Downtown Bus Station Priority

There's a lot of chat, some secrecy, and little public discussion about what's going to happen with buses downtown once they are shunted out of Queen Elizabeth Square and Lower Queen Street.

The Downtown Framework - despite coming out of Auckland Transport run CCIG - provided cursory back-of-envelope ideas to handle displaced buses by shoe-horning them into little Britomart lanes, and terminating Northern Busway services - and others - in Lower Albert Street. This was appropriately panned by Rudman. There has been some blogger discussion about what to do with buses, and a little bit of history of mistreatment of buses, including my posting.

Here's a few pointers:

In July, Anne Gibson ran an interesting piece about Precinct Properties taking "a team to San Francisco last month to study a new 62-level waterfront skyscraper rising above an underground railway there...." Maybe Precinct Properties are way ahead of Auckland on this. Because it's not about trains - for Precinct Downtown - it's about buses. Wouldn't it be sensible for Auckland Transport and Precinct Properties to work together - not just in making room for the CRL enabling works and tunnel - but in including a bus station under its 41 storeytower, with pedestrian connections to the retail offerings there, and rapid transit connections to many Auckland destinations for those living in the apartments?

If current government sticks to its guns then Auckland Council will not be able to build the CRL until 2021, but it can start it. It can build, under its own steam, the CRL "enabling works" and tunnel from Britomart, under QE Square, and more or less to intersection of Lower Albert Street with Custom Street West. One of the interesting conversations I had about this bit of work is that this new section of rail has significant utility in its own right - without the rest of the CRL. Why? Because of the ability to stack trains up the tunnel, allowing more to enter. or leave, Britomart Station/hour, and avoid/bypass the constraint imposed by the fact only 3 lines enter Britomart. For example, being able to stack trains in am peak would mean trains could enter the station at around twice the frequency as at present - for an hour maybe - because emptied trains would pull forward into the stack, leaving room for the next full train immediately, instead of waiting for the empty train to reverse out. Think of that. A big capacity gain. And it would work just as well when there was a big event (let's say the warriors at Mount Smart), where empty trains could stack taking office workers to Penrose, train after train, not having to wait for empty ones themselves delayed waiting full trains to depart.

I wonder whether anyone has done the cost benefit comparison of incentivising Precinct to incorporate a bus station into its development (supported by some undergrounding of buses along Custom Street) and improving downtown pedestrian amenity once dominated by buses, versus only building the CRL?