Posts by Matthew Poole
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And on the topic of Britomart being nearly at capacity, Josh Arbury has written this post which confirms just how close we are to being unable to add any more services into the CBD.
[edit] It also shows how much more capacity the CBD tunnel would allow.
Angus, another hitch to just delivering people to Mt Eden from Southern Line services is that in order to make the service viable you need a full six-car set for peak hour. If most people are then getting off the train at Mt Eden for the CBD, you're left with running a mostly-empty train the rest of the way out to New Lynn before turning around and taking the same mostly-empty train back again. Not exactly a good use of resources.
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FWIW, my wife used the Western line to Britomart. It was perfectly good for getting home, but not sufficient for getting to work - it was too unreliable
How long ago? All the lines have improved dramatically, and from memory in July about 86% of all services were within five minutes of scheduled time.
It's unfortunate that the network got into such a parlous state that bringing it up to modern standards has been so disruptive. But look at Wellington, where their standard for quality is > 90% of services within three minutes of scheduled and now they've had many days of cancellations and delays due to network upgrades. -
Putting a line from Britomart to the Shore would increase the number of tracks leading out of Britomart by 100% (doubling its capacity).
Uh, no. Unless the Shore line was tunnelled out through the far end of Britomart, it would have to use the same two tracks for entry/exit as all the existing lines. It would have to be landed somewhere east of Britomart, maybe in through Hobson Bay, and then switch through the shunting yards to come along the same route as the Eastern Line. Which means that if it runs the same service frequency as the other lines it'll take a full third (Eastern, Western, Southern, add Northern) of the existing capacity. And even tunnelling solely to get to the Shore simply means that it doesn't take that third, but it also doesn't add to the existing lines.
There's no provision to expand Britomart's ingress/egress corridor without enormous disruption to existing services. Boring a new tunnel, laying track that switches back into the existing tracks, all very expensive and very disruptive. It was an absolutely bone-headed design decision to have two tracks leading to a five-platform terminus, but also one consistent with public transport "planning" in Auckland. That Britomart was designed to be bored out through the far end is absolutely incredible when one considers what has ordinarily passed for forethought in city planning in Auckland in the past.
So, if we're going to have to tunnel out of Britomart in order to get a line across to the Shore why not tunnel under the CBD, add a couple of stations, link it back into the Western Line at Mt Eden, and actually double (or more) the capacity of Britomart by allowing trains to go right through it rather than being constrained to in-forwards-out-backwards operation.
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Andrea, I was more meaning that you stop people thinking "Oh, the roads are so empty, I'll stop taking the bus" by making it expensive to revert to their car-loving ways. That step has to come after you give them viable options, which is the part that bypassed the Auckland City Council when it wanted to extend the hours of metered parking. It's not an option to take public transport in the late evening for a lot of people. Likewise congestion charging, when reliable, affordable options are mostly not available.
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The CBD?
In what space? It's not like the CBD is, in normal economic conditions, overflowing with an abundance of unoccupied office space. It's also distinctly unsuited to manufacturing, and doesn't exactly have space to accommodate tens-of-thousands of people coming from two- and three-bedroom residential areas.
Albany may be "Auckland's silicon valley" but only in the sense of being an unsustainable, car dependent, suburban sprawl.
uh huh. It's also home to a goodly number of IT companies, including software exporters and data centres. Why should I pay you any attention if you know so little about the areas you disparage?
All those outer suburbs will evolve into Sydney style edge slums as the price of petrol increases and economic travel to work areas shrink.
Albany is served by quite good public transport, if you're OK with being restricted to buses. Feeder services into the busway, plus local bus services. The big problems are for the suburbs out in the south-east, designed with no public transport in mind other than the local bus stop.
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if congestion goes down much, driving looks that much better and people jump in their cars
The solution to that is to heavily ration parking space, and make it very expensive to take a private motor vehicle into the CBD or other areas that are similarly well-served by public transport.
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This is why I often think the cock-up theory of history is more plausible than the conspiracy theory alternative
But that's what they want you to think! You know, them.
I'll be getting my tin-foil hat now ;) -
Yes, I'd be reluctant to walk much further than that. Especially if it was wet.
And this is Auckland!
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Wouldn't a 1400m gap between stations imply a 700m radius
Yes, my bad. Too little sleep, too little coffee. Though that 700m radius is still at the upper end of the 400-800m walking distance in the report that Angus cited. What he didn't say is that 2km is only viable with feeder services, and that use of the MTR decreases as the necessity to use feeder services increases. The majority of MTR users walk, and the majority of walkers live less than 1km from an MTR station. That's from the same study.
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Our 'burbs houses probably average 10 or 15 km from a station. Adding line to reach more of these potential customers can be done much more cost effectively than tunneling under Albert Park.
ROFL. Now you're really taking the piss. Land to run train lines doesn't come for free. There's no corridor established to the south-east or the north, so one has to be created. That's hundreds-of-millions of dollars for a meaningful length of line, and we still haven't dealt with the issue of Britomart's capacity. Expanding Mt Eden to deal with thousands of passengers an hour won't be cheap, once you account for the platform egress work (gotta be able to evacuate the station rapidly) and all the work on nearby roads to allow for these buses you're after.
The tunnel is a pretty cheap way to double the capacity of the existing rail network, when you think about it. If you think about it, which you appear unwilling to do. Assuming that a line to Howick/Botany is attached to the Eastern Line rather than the Southern Line, all the trains would have to come into Britomart anyway. And even if it did go to the Southern Line, would services go to Mt Eden or Britomart? Why divert trains up to a nowhere stop at Mt Eden where they can't change direction when they could go right to Britomart which is where most passengers want to go anyway? A line to the Shore will absolutely come into Britomart, so you haven't changed anything there.
For all your anger and hatred aimed at the CBD tunnel, it's the most cost-efficient way of increasing capacity of the existing network. And once that's done, it becomes feasible to add lines into densely-populated areas that currently don't have any train service. It's also a pre-requisite for rail to the Shore to tunnel out the other end of Britomart.