t envision light rail as anything other than a slow heritage tram
It comes back to the question of what problems are we trying to solve with these solutions?
A heavy rail crossing solves a problem that a light rail system doesn’t, which is that it provides an alternative route for freight, which could take heavy trucks off the existing bridge potentially extending its life. And crucially, we already have rolling stock for the heavy rail network which actually removes a lot of the cost, the rest of the infrastructure is pretty similar requirements for both systems, rail irons, concrete, electrical substations and overheads, etc.
CC2M is about
1) relieving at-capacity isthmus buses on Dominion Rd.
2) bringing high-frequency mass transit to Onehunga and Mangere
3) connecting the airport to the central city
No heavy rail option can do that cheaper than surface light rail – not even close. Double-tracking, grade-separating, and extending the Onehunga Branch Line would cost in the region of $6-10 billion; the Avondale-Southdown line is already estimated to cost more than $6 billion. Surface light rail could be done for $3–5 billion.
Also crucially, surface light rail delivers a more convenient service – 4 minute peak-hour frequencies (compared to 7–8 minutes for the Onehunga HR option and a paltry 15 minutes for the Avondale–Southdown–Airport option). It runs along Dominion Rd, where the Avondale-Southdown HR line would only serve the south end of it. And LRT would only be 5 minutes slower to the airport from downtown than heavy rail, with pretty similar capacity (6750pphpd with 450pax LRVs every 4 minutes, compared to 6000pphpd with 750pax EMUs every 7 1/2 minutes)
i’m sorry, Craw, but i just don’t think commonality of rolling stock is going to make a dent when the heavy rail infrastructure costs are twice that of light rail.
Why doesn’t AIAL pay for the airport connection if they want one so bad? Last I heard they had very healthy profits
AIAL has little appetite for rail (of any kind) because they make so much money in parking fees. It’s like their 3rd biggest source of revenue.
There are a many factors that would come into the determination of whether HR or LR is the best but freight or existing rolling stock aren’t one of them.
A suburban metro line is never going to be specifically built as a multi purpose line, while the existing rolling stock is for the existing lines, more would need to be purchased either way.
Either way whatever rail is built to the North Shore it will be part of a completely separate network without the constraints of having to build platforms for freight trains.
Connecting North Shore to POAL via rail is the opposite of a constraint
We don’t have enough rolling stock to run the current heavy rail network, and if they do get more there isn’t enough stabling space or depot capacity for them.
So the current type of train is totally irrelevant, any new line will need new lines, new stabling and new depot. Might as well make the new ones purpose-designed for the requirements of the new line rather than paying more to compromise them to the kiwirail standard.
Not to mention that the Northern Busway corridor is just not suited to freight heavy rail that demands at most a 1 in 50 grade, probably far less under modern regulations. The bridge over Tristam Ave and the hills between Sunnynook and Albany are far too steep and would have to be tunnelled.
And it’s only 2 lanes wide; for any sort of freight rail or long distance passenger service to coexist with high frequency (every 5 minutes or better at peak) suburban passenger service, you would have to have 4 tracks.
Then you have the hills after Albany, the hills after Silverdale, Dome Valley… to surmount all that would be megabillions, and much harder than with light rail or light metro which is far closer to the geometric requirements of busway.
For long distance rail to Northland, the only feasible option in the foreseeable future is to improve the existing NAL (with small-scale deviations) to handle 80kph or higher speeds. And perhaps with tilting train stock, a passenger service to Whangarei or the Bay of Islands could be time-competitive with the Intercity coach on SH1
craw – It is a constraint if some theoretical freight load reduces the quality of the metro service.
I’m intriqued what freight you are thinking will travel between POA and the North Shore and vice versa.
The North Shore is almost devoid of manufacturing, and national warehousing. That is all the things that could benifit by a proximate rail connection. It just has lots of people and lots of bits of freight that need to venture south of the Waitemata harbour.
The bits of freight would benifit by less cluttered roads, and the people would benifit from faster and more reliable journey times.
Something that can only be achieved by increasing the spacial efficiency of our public transport system. Using more spacially efficient vehicles on more and more dedicated corridors.
