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I haven’t checked out New Lynn for a few weeks since the double tracking.
New Lynn’s completed station will open in September.
New Lynn is such an exciting project because it marries bus and train - as New Lynn’s station has always been - and is adjacent to a shopping mall.
It’s interesting that ARTA’s plans for the transport hub includes the line of its plans for buses: “There will be fewer bus routes, but they will generally operate more frequently and will be better integrated with other parts of the network, especially at key points like New Lynn Interchange. ”
Here’s how the transport interchange is shaping up and looks today:
This is the design:
9 Comments
I was pretty dismissive on the visual design originally, but having seen it on site, I have become much more positive.
I still have doubts about the “little train station island lost in a sea of roads” environment it is in, though. Again, I hope the footpaths and plaza areas around it will feel wider and better in reality than they looked like on the concept plans.
Then again, it is easy(er) to road-diet (than to double-track a rail line), so that planning mistake could one day be fixed pretty easily when the area has grown up with residential areas to the south and people call for less car traffic.
A great way to increase patronage and pressure the goverment into putting more attention into the PT systems.
“little train station island lost in a sea of roads”: that it definitely is. The number of roads around the station have increased substantially and pedestrian access has decreased commensurately. This is to my mind a prime example of the road-centric planning policies that prevail in Auckland. While I applaud the redevelopment of the station and the fact that, some eighty odd years after it was first proposed, we have a double tracked rail line to Swanson, I must point out that the whole rationale behind the enormously expensive trench was to accommodate the road network and that the New Lynn transport interchange is now more isolated from the scant pedestrian networks that existed previously. It is all too depressing, notwithstanding the fact that the station design seems pretty good. I might also point out that the PIDs at New Lynn still don’t work two weeks after the second platform opened; really rather pathetic and annoying, even if they only are meant to show scheduled rather than real time arrivals.
I think that New Lynn shows how we have to actually get these sorts of projects done, if we keep pushing the PT aspects things will get pushed back but if we sell it to the powers that be that the roads will be so much better then we have more chance of getting things done.
I am looking forward to this being completed
Despite my comments, I am not quite as cycnical as Commuter - double-tracking and frequency-increasing through New Lynn would have basically screwed the roads crossing it, as I understand - which were already badly blocked by the level crossing in the olden times, I understand.
So the change, while expensive, may not have been avoidable (plus it gets more safety by removing the level crossing).
Also, the rail trench is built so as to be able to be covered in the future. The engineers told us that it didn’t currently have enough strength to support buildings (those would have to be founded separately, straddling it), but you could put a slab over it, and get a linear park, for example.
Yeah I thought a park could be good along there, could be a nice way to get some greenery in to the centre of the area without taking up valuable space for buildings.
So long as it’s not a carpark, like what happened over Britomart.
“Middle English park, from Old French parc ‘livestock pen’,”
How funny. So a “park” as we understand it is a “human pen” and a “car park” is well, a car pen. Very appropriate
I arrived in AKL a few weeks back and have been getting to grips with the PT. I now live in New Lynn and think the Station (bus and train) are fantastic and like Andrew I can’t think why thry didn’t build a proper bus station behind Britomart rather than have 27 different bloody stops dotted around the place. Anyways I don’t know what the old station was like in New Lynn but one thing is certain, it is moving in a better architectural direction than the current ‘blue’ bus station. It’s hard to believe what got the go ahead in times past. I joked with a friend from Singapore that the bus station was twinned with Jurong (for those that don’t know it, it’s like NL only in red). Anyways..enough said, can’t wait to see the finished result, hope they put a park between it and the library instead of the worrying ‘high rise’ on the model I saw in said library today.