Buses in the meantime, but eventually coupled vehicles, (trains). But these have absolutely no need for the extra weight and costs that freight carrying ability entails.
That’s a solution to a problem that does not exist. We need to stop thinking small and acting like we are so poor. Dominion road Light rail was a good idea, and still is. Fully automated Metro from the Aitport to Orewa thru Birkenhead Glendale and Albany is also a great Idea. That route has 1 airport, 1 beach, 3 universities, 2 hospitals, CBD, Cornwall park, a race course. and 7 city centers to massively uplift housing and transport
id keep the the flyover for straight through traffic, but just add the missing left hand turns.
Has anyone found out how many pedestrians and cyclists use George St and asked a few of them what they would do if it was closed?
I suspect hardly any pedestrians or cyclists use it and those who do could use the Morningside crossing or Haultain St/Fenton St overbridge.
Assuming the above is valid (and a few students could validate it during November, February and March) then ase just close it
I used it yesterday. Had to deal with a New North Road business and needed to catch a Dominion Road bus: perfect, easy, connection. This is all about walkability.
It was probably ignored because that’s the dictionary definition of “scope creep”.
Where is Auckland Transport’s key foundational work behind this? That is, their over-arching traffic circulation and low traffic neighbourhood concept?
Asquith/Baldwin Option A.
Asquith/Baldwin Option A does some of that.
It also something like doubles the walking distance between Asquith Avenue north of the rail line and the local supermarket, which is on New North Road.
Option A includes connecting Asquith Ave and Rossgrove Terrace on the north side of the rail by buying houses and knocking a road through. So doesn’t change much timewise walking, possibly an extra minute worst case?
All of the options also include a pedestrian bridge at Baldwin Station, so it would not.
Since the second world war and the military industrial complex focusing on expansion of the automobile industry, we have prioritised movement by private vehicle.
This has led to a false belief that cars are the most efficient way to move.
Now that we have realised the damage to our personal health, and the wider environment, that a car centric culture causes, we can stop preoccupying ourselves with car movement.
Close all roads that traverse rail lines.
Cars are so last century, we need to educate our population towards bikes and trains. Cars only get in the way when we are not inside them.
We must see our future in public transport, cities can only live up to their potential with social coherence and peaceful coexistence. Otherwise known as bike and train life!
Bah humbug
For private cars, sure, but many of those crossings are needed for goods movement/delivery.
Simply closing all or most of the level crossings would cause considerable community severance – which is why AT is actively considering options that avoid that (though some will probably be closed). I have always favoured closing George Street level crossing – BUT only once there is a resolution of the New North Road to Dominion Road disconnection. It was proposed to close George Street as part of project DART (mainly about double-tracking the Western Line over 20 years ago, but I lead a mini campaign to retain that crossing until there was a satisfactory connection. It soon became obvious that the connection could best be achieved by demolishing the interchange (built almost 60 years ago to facilitate an eight (yes 8!) lane motorway running from the central city to Hillsborough which was then planned but was cancelled just 2 years after the interchange opened in 1968. Fortunately the concept is being seriously considered by Council planners at AUDO (the Auckland Urban Design Office) as what they are calling Dominion Junction which is more of an Urban Renewal project than a transport one. Still early days but it could result in a blighted underdeveloped area around the interchange replaced with thousands of apartments and a similar number of job opportunities. George Street closure would be a useful result – at no cost to Council.
That’s only for pedestrians/other active modes. Unless you’re trundling along at 20km/h the detours while driving aren’t a big deal, and there is no way a business case can stack up to spend vast sums to save a few drivers a few minutes.
Especially as longer distance road trips are less affected time wise, it’s only extremely local people, and most could/should walk/take active modes for a journey from one side of the closed crossing to the other, as it’s faster to walk even before the closure if you account for the time parking.
George St I think should have the road crossings shut and some form of pedestrian link, because I don’t believe AT should be severing existing pedestrian connections. But if one has to be dropped/deferred due to budget, this is the one to drop/defer and just fence/close the crossing.
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Morningside should be A – albeit event sized active modes bridge due to Eden Park, the 22 buses should be going down NNR anyway, and it’s not a big detour in a car.
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Baldwin Ave, A is easily the best option. If they were budget constrained/went over budget elsewhere, they could ditch the road link, and they could do a ped link along the rail corridor along the same route, with the only cost being fencing/footpath.
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Woodward should be a road bridge, not because of the traffic volume on Woodward, but because the NNR/Carrington/Mt Albert Rd intersection won’t be able to handle the displaced traffic and there aren’t any realistic alternatives to that intersection.
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I think it’s really at a point they should be implementing, not planning, but I’m unsure why they didn’t start planning this years ago.
Does anyone know if the plan is to extend the stations to accommodate nine-car trains as part of this? Makes sense to do the work once at Baldwin Ave and Morningside
Woodward Road will be an absolute nightmare. It wouldn’t be great for the people living in that little enclave (which looks like a great place to live) but before I committed to anything I would be inclined to trial closing it off and see what happens( would require some work in the Mt Albert Town centre to remove all street parking but I’m guessing setting up an actual carpark for the area would be a massive improvement , much safer and significantly cheaper. At the very least a study should look at how many of 12k trips could easily go through Mt Albert rather than for the people who live there. Anything has to be better than the massive disruption that will occur building up roads and bridges
It’s less NNR and more the intersection of Carrington/NNR/Mt Albert that has the capacity issues, as it’s the radial and cross town routes meeting.
The logical option to improve capacity at that intersection would be to remove right turns for all bar NNR turning right into Carrington (as needed for OuterLink), which essential requires Woodward Rd to be able to be used, as then all right turns have reasonable alternatives.
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Re parking, there is a ton of carparks around there already. Look on satellite. It’s just people prefer to park directly outside, which causes havoc on NNR. Should just be a bus lane each way 7-7, as you’d avoid most of the merging mess, but I think there are lower hanging fruit in terms of bus lanes that wouldn’t have noodle house complaints.
Woodward Ave has been a rat run forever to get from the vicinity of Pt Chev to the Stoddard Rd industrial area avoiding the Mt Albert shops.
Well guess what, we have a motorway with access points to support that journey.
Replace the road crossing with an active modes only bridge, ensure the links along Jersey &/or Harbutt to the Waterview shared path are safe and the 12,000 cars per day that are using this crossing will do what the motorway was built for them to do.
We’ve spent $Millions building the motorways around Auckland we now need to force the traffic onto them and our of residential suburbs.
Option D for George St seems a good idea. But once closed it will never get funded for an overbridge in the lifetimes of anyone reading this.
Best option is to bite the bullet and build it now.
I think Morningside Option C is the best of several unpalatable options; even though it goes directly through a family friend’s apartment
Unless you have some information from elsewhere, I think you’re overreading what it says about Baldwin Avenue. It only says that there will be pedestrian access to Baldwin Avenue Station, it does not say that that this access will be from Baldwin Avenue.
These are some good options. Better than I expected. I have done some work on this and have some preferences, but acknowledge that they aren’t necessarily aligned with AT’s priorities or resources.
George St is easy – it needs to be closed and be replaced with a pedestrian crossing regardless of Dominion Rd’s future. I like the Akepiro option as there was once a pedestrian bridge there and some of the landscape to support it is still there, however I think that a bridge at George St would be no more difficult or expensive and less affected by future flyover removal.
Morningside Rd is an important one to deal with – one of the worst for vehicles breaching the crossing. I think that simply closing it would cause major problems with Eden Park events and E/W ratrunning. I have always assumed the best option was to bridge from the west side of the crossing on Morningside Rd and cross at a 45° angle towards the higher elevation of New North Rd between options B and C. Property acquisition versus superior outcomes.
Baldwin Option A is an excellent choice that I didn’t think they’d be up for. I’d have liked to see Rossgrave closed and Asquith pass under the rail line, but that would be a big money option and never beat Option A. Those flats are well past their use by date, so the whole scheme would up the state of the area in the end.
Woodward has to be bridged, preferably combined with lowering the railway, which currently sits on an embankment to bring it up to the level of Woodward Rd and then down hill to Avondale. Making that a straight grade from Mt Albert to Avondale junction would be good for the alignment, reduce the height of the road bridge, and facilitate a future Avondale to Southdown junction. The need for a siding at Mt Albert could facilitate completion of railway realignment whilst minimizing disruption. New KR line isolation procedures make these works possible without closing the line completely. This would however result in the road being closed for the duration of the works, hopefully with the bridge being constructed simultaneously.
Alternatively, building the road bridge without closing either the road or the railway for extended periods is probably preferable to AT and would see the railway alignment unchanged and instead adjacent properties acquired to build the bridge off to the side with minimal road disruption before realigning Woodward Rd over the new bridge. That would seem like a missed opportunity, but I think AT would go that way.
Plus one for retaining pedestrian access through George street. It’s the most direct route through to the Dominion Road Shops, Kowhai Intermediate and Eden Park, for the people who live on the streets that run off Aitken terrace. It’s worth noting that New North Road from Bond Street through the Dominion Road Flyover is really poorly set up for pedestrians, and the principal imperative is to get away from it as fast as possible. With the George Street crossing closed to vehicle traffic, it might even be possible to put a pedestrian crossing across New North Road there, so you didn’t have to dice with death trying to access the bus stops. Novel concept !! Akepiro street will likely be rendered redundant by changes to the flyover and doesn’t offer much that can’t be currently be done by jaywalking across the Ian McKinnon slipway and crossing the grass verge to get onto Dominion road. If you enabled a proper crossing there, it would give you the same access to Dominion Road much more cheaply.
I don’t think there’s an alternative other than to build an over bridge at Woodward. There is a reason why Woodward Rd has a huge traffic count – to avoid the congested Mt Albert main intersection (NNrd & Carrington/Mt Albert Rd). It also links well heading east (Richardson Rd).
Regarding Baldwin Ave Station; readers are suggesting Option A, however for someone who has worked in this area for a long time, if an east to west vehicle crossing is removed then we further escalate the problems to the junctions at Mt Albert’s and St Lukes/NNrd.
This area has the second most populated secondary school, top 5 populated Primary School as well as Marist, Unitec, AIS which the train track runs down the middle.
Option A doesn’t solve this. Closing the north end of Asquith is fine, because you have Linwood and NNRd near by. Rossgrove realistically can’t have an over bridge as it’s too close to Asquith. However, further down Margaret Ave and Baldwin align well or even Caughey and Leone. Whatever the case, an east/west corridor is still needed otherwise Mt Albert intersection will struggle to function.
Agreed re Woodward.
Between Woodward overbridge, St Luke’s existing capacity, and removing right hand turns for all bar NNR into Carrington (as OuterLink needs it), the NNR/Carrington/Mt Albert intersection can cope, and it’s not a big time difference driving around vs down Asquith.
If people on either side of Baldwin need to travel further north/south they’ll either be going on Mt Albert/Carrington Rds or St Luke’s Rd, as between the motorway and MAGS there is no north south connectivity in between. Anything local they don’t need a car and won’t add that much extra time driving around anyway. It’s not a need that justifies spending vast sums, especially when we’ll have already spent that on Woodward to keep the Carrington/NNR/Mt Albert Rd intersection capable of handling those trips.
They should start with concrete barriers and watch the traffic find a new way to get where it needs to go.
Akepiro Street used to have a pedestrian crossing exactly there. Unclear why it was removed – it wasn’t removed when the flyover was constructed. You can see it clearly in the 1970s aerial imagery on Auckland Council’s Geomaps.
See here: https://basemaps.linz.govt.nz/@-36.8695182,174.7523685,z19.63?i=auckland-sn2717-1974-0.04m&labels=true
It can be seen here: https://basemaps.linz.govt.nz/@-36.8695182,174.7523685,z19.63?i=auckland-sn2717-1974-0.04m&labels=true
Maybe during electrification? or earlier?
There’s always someone responsible for asset maintenance and renewal whose budget improves when things are removed.
Earlier, was removed by the 1980s. Probably because building the flyover meant there was no longer anything to walk to north of Akepiro Street, except flyover.
A temporary option at Morningside, would be to extend the siding track “south” ( towards the city) to link to the mainline crossover. A temporary platform could be built, from the foot crossing long enough for the 3 car Onehunga line trains. They could then be extended from maungawhau to Morningside in the peak hours . If need be they could cross the road crossing to the sidings when the gates are already closed for a city bound train.